Content marketing, for all its good sides, is complex and can be hard to get right from the start.
Here’s a list of quick content marketing facts and tips to put all the various aspects of content marketing into perspective.
Let’s start with the content creation aspect of content marketing!
Content Creation Aspect
You can bootstrap your content marketing efforts
Creating content isn’t free – it will cost your money, time, or a combination of the two.
However, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing.
It’s completely possible to bootstrap your content marketing efforts in the beginning and only invest time in exchange for content.
In fact, it’s advisable to create content on your own at first even if you plan on outsourcing this activity in the future.
The idea is to learn the ins and outs of the process before paying somebody else to do it for you.
Video content marketers see faster ROI
83% of marketers say video gives them a good ROI.
Additionally, video content sees more engagement and sharing than text-based content.
Video posts on LinkedIn, for example, are 5X more likely to get comments and are getting shared 20X more than any other content.
Important note: don’t mistake the word faster for fast. Video content marketing still takes time and effort to start rolling, but it’s typically going to happen faster than if you focus just on your blog, for example.
Blogging is still a powerful content marketing channel
61% of consumers made a purchase after reading recommendations on a blog.
Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
68% of marketers think blogging is more effective than two years ago.
Blogging usually gets pronounced dead every couple of years and yet it continues to remain one of the pillars of content marketing.
A blog filled with useful content on your company website will bring numerous benefits like:
- Increase the number of keywords your site ranks for
- Attract links to your website
- Increase your website domain authority
- Help your customers solve their problems
- Amplify your branding efforts and increase brand awareness
- Increase qualified lead generation and sales
The omnichannel approach works well
The competition online is getting tougher and tougher every year and content marketers are increasingly forced to up their game.
It’s widely advised to focus on more than one content marketing channel when crafting your content marketing strategy.
Right now, these three channels in tandem work very well for a lot of marketers:
- Blog
- Youtube
Blogging and Youtube (video content marketing) I already touched upon, so let’s say a couple of words about LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has grown from a business recruiting tool into a full-blown content marketing channel in recent times.
Over 650 million users on LinkedIn are currently consuming more content than it’s created and published on the platform.
This means that the algorithm will organically share your content with a much wider audience than on, for example, Facebook or Instagram.
Will my >insert niche here< content work on LinkedIn?
Virtually any niche can work on LinkedIn because of the wide and active user base on the platform.
Original images and videos are preferable
Original multimedia content in your blog posts will be rewarded by both the search engines and your audience.
Original images and videos will show your users that you have hands-on experience with the topic you’re covering.
For example, if you’re reviewing a product and can show images or videos of you actually using the product, your audience is much more likely to take your recommendation seriously.
Of course, having original images and videos in your content is not always possible and you shouldn’t stress about it too much if that’s the case for you.
But if it is possible – do it!
If you’re interested in finding out how many images should you use per blog post, check out my article on the topic.
SEO Aspect
New websites and new content take time to rank
Search engines like Google will put your site through the coals and test what it’s made out of before directing any significant amount of traffic to it.
Getting into a competitive niche or creating content on competitive topics with a fresh website only delays this even more.
Depending on various factors, it usually takes 8-12 months for a piece of content to start getting traction on Google.
If you can recognize under-served topics within your niche and create content on those, you might be able to speed this process up.
Still, don’t expect any life-changing results in the first year.
Search intent is critically important
When creating content around any topic, always check the first page of Google to see what type of content already does well on it.
If your content doesn’t match what users are looking for, it will never rank.
For example, if you type into Google something like “best gardening tools,” you’ll see that virtually every result is a list of tools.
This is not because Google thinks a list of gardening tools is what users would want to see in this case.
Google knows this by measuring close to 200 ranking factors and coming to the conclusion that a list of gardening tools is the most useful piece of content for the vast majority of users.
80:20 rule is all you need when it comes to SEO
SEO is a bottomless pit.
One that will eat up your time if you let it and make you procrastinate on what’s really important – creating more content.
Google is becoming more sophisticated and less dependent on things like keyword density or meta descriptions by the day.
Employ the 80:20 rule and get 80% of the benefits by doing the most important 20% of the work like:
- Make sure your site is mobile friendly and runs reasonably fast
- Create relevant content
- Cover topics comprehensively
- Create content for humans, not search engines
Your site has to be mobile-friendly
Google has switched to mobile-first indexing a while back which means that they use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking.
This should not be a huge problem as most modern WordPress themes are mobile-friendly.
If yours isn’t, it’s time to switch to one that is.
Build relevance by comprehensively covering topics
Google likes relevance.
They even came up with the acronym E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
You can build E-A-T in your niche by comprehensively covering topics and solving every possible problem your audience might have.
Obviously, that can’t be done overnight and that’s OK.
Just keep E-A-T in mind as the long-term strategy for your content creation efforts.
Monetization Aspect
Don’t worry about monetization in the beginning
I wouldn’t worry about site monetization until you’ve published at least 30-50 quality pieces of content or hit 5,000 pageviews per month.
If your site gets 5,000 pageviews in the last 30 days with less than 30-50 articles, more power to you.
That means you’re choosing the topics correctly and creating quality content.
Until you hit that landmark goal, your time is almost always better spent by simply creating more content.
Ads are a very powerful monetization tool
Having content rank in the top spots on Google for transactional search intent keywords and collecting affiliate commissions is amazing, but those keywords are targeted by everyone in your niche.
You will typically have much better chances of finding and ranking for long-tail informational search intent keywords as a new site.
Luckily, ads can be a perfectly viable monetization tool if you can win many of those keywords and bring in a lot of traffic to your site.
Diversifying your monetization schemes should be a long-term goal
The three most popular website monetization schemes among content marketers are:
- Ads
- Affiliate marketing
- Your own digital products
Being heavily dependent on a single one is a vulnerability.
Developing your own digital product is something that’s not worth doing unless you have a large audience, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind as a long-term goal.
Ads and affiliate marketing are more beginner-friendly monetization schemes that you can start considering much earlier on.
Technical Aspect
A cheap shared hosting plan is more than enough in the beginning
A shared hosting plan from a reputable hosting company is all you need until your site starts earning revenue.
Normally, you won’t have to spend more than a few dollars per month on very decent hosting options like a basic WordPress hosting plan from A2 Hosting.
I even made a step-by-step guide on how to purchase and set up this hosting plan and you can check it out here.
Production quality is less important than you think
Production quality is great, don’t get me wrong.
But that’s not something you should let stop you from starting.
For example, images of a product in your hands taken with an old phone is much more valuable than a beautiful image of the product in somebody else’s hands.
Conclusion
The path to using content marketing successfully is long and traitorous.
Being aware of the facts and tips discussed in this article could shave off months or even years off of your journey to positive business results through leveraging content marketing.
If you think content marketing is the right avenue to take but don’t know where to start, check out my series of articles on how to create a working content marketing strategy.
It starts with an article on how to set your mission statement and why that’s important.
You can check out the mission statement article here or the entire series on the site homepage.