The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

“Content marketing” is the new catchphrase. In the old days, people used “article marketing” to denote what today is often referred to as “content marketing,” but the two are really different.

Article marketing was the process of writing articles and then publishing those articles in directories for e-zine editors and publishers and webmasters to use as content on their own web properties. While this process in included in the overall concept of content marketing, there is a fine nuance that differentiates the two.

Content marketing is a broader category. Anything you do online that promotes your business or your content – whether it be on your own web properties or elsewhere – can be considered content marketing.

So is there a viable strategy to ensure that your content marketing is effective?

Yes, but it’s different for every business.

The first step to an effective content marketing strategy is to define your business goals. All of your content publishing and marketing should go toward helping you reach those goals. Anything that doesn’t contribute to the advancement of your business goals is superfluous and should be cut out. Anything that pushes you forward toward your goals is good marketing.

But is everything content? Content is anything you create, produce, or publish. It can include guest articles for your blog, articles you publish around the web, images and videos you load to your website or third-party sites like Flickr and YouTube, and anything else that takes up virtual space on a server and is public. That includes forum postings and blog comments on other blogs.

Your strategy should be to present your company in the best possible light in all situations. That requires forethought. Don’t market emotionally. Market responsibly.

If you write, promote, post, or market a blog or website content in any fashion, then I’d chance to say that you are a publisher. But what does that mean, exactly?

The definition of “publisher” has changed. In the old days, it meant you contracted with writers and agents to produce written manuscripts. You were often the risk taker in the business process of producing written works. You put up the money for the content being produced and saw the project through from beginning to end. You were seldom the creator of the content itself.

All of that has changed in the Internet age. Today you can be a publisher without as much risk. If you have a blog on your website, you’re a publisher. If you write and post articles online – even if those articles are not on your website – then you might be a publisher.

Why does that matter? It matters because if you are a publisher, then you should act like a publisher.

A publisher is concerned as much with the cost of producing content as much as he is with the actual process of producing the content. That means you must concern yourself with the cost of acquiring content if you don’t produce it yourself, the time cost of producing your own content, and the return on your investment in terms of the money your content makes. That’s what publishers do.

Content marketing is about producing quality content for your readers, but publishing content is about measuring the return on that content. If you want to run a business online, you have to think like a publisher.

Content marketing is the best way to reach your market today. In fact, it’s really the only way. You’re either effective at it or you’re not. But where do you publish your content?

Here is a list of 12 essential content marketing channels for your online content. Use as many as you have time to manage.

1. Pinterest – Pinterest is the new kid on the block, but if you have graphics on any of your Web properties, then it’s a great channel to incorporate into your marketing plan.
2. Tumblr – Tumblr, too, is highly graphic in nature, but unlike Pinterest it is also very textual. You can incorporate your best graphics with textual content and build a community around your content pretty doggone fast.
3. Blogger – Blogger is the original blogging platform. While it hasn’t changed much over the years, it has gotten better.
4. WordPress – This competitor to Blogger is another platform you should incorporate into your content marketing strategy.
5. Your own domain – Your blog and website at your own domain name is the best content marketing channel you have. Don’t abandon it or, for goodness sake, forget about it.
6. YouTube – If you have video content or you’ve been thinking about producing video content, then you should have a YouTube channel.
7. Twitter – You can actually say a lot in 140 characters, and drive tons of traffic.
8. Facebook – Connect with old friends and make new ones. Build a page for your brand. But don’t stop there. It’s the most trafficked website in the world.
9. HubPages – Build your own hubs and monetize, plus drive traffic to your own web pages with solid, original content.
10. Squidoo – Create lenses on any topic in which you are an expert, and point your links back to your website. It’s the perfect marketing channel.
11. LinkedIn – Meet other business people, ask questions about your topics of interest, answer some, and make connections for life.
12. Quora – If you are an expert on any subject in the world, Quora is the place to prove it.

Now that you know the 12 essential content marketing channels, what are you going to do about them?

Let’s say you’ve decided that a huge website covering every aspect of peeling a banana needs to be published and that you are the right person for the job. You’ve done the research, you’ve picked your keywords, and you’ve put together an awesome plan for the website. How many pages per day should you publish?

I’m not talking about blog posts. I’m talking about web pages. Actual content pages of your website.

There are two types of mistakes new webmasters can make with the rate of publishing their web pages.

• Too often
• and not often enough

Both of these mistakes are easy to make.

Why You Shouldn’t Publish Web Pages Too Often

If you publish hundreds or thousands of web pages at a time you are likely to make some huge mistakes. First, you’ll have no way of knowing what you are doing that is working if you manage to get some of your pages to rank #1. What is your control group? It’s best to go slow so that you can measure each activity you perform as you perform them. Then, you have a much better chance of figuring out what is working and what isn’t.

Secondly, if you publish too many pages at once, you may very well get flagged by Google as a spammer and your web pages could end up at the bottom of the SERP heap. That would be disastrous.

Why You Should Publish Web Pages Every Day

A much lesser problem is not publishing often enough. You won’t be penalized for publishing one page a year, but you’ll spend a lifetime trying to figure out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. As often as search algorithms change, you’ll probably never figure it out.

The best content plan is to publish in moderation. You want to publish often enough that you can test new techniques and strategies without destroying the old ones you know are working. But you also don’t want to publish too much too fast. So my recommendation is to publish no more than 5-10 pages a day, at most. 10 pages a day might be too much to tackle if you are on your first website. At the least, you want to publish one new page per day, or one every other day.

Every time you update your website the search bots come and recrawl it. The search engines then index new pages and re-index any that might have changed since the last time you updated your website. By publishing often, you ensure that you have a steady content publishing stream that keeps your website in the search engines’ eyes. And if you are on the search radar, you are in front of visitors’ eyes too.

