Friday, 16 September 2016

Is SEO Important?

Search Engine Optimization is an important marketing tool for business owners. It can no longer be something that is good to have but is rather viewed as a must have in today’s marketplace. Online marketing may prove to be a challenge for many because promoting one’s brand online requires an understanding about online marketing trends.
SEO is a marketing strategy that should be clearly understood and if implemented properly can boost your brand value online.  SEO increases your website’s visibility in a search engines natural results which is always free. In this era of technological evolution it’s very important that your website always stays ahead of others and appears on the first page of the search results. This will increase your websites presence, recognition, and traffic that is generated.
SEO aims at understanding how popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. works, what people search for, what keyword they use while searching for something &how often they use these keywords. If you understand this then you can optimize your website and make it SEO friendly. This will in turn provide you with the results you want and need to increase your presence online. Optimizing your website requiresupdating the content of your website on a regular basis. You should always try to use unique content in your website that is relevant for your users you are trying to attract. The HTML and associated coding to should also be relevant to the specific keywords and it will remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Why is it important to appear on top of the search results through SEO?  Here is your answer below:
From the graph below you can see that the top listing in Google’s organic search results receive higher traffic and the traffic keeps on decreasing with the second, third, fourth ranking.
(Source – chitika.com)
Apart from targeting your choice of keywords, using SEO friendly coding, a keyword analysis should always be performed for SEO optimization.With technology being changed constantly for SEO, it is imperative that you monitor your SEO efforts and adapt your strategy accordingly. If your SEO is performed correctly the results that can be achieved are tremendous. We have certified SEO experts at Mind Digital who are constantly trained according to SEO best practices as well as all the online marketing trends. As always if you need any SEO advice or are looking for an expert to boost your rankings online, please feel free to reach out to the Mind Digital team anytime.

Thursday, 15 September 2016

Tips To Create A Good Backlink Profile

Content is king in terms ofSearch Engine Optimization Search Engine Optimization and this statement which I am sure you have heard many times before is also one of the most over-stated facts about SEO. On the basis of only content, you cannot get higher rankings within the search engines. You need to do something beyond just create unique content such as both on-page and off-page SEO. Nowadays with the changing landscape of SEO, you hear most experts discuss mainly 2 things which are content and on-page optimization. Off-page SEO has importance that needs to be taken seriously, however it is not as important as before but still a vital part of your digital strategy. Today, we are going to discuss about how you can create a good backlink profile to help with your SEO rankings. Creating a good backlink profile comes underneath the remit of off-page SEO activities. Below, we will give you some simple advice on how to create a good backlink profile.
1. Pick Targeted Keywords – The first step is finding the main keywords that you want your website to rank for. This is critical and the first task which you need to undertake before doing anything else so you know exactly where you want to be. Ensure that you are doing research and thinking thoroughly about where you want your business to be viewable online. You should ideally target 5 to 10 keywords in the beginning that are not very high competition that you would like to rank for within the search results. After this is complete; your strategy, content, and goals should revolve around these targeted keywords.
2. Main Competitors - Once you have completed the first step, the next thing you need to do is see who are the competitors that are ranking for your targeted set of keywords. Once you have completed this and identified all the main competitors, move on to the next step.
3. Backlink Analysis – You now have your list of targeted keywords and your main competitors, great! The next step is analyzing and seeing what are the backlinks of these competitors. There are many free online tools that are available through which you can explore the backlinks of any website. Use these tools to identify the links and once you have this detailed list of backlinks, you should filter the quality sites into a separate list.
4. Get Links From Similar Sites – This is a lot easier said than done, however try your best to get links from the same site or similar sites to your webpage. Use techniques such as content seeding, creating valuable content that the website owner would want to share with their audience to generate you a backlink or even just contact the webmaster directly. Links from similar sites shows the search engines that your website is also relevant for the same topic.
This above list are some simple steps you can follow to get higher rankings by improving your backlink profile through targeted efforts. You would be surprised how far you can get with thinking things through and creating a good SEO plan. If you need any assistance or help with your SEO or anything else digital marketing or development related, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Wednesday, 14 September 2016

