Content Marketing 101: A Guide for Beginners

content marketing 101

Content Marketing is a very specific form of search engine optimization that has become more and more popular as the internet has evolved into a content-driven information machine.

If you ever have a question or want to know about something, you ‘Google it’ to find the answer. This is what makes Content Marketing such an invaluable and high ROI marketing method.

On a basic level, content marketing is creating content that ranks in search engines for specific keywords that your customers are likely to search for. This allows for an endless stream of targeted leads and customers coming to your website daily.

In this guide, I am going to show you everything you need to know about content marketing to increase your traffic, customers and sales to your website.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is the method of creating high-quality content and attracting backlinks, shares and eyeballs in order to convert readers into paying customers or leads.

The process of content marketing itself is different depending on who you ask, but at Tyton Media the content marketing process is split up into 4 important tasks:

  1. Research: The most important part of a content marketing campaign is research. Ideally, you want to find high searched / low competition keywords in a specific niche.
  2. Build: Next, you build incredible content related to your niche and researched keywords.
  3. Optimize: Optimizing your content so that it complies with all the latest search engine optimization best practices.
  4. Promote: Launch your content and build backlinks in order to rank your content high in Google for your chosen keywords.

Types of Content

There are a ton of different types of content that can be used with content marketing. Here is a list of some of the most widely used content types for content marketing:

  • Articles
  • Guides
  • Blog Posts
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Audio Clips
  • Memes
  • Powerpoint Presentations

Benefits of Content Marketing?

Content Marketing can be a bit of an investment up front but its one of the greatest returns on investment when it comes to customer acquisition. When you get content ranked for high searched keywords you have an endless stream of new customers and leads coming to your website.

Depending on the keyword you can get anywhere from 10 to hundreds of thousands of new visitors every month. But there are also a number of other great benefits of content marketing:

  • An endless stream of new customers
  • High return on the initial investment
  • Establish your online presence
  • Become an international company
  • No need for a full-time employee
  • Lower customer acquisition costs

Ok, so now you know what content marketing is and the numerous benefits but how the hell do you do it?

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Content Marketing Strategies

There are quite a few different content marketing strategies that you should use in order to optimize your campaign to give you the best results.

Use Awesome Images

Using engaging visuals, images and infographics in your content can help break up the text as well as keep the reader’s interest. Not only that but its also good for SEO to include all different types of media in your content.

Add Valuable Data / Graphs & Stats

Another great way to break up your text and add value to your content is to place graphs, statistics and informative data inside your posts. This will add a ton of SEO value to your content and also attract more backlinks because people often reference data and statistics which gives you great backlinks.

Create Well Written Content

One of the most important strategies is to create well-written content that people want to read. Are you going to read a piece of content that has a ton of spelling and grammar issues, isn’t written well and is just plain crap?

No. You have to keep your readers attention by having a voice and really good writing skills. Use a service like Grammarly to make sure your spelling and grammar are perfect.

You also want to make sure that your content is very lengthy. Try and write in between 3,000-10,000 words in order to maximize your long tail keywords and increase your chances of ranking higher in Google.

If you aren’t a great writer or you simply don’t have a writing voice, then hire a content marketing agency to take over your content marketing.

Target Your Audience

You don’t want to spend a ton of time building awesome content that brings in people who aren’t interested in your product or service. You must first, find out who your audience is, what content they are consuming and then build your content around that audience.

If you are a personal trainer trying to get more clients and you are building content around cars, you will probably not convert many users into customers from that content.

How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?

Content marketing can cost anywhere between $500-$20,000 a month and it really depends on the strategy, amount of content and marketing objectives. At Tyton Media, we have a $7,000/mo content marketing package that includes everything from research to execution. We take over your entire content marketing operation and build insanely good content that brings in targeted traffic.

If you are interested in hiring a full-time employee or team to do your content marketing you are looking at at least $70,000 a year plus the health insurance costs, taxes and training. It usually much cheaper to simply hire a team of specialist to take over your content marketing.

