Content Marketing Tips, Strategies and Resources
Content Marketing is a powerful arsenal that brands can heavily rely on, especially in scaling the business’ ability to build brand awareness, generate constant visitors/leads/loyalists, and improve the site’s conversions. This marketing practice has been around for centuries, but now has evolved and been embraced as one of the most efficient digital marketing activity today.
I’ve written dozens of posts that share different methodologies and insights in terms of content development as well as in promoting content to its targeted audience, which you can check out below.
Inbound marketing or earned media is a marketing principle that merges several online marketing practices that aim to attract visitors/customers to a site – instead of interrupting their online activities through paid methodologies – by simply discerning what its target audience need, search for and find genuinely interesting and providing value to meet those necessities.
Processes that this marketing strategy mostly involves are search engine optimization, content marketing, social media and conversion rate optimization, wherein most don’t rely on heavy marketing budgets, but can provide longevity for its results to a great extent in terms of branding and revenue generation.
Google+ has been the majority of discussions in the Search industry since the start of the year, and it’s almost certain that it’s because of the sudden merge of social and personalized search results (Search, plus your world).
The amount of users joining Google’s social platform is aggressively growing – reaching over 100 million users worldwide (since the start of February this year) in a short period of time. However, this amount doesn’t really prove how engaged their users are in the platform, given that I’m personally not that active on using this social network, and most of my friends aren’t utilizing Google+ that much as well.
I have been writing a lot about online branding for the past several months, seeing that this practice is being more relevant and significant to the changes that search engine algorithms have been continuously implementing to serve better results to their users (particularly in developing new signals for new ranking factors and algorithmic changes such as Panda and Search plus your world).
Apparently, the more search engines evolve, is the more all the available known channels for online marketing become a single component of an entire strategy, making integration the most efficient way to drive visitors, build a solid brand, generate sales to your business and to withstand any imminent/drastic game-changers.
When Google announced last week that they’ll be starting to roll out Search Plus your World, it became more evident that search is shifting towards a simpler way of retrieving data for their users by merging personalized search and social search on their result pages for logged-in users (including relevant Google+ pages).
This sudden – but already foreseen – move from Google is definitely going to make massive changes on how businesses should market themselves, as this is certain to affect traditional online marketing methodologies.
In 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin received funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, no one really expected for Google to grow or to be as big as it is now. And perhaps, not one person expected for it to create massive job as well as business opportunities for people worldwide, which is now one of the most competitive and in-demand industries in the web space – Search Engine Optimization.
People have speculated enough – for over a decade of its presence – that the industry is predestined to die (particularly on every year-end posts/articles predicting that next year, SEO will be dead, I guess most of you have seen this statement a lot). Seeing that SEO is still continuously evolving, we all might not see its end anytime soon.
Last Saturday, October 29, 2011, I presented about Viral Content Marketing at Mastering Online Ranking Conference. MORCon is one of the most awaited yearly SEO conferences in the country, as several of the country’s top-gun SEOs unite to share their knowledge (and some of their secrets) about the online marketing industry to our small local community of Internet professionals.
I was lucky to be invited to present at this event and definitely fortunate to receive a lot of positive feedbacks about my presentation, seeing that it was my first ever speaking gig. My slides from MORCon are below, and I might also upload a video of my presentation (though it’s in Filipino) in the coming weeks. Any questions about the presentation, you can drop a comment below.
Link building is a very exhausting, and usually, the most frustrating aspect of website optimization, especially if you’re one of the small ones who’s competing against the bigger names in a certain industry that have all the means to speed up the implementation of the tougher and time-consuming tasks (tasks that are capable of returning results faster).
In search marketing, when you are competing with the bigger brands, you get mostly tied up with limited strategies to fight back, as these brands are willing to spend a lot to take preemptive actions and dominate the SERPs, which sometimes lead the smaller ones to resort to desperate measures (like web spamming).
Search engine optimization is quite similar to a relationship, marriage or driving a car perhaps (sorry for the failed correlations) – let’s just say that it’s a two-way system, where one process cannot survive and would not work effectively without the other (on-page = content and off-page = links).
Apparently, search engine traffic is still the best form of traffic out there, as visitors generated through search engines have higher chances of converting, knowing that they are in search of the information that your site/webpage is providing.