This tutorial is part of our tutorial series on content marketing and web content creation.
Subscribe to our FREE content creation course to learn how to create great content for your website or blog.
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Content Marketing With WordPress
The tutorials in this series show you how to drive more traffic to your website and increase exposure for your digital presence using content marketing.
Content Is King
Have you heard the expression “Content Is King?”
This is probably one of the two most often quoted sayings in internet marketing circles (the other saying is “The Money Is In The List!”).
Do you know where this expression comes from?
In 1996, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, began an essay entitled “Content Is King” with the following statement…
“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet …”
(“Content Is King,” an essay By Bill Gates. Source: WayBack Machine)
Almost a decade and a half after Bill Gates wrote that “Content is King”, Seth Godin, a well-known internet marketing pioneer, entrepreneur, and the author of many best-selling books about marketing in the digital age, declared that…
“Content Marketing is all the marketing that’s left.”
(Source: ContentMarketingInstitute.com)
So … in the Digital Information Age, content is “king” and the only effective form of marketing left.
Here are some other interesting facts about content marketing:
- Consumers trust content not ads
- Consumers actively seek product information and reviews first
- Consumers need to see marketing messages multiple times
- Consumer purchases are influenced by content
For stats and figures on the above, see this article.
Digital content is the currency of the Digital Information Age.
Everything you do to grow a business online requires content. Your business needs content for website pages, product descriptions, sales copy, ads, articles, promotions, newsletters, customer training, FAQs, etc.
Knowing how to create or produce content, therefore, is one of the most valuable skills you can develop to grow your business online.
All websites need content. No matter what business you are in if you plan to build a successful business online, your website needs to have an effective content strategy for publishing valuable and relevant content to your target audience on a regular basis. Preferably every week if possible.
If you can’t publish new content on a weekly basis, then aim to get something posted on your site or blog at least every 2-3 weeks.
Don’t expect great success online if all you publish is an occasional self-promotional post (e.g. announcing a special sale or service discount). Your content strategy is much more involved than that. Creating a continuous pipeline of visitors, prospects, leads, subscribers, sales, customers, and clients requires publishing high-value content on a regular basis that will benefit your readers, engage with your visitors and subscribers, and provide your customers with something unique.
What Is Content Marketing?
“Content marketing” is often mentioned when people discuss digital marketing.
The essence of content marketing is:
- Creating valuable and relevant content that builds trust, credibility, and authority with your visitors and customers and makes them want to continue doing business with you.
- Using media to increase exposure and sales for your company or organization. This media can be anything that you create: blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, images, infographics, special reports, e-books … even software!
Whether you create large content items like a video or e-book, or small items of content like a blog post or a forum signature, it’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of your content is to make a compelling statement that engages your target audience.
This is important because the goal of your content marketing strategy is not to “sell” people a long or short advertisement about your business, but to educate them on how to become your best customers or clients.
Our FREE content course shows you how to create content that will get attention, gain your reader’s interest, help build desire for your offer, and encourage them to take the action you want them to take, i.e. click on a link, fill in a form, call to make an appointment, subscribe to your newsletter, share the information on social media, etc.
The key to creating an effective content marketing strategy is to focus on providing value and using information to help your potential and existing customers understand how your business, company or organization can add great value to their lives. Essentially, you are using an indirect sales method to create a content pipeline that will enhance the lives of your prospects in a beneficial way. Like any sales pipeline, the goal of your content marketing strategy is to help turn your visitors into prospects, your prospects into customers or clients, and your clients into champions.
To achieve this goal, you need loyal customers who are part of an active community that regularly use and recommend your products and services to others. Your content needs to educate, inform, train, engage, and motivate your audience to act and share your information with others.
Content Marketing: Not Talking AT, But WITH Your Visitors
Content marketing is a dynamic process for communicating and interacting with others online. It is more than just communicating AT visitors and customers. It’s communicating WITH them. You are not using content to blatantly advertise your business, but sharing valuable information with benefits.
If you’re using your website to post mostly self-promotional content, there may not be room for dialogue or any type of meaningful engagement with your audience. In today’s socially interconnected world, this type of communication is no longer as effective as it may have been once. Online users quickly become blind to advertising and self-promotion and start tuning these out.
