The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy

The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy

If you're new to content marketing and you want to learn how to use it for your business,

then you are in the right place because, in this detailed post, I'm going to walk you through a complete guide

to content marketing for beginners.

Stay tuned.

What is Content Marketing

Alright, so let's start with the basics and talk about what content marketing is.

Simply put, content marketing is creating and distributing content to attract

and retain customers.

The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy

Today I'm going to show you exactly how to use content marketing to get more traffic, social shares, backlinks, and, most importantly, more customers.

In fact, these are the same strategies and techniques that I used to get two million people to visit my site last year, so if you want to get better results from your content, you'll love this step-by-step guide. Let's dive properly.

When I launched my first blog in 2009, I read the same advice repeatedly; you know, the stuff I'm talking about published short 500-word blog posts.

Make sure to keep your blog updated with fresh content; you need to publish a new post at least once a week. That stuff might've worked back in 2018, but it doesn't work today. 

In fact, I grew my blog into one of the most popular marketing blogs on the planet by doing the exact opposite of what these so-called experts recommend instead of short blog posts.

I only publish long-form comprehensive guides. Instead of keeping my site updated with fresh content, I only publish a new post every four to six weeks, and instead of publishing something because it's Tuesday, I only release content if it's world-class stuff. With that, let's get into the specific steps starting with

1. Find a Proven Topic

Your first step is to find a topic, but not just any topic, a topic with a proven track record. Here's precisely how to do it. First, check out content from one of your competitors that's done, really.

In other words, go to a competing blog and keep an eye out for posts with lots of social shares, comments, or both.

For example, I'm in the SEO niche, and one of my competitors is Moz. A while back, I was looking through some of their latest content and noticed that blog posts about site audits tended to do really well. 

So I created a post called the ultimate SEO site audit, and because this post was based on a proven topic, it quickly racked up social shares. Backlinks, plus my new position, ranks on the first page for my target keyword next. Look at podcasts in your industry. This is just like the approach we just talked about.

But instead of looking at your competitor's blogs, you look at other guests, so if one of your competitors has a podcast, and let's face it, who doesn't.

These days check out their episode list on iTunes. This can reveal some fantastic topics that

you'd be hard-pressed to find any other way finally get topic ideas from online communities.

For example, let's say you run a Paleo diet blog. Well, when I look at paleo threads on Reddit.

I noticed lots of questions focused on dessert, which shows me that there's a lot of demand for dessert-related content in the paleo space. You can use this process on Quora or on forums where your target audience hangs out and if you want to scale this technique. 

I recommend trying out a tool called Answer the Public. It's a free tool that hands you popular questions that people have around your topic, which leads us to our second step.

2. Find a Keyword For SEO

So you've found a topic that your target customer is interested in, and now it's time to find the keyword they use to search in Google. Here's how first use YouTube and Google Suggest

this is an old-school keyword research strategy that I still use all the time.

Start to type in one of the topics you found in step number one and then write down keywords that Google suggests, and you can repeat the same process on YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and more. Next, use searches related to finding longtail keywords.

Do you ever notice that these searches are related to an area at the bottom of Google search results? I didn't either until recently, and I quickly realized that it's a goldmine of keyword ideas.

For example, if you search for the Paleo diet and scroll to the bottom of the results, you get a list of these excellent keywords. The best part is these keywords aren't from some third-party tool. They come straight from Google moving right along to step number three choose a content format personally when I hear the word content.

I automatically think of blog posts, but blog posts are just one of many types of content formats. Besides blog posts, there are YouTube videos, native videos, lead magnets, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, quizzes, and more. Those are there one format that works, not really.

The key here is to choose a format that works best for you.

Are you an awesome writer focus on blog posts. {alertInfo}

Do you love getting in front of the camera and making a video, or maybe you're a fantastic designer? In that case, you'd want to create a piece of visual content. In fact, you don't even need to stick to one format. You could take the same topic and cover it using several different forms.

For example, a few years ago, I published an article on link building guide, and that post did well. 

So I decided to make a YouTube video on that same exact topic. That video brings in 8,000 views every month the big takeaway is there's no perfect content format for any case, so choose a concept format that you can crush and move on to step number four which is

3. Publish an Amazing Piece of Content

Let's face it, getting your content to stand out is more complicated than ever.

In fact according to WordPress there are two point five million blog posts published very single day. {alertInfo}

They also report that page views are down for the first time in 12 years. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's still possible to create excellent content that stands out, but for your content to stand out among the millions of blog posts that come out every day and needs to be perfect, here's how to do it.

It first publishes insanely actionable content. It doesn't matter if your site is about cars or cats. People want content that they can use right away.

For example, when I was researching this video, I watched a bunch of other content marketing videos that were primarily full of fluff and filler advice.

For example, they tell you to create a process for creating content, but they never show you how to begin that process. That's why I worked hard to make every technique in this guide super actionable.

The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy

Next, use lots of examples in your content. When it comes to content, there's one thing I found to be actual people love illustrations.