Make Social Media Work For Your Business

Social Media is all the rage these days. Companies can benefit from viral social media campaigns — and sometimes get burned by Social Media as well. What companies hope for is to create something viral like the Ellen DeGeneres Oscar selfie but not every company can do that or have an ad budget equalling the GDP of a small country.
Social Media marketing has got to be a part of the overall brand building process for any company. This is a long term process and cannot be a one-time or a short term thing. The best Social Media marketing campaigns combine SEO, online marketing and above all, effective storytelling.
The Internet has levelled the playing field for businesses of all sizes. A viral YouTube video that can cost nothing that can be seen by millions on YouTube or shared by the billion plus users of Facebook or nearly half a billion users of Twitter can have a huge impact on your business. Social Media includes Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and more.
Social Media not only can help your business gain traction on Social Media platforms it also has an impact on your SEO rankings on Google. An important thing to remember is that you need to ensure that your business has a Google+ page so that users can rate, review, and share your business online. Besides gaining reviews, Google is now serving up these profiles in the search results to users as well as it has become a ranking factor within your SEO.
Businesses of all sizes small or large should hire a professional Social Media marketing services firms for the best Social Media marketing results or even consider doing it in-house themselves. The bottom line is Social Media can have a huge impact on your business and is something that needs to be taken seriously.
A good way for a company to create Social Media buzz is by running Facebook or Twitter contests and rewarding these participants through prizes or coupons. In return, they can get to see their hashtags trend on Twitter if there’s enough buzz and enough tweets. If you can create interesting content that Social Media users love, they’ll share it with their network on Facebook. If you create great content on the company blog, it will get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and so on. Pinterest and Instagram are image-driven; hence, they are appropriate for businesses such as restaurants, bakeries, florists and so on whose products can be highlighted via great photos. YouTube videos can be great tools to provide product training or ‘how-to’ tutorials.
Creating great content is a key part of Social Media marketing. Content marketing and Social Media marketing therefore go hand in hand. Content marketing has become even more important considering the changes Google has made to its ranking algorithms. With changes such as Google Penguin, Google Panda and Google Hummingbird, Google has made it clear that it loves fresh content and discourages meaningless backlinks or duplicate content. Your Social Media marketing strategy has to take into account the fact that nearly half of the visitors to your website are likely doing so from mobile devices and this will only keep growing with the rapid adoption of smartphones. For online E-commerce businesses as an example, they need to ensure that customers are able to make purchases online from mobile devices.
If you choose to hire a Social Media company, make sure to opt for a company that has the experience and expertise you need to stay ahead of your competitors. Remember that SEO and Social Media marketing should be an integral part of any business’s marketing efforts. If you do it on your own or have a company do it, the choice is ultimately yours. All in all, Social Media marketing is a key weapon in the overall marketing battle that needs to be taken seriously. If you have any questions or need any help with your Social Media, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Saturday, 10 September 2016