On the other hand, it’s hard to tune out information that benefits you. Imagine for a moment that your business genuinely helps people to save money and that every time you put out a new piece of content, your readers will actually end up saving money. Pretty soon, you will have a crowd of people who are paying attention to your content and actually waiting to hear from you and people who are sharing your great money-saving tips with others.
In the Digital Information Age, people are consuming large amounts of digital information. Look at cable TV and 24-hour news channels. Imagine how much content is required to keep their wheels turning. These networks wouldn’t be thriving if people weren’t hungry for information. Your business is no different. Your job is to define what type of information your target audience finds meaningful, and provide it to them.
It’s time to dive into content marketing!
ACTION STEP
Before you begin outsourcing the creation of content for your digital marketing, you need to be absolutely clear about how you will use content to add value to people’s lives. If you have never done this before, sit down somewhere quietly and write down all the ways your business can benefit others and add great value to their lives.
One technique for doing this, is to make a list of all the possible objections your prospects could throw at you (e.g. “your product is too expensive,” “I can get the same thing or better from your competitors, why should I buy from you?” etc.) and then begin to answer these objections. This will highlight what is unique about your business and your products or services, and show you what kind of content you can create to begin adding value to other people’s lives.
If you need help generating content ideas quickly, see this tutorial:
Content Marketing – Types Of Content
Some of the types of content you can use and publish on WordPress to attract visitors and promote your business online include:
- Blog Posts
- Guest Blog Posts
- Images
- Memes, Cartoons & Comics
- eBooks & PDF Reports
- Infographics
- Video Sales Letters & Promo Videos
- Podcasts
- Testimonials, User Reviews, And Case Studies
- User-Generated Content
- 3rd-Party Content
In this content creation tutorial series, we’ll explore each of these content types in more detail, beginning with …
Blog Posts
Blogging has become the most popular and flexible way for businesses to communicate with their customers and potential customers. A blog gives your business a “voice” and lets you share all kinds of content, including text, images, videos and more.
Blogging is probably the most cost-effective, accessible and immediate way to start implementing your content marketing strategy. If you don’t have a blog set up for your business, then get one.
The only thing to remember about blog posts is that you have to post consistently to keep people coming back to read your blog posts. As stated earlier, you don’t have to post to your blog every day but you do need to post to your blog regularly.
If you are going to blog about your business, we highly recommend using WordPress. WordPress not only lets you easily add, edit, and manage all types of content with text, images, videos, audios, downloadable files and more, but WordPress can also be configured to automatically start driving traffic to your website.
An expertly configured WordPress site will instantly announce, publicize, and distribute your content automatically to search engines, social media, RSS directories, bookmarking sites and other traffic-generating websites as soon as new content is published on your website.
To learn more about the befits of using WordPress, see the training module below:
If you need help installing and expertly configuring a WordPress site or blog, refer to our FREE WordPress installation tutorials below:
Summary
Content is king and content marketing is the only marketing left. Content marketing is communicating with customers and providing them with content and information that benefits them and adds value to their lives.
Action Step
Before you begin outsourcing the creation of content for your digital marketing, you need to be absolutely clear about how you will use this content to add value to people’s lives. If you have never done this before, sit down somewhere quietly and write down all the ways your business can benefit others and add massive value to their lives.
One technique for doing this, is to make a list of all the possible objections your prospects could throw at you (e.g. “your product is too expensive,” “I can get the same thing or better from your competitors, why should I buy from you?” etc.) and then begin to answer these objections successfully. It will highlight what is unique about you, your product or service, and show you where you can add value to other people’s lives.
Go through all the content types listed above and make a note of the kind of content that you believe your audience wants to consume. Once you have made this list, mark which type of content you can easily create yourself and which type you would prefer to outsource. In other tutorials, we’ll show you how to research the cost of outsourcing the creation of this content.
In the next tutorial, we’ll continue looking at other types of content you can add to your content strategy mix.
To learn more about using memes, cartoons, comics, and animated videos as content, see the tutorial below:
(Source: Pixabay)
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