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Traffic Technique 2: Content Marketing

Posted By Darren Rowse 19th of July 2012 Blog Promotion 0 Comments

Content marketing is probably the most common traffic tactic these days. It lets us target specific audience segments, in some cases it allows us to get the benefit of some other brand’s or blogger’s authority with a market, and it doesn’t require that out target readers be using particular tools or networks the way social media does.

As I mentioned in a related post earlier this year, content marketing basically involves repackaging your message to meet the needs of different users and would-be users at specific moments in time, and in specific locations. You might repurpose content you’ve already written; you might not. But in all cases, you’re taking your blog’s key message and presenting it, via content, to a new, targeted audience.

Types of content marketing

How many types of content marketing are there? How long’s a piece of string?! There are as many variations of content marketing as there are bloggers, but here are the main types that we seem to be using:

  • Guest posting: creating posts for publication on other sites and blogs. Note here that “creating” doesn’t necessarily mean just writing. You could be creating other content assets, like videos, infographics, comics, photos, and so on.
  • Article marketing: writing posts for distribution through article “spinning” sites like Ezine Articles.
  • Packaged content: working some of your content into a whitepaper, or mini-ebook, or emailed “course” or series, or some other product that you can offer free in exchange for the reader’s email address, and then promoting that offer in various hand-picked offsite locations.
  • Syndication: disseminating your blog’s content to other locations, either through an open reuse policy (like Leo uses at Zenhabits), or offering select outlets reuse of a certain segment of your blog’s content.

Whatever the format, content marketing is really the process of taking your message—perhaps even taking content you’ve already produced and published on your site—and positioning it in a way that meets the needs of off-site audiences. It can be used to promote your blog as a whole, or a special product or offer that you’re running—really, it’s up to you.

The right kind of content marketing traffic

Obviously one of the great things about content marketing is that we can use it to target really specific sub-segments of our readership. So the traffic it brings us is usually primed for the other information we have on our blogs.

You’ll remember that last time, we talked about search engine optimization. Now, where searchers know they have a need, and it’s strong enough for them to search the web for a solution, the people who come into contact with your content marketing efforts may not realise they have a need for your material until they see it.

The purpose of your content marketing efforts is to show these new audiences that they have a need, that you can meet it, and to draw them through to your blog. For that reason, it’s important to shape the repackaging of the content itself to specific reader types, based on the profiles of readers on the outlets where you’ll be promoting or using that content.

So if you’re writing a guest post, you’ll want to make sure it casts your content as responding to the specific needs of the readers on the site where the post will be published. If you’re offering a special report or whitepaper, make sure that it meets a felt need of the audience of the location where it’ll be downloaded.

Obivously, it’s also important to choose your content marketing outlets carefully, to ensure that the readers who do come through to your blog are actually interested in what you have to offer on a broader scale.

Also, make sure it’s effortless for readers to move from the offsite content to your blog. Finally, the landing page may well make or break their response to, and engagement with, your blog, so pay special attention to that, to make sure readers get what they’re after, as preempted in your offsite content.

A content marketing case study

I think one of the keys to content marketing is being able to adapt your message to the needs of the readers in the locations where you’re doing the marketing. So, if you’re guest posting, the success of your post—not just in being accepted by the host blog, but in terms of drawing readers through to your own blog—depends largely on how well you shape your message to those readers.

The more content marketing you do, the easier it gets to adapt your message, but to make it clear I wanted to give you an example of content marketing we’ve done here at ProBlogger.

Earlier this year we launched Blog Wise, our ebook on blogging productivity. To help promote it, my editor Georgina wrote three guest articles for other blogs:  one for Copyblogger, another for Goinswriter, and a final one for Zenhabits (as well as publishing a small series here on ProBlogger).

We all know that ProBlogger’s about pro blogging, and the ebook is about being productive—professional-blogger productive, in fact. But as the table below shows, these other blogs have different purposes. Georgina had to reshape that key message to suit each one.

Content marketing article plan

How did she do that?

Leverage connection

Each blog’s owner had been interviewed for the ebook, so she decided to leverage those interviews in writing her guest posts. Each post was intended to reveal to the blog’s loyal readers something new about a blogger they already know and love.