An SEO Company Can Help Your Website

When IBM decided to enter cognitive computing and developed their Watson computer system, they decided to first develop it specifically to answer questions on Jeopardy and famously pitted the computer against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. The resulting publicity has made Watson more or less a household name. The Jeopardy match-up resulted in invaluable coverage in the media which would otherwise have cost IBM millions of dollars in publicity expenses.
Marketing and publicity are a key part for any brand or business. Which is why the expensive half-time commercial slots during the Super Bowl cost $4 million for a 30-second spot and yet, there is no shortage of buyers.
In the online world, making a website popular is clearly one of the necessary conditions for website owners and Ecommerce businesses if they want to survive and flourish. One of the ways to achieve popularity is via Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with an SEO company. SEO is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Super Bowl half-time ads. SEO is entirely free and the only investment being the SEO professionals themselves times.
Of course, digital marketing is an ever growing activity and online businesses need to opt for paid online marketing activities such as search advertising, PPC advertising and online video ads. Such paid online marketing campaigns can be effective in the short run and they are typically the preferred method when the intention is to promote a short-term activity such as an end-of-season sale. But nothing beats SEO as the preferred vehicle of online marketing to increase a brand’s online profile in a sustained manner as once you achieve rankings, it’s free traffic.
SEO company
For those who are serious about their online business (which includes all Ecommerce businesses at the very least), there are two essential requirements for enduring success: 1) have a user friendly, functional and simple-to-use website with a great user interface and 2) engage a digital marketing company to help you with the SEO aspect of your business in an ongoing fashion.
SEO is for the long haul
Why do you need to hire an SEO company instead of doing it in-house? Well, that is because SEO is a job for professionals who have gained long years of experience by working in the SEO business. They have in-depth knowledge and perspective about both the past and the future possibilities of SEO.
With SEO professionals at an SEO company are taking care of SEO for your website, you will be assured that all the basics are taken care of: such as on-page and off-page optimization. SEO professionals will also know to avoid the deprecated practices or black hat SEO techniques.
Search engines like Google are taking action against those websites who try to artificially enhance their organic search rankings on the search engine result pages (SERPs). An SEO company that knows what they are doing will ensure that the website is appropriately optimized, no illegal quick fix solutions are tried. When it comes to SEO and website organic search rankings, the smart ones know that ‘slow and steady wins the race’ is the motto to remember and follow. There are no quick fixes. For example, if a site is old, it will a get certain amount of value and weightage in Google’s rankings irrespective of other qualitative aspects of that site.
SEO is a many-splendored thing
SEO is not a single monolithic thing anymore — if it ever was. SEO comprises of many things. Apart from the off-page and on-page optimization mentioned earlier, SEO professionals at an SEO company will ensure that there is no duplicate content on the website. Google chooses to punish sites with duplicate content (since in Google’s view, such sites do not add value to the internet; and Google is right here) and it is better to remain careful rather than seeing your hard-earned position in the SERP suddenly vanish. With numerous algorithm changes such as Google Penguin, Google Panda (not named after the cute animal), and Google Hummingbird, Google is trying to adapt to changes in user behavior as well as trying to provide the best and the most relevant links in the organic search results.
After all, Google’s (and other search engines’) reputation relies on such website providing authoritative answers to users’ queries. The changing nature of audience behavior includes such seismic shifts as the inevitable predominance of mobile devices to access the internet. To cater to these changes, Google is changing its algorithm to be able to better meet the needs of its customers. These are all things that your SEO company that you are working with will need to keep mind.
With the growth of mobile, voice search has grown. And with the Google Hummingbird changes, Google has revealed how it seems to answer truthfully any question put to it. Today of course, Watson is much more than a Jeopardy winning computer server. Watson has morphed from being unbelievably good at Jeopardy to helping cancer specialists make sense of the growing volume of medical literature comprising of endless data from current and old studies, clinical trials, side effects of drugs, drug combinations to avoid, etc.
Similarly, SEO professionals will take the guess work out of SEO. Apart from making sure that the website adheres to all the rules from search engines, SEO professionals that are working at an SEO company will develop and implement long-term plans to improve your site’s SEO. That includes running content marketing and social media marketing campaigns to improve the website’s SEO.
SEO includes content marketing & Social Media marketing
For a website to get good ranking in the organic search results, it needs to have great on-site content which the SEO company you are working with can advise you on. Google gives great weightage to authentic and authoritative content. Hence, SEO professionals ensure that websites have a deliberate approach towards content marketing which includes regular blog posts.
Blogging, email marketing, white papers, Slideshare presentations, etc. are a few of the ways of generating and then sharing great content. If the community of users likes this content and consumes it and shares it, this will give a signal to the search engines that this is valuable content. That will translate into those sites getting good rankings in the organic search results. If the content on a site gets many Social Media shares, this tells the search engines that this is authentic, meaningful and powerful content created by experts or industry leaders.
Search engines will display such sites higher up in the search rankings. Of course, the final rank of a site is determined based on ‘more than 200 factors’ as Google might put it but having good content is one of the most effective ways to enhance your site’s SEO in an effective and long-term fashion. An experienced SEO company can guide you and the do’s and don’ts in this area.
An SEO company specializing in content marketing will ensure that your site has great content. Social Media is the other great battlefront for the modern SEO professional. This battlefront must also be conquered if your website wishes to last for long. Social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — is the place where you have to post funny and relevant content which will get widely shared and disseminated among peers in a user group.
When a blog post shared on Social Media gets numerous Likes or Retweets, that gives the search engine the idea that this is a good site with interesting content. Of course, for content to be shareable, they have to avoid the cardinal mistake of being boring. Content can be boring because of many reasons — it can be too technical, archaic, or arcane, it can be presented in a soporific manner, it may lack the factors that make a post go viral such as having images or an emotional core to it. A good SEO company knows the balance that needs to happen in this respect
Social Media is sort of a pressure release valve for many busy working people. Hence, the popularity of cat videos on the internet — or videos of human twins doing funny stuff and so on. An effective Social Media marketing strategy will take into account such rules of the game as when to post content and how often to post content to each of the different social media platforms.
SEO companies with proven social media marketing strategies and expertise will be long-term assets for your company Once you get your ‘content strategy’ honed, you will likely get a pretty popular website which attracts endless unique visitors as well as a devoted band of regular readers. The deep engagement with your community of readers apart from the large number of social shares will give the right signal to the search engine that the website is an authority on that given business vertical. This will help your website rank higher in organic search results leading to more search engine users discovering your website.
Conclusion
For the above reasons, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by an experience SEO company can lead to greater popularity for your website. If you are looking for a reliable, trusted and experienced SEO company that can help you achieve higher rankings, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group for any of your digital marketing needs.