In fact, research shows that examples make learning significantly more accessible, which is why I include many examples in every post. Now do models take a little more work than just saying do this yep is it worth it? Absolutely finally.

I recommend focusing on your con you UX. When most people think about user experience, they think about things like Software, but as it turns out, content has a user experience.

If you have podcast content. UX is the quality of your audio, and if you're making video content, UX is that video production value.

The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy

In other words, making it easy for people to consume your content has a much better chance of driving targeted traffic to your website.

4. Optimize Your Content For SEO

There are dozens of ways to optimize your content for SEO, but in my experience, these three strategies are working best right now.

First, optimize your title tag for click-through rate, as you may have heard.

Google uses your site's click-through rate as a ranking signal. In other words, the more people click on your place in the search results, the better it will generally rank. That's why you want to make your title tag super enticing to click on. For example, my original title for this post didn't have any brackets or parentheses.

But I realized that I could make this title even more compelling by adding a step-by-step case study in parentheses, so I did next use your keyboard a few times in your content, especially in the first 150 words.

Finally link out to other websites. {alertSuccess}

This industry study found a clear correlation between external links and Google rankings, so whenever it makes sense, link to resources that will help your readers learn more about the topics you cover in your article.

Link Building

For example, in this post, I linked out to a handful of authority sites in case someone wants to dig deeper into that topic which leads us to a critical step that many people skip. That is

5. Content Promotion

\Content Promotion

There's no other way for me to say this if you're serious about content marketing, you need to learn about content promotion.

When I say to promote your content, I don't mean sharing your content on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, even though that can help.

I'm talking about strategically promoting your content, so it gets lots of shares, links, and traffic. 

The question is, how do you do it? Here are three strategies that are working great for me right now.

1. Content Roundups 

Roundups are blog posts that curate the best content from that week, and if you can get your link in front of someone who runs a roundup, you have a good chance of getting a link.

The best part is there are roundups in pretty much every niche.

2. Email Newsletter

Our next promotional strategy is to promote your content in your email newsletter. I've tried it all when it comes to content promotion; in my experience, nothing beats email.

Email Newsletter

For example, I published a post on my blog late last year, and to promote it, I sent out an email to my email subscribers. I also shared it on Twitter; my tweet was up 1710 clicks, and my newsletter had 14,113 clicks, so yeah.

If you want to get lots of eyeballs on every piece of content you publish, you definitely want to let your email subscribers know you just posted.

3. Boosted Facebook Posts 

Boosted Facebook Posts

Something last up we have boosted Facebook posts over the last few months. I've spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, and the number one lesson I learned from that experience is this retargeting is legit, and now it's time for our second to last.

6. Track Your Performance

So you just published a fantastic piece of content. It's based on a proven topic and has excellent content UX. You promoted it using the strategies that I just shared with you. The question is, how do you know if all that stuff actually worked.

Here are two metrics that I recommend focusing on. The first thing I recommend looking at is traffic.

1. Traffic

At the end of the day, this content marketing is to get more traffic, so if your content isn't bringing in more traffic, it's probably time to switch things up. That said, content marketing and SEO can take time to kick in, sometimes months.

Traffic

For example, look at the traffic numbers from the early days of BountyBlade as you can see, it took about six months for things to really take off, and if I gave up early on because the content wasn't working, I wouldn't have seen this vast traffic spike that got me going.

2. Conversions

Next up, we have conversions ROI, business goals, KPIs, whatever you want to call it. Basically, with this metric, you're answering the question is the content actually helping us sell more stuff, as you may already know.

Conversions

You can measure conversions in Google Analytics, and if you see conversions moving up along with traffic, that's a sign that your content marketing is working. That said, sometimes it's hard to measure those indirect sales that come from content marketing.

For example, the number of conversions that come directly from YouTube is deficient, and if I only looked at google analytics, I'd probably say, you know what? YouTube is a waste of time, but when I dug deeper, I discovered that my YouTube channel is a huge source of subscribers and sales.

In fact, many new customers expressly set my YouTube channel as a primary reason they decide to enroll in one of my courses, which tells me that my YouTube videos are paying off, leading us to.

8. Scale Your Content Marketing 

our eighth and final step scale your content marketing, So at this stage, your content marketing is working. You're getting more traffic, leads, and sales than ever before, which is excellent at this point, you're probably wondering.

How do I scale this stuff before I answer that question with a quick word of warning?

I don't recommend scaling by pumping out a bunch of blog posts that's what most people do at this stage and it hurts them instead of continually putting out awesome stuff they start to focus on quantity and because their content isn't as good as it used to be people stop reading it.

I'm sure you can think of a blog you used to follow that fell into this trap. So yeah, you definitely want a scale but don't want your quality to suffer.

For example, I've only published 63 posts on the BountyBlade, and those 63 posts bring in three hundred ninety-two thousand four hundred and forty-one visits every month.

My secret: I focus on scaling quality not quantity. {alertSuccess}

There you have it, my eighth step content strategy.

I hope you like this complete guide on The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy.

Please tell me your thoughts and comments below.