Content Marketing Strategy Delivers 3 Benefits

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Content marketing strategy promotes a website with content on other websites. The content published elsewhere usually links back to the parent site.

For example, a publisher or business owner has a website about lawn care. The revenue opportunity lies with selling grass seed, weed killer or other related products.

The publisher writes an article about how to reseed lawns and publishes it elsewhere on a blog, social media account or other external website. The article contains links back to the related content on the parent site.

Ideally, the business pays nothing for that article if it appears on a site that doesn’t require a fee. Examples include company-owned blogs, YouTube channels and certain social media sites.

Some websites will accept an article for the sake of getting free content in exchange for accepting a link in the article. These are usually guest posts. Otherwise, website owners have to pay a fee to publish it elsewhere.

Publishing content elsewhere has three major benefits:

1. More audience via clicks from people who read the article on the external site and click on links.
2. Better search engine optimization as a result of the backlink (especially if the link is dofollow).
3. Brand awareness for people who read the site name or click on the link and visit the parent site.

One rule dominates the strategy — quality matters more than quantity. Too many low-quality “guest posts” on other sites can backfire because search engines algorithms frown on manipulation.

External sites vary in the value they provide a content marketing strategy. Some are good at delivering audience, others deliver better search engine optimization and others still enhance the branding value of a site.

The Basics of a Content Marketing Strategy

The typical article consists of three elements that are either required by the external site or essential for increasing clicks:

1. The search engine friendly title (or headline) using words that are accurate but also attract attention
2. The body with text that is useful, informative and grammatically correct, along with backlinks
3. An “About” box — if one is available — with a brief biography of the writer, plus one or two links back to the writer’s site.

When search engines discover a new article on these sites, they initially may rank it high in their results because of the size and importance of the sites.

The parent site may get value from the backlink, which in turn enhances the parent site in the search engine results.

Uniqueness of the content and the credentials of the writer may improve the article’s ranking as well.

In addition, if the title, body and call to action in the resource box are good enough, visitors will click on that link and come to the parent site to read more.

Hooking the Reader

The single most important part of the process for hooking the reader is the title followed by the first paragraph.

It is the title and meta description (or some other relevant content on the page) that are displayed by the article sites and the search engines.

If they are well-written, interesting or catchy, people will click on the title link, click on the site backlink and drive the articles higher in search results. If they are sloppy or dull, people won’t click on them.

Be aware that it can take at least dozens of articles to make an impact. It also takes patience and fine tuning the title, body and resource box if the article doesn’t produce any meaningful impact after several days.

Just as importantly, the landing page must be good. The landing page is where the clicker arrives on the parent site.

Quantity Versus Quality

Besides learning the process, another consideration for writers is whether to focus on quantity or quality.

Which approach is better? Is it a large number of short and quick articles, or a small number of high-quality articles?

There are two schools of thought among content marketers.

One school believes in producing as many short articles as possible in the briefest amount of time and post them on as many external sites as possible.

The second school focuses on quality over quantity. They tend to write longer articles, take more time in writing them and focus on trying to get click throughs to their sites from their articles.

Because they take more time, they produce fewer articles and place them on fewer sites.

But high quality articles can rank higher in search engine results if the title, body and resource box are good enough and unique enough to attract high readership.

Recent trends in search engine optimization favor this second approach.