Friday, 9 September 2016

A Comprehensive Digital Marketing Campaign Can Do Wonders

Very few companies and brands have global recognition. There is only one Coca Cola, one Apple, one Sony, and one McDonalds. There might be hundreds of brands that will ring a bell with consumers but there are millions of companies out there. Every year, new businesses join the existing hordes and try to stand out from the clutter. How do new companies and small enterprises with limited finances accomplish this or even try to? Digital marketing is a highly effective, flexible tool that can be deployed to this end. The cost ofdigital marketing varies to suit all pockets and companies of all sizes. So, unlike traditional advertising which can be highly expensive (consider ad rates during the Super Bowl or the Olympics) and therefore an option that is available to Fortune 1,000 companies and the like, the digital marketing option is available to companies of all sizes.
Digital marketing encompasses a range of activities including paid advertising, email marketing, display re-targeting, SEO, news/PR releases, and social media promotion. With digital marketing, you can measure the ROI very accurately and ensure that your marketing budget is being well spent. Since millions of customers (either existing or potential) are online interacting and sharing experiences with their friends, relations, and colleagues via Social Media. Companies who are present on social media can reach out to these customers directly and intimately. Those who are not present on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ are essentially sending a negative message about themselves to customers.
If companies choose to remain absent from Social Media, they are losing out on an opportunity to build relationships and enhance their credibility with customers. When you want to advertise a new product or something unique about the company such as a green initiative, as an example you can create a cool video about it and upload to YouTube. If it’s a great video that the online audience takes a liking to, then millions will watch it and spread it to their friends and beyond thus volunteering to be your brand ambassadors. Another area that is gaining traction is online reviews with E-commerce retailers like Amazon leading the way. The popularity of Yelp and Tripadvisor show the potential benefits and importance of having good online reviews for your company.
You can even keep track of what the competition is up to by setting up Google alerts. This helps you stay up to date about new products or marketing strategies from the competition. The company website is often the first point of contact between a company and a customer. Therefore, to make a great first impression, the website should be suitably impressive. For E-commerce companies, the website is their showroom as well. Customers expect nothing less than a first-rate experience from E-commerce websites now a days. Amazon and EBay have raised the bar for everyone to try and live up to. With many technology and platform options available, it is incredibly easy for even very small or specialized E-commerce retailers to make great impressions with customers by having a rocking website with all the bells and whistles such as shopping carts, multiple payment options and so on.
The bottom-line therefore is that a comprehensive (and sustained) digital marketing campaign pursued in a thorough and professional manner will lead to more awareness about a company among customers who choose to spend any amount of time online. This will surely do wonders for any company including increasing the top and bottom-line. If you need any help or assistance with your digital strategy then feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group for any of your digital needs.