Content Marketing Tools

If you are looking to do your content marketing yourself, there is a number of great tools out there that can help streamline your content marketing campaigns.

Ahrefs

Although it is hard to pronounce, Ahrefs is a great all-around tool to build and manage the best content marketing campaign possible.

ahrefs content marketing

Ahrefs allows you to find popular content ideas in their content explorer and even view how much search traffic, shares and views each article has. This will allow you to build similar content and get the same backlinks of the content you found.

You can also track all of your keyword rankings so you can see your campaigns progress and your search engine visitor growth.

Buzzsumo

As I mentioned earlier in this guide, content research is the most important part of content marketing. With Buzzsumo, you can find the most shared, trending and most linked to content around the web. It can show you the social shares, who is linking to it and a ton of other great data that will help you pick the best content ideas.

buzz sumo

Google Analytics

With Google Analytics, you can track your visitors from Google and other search engines, see your top engaging content and even see which pieces of content are converting the most customers.

Content Marketing is all about data and analysis so implementing Google Analytics is a must for any content marketing campaign. Knowing where your visitors are coming from, what content they are engaging in and which ones are converting is vital information for campaign performance.

ClearVoice

ClearVoice is an all-in-one platform for managing your content marketing campaigns. It has a plethora of amazing features like personas. integrated publishing, collaboration tools, calendars, freelancer management and even in-app messaging.

clearvoice content marketing platform

Your entire content marketing team can run their operation with ClearVoice as the backbone.

Buffer

Buffer is somewhat similar to ClearVoice but is focused more on social media. Getting your content shared across all social media channels is vital to getting eyeballs and backlinks to your content.

With Buffer, you can create, schedule and automate your content publishing to all of your social media channels. Stop wasting time sharing your content on each social media platform and have it post automatically.

They even have a detailed reporting tab that allows you to keep a close eye on your social engagement and key metrics.

Converting the Traffic

It is great to have a ton of traffic coming into your website but if you’re not converting that traffic then it was all for nothing. Having a crappy website or conversion funnel is the single biggest reason that most DIY content marketing campaigns fail.

To convert content marketing traffic, you will need to have the following things on your website up to date:

Responsive Web Design

In order to convert your targeted traffic, your website must be mobile-friendly (most people use mobile to browse and buy now), engaging and easy to navigate. If the user can’t find out where or how to buy, then you will miss out on a lot of potential customers.

Make sure your website works on all devices and browsers so that you look like a legitimate business (which you are). 60% of searches in Google are now done from a mobile device and Imagine soon it will be higher…

Call to Action

To convert your traffic, you need to tell them what to do in order to convert them into paying customer.

call to action

If you are providing a service, then you should have a call to action that stands out where they can fill out a form or have a way to sign up for your services. If you are selling products on your website, then you should have a call to action to buy your products.

The less friction in between the users landing on your page and converting, the better.

Lead Collection

Some of your traffic could be potential future customers but they simply aren’t interested in buying right now. This is why collecting as much information about your visitors is really important.

When you collect your visitor’s email or phone, you can send them updates, promotions and sell them over time. Try adding a popup to your website and provide a valuable piece of content in exchange for their email or phone. Make sure the content is relative to your service or product so that you know people who are adding their information would be interested in your service or product.

call to action example

A good example is the lead capture form we have on Tyton Media where users can sign up for our Free 5 Day Content Marketing Email Course. Visitors can sign up for the course by entering their email and then we send you a daily lesson to your email for 5 days going over a ton of great information on how to do content marketing.

This builds a relationship with our potential customers, shows our content marketing skills and allows us to pitch our services at the end of the course.

In Conclusion

There is a lot that goes into creating a running the perfect content marketing campaign but I hope this guide helped you at least learn the ropes. Content marketing is a great investment because you can get an unlimited amount of new customers that are practically looking for your product or service.

In the end, creating amazing content is the best way to grow traffic to your website.

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