Content Marketing Changes to Keep an Eye On – Part 3

Welcome to Part 3 of my series and I hope you have enjoyed the previous content. This is going to be the final part of this series and I want to wrap it up by discussing “2” more important content marketing changes taking place within the industry. Many argue content marketing is NOT important, however, the MOST success bloggers have stated numerous times that content marketing is going to be the only thing that matters going forward. Through a solid content marketing campaign, you can do the following:

• Add value
• Marketing products
• Increase traffic
• Increase social shares
• Build momentum
• Increase brand awareness

The internet is all about information and today, this can be provided through images, videos, text, podcasts, or even infographics. All of these formats can be used going forward to build your brand, too. Let’s jump into Part 3 and talk about “2” more important elements. Your feedback and opinion will be appreciated so leave your thoughts in the comment box below. Let’s jump right in.

Analytics Matter Even More

I’ve always believed, no matter what type of content you’re marketing, it’s important to keep track of your statistics. Having data will help you optimize your campaigns going forward, which is important because this can help with increasing conversions. However, I’m surprised by the amount of people who don’t make use of the tools available to them and I think it can be for the following reasons.

• They don’t know about the tools available
• They are lazy
• They don’t want to keep statistics
• Not serious about their business

Keeping stats will help you get the MOST out of your user engagement, which is why I recommend everyone implement some sort of tool in their backend. For example, imagine having a landing page where you are offering an eBook in exchange for their email address. It helps to know what types of form, headline, colors, and information converts the best. This way, you can continue to do what needs to be done to get as many conversions as possible. Google Analytics is a great tool you can implement in your backend. It’s FREE and very easy to install using a simple code.

For you to achieve optimal conversions, I recommend testing what works and then optimize your campaign.

Content will be Interactive

This is a tricky one to understand, but many have mentioned content will be heading this way going forward. As a matter of fact, you can start to see interactive content implemented into blogs already. Why is this important and what does it do?

First, it gets people involved in your content and builds the personal connection. When you have interactive content, it’s a great way to provide value by making certain elements clickable and this will help readers understand the value better. Next, it’s a different type of content than the usual available online so people will find it more engaging. Imagine when people share it on social media platforms and the response you’ll get. The point I’m trying to make is you’ll have to think outside the box to engage a new breed of readers. Blogs are not new and reading content is something that has been around from the start. It’s time to publish different types of content that will catch people off guard, but provide value at the same time.

• Make content interactive
• Add charts and graphs
• Add movable objects

Final Thoughts

To implement each type of strategy will take time, but after analyzing the data, you’ll find how some work better than others. Then you can optimize and add the same strategies to other content when you publish because you know they have worked well in the past. Content marketing continues to grow so you have no choice but to add it to your blog. The only difference is finding what works better for you compared to others.

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Instant Gratification and Mountain Climbing

We live in a glorious age of technology where we can get (almost) anything we want. Not only that, but we can get (almost) anything we want nearly instantly. Want to listen to a certain song? You don’t have to wait for it to come on the radio and you don’t even need to rewind or fast forward through a cassette tape to find the right place. Just fire up your Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube and you can get that track right now.

Want to watch a movie? You don’t have to wait for a specific showtime at a specific movie theater in a specific location. Just fire up Netflix on your computer, TV, smartphone, tablet, or any number of other compatible devices and you can watch that movie right now. Want to watch a TV show? You don’t have to wait for it to come on at a certain time on Thursday night, because it’s right there on Netflix too. Not only that, but you don’t have to wait seven whole days for the next episode, because you can binge through the whole season (or seasons!) back to back to back.

All this instant gratification is tremendous, because it has allowed for an incredible level of choice and convenience. You can order almost anything on Amazon and have it arrive on your doorstep within a couple of days. Depending on what you want and where you live, you might even be able to get it within a couple of hours! But the problem with all this instant gratification is that we’ve come to expect it from every other area of our lives too. And a lot of things don’t work that way.

