Have you ever spent hours designing and editing a beautiful flyer about a service you offer only to let500 copies of it sit on your desk untouched? I didn’t think so. But why is it then that so many bloggers do exactly this? As a matter of fact, it’s what I have done for the past three years – writing content and hoping people will stumble across it and love it. To some degree, it has worked. I have a decent readership and it seems I always run into people who read the blog and respect my opinion. But still – there isn’t the traffic that I could be seeing. Today I wanted to share a couple thoughts on content marketing – how to get the word out there. I’m basing this solely on what I’ve learned thus far and will certainly add to it as I continue to learn. For all you content marketing experts out there, please let me know what you think as well. Okay – so here we go – the first things you need to know about Content Marketing.
Create Good Content
This should go without saying, but you have to create quality content. I can’t tell you how many blogs I stumble upon that are spammy and annoying. Don’t do this. Engage people. Share your viewpoints. Blogging is THE BEST way to establish yourself as an expert, so make sure you are doing everything you can possibly do to put yourself out there. Talk about your projects, things that you love, things that piss you off. Whatever you do – be you. And be honest and transparent. Don’t leave people feeling like you’ve lured them to your site just to buy your product. People hate that, and they will hate you for doing it to them.
Make Sharing Easy
Whatever plugin you use, make sure you do your best to allow your current audience to easily share your content. The people who come back over and over, should be able to share your content. These people are your best advocates so make their job easier.
Share Your Posts with a Wider Audience
If you expect the wide world to stumble upon your little space in the world wide web like I did, you will be sorely disappointed. You have to put your content “out there”. Some ideas are to share portions of the post on guest blogs or submit to sites like Triberr, BizSugar or other social networking sharing sites. They more places you put your content – the more likely it will get noticed. Even if you get 2 new readers a day, that’s better than nothing!
I’m still exploring and looking for better ways to share the things I spend a lot of time writing. Do you have any suggestions? I would LOVE to hear!
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