Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Google. He was a very clever boy but as he was still small and didn’t have much life experience, had some confusion in sorting his toys on the shelves. He was constantly trying to arrange them up and down, but as he was also a fair boy, he kept thinking of some criteria that would allow him to be as impartial as possible. In February 2011, when he was already twelve, he created a Panda toy on his own and this Panda recommended him to review and update his approaches. After that, all of the toys had to do their best to comply with the requirements for their positions. This was about six years ago and a lot of things have changed since then. But due to Panda update revolution (thanks to Google engineer Navneet Panda) the role of content marketing as an SEO strategy grew and expanded. Thus before 2011, many poor quality websites occupied high rankings using different SEO strategies. Nowadays, gaining high positions unfairly is becoming more and more difficult. Accordingly, in order to improve your website’s position on SERPs you have to develop your writing skills to create unique and interesting articles. But generating unique and engaging materials is not enough if you also want your content serve your marketing goals. So, as you can see, to grow your business through content marketing, you should solve two issues:
- How to generate unique content
- How to customize it according to your marketing needs
So, first, let’s discuss some points on how to create a unique and engaging content.
- Choose an Eye-Catching Title
A good title is the gateway of your article. That’s why it is of utmost importance to choose a title that will catch up your readers’ attention. Among the most engaging titles are those that contain numbers (3/5/7 etc. steps/tricks/tips/hacks etc.). Also, “How to…” titles are also among one of the most trending ones. You can look up other effective title styles in the infographic presented below:
(infographic source http://www.99signals.com/shareable-content/)
- Consider Your Audience
Considering audience supposes bearing in mind who is going to read your article, i.e. for whom you are writing. For instance, authors of textbooks should always remember that their audience consists of schoolchildren. Accordingly, they should write more clearly and illustrate their writing with relevant childish images. What’s more, if necessary, in their writings authors should agree with something they don’t actually consider to be right.
- Split your Text Into Paragraphs
To make your text easy going, you should divide your content into paragraphs. This way, you take care about convenience and busy readers who usually skim through texts to quickly outsource some useful takeaways.
- Make Use of Transitional Words to Ensure Coherency
Dividing the article into paragraphs is crucially important, but ensuring coherency between the paragraphs and the sentences also gives much value to your piece of writing. Actually, jumping from sentence to sentence without using words of transition will make your text disorganized and incoherent. So which are those transitional words? Here are some of them: actually, moreover, however, nevertheless, so, thus, surely, certainly, in contract, in addition, finally, to recap, to wrap it up, to sum up and a lot more. For a full list of transitional words and their types. There is no lack of information on this topic. Thus, use transitional words to make your text run smoothly and to give it an emotional coloring.
- Use Bullets and Numbering to Make your Points Conspicuous
Usage of bullets and numbers makes your article more organized and your ideas more outstanding.
- Use Images, Infographics, Screenshots in your Article to Illustrate your Points
As a practical part of your content, usage of imagery is of paramount importance. Thus, relevant images make your article more illustrated; infographics give valuable data on the latest researches. Accordingly, instead of writing something in detail, you can make an infographic to spotlight your ideas. In their turn, screenshots come up as images supporting and illustrating your points. To Ensure your Article is Unique Always,
- Look at the Things From a Different Perspective
Never be afraid to differ from the crowd of content writers. Specifically, if you have an idea and want to develop it, never avoid using style and ideas different from those applied by the majority. If you can interest readers by catching up their attention and providing useful information, it means you go the right path, so go for it.
- Avoid Redundancy
Avoid repeating the same thoughts over and over again. Don’t make an impression that your readers are so stupid as not to understand your points in a few sentences. So, evade redundancy and don’t beat around the bush – speak as to the point as possible!
- Make Research to Give New Information
In today’s world, there is no lack of information. So, in order to make your article compelling, always look for useful resources, make researches and why not, come up with your own judgments and conclusions to strengthen knowledge. Have Completed the Article? Check its Uniqueness Via a Plagiarism CheckerThere are many plagiarism checkers over the Internet to choose from. Choose the one that is professional – strict and precise in its evaluation.Any questions? No questions? Well, then let’s pass on to the second part of our article, namely, how you can customize content to marketing needs.Thus, to Customize the Article to Marketing Needs, take the Following Necessary Steps…
- Introduce Suitable Links Within your Article to the Website Serving your Business
Of course, creating a writing piece doesn’t usually serve its own purpose. Surely, by generating some content, you pursue a goal to place a content-relevant link, which, being included on other websites, will drive you traffic and in addition, will add up the PageRank of the linked website when people make searches on Google. With no exceptions, the keywords should be in harmony with your piece of writing.
- Post the Generated Article on the Blog Section of your Own Website
As to the marketing strategies, they can be applied to serve as powerful methods to bring in traffic. One of these strategies is creating functionalities on your webpage with the use of which visitors can spread out the content across their socials. For this purpose, by putting social popups and attracting attention, you can invite the visitants to share your material in case they like it.
Or else, you can apply a subscription popup so as the visitors provide their emails to receive other helpful resources – books, guides, articles. In addition, connect your MailChimp or Aweber account to the subscription popup and begin to synchronize the submissions.
Just remember not to stuff your website with popups because usage of many popups is annoying for most people. So, opt to place one or at maximum two popups on each of your pages. If you wish to place a few popups on your site, you can place one on each web page according to your taste and content relevance.
- Apply to Website-Owners for Guest Posting
The necessity of placing articles on your blog is conditioned by the importance of giving information on your services, solving your readers’ problems through content and redirecting them to appropriate pages on your site. But it isn’t of much value when it comes to increasing PageRank in Google search. So, being backlinked by the sites of authority will give you a chance to gradually increase the visibility of your web page when searching Google for certain keyword phrases.
- Take Care While Sharing the Posted Articles on the Socials
Once you have written an informative article, I am sure it will be a pleasure for you to spread it. Firstly, choose social media channels where you enjoy the most visibility. So, if you already run business pages on Facebook and Google +, simply connect them to your Facebook and Google + accounts. Afterwards, find groups relevant to the subject you are covering in the article and start sharing it with people. Also, use Twitter to add up your followers by tweeting with your engaging materials. Day by day, your social media sharing experience will improve and you will reap the rewards of your hard work. The progress you make will be a motivation for you to work even harder and achieve better results. To wrap it up, in order to achieve the desired results enforcing strategies of content marketing, firstly learn to write engaging and unique articles. Then, to make your content serve your marketing needs, link to your website within your article, but do your best to make it look harmonious and natural in the context. So if you make an effort, the desired results won’t make you wait long.About the Author:My name is Narine. I am fond of listening to music, reading, sports and my pretty daughter. I am also a fan of blogging on different subjects. At present, I work as a content manager for Popup Builder website. We are a web development company and we make WordPress plugins. We do our best for our customers’ satisfaction. I am a dedicated blogger as I have been blogging for already 3 years providing quality content in the field of Internet marketing, particularly – SMM, SEM and SEO. It’s a great pleasure for me to share my knowledge and be helpful to newbies.