Want to have a deep, meaningful relationship with your significant other? You may have been able to meet one another by simply swiping right on a mobile app, but the kind of strong bond that you desire takes time and patience. You can’t just binge through your relationship like how you binge through every season of The Office on Netflix. You can’t just order a trusting, loving lifelong partner through Amazon Prime. It doesn’t work that way.

And as much as you may be attracted to the innumerable “get rich quick” schemes online, the truth of the matter is that anyone who achieves grand success with them will always be the exception rather than the rule. You stand at the foot of a path and all you see is the summit at the top. You turn a blind eye to the treacherous mountain between where you stand and where you want to be.

Because these kinds of obstacles and barriers have been removed from so many other aspects of your life. It used to be the case that you could only eat certain food at certain times of the year, because of the seasonality of crops and harvests. These days, you can import almost anything from almost anywhere and eat it all year round. Want to read a book? You don’t have to wait for the store to replenish stock, because you can have it delivered to your Kindle instantly. There’s no waiting. There’s no work.

Success in business doesn’t work that way. You might see the fancy cars, the big mansions and the extravagant trips, but you don’t see the years of hard work and dedication that went into building that kind of lifestyle. It is absolutely true that anyone can do it, but it’s also true that you’ve got to fight your way through some bad weather to get there.

But the view once you get there is pretty spectacular. And it’ll be all that much more rewarding because you’ll know what it took to get there.

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Content Marketing Changes to Keep an Eye On – Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of my series and I am discussing some content marketing changes happening over the next few months that will impact blogging. It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or experienced because you will have to ensure you start incorporating these changes to stay ahead of your competition. Content marketing can be awesome to generate traffic, conversions, and profit, but you’re still going to have competition. This means you have to continually tweak your content to understand the way your audience engages with it going forward. In Part 1, we discussed how the following:

• Mobile friendly blogging
• Images and infographics

This will help push you in the right direction and allow you to engage more people with your content. Please provide your feedback on Part 1 and let me know if you agree or disagree with my statement. Today, I’ll be discussing some more important elements of content marketing that you have to pay close attention to. Let’s get started…

Personalization

I can’t explain how personalization and building a connection with your audience is important when blogging. You have to find a way to stand out compared to your competition and building a “personal” brand is the best way. This is why many bloggers have decided to start a blog using their name, for example:

• JohnChow.com
• NeilPatel.com
• ZacJohnson.com

This strategy is NOT only important within blogging because you see other successful entrepreneurs doing the same, like Donald Trump. Personalization within content marketing is especially important because if you can build trust and credibility, it’ll help promote your content when your name is mentioned within inner circles. Imagine how many pieces of content you have read simply because of the author. This is because you know the author will provide value and you can trust their opinion on a product or service they are endorsing. I know many of you are asking how can you implement this into your content marketing…right?

Here are a few ways:

• Always provide value
• Be genuine
• Answer feedback
• Provide unique content that can’t be found anywhere else

Going forward, I can promise you that blogging and content will be more personalized going forward. You want people to hear your name and know right away that they’ll find something special on your blog.

Networking

Here’s a new trend developing and you might have noticed it if you are online a lot reading blogs. First, you’ve noticed many people are guest blogging on other popular authority blogs. It’s also not uncommon to find expert posts, interviews, etc., about influential bloggers within your niche. Building these relationships opens huge opportunities for both the experienced and beginners within the industry. This is why, going forward, you should try to network as much as possible so you can build your brand.

Here are a few ways this content marketing strategy can help going forward…

First, writing content on other bloggers builds your initial connection with them so the next time you reach out, you have a better chance of them replying. Secondly, by writing guest content, you have the potential to drive traffic to your blog, which, again, increases your brand and conversions. Expert posts help because after publishing, they often get shared, which is great to build social momentum. For example, here is a quick roundup I did months back: 14 Expert Bloggers Discuss Their Most Effective Link Building Techniques

Investing in Content Marketing

Here is a short one that I think will apply to those with a budget but is very important. Many bloggers and companies will shift how they spend their money toward content marketing. This change is, again, because they understand the importance and know how an investment now can produce long-term success. If you are starting, then you might not have the investment, but this won’t stop bigger companies from doing it. You should try and learn from them so you can maybe one day implement the same strategies into your content marketing.

