A Boost from Paid Methods

Content marketing requires some pieces that are far less tangible than strategy or SEO, but are perhaps the most important.

When it’s truly successful, content marketing is a long-term strategy.

It takes time to start seeing the ROI from your content efforts.

The blog post you publish today will not pay off by tomorrow, next week, or even next month.

Instead, you must have the patience and fortitude to wait months – maybe even up to a year or longer – to start seeing the returns.

The good news?

Content marketing is internet marketing that builds momentum over time. HubSpot calls this phenomenon “compounding.”

High-quality content gets increased visits over time. This helps build the page’s authority, and can increase its reach through the ways people interact with the content as they discover it.

Think linking, sharing, engaging, and more.

Most importantly, all of these compounding returns can help your content climb the Google ranks, which in turn helps it reach more people organically.

Pretty soon, your hard work on that post starts paying off in spades.

It doesn’t happen right away, but it will happen if you set up your content for success, with strategy.

It just takes patience and fortitude to see it through, and to keep putting out content with the months ahead in mind.

Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Pacing yourself is essential to doing it right – otherwise, you’ll start spinning your wheels, and burnout will be inevitable.

Instead, take stock of where you are in your business.

Think ahead to where you want to go in the next year.

• Do you already have customers?
• Do you have a website?
• Are you starting from square one?

Pick up a pen and paper, or settle yourself in front of your computer, and start formulating some goals for content marketing.

Make your goals achievable (but not too easy), and make them measurable.

Need some guidance about goals?

Here are some tips from CMI on setting goals, including how to tie them to key performance indicators (KPIs).

For ideas about goals to reach for, read this article from Copyblogger on 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing.

2. Secure Your Content ‘Home Base’

For content creation, lead gathering, and more, you need a home base on the web.

This is:

• Where your content will live.
• What you’ll link to when you share your content on social.
• Where you’ll gather leads from the traffic you pull in.

If you don’t have a website, start researching options.

If you have a website, make sure it’s optimized, user-friendly, and organized by following SEO and usability best practices.

3. Start Strategizing

Now that you have goals, a home for your content, and enthusiasm, it’s time to surge ahead with the rest of your content marketing strategy.

We’ve already discussed strategy, but here are the actionable steps that make it work:

6 Key, Actionable Steps for Content Strategizing

• Target audience research and brand persona development
• Keyword research and SEO opportunity research
• Topic ideation and content planning
• Creating/writing/producing content
• Community building and nurturing
• Sharing and promoting content on social channels

This is a broad list. Each step has its own set of actions and planning involved.

It’s important not to skip any steps. Each is vital for winning at content marketing.

Yes – this takes time, effort, planning, patience, fortitude, and teamwork to get it all done.

Once you get your internet marketing rolling, though, just one piece of content in your arsenal can have an impact like this:

      The anatomy of a content marketer

Another popular and effective form of content is a case study.

In general, a case study is an in-depth look at some action your brand or business completed that had measurable results for success.

Usually, this translates into something you accomplished for a client.

Here’s a great example of a case study by Fractl:

In it, the agency showcases how they executed a successful content campaign for a real estate brand. They talk about how it came together, the “whys” of the project, and the results (presented in measurable stats).

This type of content is an awesome trust-builder for obvious reasons.

They’re similar to the storytelling and news radio shows of yore, except people can download them and listen to episodes however and whenever they want.

If you are a good speaker or interviewer, this content format can be a great one for sharing valuable information with your audience.

For an example, check out Search Engine Journal’s Search Engine Nerds, about SEO, paid search, social media, and content marketing.

           What is Internet Marketing?

Defining Internet Marketing

Also called online marketing, internet marketing is the process of promoting a business or brand and its products or services over the internet using tools that help drive traffic, leads, and sales.

Internet marketing a pretty broad term that encompasses a range of marketing tactics and strategies – including content, email, search, paid media, and more.

These days, though, internet marketing is often used interchangeably with “content marketing.”

Why?

Because content marketing is the internet marketing of the present and future.

Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:

“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Think of it like this: content marketing (or inbound marketing) is in direct opposition to traditional advertising (outbound marketing), and in direct integration with the patterns and habits of today’s generation.

We don’t like to be sold to, we have our ad-blockers on, and we barely watch cable anymore.

Content marketing serves up content that addresses our pain points, and is there when we want it.

Here’s a great illustration of that from Voltier Digital:

Content Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising

Here’s the evolutional pathway behind the modernized form of marketing that is most successful today.

Selling no longer works (a.k.a., traditional advertising).

Why?

Traditional advertising focuses on pushing messages at the consumer to get them to buy.

It’s interruptive, obstructive, and intrusive.

It shouts, “Hey, look at me!” while waving its arms.

You may try to avoid eye contact, but traditional ads are persistent.

You know what traditional ads look like because you’re bombarded with them every single day.

Think TV commercials, billboards, magazine ads, radio ads, and web banner ads.

Ads have been around for a long time, as evidenced by this traditional ad for “honest-to-goodness” coffee from the 1950s.

Ads may still work in some strategic places.

But Internet users can just click away from ads if they don’t want to see them.

Which is exactly what happens.

According to a PageFair report, 615 million devices in use today employ ad blockers. Additionally, ad blocker use increased by 30 percent in 2016 alone.

You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.

Ads are annoying.

And, they aren’t the way consumers prefer to learn about new products anymore.

Instead of businesses shoving themselves in consumers’ faces, they need to take a different, gentler approach.

Content marketing is exactly that.

Brands and marketers who use it publish content that teaches, inspires, guides, or solves a problem for their target audience.

With some handy tricks, the targets can find that content on the web without it being pushed at them.

If the prospects gain something useful from the content, they’ll keep coming back for more.

Finally, consumers can interact with the brand organically and share their content on social media.

