How much do you know about Content Driven Marketing?

Overview

Content-Driven Marketing is a strategy that involves adding information and other resources of genuine interest to your website visitors. This information should be topically related to what you sell on your website, and may even support your sale generally. However it is really pure information that provides additional value to the visitors to your site. The increased amount of information to on your site has the effect of increasing traffic in numerous ways.

Benefits Of Content-Driven Marketing

The most successful sites on the web try to make their websites into more than just one-dimensional advertisements. Adding real content pushes your website to the next level. Here are just some of the benefits of adding content to your site:

Broader Search Engine Profile- Whenever you increase the content on your site, you are naturally adding more pages to house that content, which of course gives you a broader search engine profile. The more content pages you have, the more listings you have in search engines. This naturally increases the chances of getting more and better traffic.

Stickyness- Stickyness is simply defined as the quality of your website that attracts visitors to return to your site again and again. Purely sales oriented sites typically are not sticky. But when you add real content to the site, visitors tend to find it useful for more than just buying stuff. As such you will find that visitors tend to value your site more than others and return to it again and again.

Credibility- Sites that offer more than just a lPne of stuff for sale tend to come off as much more established, authoritative, and credible. As such you may find that increased quantity of useful information tends to positively affect your conversion rate. Visitors tend to have fewer doubts about dealing with a site that feels credible. Content builds almost subconscious credibility for you in the minds of your visitors and buyers.

Word Of Mouth- Visitors who find your website truly useful for reasons above and beyond the stuff you sell, tend to tell friends, family, and associates about it. You will find that you get more direct typed web address visits, and a genuine increase in your Viral Marketing efforts.

Bookmarks- Visitors who find your site useful tend to bookmark your website more often. This of course increases the chances that a visitor will return to your site in future.

Spontaneous Inbound Links- If people begin to find your website truly useful, the chances that other websites will simply link to you (one-way inbound link) increases dramatically. Informational and personal websites often link to other sites they consider interesting or useful to their visitors. The more content you have, the higher the likelihood of getting some spontaneous inbound links. More links generates more traffic and higher Link Popularity & Page Rank.
The net result of all this of course is more qualified traffic.

Types Of Content

The following list has some general recommendations about the types of content you might consider adding to your website to expand its content. The list is certainly not exhaustive, and some ideas may not be appropriate for every site. The basic idea is that adding additional content however is generally a great idea. Experiment with some of these ideas and see what they can do for your site.

News & Events- You might add a section on your site dedicated to current news and events in your industry. This might include calendar of events of trade shows or conventions, industry news and gossip, and anything of interest to readers. This only tends to be effective if it is kept current. Stale information tends to discourage future re-visits.

Link Directory- Your "link page" (see Basic Link Trading for more information) can eventually grow into a multi-page topical directory linking not only to link trade partners, but also spontaneously linking to other valuable resources of interest to visitors to your site. A thorough link directory tends to be viewed as a genuinely useful resource to visitors to your site that tends to draw repeat visits. Make sure every page in your link directory is optimized for relevancy search engines.


Newsletter Archive- Every time you send out a copy of your permission marketing based newsletter, be sure to archive the newsletters on your website, so visitors can examine back issues. This is a great source of content. Make sure that each archived newsletter is optimized for relevancy search engines.


Polls- Check create your own to match the subject matter of your site. This adds stickyness, and is a nice feature to round out the informational content on your site. This option is not necessarily a good fit for all sites.

Guest Books- Like polls, guest books create content spontaneously and nicely round out the informational content on your site. this option is not necessarily a good fit for all sites.

Blogs- The word "blog" is short for "web log." A blog is a live public topical journal kept on your site. Some of the most popular blogs online are political opinion blogs, but there are blogs on every topic. You can create a blog dealing with the topic of your site by simply writing a daily or weekly journal type entry that discusses your subject matter in an informal, opinion oriented manner, and archiving it on your site. Segregate the content of your blogs on to numerous pages, perhaps with a weeks worth, or months worth of entries on a page. Make sure these pages are optimized for relevancy search engines. As you might imagine, there are dozens of blog directories (vertical portals) that list blogs on every topic. Check them out to see examples of blogs to help you decide if a blog is appropriate content for your site. And as you might have guessed, if you do have a blog, then you should submit your blog to each blog directory you can find. This drives traffic and increases your Link Popularity & Page Rank.

Don't Overdo It- Be careful that you don't add so much content that you overshadow the main purpose of your site, which is to generate sales. There is a fine balance, and your instinct is the best judge of how much content is too much for your particular site. Remember that developing content takes effort and some of it like Blogs and News, for example require an ongoing commitment in time and effort. Only do as much as you are comfortable doing. If it gets to the point where it isn't fun? then what is the point? Find a happy balance.

Feature On Every Page- Make sure that every new content-based page features at least something for sale. Every page should have your overall site navigation bar. Never let visitors to your site forget that the main point is what you sell.

Banner Exchange Leverage- Some of the content related pages make perfect candidates to build banner exchange credits, where other pages on your site should probably stay uncluttered by banners.

Segregate- Make sure that you clearly segregate content pages from selling pages. Make sure that all your content pages are kept in one section of your site, and content is not interspersed randomly with sales pages. Un-segregated content tends to confuse visitors and hurt your conversion rate.

Write With Keywords- Know the important keywords and keyword phrases by heart. This comes from having spent sufficient time reseaching and thinking about how to reverse search. If you know these important words instinctively, it is easy to deliberately include them in all the writing you do to generate content. Get in the habit of including exact keywords search phrases in your writing. Everywhere. All the time. This naturally improves your chances of getting search engine traffic.

Indexed and Ordered- Create an index/directory of the content pages on your site. The structure should be planned, well thought out, intuitive, and make sense. Visitors should be able to easily locate the information they seek using the index. This index also becomes the tool that search engine spiders use to find all your content pages.

Summary

Adding quality content to your site is a great way to improve credibility and drive lots of additional traffic to your site. It should be your part of your long-term strategy to continually add new content to your site and remember have a great day!

Thank you for your time.

Mark..