Thursday, 8 September 2016

How To Do Content Marketing On A Small Budget

Content Marketing
Content marketing is about building your brand’s reputation online with a view to pulling customers towards your brand.
Content marketing is different from direct advertising or a campaign by campaign approach.
 
Why Do Content Marketing?
Small business and local business owners may be a little bit uncertain about this new mysterious marketing technique. But really when it comes to the digital space, content marketing is less technically complicated than other digital advertising techniques such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, banner ads, YouTube video ads and so on.
And the trendlines are clear. Here is data from Google Trends.
Google Trends for Content Marketing
(Google Trends result for ‘Content Marketing’)

The Basics
Content marketing at its simplest level may mean adding a blog to your business website and posting content there regularly.
So, if you are a famous (or a new) bakery shop owner, you may want to post some of your baking secrets or tips on the blog. Similarly, if you own a specialist seafood restaurant, you can post prawn and shrimp recipes to the restaurant’s blog and help people cook tasty seafood themselves.
Be the Gordon Ramsay, or Martha Stewart, or Anthony Bourdain, or Jamie Oliver in your niche.
If you sell hiking equipment, you can always post tips about safe hiking practices or safe whitewater rafting practices to your site’s blog.
GoPro, which sells action cameras, aims to differentiate itself from other camera companies by claiming to be a content company.
Once your business acquires a certain size, you can do content marketing at scale. Both employees as well as consumers can become participants by creating content for you — basically, becoming volunteer evangelists for your business.
Consumers may do this by writing about their own transformative experience with a product or service sold by your company. Or, consumers may upload a video to YouTube that showcases the GoPro camera or the ‘Insane’ mode of their Tesla or its ‘AutoPilot’ features.
There is more to content marketing …
 
ROI
You may ask: what return do I get on my ‘investment’ in content marketing? First of all, the great benefit and advantage of content marketing is that it suits the pockets and budgets of all sizes. It can be done free of cost or you may need to spend a few thousands of dollars per annum on your content marketing effort.
And the ROI will be there. With content marketing, it takes time for results to show. There are SEO and organic search benefits as your content spreads across different social media.
Content marketing is not like a traditional advertising ‘campaign’ or its digital equivalent.
If you spend X amount of dollars on a PPC campaign or a banner ad or a Facebook campaign, the ROI on that will be measurable but clearly any gains of that campaign will be short-lived.
Think of the effect of such an ad campaign as being like the chart below:
Digital Ad Benefits
(Benefits of Digital advertising plotted against time)
With content marketing, the reach, engagement, and trust keeps increasing over time.
Think of the benefits of content marketing over time as being somewhat like the chart below:
Content Marketing Benefits
(Benefits of Content marketing plotted against time)
There is no fixed duration of content marketing as it is not a traditional advertising ‘campaign.’ It is more of a persistent, ongoing effort to capture the mindshare among your target audience and convert them into potential customers.
The primary purpose of content marketing is to enhance your brand’s online personality. Once your audience is hooked on the useful, engaging, or entertaining content from your brand, it is a matter of time before you can convert them into your customers.
The ROI after six months of a content marketing campaign can easily reach 300% and it keeps increasing over time. But the ROI depends on the quality of content.
 
