Increase Your Authority With Content

Content is considered to be King for a reason. Consumers are looking for as much information about a product/service/business/brand before making a decision as possible, especially in the B2B sector where the decisions that are made can affect a large number of people within the organization. The content that is created on behalf of a business can go a long way in establishing trust with potential clients or customers. B2Bs are investing more into content marketing, which is great, but many are still making some mistakes along the way. Content marketing is really a 5 step process and many B2Bs are missing at least one of the steps. A thorough B2B content marketing campaign includes the following steps:

Research
Skipping this step can limit the success of your content. Before you start writing it’s important to see what kind of content others in the industry are creating. Take a look at their approach and analyze what might work for your business and what wouldn’t. The content that gets shared the most and receives the most content is obviously what people want to see. Just as you would when starting a business, do some competitive research. Don’t use this information to copy a content marketing strategy, but look for opportunities where you can improve upon what is already being done. If you just post more of the same, it will be difficult to get noticed.

Create and Edit
Once you’ve decided on your topic, you need to decide what the best format for that content should be. It can be a blog post, article, white paper, eBook, guide, video, podcast, infographic, etc. Once you’ve created something that you think is worth sharing, get a second opinion and make sure to triple check for spelling or grammatical errors. Remember, this content is a representation of your business.

Post
The best place to post content isn’t necessarily on your website. To increase brand exposure it’s important to seek out opportunities on other web properties. Spend some time researching industry related sites that accept content submissions like guest blog posts. Content creation can be difficult for everyone and many bloggers supplement their blog with guest posts to keep it active. Post videos to video sharing sites like YouTube in addition to posting on your own site so that it may appear within a YouTube search. Expanding your content across the web not only improves the chances of it being seen, but also aids in link building efforts for SEO purposes.

Monitor and Share
If you are posting on another web property, you’ll have to check in to see when it was published. All content needs to be monitored for comments and additional feedback. If comments or questions are ignored it doesn’t result in a good brand experience. Be sure to share all published content with social media followers and encourage them to share it with their connections.

Include it in Future Content
Content doesn’t need to have a short shelf life. As you continue with a content marketing strategy, you can include a link to “old” content within the new content. As long as it’s still relevant, this is a great way to get more eyes on that content and increase its value.

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Video Marketing That Makes Sense

Video Marketing Misinformation and 5 Big Myths About Video Marketing

If you aren’t using video to improve your brand visibility online and boost your SEO efforts, you should be. Every business has a website and is fighting for a prominent search engine presence, but there aren’t nearly as many businesses fighting for a YouTube presence. That means that creating and posting videos provides you with more opportunities to target specific keywords. Many businesses are hesitant to create videos. Hopefully by clearing up some video marketing myths, you will feel more confident and willing to move forward with a video marketing strategy.

Nobody Will Watch It
Marketing is about being where the people are, right? Well people spend up to 20 hours a month on average watching videos online on sites like YouTube and Hulu. There’s a reason why YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Some people prefer to learn visually and find it more entertaining to watch a video as opposed to reading a blog post or an article. As long as you have something interesting to say and provide value with your video, people will watch it.

It Has to Go Viral
It’s extremely hard to achieve a viral video. According to Pixability, 2/3 of all videos get fewer than 1,000 views and only 1.7% get more than 100,000 views. Just because your video doesn’t go viral, doesn’t mean that it isn’t having an effect. The focus of a video marketing strategy shouldn’t only be on the number of views that videos get. It really serves a much broader purpose.

It needs to be up to Hollywood Standards 
If you are a multi-billion dollar company, that’s one thing. But if you own and operate a small business nobody expects you to have a video that looks like it cost a few thousand dollars to produce. A marketing video needs to be professional looking, have proper sound and image quality, and provide value. Most phones have cameras these days that will work just fine and there are numerous free or inexpensive editing programs available that can get the job done.

It needs to be short
There is a common misconception that a marketing video shouldn’t be longer than a few minutes or you risk losing a viewer’s attention. The truth is that there is nothing wrong with including some long form videos in your video collection. They shouldn’t all be long, but they don’t all need to be short either. Do whatever makes the most sense for the content. If you need more than two to five minutes to get your point across, that’s OK. Create videos that have a wide range of lengths from quick promotional videos to longer videos that are educational.

It’s Expensive 
As was already mentioned, you don’t need to spend thousands on production. You also don’t need to spend thousands on promotion. Promote your videos through your established marketing channels like email newsletters and to your social media fans and followers. If you have the resources to do so, think about paying for a “Promoted Video” on YouTube. The costs aren’t nearly as high as paying for Google AdWords.

Doug Thaler is an expert customer acquisition and online marketing expert. He can be reached at 888.410.9690 x225

Another sample of a commercial video

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Building Backlinks That Will Generate Traffic!

How To Build Backlinks That Will Generate Traffic!

Building Backlinks

There’s no doubt that link building is an important part of SEO. Inbound links are what help convey trust to the search engines and improve a search engine presence. However, you never want to focus too much on the search engines when it comes to link building. After all, the search engines are simply robots. Building links just to build links in the hopes that they get noticed by the search spiders is the wrong approach. Instead, it’s important to make your target audience the priority when it comes to link building. After all, the goal of any internet marketing activity is to get someone to visit your site and convert. Building links on obscure sites may build up your link portfolio, but they aren’t going to result in any direct traffic.

Focusing too much on link volume for the search engines can result in bad decisions. Sure, there are plenty of ways to build links and build them quickly. This approach may even give you a boost in ranking for a short period of time. However, the search engines are becoming more and more advanced. The Google Penguin update was a game changer as it went after sites that were guilty of link spam tactics like building links from low quality sites, link exchanges, overuse of exact match anchor text, and more. Building links only for the search engines will have the opposite effect and aren’t worth building at all.

Links that are built purely for SEO purposes often miss the mark when it comes to traffic generation. The links that are included on many popular sites (including social networking sites) are typically “no-follow”. This code tells the search engine spider not to follow the link, or essentially not to pass any value over to the site that is being linked to. At first glance, “no follow” links appear to be a real bummer. What’s the point of getting this great link if the search engines aren’t paying any attention to it?

There are actually two reasons to try and attain these no follow links. The first is to generate traffic. Even if the search engine spider isn’t following the link it still looks the same to a human visitor. They can still see the link and they can still choose to click over to the site. Popular sites like YouTube and LinkedIn utilize the “no follow” tag to avoid an abundance of link spam but these sites can be great at generating traffic to your site. It would be crazy to avoid creating and sharing great videos on YouTube or answering questions or joining groups on LinkedIn for exposure just because any link that you are able to put on those sites are not followed by the search engine spiders. Think about the amount of traffic that those sites get on a daily basis.

The second reason is that it’s not actually true that no follow links have no SEO value. The search engines may not “follow” the link but they are still seeing it. The search engines like to see a well rounded link portfolio. If all of the links pointing to your site are followed links, it could raise a red flag. A combination of followed links and no follow links shows that you are building links for the right reasons, to gain exposure and generate traffic to your site from target audience members.

Doug Thaler is an expert on Customer Acquisitions and online digital marketing. Contact Doug at 888.410.9690 x225.

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