Combine topics

For each post, Georgina combined the topics of the blog she was writing for with the key topic (productivity) we’d discussed in the ebook. We’ve listed those on the far-right of the table.

Make it relevant

The above two points helped to make sure the guest posts were relevant, but she had a final imperative, which was to make sure that each guest post stood up for itself on the blog where it was published: if readers of that blog saw her post and had no interest in learning more about productivity through the ebook, they would still get something valuable out of her guest post, and be glad that the host blogger had published it.

Georgina repurposed content from the Blog Wise interviews and ebook to make the series she published here on ProBlogger. That was fine, since the ebook, like this blog, is written with our readers in mind! But for the other blogs, she wrote specially prepared content that met the needs outlined above.

The results for these posts were good—and that’s despite the minimalist bio she published alongside them! Each post attracted new users at a strong rate—between 50% and 90%—and each traffic source had lower bounce rates, higher on-site times, and more average pageviews per visit than most other sources for the same time periods, including social media.

The post on Zenhabits, for example, referred more traffic than any other referral source on the day it was published (including social media, Google, and so on), and remained in the top 5 referrers for a few days afterward. That traffic contained more first-time visitors than traffic from the other posts (around 86%). Bounce rates for that traffic were lower than any of the other traffic sources in the top 5—and about 10% lower than the site-wide average—for those few days.

That’s not bad for content marketing on a blog that’s not, at first glance, even closely aligned with the purpose of this one.

Of course, the added benefit of this kind of content marketing is the opportunity to engage with the readers at these other online locations and build your brand’s profile—something that you can do with search traffic. Have a look at the comments each of those posts generated and you’ll see intriguing discussion and more than a few ideas for follow-up guest pieces. If we continued to guest post at these locations, there’d be a strong chance that we’d be able to draw a larger percentage of readers through to problogger.net over time.

How does your content marketing perform?

As you can see, successful content marketing isn’t simply a matter of “spinning” your topic to suit a new audience. To work well, it needs to be done with care and, above all, consideration for the location at which your content will be published or shared.

This can be a particularly challenge when you’re doing things like article marketing, because with those options, you simply can’t get the level of audience insight required to target the content as heavily as this. Syndication can work better, so long as you know the blog where your content will appear, and can get to know its readers, too.

This is just one example of content marketing at work—and the kinds of results you can achieve with it. But let’s face it: guest posting isn’t the most innovative form of content marketing. What are you doing with content marketing at the moment? Share your secrets—and your tips!—in the comments.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Great post Daren,

    Still feel doubts when a lot webmasters said “writing posts for distribution through article “spinning” sites like Ezine Articles.” are have no benefits at all.

    If you;re not agree, please let me know.
    What do you think it will not be in vain?

    Wait the respond, and thanks so much for great tutor!
    Deny

  2. I’ve been doing a lot of guest posting and article marketing for the past few years, and I’m just now getting interested in video and audio.

    More specifically, YouTube and iTunes. Basically taking my stuff onto other platforms.

    But as long as you’re doing something and checking the results, you’re heading in the right direction.

    • Hey Henry how about your results for those few years?I also going to start guests posting now. I’ve done 1guest post but it didn’t drove more than 70visits. Anyway I will try second one in a hot blog.

      -Shyam

  3. great post.

    content marketing has always been my most effective form of marketing. on page SEO is given, but I am starting to feel like off page SEO carries more risks with it that truly understood, particularly given fickle search engine behavior and not so direct/timely and specific feedback (try guessing what you did wrong).

    of my portfolio of niche websites, the best performing ones are those that deliver a heavy volume of solid subject matter expert content. i am finding that my new authority website is picking up steam a lot quicker than any of the previous projects because it is on a topic i know inside out, and thus car write about it with solid authority.

    content marketing always shouldv’e been the approach, and I am seeing more bloggers evolve towards it now days

  4. Repackaging content takes a bit of finesse because you don’t someone discrediting you for using the same content over and over so the trick is in the tailored editing just like when using plr content.