I’m guessing Stacy Green coined the acronym P.O.E.M. I Googled it and got no results. She published her post introducing the acronym just four hours ago.

So what does it mean?

P.O.E.M. is an acronym that stands for Paid, Owned, Earned Media. We’re talking about content here.

I think it’s a useful acronym, especially for businesses that are accustomed to developing public relations campaigns for print and offline media. You can take this acronym and use it for offline, or digital media.

• Paid – This refers to pay per click advertising, in-text paid links, banner advertising, and other forms of online media that you pay for. Do you have a plan for paid media? Can you measure your results?
• Owned – Owned media of course is a reference to media you create in-house. It includes your website, videos that you create, articles you publish off-site, blog posts, and any other type of media that you have the copyright to. You own that media.
• Earned Media – In the old days of offline marketing, earned media meant sending a press release to a news editor somewhere and hoping he found your story worthy of journalistic mention. Today, you don’t necessarily need professional journalists and editors, though they can help. Earned media includes interviews with bloggers, social media shares by celebrity networkers, and virtually any digital move that involves other people in an online format – forums, videos, blogs, social networks, etc. If it goes viral, that’s the ultimate earned media.

A good marketing strategy involves all three of these types of media. Plan it, implement it, and measure it. Follow a useful strategy and your online marketing efforts stand a much better chance of succeeding.

If you plan on doing any online marketing in 2012, what are the important methods of marketing that you should focus on? What should you stay away from?

First and foremost, SEO is definitely not dead. You shouldn’t give up on that yet. But it has changed in the last five years.

For instance, if you are out prowling for links and looking for high PR do-follow links, then you are probably wasting your time. But if you are focusing on placing your unique articles on high profile, high traffic websites where they will be seen, then that is a much better way to go about link building in 2012.

Social media is another online marketing tactic that isn’t going away. However, don’t just sign up for a bunch of social media websites and forgetting about them. Stick the large sites with current traction and high traffic. For most businesses, that means Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. If there are niche-specific sites that you can focus on, join them too.

Whichever social media websites you decide to join, stay active.

Video marketing and mobile marketing are two other online content strategies that are gaining ground and look to be effective in 2012.

Online marketing hasn’t changed much in the last five to ten years, but it has changed. Make note of the changes and keep promoting your content far and wide.

Online marketers have recently begun using a different kind of language. It used to be that you’d hear a lot about link building, social media marketing, and the use of other terms to give a fragmented impression of Internet marketing strategies. But there is one term that draws all of these concepts together under one impressive term.

That one term is “content marketing.” So what is it?

Content marketing includes the full span of content that you produce to promote your brand. It begins with your own website content, but it doesn’t end there.

Beyond your own website you have your blog, your social media profiles, directory submissions, video content, links, articles, Knol pages, Squidoo lenses, guest blog posts and anything that involves promoting your content in hopes of drawing attention to it.

All content marketing is really about one thing – drawing attention to yourself. Anything you use that does that falls into the category of content marketing. That even includes press releases, forum content and comments on other people’s blogs.

So here’s the question you have to answer about your own content marketing efforts: Are all of your efforts consistent in terms of your message and brand? If not, what do you need to do to get it there?

Content marketing is as much as creating perceptions as it is anything else. What are you doing to make your content sell your business?

Have you defined your content marketing strategy or do you just post random content when it comes to you?

It’s important to create a content marketing plan. This is your blueprint for content publishing and your online business success. It entails a three-part process:

• Decide which types of content you will use in your marketing strategy.
• Plan how you will publish and promote your content.
• Execute.

That seems simple, but it isn’t. It really is hard work. But it’s necessary work.

On deciding which types of content you will use, you’ll have to ask yourself if you’ll need a blog. Will you incorporate articles in your marketing strategy? PPC? How about social media? Furthermore, what role will each of these tactics play in your overall marketing strategy and who will be responsible for implementing them?

Your content marketing strategy should consider how SEO and social media will work together to put your content in front of the eyes of the people you want to do business with. Are they local or global?

Does your audience spend a considerable amount of time on social networks? How much? Which ones do they use most often?

When defining your content marketing strategy, you have a lot to think about. Think about how it all fits together and don’t leave anything to chance.

Viral marketing seems to be the new buzz word in Internet marketing. Everyone wants their content to go viral. Everyone wants to see their content get distributed across the entire Web, but not everyone understands just how to make that happen.

The bottom line for any kind of marketing is to ensure that your content is before the eyes of the people who will actually use it. That’s half the battle in viral marketing right there.

Viral marketing can often occur spontaneously. When you share something with a friend and that friend shares it with another friend then that friend shares with another. Now imagine that each friend shares your content with five other friends. It’s easy to see how quickly this process can multiply. Just look at how many friends you can reach after going five levels deep:

• You – Share with 5 friends
• Level 2 – Your 5 friends share with 5 friends each = 25 friends
• Level 3 – Each friend’s friend shares with 5 more = 125 friends
• Level 4 – Each Level 3 friend shares with 5 friends = 625 friends
• Level 5 – Each Level 4 friend shares with 5 friends = 3,125 friends

After five levels of sharing, your content has reached 3,906 people including you and your five friends. Now take that one more level and you’ve touched 19,530 people. That’s how viral marketing works.

But what medium should you use to produce that can result? It depends. Where are the people you want to reach? Are they at StumbleUpon or YouTube? Try it there. How about social bookmarking sites like Digg? If that’s where your audience can be found then that’s where you need to submit your content.

The hardest thing about viral marketing is predicting how people will respond. Not everything that looks hot goes hot. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.