You’ve probably heard the phrase that “content is king,” and it’s true. Delivering content that is relevant to you and your business will improve your website ranking, your audience and ultimately your bottom line. It also sounds fancy, “content marketing,” but it’s not as fancy as you think. You don’t have to write lengthy white papers or case studies, and you don’t have to be an experienced journalist. All it takes is an idea, some writing time, and the following quick tactics to help you get a content marketing campaign off the ground.
Issue a press release – Issue a press release announcing the launch of your business or new website. You can issue a paid press release (recommended) for around $150 and use several online PR distribution platforms to issue it. These platforms then categorize your press release and automatically notify the top publishers, media professionals and local journalists in your respected industry and geographic area to draw attention to your release. As far as using a free press release goes, let’s say go for it. It’s not always the most effective in terms of gaining media coverage, but it can still help you get the message across to sub-media, blogs, and websites. Our advice is, if you’ve taken the time to write a quality press release, it certainly can’t hurt to distribute it to as many places as possible. So, try all your options and depending on your budget, choose the one that works best for you.
To be published – A how-to article, an interview from the local news outlet, or even a guest post on another local blog can help you get noticed by search engines and improve your website ranking. Especially with new websites, which often take a few days or even weeks before they are indexed, you benefit from the spiders crawling your website and noticing your link and following it back to posting on someone else’s website to your website.
Article Marketing – Similar to publishing but a little less work, article marketing is a great way to spread content online and get links and qualified traffic back to your site. There are dozens of article directories online that allow you to create a free account and then submit articles for consideration. Once approved as a publisher, create an author bio, which includes a brief description of who you are, your company, or your product/service, and may also include a link back to your website. These articles tend to rank fairly well on their own because these article directories are frequently crawled by search engines. As a result of the article’s high ranking, you benefit by catching the search engine traffic that clicks on your article and eventually clicks through to your website. These articles are also often syndicated from the publishing platform and end up republishing on other relevant blogs and websites, giving you even more links.
