There are several ways to approach content marketing. For some, content is a distraction-free zone that exists independently of advertising. For others, content is a type of marketing activity that can be done to attract potential customers to a brand or business. Regardless of the path taken, creating, publishing and promoting content are integral to the strategy.

But what exactly is content marketing? And which strategy or techniques should you employ? What are the foundations of online content marketing?

Key Takeaways

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes for a moment. What is your primary source of information when you visit a website? What do you expect to find on a website?

Your answer to these questions will dictate the content, keywords and format of your online content. For example, if you’re aiming to attract gamers to your game-related website, you might want to consider creating a strategy around highly-specific content like how-to guides or FAQs. Alternatively, if you’re aiming to attract women to your health-related website, you could consider incorporating more lifestyle content.

When developing content for an online space, you should keep in mind that your goal is to provide valuable information to your reader. The more they value the content, the more they’ll value your brand.

To provide more insights into the topic, we’ll examine three pillars of a successful strategy: content, keyword and design. We’ll then dig into each area and examine how each one affects the success of your strategy.

Content Is King

While you might not always have the opportunity to publish new content, whether in the form of an e-book, a news article or an op-ed, you always have the content you’ve created in the past. The more you provide, the more you’ll attract potential customers to your business.

The first step in creating content is to define the topic you’ll write about. Once you’ve got that down, you can start to develop content ideas. As a general rule, you want to produce content that is both informative and unique. A good strategy to follow is to begin to explore what others are doing in your niche. What content do your competitors have published? How is their content performing? Use this information to your advantage and create content that is both helpful and sets your business apart from the competition.

When developing content, you want to ensure that what you produce is both useful and interesting. If your content is engaging and offers some value, you’ll surely find success building a following.

Keyword And Asset- Based Marketing

If you’re new to internet marketing, you may be wondering what the difference is between keyword and asset-based marketing. The short answer is, it’s all about the words you use.

Asset-based marketing is all about the content you have at your disposal, whether that’s a blog, social media accounts or a massive e-commerce store. For example, if you’ve got a blog for your business, you could examine how you could incorporate content from other areas of your site—like product reviews or tips and tricks—into blog posts. If you’re running a review site, you could look into reviewing products based on similar themes or using your blog to promote your e-commerce store.

With keyword-based marketing, you’re looking to dominate the search results for specific keywords. For example, if you want to rank for the keyword ‘London’ (which we know is a very competitive keyword), you could try to include a London post in each of your articles.

The advantage of using keywords is that you can choose specific terms that are both highly-specific and, at the same time, broad enough to perform well in search engines. For example, if you want to rank for the terms ‘landscape photographers in London’, you could include a few landscape photographs of London in each of your articles and they’ll perform well in search.

The main takeaway from this section of the blog post is that your content—whether you create a blog post, a tweet or a Facebook status update—should all be designed to attract, engage and convert your target audience. And to do that, you need to set your content apart from the competition.

Design Is Vital

Finally, we come to the most important part of any blog post, website or marketing material—the design. As we’ve established, content is important, but so is the design of your material. One of the simplest ways to make a real difference is to ensure that the content is easy to consume. If you’ve got a huge chunk of text that requires a reader to scroll down to see the first word or image, you’re losing a potential customer. Nobody likes to read long blog posts. If you want to grab their attention, you need to do something about it.

With that in mind, create a design that is easily digestible. Look at your website’s existing design and determine what you could do to make it better. Do you need a different font? Perhaps a different color scheme? More images?

Once you’ve got your content and design in good shape, start to think about promoting your content. There’s plenty you could do to spread the word far and wide. From getting featured on other websites and blogs to creating and distributing infographics, there are plenty of ways to gain exposure and drive traffic to your site.

If you’ve been considering a content marketing strategy but don’t know where to start, this post is for you. By learning the basics of online content marketing, you’ll be able to dive right in and create highly-optimized content that will draw in and retain your audience.