“Content Marketing is One of The BEST Ways to Get MORE Customers!”
One of The Best Ways To Advertise Your Business Online
There are many ways to advertise a small business or any business…from magazine, newspaper, radio and TV ads to attending tradeshows and handing out business cards. These forms of advertising can be expensive, time consuming and provide only a small ROI (return on investment), if any at all.
Thousands of people are actively looking for all sorts of businesses online…EVERY DAY. There are various ONLINE advertising and marketing techniques that are low cost, if not FREE, that can give you exposure to those potential customers! The Content Marketing Strategy below is one of the best ways to advertise your business online and help these potential customers find YOU!
The 4 Steps of Content Marketing
Step 1: Get an internet optimized website or blog.
This step is the MOST IMPORTANT because customers expect businesses to have a website in today’s marketplace. Going without a website is like going without a telephone number for your business.
However, it is important that you don’t create just any old website. And if you’re thinking “I can just make one of those cheap or FREE websites”…think again. Just building a website does NOT mean you automatically start to get visitors on your website.
In order to get traffic you MUST get an internet optimized website…one where people can find your website… or it is a waste of time in getting a website in the first place.
Thankfully, you can easily find a FREE website development course that can show you how to create a powerful and effective website or blog in just a few days.
Step 2: Add Interesting Content to Your Website or Blog. 
There are, essentially, two types of Web content:
- Text:
Text is easy, it’s the written content that’s on the page, both inside images and in text blocks. - Multimedia:
The other type of Web content is multimedia. To put it simply, multimedia is any content that isn’t text, but this includes a lot of different things:
- Animation
- Images
- Sound
- Video
The goal is to create informative content that is designed to, over time, convert customers and to keep previous customers loyal to your business. It’s an attention marketing strategy where you use content to attract people to your business and then keep them there. As you can imagine, there can be a pretty big time investment associated with creating content.
So…as a business owner, why should you be doing it? What’s the payoff? With website content you can build awareness and trust of your business, and content can be used for lead generation, upselling and to shorten the sales cycle.
Once on your website, hopefully the visitor will continue to read your other interesting content on your website which could lead to a possible sales. If you don’t get sales upfront, you are establishing your business as an expert and thought leader in your industry. Once you are thought of as an expert, visitors are more likely to purchase from you.
Other great areas to place your content:
- On Social Networking sites like FaceBook and Twitter
- As guest posts on other blogs
- On Social Bookmarking sites
- In emails sent to your customers
If you place your content in any of the places above you would simply place a link within the content that would lead back to your website, therefore giving you more web traffic and increasing your sales potential.
And… if you DON’T like to write, you can use a writing service to get all of your content written for you in a matter of days!
Step 3: Post Content Links on Social Media.
Use social media to network and push out your website’s content. Just considering Facebook (over 800 million users), Twitter (100 million users) and YouTube (over 3 billion videos are viewed a day), these three social networking sites offer a very powerful platform on which to build a presence. There are also other social networking and bookmarking sites that can help to increase your visibility and get you more customers.
Examples of Account to Create:
- YouTube
- Google +
For social media sites (Twitter and FaceBook), post only the titles of your content and include a shortened link in the post that leads the visitor back to your website content. This method will create tons of traffic to your website. Share other people’s content, and they will promote yours. Use a 4:1 ratio of promoting other people’s content over your own. Remember that social media is about mutual interaction, so don’t be all about promoting your business.
Step 4. Post content on social bookmarking accounts.
Social bookmarking accounts are great places for posting your content. Many people visit social bookmarking sites to read the content provided. As with social media, you should post content to each site and have a link pointing back to your website. Listed below are some social bookmarking sites:
- del.icio.us
- Digg
- StumbleUpon
- Tumbler
- igooi
- Backflip
- Bibsonomy
- Linkagogo
- Spurl
- Jumptags
- MyLinkVault
- MyVMarks
- A1-Webmarks
- Diigo
- Connectedy
- OYAX
- SiteSays
- MyPIP
- Propeller
- Spotbank
- Connotea
- Stumpedia
- Mister-Wong
- Corank
- Mixx
More on Content Marketing
4 Reasons Businesses Need Content Marketing
4 Reasons a Business Must Have a Website