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Beyond a Means to an End

If you were raised in a typical western family in a typical western society (and likely these days even if you weren’t), the expectations for how your life will go are pretty typical and generic. You’ll start school at a relatively young age, progress through the grades, and eventually graduate from high school after about a dozen years.

After you graduate from high school, you might attend some form of higher education, like a college or university, or you might go to a trade or technical school. Maybe you’ll land an apprenticeship somewhere. After you finish whatever program it is, you apply for and eventually get an entry-level job at some company. You’ll work your way through the ranks, aspiring for middle management and beyond, until you finally retire and aim to enjoy your golden years before kicking the bucket for good.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of journey and it’s the kind of path that the overwhelming majority of people take, or at least some basic variation of it. And if you like the work that you do and it’s enough to pay for your desired lifestyle, then maybe it really isn’t so bad. But we all know that it doesn’t always work out this way.

For a lot of people, they end up pursuing an education or training in something not because they’re actually interested in it, but because they think it’ll be easy or that it’ll be lucrative. Or maybe they think it’ll be stable and reliable, exactly the kind of career you want to use to form the foundation for raising a family. Right? A job is just a job. Right?

But why can’t a job be more than just a paycheck? Why shouldn’t your livelihood be tied to your passions and interests, something that’ll keep you going not just today and tomorrow, but for years into the future?

I recently watched the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond on Netflix wherein Jim Carrey recounts his experience playing the late Andy Kaufman in the 1999 movie Man on the Moon. At one point, the interviewer asks Jim about his father. Jim says that he was the funniest man in the room and he was a tremendous saxophonist, but he never really pursued a career on the saxophone, because it would mean uprooting the family to the United States (the Carreys are from Canada) and he didn’t want to do that. So, he took the safe and respectable route and became an accountant.

But that didn’t exactly work out as planned…

As time wore on, it wore him down, you know. It wore him down, and he got a little bit bitter, especially when he lost his job when he was 51. Uh, that really broke him. Not only was he compromising to raise a family, but when you compromise and you fail, it really hurts. It hurts even more than failing at what you love.

We all make sacrifices and compromises, especially when it comes to raising a family. You might forgo heading out to the local pub to catch the big game with your football buddies from college, because you need to take your daughter to her ballet recital. You might opt out of buying a wicked awesome new drone, because your son needs braces. That’s just life.

But when you make those sacrifices and you don’t get the intended benefit, it hurts that much more. You miss out on the big game, but it turns out your daughter’s ballet recital is cancelled anyhow. You skip out on buying a new drone, and your son’s teeth are as crooked as ever after paying for those braces. You can’t even get the consolation prize.

I learned that you can fail at what you don’t love, so you might as well do what you love.

Life is too short to be stuck at some dead end job where you are miserable for 40+ hours every week. Life is too short to be doing work that you hate, just because it keeps the lights on. You should do what makes you happy, so long as you’re responsible about it, and you can end up winning all around.

And truth be told, that’s what the dot com lifestyle can deliver and in spades. You enjoy the ownership of self-guided entrepreneurship, you enjoy the time and location freedom of working online, and you get to do work that is fulfilling and meaningful on your own terms, all while providing the life that your family deserves. And it’s pretty fun too.

Your job is more than a means to an end. What you do for a living should be a part of what makes life worth living in the first place.

