Photo: Quinn Dombrowski
Inbound marketing (content marketing) is a highly effective way for small business owners to attract more website visitors.
Writing informative, helpful articles, blog posts, and reports helps you to become a trusted authority to potential customers as they learn more about you and the products and services you offer.
Unfortunately, many businesses take shortcuts in order to produce content quickly and cheaply.
These tactics are harmful in the long run, for two reasons:
1. Search engines like Google penalize sites with poorly written or plagiarized content. This prevents them from appearing in the top pages of search results.
2. Weak content won’t help you to be seen as an expert in your field. This will make it more difficult to convince prospects to do business with you.
Google Recognizes Good Content
In the early days of the internet, it was easy to get good rankings on Google by generating dozens of poorly written articles and blog posts filled with the right keywords.
Many businesses simply copied and pasted content from other sites, changing only a few words to deceive the search engines.
Today, Google has the technology to catch such tricks, and penalizes websites that use these tactics.
Websites can run into trouble for the following reasons:
⦁ Creating irrelevant, low quality content
⦁ Reusing content from other sites
⦁ Posting poorly structured content
Well-Written Content Prevents These Problems
The only way to get results from content marketing is to create informative content that discusses the challenges and questions your potential customers have about your industry, your products and services.
You need to see yourself as a publisher, and create a plan that lists the topics you plan to write about, the formats you intend to use. You also need a calendar that tells you when to upload each piece of content to your website.
Best Practices for Creating Effective Marketing Content
These guidelines will help you to produce quality website content that gets results:
⦁ Use keywords related to the questions and problems your potential customers routinely deal with
⦁ Write about topics that are relevant to your typical clients / customers
⦁ Make sure your articles and blog posts are easy to read and scan. Use subheadings, wide margins, and bullet points to make the text flow
⦁ Ask readers to take action. Whether it’s downloading a booklet, or scheduling a free appointment, always include a call-to-action at the end of every piece of content you create
⦁ Reuse your content in social media posts and email messages in order to spread your messages to the widest possible audience.
How to Consistently Create Quality Content
Creating articles, blog posts, and other forms of online content takes a lot of planning, research, and revisions.
It is possible to do some of the work by yourself. You may decide to write a draft of the blog posts you need, and then have an editor or writer revise and polish them.
You may also decide to outsource your content marketing efforts to one or more freelancers.
This is the best option if you simply don’t have the time or desire for researching and writing.
There are many competent freelance content writers / copywriters who can manage your inbound marketing needs for affordable monthly fees.
Content Marketing Works When Done Right
Getting the best results from inbound marketing requires well-planned, informative written materials.
Creating an inventory of informative content that helps your prospects and customers solve common problems will eventually get the attention of Google and other search engines.
This will help you to separate yourself from competitors who create low-quality, unfocused website content.
As we’ve discussed, taking shortcuts, such as copying others’ content or buying articles from cheap content agencies, actually hurts your website rankings.
This also hurts your business in the long-run, if website visitors get a poor impression of your credibility and skills.
Investing in a good freelance writer, or a competent marketing editor, will lead to more website traffic, email subscribers, and paying customers.
Good writing still matters!
Avoid These Common Marketing Mistakes!
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Do you need help fixing poorly structured or ineffective content or copywriting?