Trust is forged.

Authority is established.

Connections happen.

These loyal followers can then be converted into leads and sales – naturally.

All of the above happens with a focus on giving value to the user.

Help users – offer them value and they’ll reward you in return.

That is what internet marketing/content marketing is all about at its core.

5 things you can do to improve it for your business

If you’re running a local retail or service business, you want to make sure consumers, particularly in your locale, can actually find you. To get in the game, competitive businesses already know they need to have an available, informative and attractive website to market their wares. But potential cutomers need to be able to find that webiste online via their search engine of choice. To get those local customers in the door, local businesses must adopt local small business SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques.

Local small business SEO methodologies help optimize your website using online marketing techniques to make it rank better and higher on Google feeds and search results that reach local audiences who inpu5 words or phrases relevant your site’s content.

The success of small businesses in today’s world of digital technology increasingly depends on how visible and easy-to-find they are via search engine results. The big question: Will your business get one of the top links on a search; or will the winner be one of your market competitors instead?

Do you wish to be on the foremost line of search? Check out the 5 most important things you need to address via small business SEO to put your business on top of any relevant local search results.

First and foremost, your business needs to have a fully functional website online and in full operation. Surprisingly, even today, many small businesses don’t have one. But to even get noticed by prospective customers, and to enhance your online presence and availability, you simply must have in a top-quality website. Or invest in one as soon as possible. Your site must be adequately designed, accessible and audience-friendly. The success of your business frequently depends not only on your site’s attractiveness, relevence and each of use. It depends, perhaps even more, on how internet search engines see it. To use search engine shoptalk, your website must be crawlable by search engine “spiders,” but also understandable and user-friendly.  

Develop a new Local Small Business SEO Profile

To enhance your online SEO presence, first make certain you’ve already posted a top-notch local business profile for your company or business. It’s astonishing just how many businesses – even large ones – are available via online website that lack basic information like a local address, contact email addresses and phone numbers, and favorable reviews via reliable review websites. How many users will end up contacting these businesses?

You can easily avoid this error. Create your business profile by modeling it on well-ranked profiles for other companies. You can find representative samples on popular review websites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp. It doesn’t matter whether you read reviews relevant to your specific business area. What does matter is that you discover successful patterns in business sites that achieve the top rankings. After all, there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel. The same approach that hits the jackpot for other companies can also work for you.

Also, when developing your new or revised local business SEO profile, find out what words, phrases and terminology are routinely deployed by top-ranked  businesses similar to yours. Further, find out what information sources or online directories are related to your business. Don’t forget to look for local online directories as well in this process, if available. If you can interest, affiliate with or join a few of these, your business can be highlighted there. It can subsequently be linked back to your own site. Implementing what useful information you find can almost certainly bring you out of the “invisible zone.” That enables more consumers to discover your site and your business.

Create top-quality content with targeted keywords

Google regards quality content as one of its top three ranking criteria. Content you post on your website should always be top quality and full of useful and easy-to-understand information. These qualities distinguish your site from other competitors.

Inasmuch as you create robust and useful content, you must also make sure that content amply contains important business- and product-targeted keywords. These further improve and increase your ranking on the search engines. But  never overuse keywords in your text, thinking this can improve your search engine ranking. Search engines long ago built in technologies that readily detect such unnecessary keyword overloading, called “keyword stuffing.” So by all means, do use keywords. But use them artfully. And use them to make your content concise, specific and easy to comprehend.

Collect and gather reviews

Positive reviews help improve and boost your availability and visibility on local search engines. Research conducted by Moz, suggests that online product and service reviews play a vital role in consumer awareness. Such review results contribute approximately 10% of the positives influencing how search engines discover and rank search results.

To encourage customers to give your company a good review, make provisions to link reviews to your website and to other online profiles. Also encourage your employees to as satisfied customers to consider writing  reviews. Attractive and informative online reviews prove among the most reliable ways your business can appeal to existing customers. Or encourage new ones to give your company a try.

Make use of quality links

Finally, to attract or increase the number of eyeballs finding you via search engine results, you must work on developing quality links to quality website. This enhances your site’s reputation. Every good search result involves such high quality links to other websites. Ensure that along with the top-notch content you create and post on influencer websites, you embed links back to your site—preferably via hyperlinks. In no small measure, this can up your game and increase your visibility in every search result.

Conclusion

Small business SEO is one of the most important ways you can grow your business via your online presence. No matter how small your SEO investment is, if you put today’s 5 tips into action, you can become a force in your business and a top choice for local online consumers. When you rank well in search results, you know that your marketing strategy is paying off. And you also know that you’ll soon be on your way to reaping the benefits all small businesses need to achieve: greater benefits for customers and higher profitability for your business as well.

Explaining How SEO Works To Clients

The more people who can find your website in search engines such as Google, the more customers, sales and leads you are going to generate. Plain and simple. This process is called search engine optimization, or SEO for short.

When it comes to selling SEO services to a prospect who is familiar with this process, things can be fairly easy. But what about when you’re dealing with a prospect who has no idea what SEO actually is? That’s when things can get tricky.

Operating inside the trenches of local marketing, I’ve been able to rank my local marketing agency for many top marketing search terms. We've achieved thousands of first-page rankings for customers and I've taught other digital marketers my SEO strategies through trainings at our marketing school, Offline Sharks.

So, if you're an entrepreneur or business owner selling SEO as a service, how do you effectively explain how it works?

This is a great opportunity to not only flex your expertise by explaining how the inner workings of SEO, but also demonstrate what it can do for their businesses. When clients trust that you know what you are doing and how it benefits them, closing the deal is easy.

Before you dig into your SEO lesson, ask how much your client knows already. This tells you how to best simplify your message and if you need any educational materials. Then you can run down the basics of SEO.