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Content Marketing Changes to Keep an Eye On – Part 1

Content marketing continues to change over the years and we have been able to learn a lot. However, some beginners still need to know what to expect going forward because this will help them make the right decisions about their future content marketing implementation. I believe blogging is an “art” form that has to be changed with the trends so you have to stay well aware of the changes being made over time within your industry. Content marketing is the ability to promote products and services through your writing and this strategy has been growing enormously in recent years. Imagine ranking for specific keywords within your industry and selling a problem? This can generate enormous sales for you going forward.

Let’s get started and look at some changes to keep an eye on and how you should implement them into your blogging. I have split this content into a three part series so I can elaborate into each element deeper.

Mobile Users are Very Important

With the growing use of mobile users, it’s important your site and content is tweaked for these users. This means making sure each element is tested and tweaked numerous times to ensure it is optimized when seen by mobile users. Let’s think about it this way. Imagine 50% of those who arrive on your website come straight from smart phones and your website has NOT been optimized. This means you can lose a potential 50% readership and conversions, which is a staggering amount, especially when this is your main source of income.

Going forward, no matter what changes you make to your website and what content you publish, it’s important to make sure they are completely optimized for mobile users. Here are a few things you can do to get started…

• Test your mobile site on “Google mobile testing tool”. If there is an error, then you have to make some changes going forward.
• Research and find some mobile optimized themes that are easy to implement. This is much easier if you are using WordPress.
• Test using your phone, making sure the theme is optimized and run the Google test analyzing the results.

Going forward, I see the use of mobile phones growing so this change isn’t going anywhere. You should already find ways to implement mobile optimized tweaks into your website.

Content Marketing – Visual Content

Have you noticed the presence of images, infographics, and videos within the content you read online? This is because the way we capture the essence of the content is changing and we have to make sure we make those shifts, too. For example, visitors are looking for information swiftly so you have to find ways to attract them as soon as they land on your page. Next, you have to make sure your content can be understood by people all over the world and I believe there is a simple solution for both.

The use of images and infographics gives you the flexibility to add large headlines, colors, and to tell a story quickly. Going forward, it’s important to start making the use of both these features because they will help convert and build engagement. Many of the social media platforms have optimized the way they display images on their network, which is awesome for you when your content is shared.

In our time, creating images and infographics are very cheap so you should utilize them where you can. Remember, when your reader is looking for a quick solution, they won’t wait around to skim through 2,000+ words so provide them with a proven alternative. Infographics and images can get your point across quickly and build the initial engagement you need to increase conversions.

Once you implement these “2” quick strategies, then you can move into the other two mentioned in Part 2 of my series. Content marketing is the new trend and it’s important you start making the right changes immediately because I’ll guarantee your competitors definitely are.

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What Is Latent Semantic Indexing (And Why Should You Care)?

While you should most definitely be exploring any number of other possible traffic sources for your website, it is positively undeniable that search traffic is both one of the most valuable and one of the most elusive. Every time that you think you’ve got Google’s algorithm figured out, they push out an update that throws your plans straight into the dumpster.

This serves to teach you two key lessons. First, you should never write content with purely the search engine bots in mind. The content you create should be created for the readers and visitors to your site. Good content will always be good content. Second, trying to “game the system” is ultimately going to backfire and blow up in your face, so just don’t do it. Again, good content will always be good content.

All this being said, there are some fundamental principles that you should keep tucked away in the back of your mind as you do create content for your website. These types of principles outlast pandas and penguins with the best of them, and one of these principles is called latent semantic indexing.

The basic idea behind latent semantic indexing, or LSI for short, is that it is used to figure out the relationship between the different concepts and terms included in the content. It puts all those words in relation to one another to come up with a better overall picture of what the content is about and, by extension, for whom the content will be most relevant.

On some level, you could say that latent semantic indexing addresses the previous problem where so many website owners would simply stuff high value keywords in the meta tags and meta descriptions of their pages. They’d literally have hundreds of them in there in hopes of getting ranked for anything remotely related, even if many of these keywords had nothing to do with the subject matter on the page at all. With LSI, the spiders and bots are looking specifically at the on-page content and not so much at the meta tags. The content needs to be there.