  5. I am doing Guest Posting, and that is pretty much it.

    I have tried a few other things but I am usually very distracted, so it’s hard to stay on one thing!

  6. Hi Darren,

    Guest posting may not be the most innovative, but for me it’s been the most effective marketing strategy for building my blog’s audience. At first, I felt bad about giving away all of my best content to other blogs, but the results more than made up for that. Even though it does take some time to write a thoughtful post, it saves you time when it comes to promoting – you don’t have to spend so many hours on Twitter – you post to the write blog, their audience tend to share it for you.

    But you’re right, you can just spin your content, you’ve got to write high quality original posts for each blog. It’s got to be matched perfectly for their audience regardless of what you’re trying to promote.

    • Hey

      I also feel bad when giving best content for other blogs. But you’ve said that promoting those will be easy. I’d like to know what things you add to your posts like word count, graphics and so on.

      Thanks
      Shyam

    • Hi Kiesha,

      Your comment made me curious, so I’d love you to give us more details, if you can. When you say guest posting has been the most effective for you, what do you mean? Did you get traffic spikes after your guest posts were published? How many of those new visitors turned into loyal readers (subscribed to your feed or newsletter or followed you on social media)?

      I used to do guest posting a while ago, but I never saw results to live up to the effort, so I gave it up. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

  7. Article marketing is something that I have dabbled with in the past on sites like Ezine Articles and Article Dashboard. I have not dipped my tow into writing guest posts yet though, it is weird but I get self-concious about my writing abilities even though I actually do quite well as a freelance writer. :/

    • Its Difficult To Belive But It Really helps
      SEO carries more risks with it that truly understood, particularly given fickle search engine behavior and not so direct/timely and specific feedback

  8. Great post, as always! :D I was just wondering about the “syndication” point – wouldn’t Google penalise a person’s blog for duplicate content?

  9. I’ve been a fan of ProBlogger for a while but never really LOVED IT. This post has won me over… You had me at “content”….

  10. I have never done guest posting too but I’ll try it out soon. Anyway, providing great content to your site is surely one of the best ways to generate traffic and main that. On the other hand, SEO is the way of generating instant traffic without building a relationship to the clicker.

    So that’s the reason why people stick more today on content writing =)

  11. Wow! That case study was inspiring. Very creative marketing.
    I’m a crafty blogger and I think its easier for us to market our content. My biggest source of traffic has been popular crafting website that highlight good crafting tutorials from other websites. I submit my link to a whole bunch of them after every tutorial. There are a couple that feature every article, there are some who feature some selected ones and the traffic also varies depending on the standing of the featuring website. But I find it an easy way to market my blog.
    I have also done many guest post in the past one year I have been blogging. One thing I have realized is that I need to carefully select where I’m writing. While some posts brought an avalanche of traffic, some others didn’t bring even a single visitor…and no, I don’t think content had a lot to do with it.

  12. I just started a blog three months ago and my head spins with the terms and ideas that I need to become familiar with. Thanks again Darren for bringing light to my darkness.

  13. I am not going to get into guest posting until my site is more established. I only have 9 posts and its only been live for 2 weeks so I’ll look into it later.

    As far as other content marketing goes, I have done 4 videos and dozens of articles at EzineArticles and have seen a trickle of traffic that is gradually increasing.

    Thanks for the awesome post,
    -Gabe

  14. Not so long ago, to promote my blog I wrote a whitepaper (PDF) and published it on SCRIBD, slideshare and some other document libraries. After a week I started to get some traffic from those sources.

  15. Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

  16. Not so long ago, I created a PDF whitepaper and published it on scribd, slideshare, free-ebooks.net, and some other document libraries. After a couple of days, I noticed extra traffic comming from those sources.

    I also experience that the most simple way of marketing, “post commenting”, can drive some traffic to a blog.

    Nico

  17. This is so true, everybody seems to be jumping on the guest posting bandwagon, every for my other site I would receive guest post articles that are sometimes completely irrelevant to my site or if not utter none sense they would be articles that were created for grade school readers.
    And from there, they would contain a link to a totally irrelevant site, totally devoid of any relation to the topic they just submitted.

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