Content marketing is getting a lot of praise from internet marketers and from experts in SEO. This is a form of marketing that focusses on creating and sharing high quality blog posts, articles and videos. The general idea is that you’ll provide a way for people to discover your site but at the same time, you’ll also demonstrate quality and authority so that people decide to start visiting your site of their own accord.
Content marketing doesn’t just mean writing the content though, it also means sharing it with others on social media. You need to create the content and then market the content as though it were a product in its own right.
But what if you’ve been doing all that and your site still isn’t the huge sensation you were promised? Why aren’t you seeing the returns you’ve been led to expect from content marketing?
The simple answer is that you either lack quality or you lack quantity.
Lots of Content = Lots of $$$
If you are producing large amounts of content – if you are posting a new blog post twice or three times a day – then it becomes very difficult to fail. On the other hand, if you are only posting once or twice a week, then it is very hard to become as successful as the biggest players.
You can see this for yourself if you just take a look at some of your favorite big blogs on the net. Most of these will probably post several times a day.
This should make common sense. If you hope that you will make a full-time wage from your website, then that means you need to start treating it like a full time job. You need to be writing content and promoting it full time. Doing this for just a couple of hours a day is really not enough!
At the same time, creating lots of content also creates a huge amount of opportunity for people to discover and interact with your brand. If you create a blog post on your site, then even if it isn’t optimized for SEO, Google will likely identify a couple of ‘long tail keywords’. These are exact matches for long, random phrases that people search but that no one is bothering to compete for.
Now let’s say that every article you post has 1 long-tail keyword and each of those gets searched for once a week. If you have 3 new articles a day, then that’s 21 new hits that week immediately. That becomes 42 new hits in week two and 63 new hits on week three.
And chances are that some of those articles will do much better than that. The more you publish, the greater the odds of a runaway hit happening soon.
But that’s the other thing you see: your content must be high quality to stand a fairer-than-average chance of getting shared and going viral. Spam is not going to get you anywhere, so if quantity isn’t problem, then quality is. But it’s definitely one of those things!