Just like Google’s search algorithm, the specifics of how it leverages LSI remains shrouded in mystery. What we do know is that it looks for relevant synonyms to the title of the page or article, as well as the terms that you use in headers (h1, h2, h3, etc.), bold text, italicized text, and so on. Putting it all together, the algorithm can figure out what you’re trying to say and who should read it.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re writing an article about Tesla. That’s already a fairly specific topic, but it’s not really specific enough. Is the article talking strictly about the vehicles and, if so, which model in particular? Is the article talking about Elon Musk and his involvement at Tesla? Is the article discussing the business of Tesla from an investment standpoint? These types of articles approach three very different types of audiences and Google (and other search engines) need to know this difference.

Think about what other synonyms or related keywords would work their way into those three different topics. While you certainly shouldn’t shoehorn in relevant keywords in an unnatural way and you definitely should not use article spinning software, it is useful to keep the concept of LSI in mind when you go about writing content for your website. Getting to the top of those coveted search engine results pages (SERPs) isn’t easy. Remember that keyword stuffing could get you flagged.

Yes, as John has stated so many times before, if you live by the Google, you’ll die by the Google. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be friends with the Google in the meantime. It’s an open kind of relationship anyhow.

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Why Content Marketing Will Keep Growing Over the Years

Content marketing is huge within our industry and the importance keeps growing. Before to get your products and services in front of people, you had to create separate campaigns and would have to invest countless resources. Things have changed drastically because of content marketing and much of your success can be achieved by simply implementing one single campaign. However, people are worried about the future of content marketing because if it’s like other things, then it will have a relatively short life line. I personally think content marketing will continue to grow over the years because not only is it simplistic in implementation, but it also meets all of the requirements of search engines.

For those of you still not convinced, let’s look at why content marketing will continue to dominate over the years. Let’s get started…

People are Adding Value

Because one of the requirements of content marketing is to provide value, it’s able to make a huge impact online. By adding value, you’re essentially meeting the requirements of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Content and success is about making sure your audience finds what they are looking for so content marketing is a great way to conquer this WITHOUT being too aggressive in your sales approach. Before, content would be short and aggressive, trying to push irrelevant products to earn commission but now the landscape has changed. Content marketing is lengthy, providing value of 2,000+ words and then recommending a product that NOT only helps, but also can help your readers achieve their objective.

As long as content marketing provides value, it’ll continue to grow no matter what.

Affordable

Content marketing doesn’t involve spending thousands of dollars each month, however, you can if you have the budget, but it’s a strategy that can be applied by anyone. The main thing you need to do well is patience and hard work putting together something special for your readers. If you have the mind to research and write content, then you can do a great job through your content. If you think about the major ingredients of content marketing, you’ll notice the following:

• Research
• Value
• Relevance
• “Targeted” keywords
• Social marketing

The above are FREE and only requires effort to implement, which anyone can do. Other marketing methods require thousands of dollars but this is not the case with content marketing. It’s affordable and this is why experienced bloggers and beginners will continue to apply it to their blog.

Search Engines Love It

I know I’ve talked about this above but keep in mind, search engines are very important to get your content in front of people. Google has been making tweaks over the last several months to encourage value and increase the user experience. Content marketing provides both of these, which is why Google will give preference to those who can create something special. Google relies on its users to dominate the web and these people want the best user experience. Google has started to implement the following and has been very strict about the following:

• Quality
• Relevance
• Freshness
• Social signals
• Quality links
• Keyword targeting

By having a solid content marketing strategy, you are truly fulfilling all of the requirements and this will encourage people to give preference to content marketing going forward.

In the end, if you can provide EXACTLY what search engines are looking for, you’ll be able to rank higher within the SERP’s. This means more traffic and conversions, generating profits for you in the long run.

With content marketing providing value, it being affordable, and search engines giving it preference, it’s no wonder the future looks great.

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