To get more traffic to your business blog and convert those visitors into leads and sales, content marketing is the way to go. But it’s important to keep up with the latest techniques in search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing trends. Companies that don’t adapt to changes in search marketing usually end up paying a heavy price in lost traffic and earnings. But, this should not be the case when you can easily get affordable digital marketing services. To keep your content marketing campaigns from getting derailed, follow best practices and avoid these four deadly mistakes.
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Publish Content Without Promoting It
Once upon a time, you could write a blog post — or pay a freelance writer to write it for you — publish it on your company blog and expect it to start ranking in search within a matter of weeks or months. Throw some share buttons at the end of it, and half a year later that post could be getting dozens or even hundreds of hits per day from Google. Some of those visitors would then convert into leads and paying customers, and the post would pay for itself many times over in the years that followed. Those were the good old days.
This fairy tale can still play out once in a while, but in most cases it doesn’t work out that way. Today, if you want your content to attract tons of traffic and convert like crazy, you need to promote it. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Google+ are all still excellent ways to promote your content. But you shouldn’t stop there. There is still value in posting comments on blog posts and forums, as long as those platforms are active with engaged, targeted readers.
Paid advertising also has its place. But to maximize your ROI with paid ads, you will need to push that traffic to landing pages that are optimized to convert rather than to random blog posts. Different methods will provide different results, and the only way to know for sure is to test, test, test.
But whatever you do, don’t just hit the publish button and walk away.
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Ignore Older Blog and Video Content
Another content marketing mistake to avoid is publishing content on your blog or video platform, promote it for awhile and then never touch it again. In the past, you could do this and still expect those pages to rank for years to come, but that isn’t a reliable strategy anymore. There’s no such thing as evergreen content anymore.
If you want old content to keep getting traffic, then you should still promote it every now and then. And you should also update it as needed. Fix broken links. Add new information. Provide something fresh for your readers and for Google to see. Updated content tends to draw more traffic than dusty, old, forgotten blog posts.
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Create Cheap, Low-Value “Me Too” Content
Remember the old days of article marketing? Well, try to forget them if you can. That stuff doesn’t work anymore and will likely get your site penalized.
You can’t just blast out tons of cheap, low-value content that barely scratches the surface of the topic and expect it to rank and bring traffic. There are millions of articles like that already out there. If your content is no better than those, then there’s no point in even publishing it.
Today’s content needs to be pretty amazing. The bar has been raised exponentially over the past few years. People are tired of reading the same old drivel that targets the same old keywords without any real depth.
Don’t just create content that mimics everyone else and targets the exact same keywords. Reach out to your customer base for content ideas. Content marketing created from business research will be more effective and will speak more directly to your customers than thin, keyword-driven content that says the exact same thing your competition has been saying for the past three years.
So up your game and seek to become the expert in your industry. Make your blog something special — something worth bookmarking or subscribing to.
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Promote Content Using Spam Methods of any Kind
There are still a lot of SEOs out there pushing spammy, black hat SEO methods. They use automated programs to scrape other websites, spin the content and blast it out on their blogs, on their clients’ blogs, on article directories, on social media and in forums.
They do the same thing with content promotion. They buy email lists and spam them 24/7 with copy-pasted emails. They push out spam comments on blogs, forums, YouTube videos and social media posts. They put links on cheap PBNs and penalized websites.
And they pay the price — or rather, their clients pay the price by getting hit with manual penalties from search engines. And it can take months or years to recover from those penalties.
Content marketing is probably the most effective way to promote your businesses online these days, and there’s no sign that it’s effectiveness is going away any time soon. But to reap the benefits, you need to do it right. Watch out for these four marketing mistakes and keep your campaigns on track to grow your traffic consistently and get more readers, more leads and more sales.