Outsourcing Content Marketing to A Digital Marketing Agency
You should perform a cost-benefit analysis of which approach to content marketing works best for you.
Your options are:
 As the founder/owner, you do all of the content marketing yourself including writing the blog posts, replying to the blog comments, posting to social media, keeping tabs on the different social media reactions and conversations happening
 You put someone in-house as the guy in charge of content marketing and she takes care of all of the above tasks noted in point No. 1 above
 You hire someone to a full-time position to be in charge of all of your company’s content marketing
 Or, you outsource your content marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency such as Mind Digital.
Experienced digital marketing agencies will be able to expertly manage your content marketing campaign while ensuring all the right boxes are checked such as:
 Good quality content
 Presenting the content in a variety of forms such as blog posts, pdfs, slideshares, podcasts, videos, etc.
 Maintaining a regular content calendar
 And regularly posting to social media.
For small business owners, it may be better to focus on the core business rather than on creating content and so on. Similarly, having a full-time content professional in-house may be an overkill for a startup.
Outsourcing content marketing to a digital marketing agency is the most cost-effective solution.
 
SEO And Content Marketing
With Google growing more sophisticated in how it ranks websites in the organic search results, having good quality, fresh content is one of the best ways to rank well in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
When your content is shared widely on social media or has good quality backlinks from high authority websites, Google gets the ranking signal it needs.
You simply cannot conceive of an SEO campaign without content these days. And content — properly executed content campaigns — always carries an SEO signal or contains an SEO message for search engines.
Your content needs to have the target SEO keywords sprinkled in it as well as the LSI keywords and Google will do the rest.
One of the benefits of outsourcing content marketing to a professional SEO agency is that they are well acquainted with the necessary keyword density requirements as also how to avoid keyword stuffing.
With the right keyword research using tools like the Google Keyword Planner, you can really get to the high return long-tail keywords. SEO professionals at SEO agencies such as Mind Digital will have experience with finding out the correct long-tail keywords by conducting keyword research.
 
How To Do Content Marketing On A Small Budget
Adopt a multi-pronged approach to content marketing
This benefits your readers some of whom may like to read blog posts while others may prefer to download content in pdf format for reading later. Still others may prefer podcasts while short YouTube videos may be the format of choice for others.
So, present your content as:
A. Blog posts
B. Podcasts
C. Slideshows
D. Videos
E. PDFs
F. Infographics.
When you push the same content out in different formats, you should also study how they are doing relative to one another.
If you have invested your own time as the business owner/founder in writing the blog posts, creating the podcasts/videos, infographics, pdfs, and so on, then you would be interested to know which of these activities represented the best investment of your time.
After all, making a slick video or a good looking infographic will require time even if you have created the content while writing blog post.
On the other hand, if you have outsourced content marketing to a digital marketing or SEO agency, then evaluating the cost and performance of each type of content becomes even more important so that you can smartly allocate your content marketing and digital marketing budget.
 
Quality Over Quantity
You should not worry about how often your competitor posts content. Some bloggers may be able to post good quality content thrice a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That’s great! But you may find that pace difficult to sustain initially. Not a problem! You may opt for two blog posts per week. No point in having blog content that does not provide exceptional value or have some useful info for your readers. You should only try to post content that is likely to gain traction across social media and that will oly happen if your content is top notch, unique, and exceptional.
Think of the Olympics. There are teams from more than 200 nations playing in Rio at the moment. Probably the United States will be at the top of the medal tally at the end of the Games. Or China will be.
Look at the size of their teams. And also look at the team sizes of the UK and Australian contingents. Remember that the population of these four nations ranges from 1.4 billion to 20 million.
Which country out of the above is likely to win the most number of gold medals or any medals on a per capita basis? Most likely, that country will be Australia.
You can then say that Australia is the highest quality nation in terms of athletic prowess and excellence.
 
Don’t Waste Money on Trying to Create Viral Content
There is no secret formula to guessing the correct Powerball combination. Otherwise, everybody — or, lots of persons — would guess the correct combination.
Similarly, there is no secret formula to creating viral content. A Buzzfeed watermelon bursting experiment goes viral but you cannot plan that in advance — it is likely that hundreds of copycat viral video attempts have failed.
Sure, if you can have two men in jet packs flying over Dubai, the resulting video will get millions of views on YouTube, but that video means huge expenses. Drone videos are cheaper to make. Drone videos of theconstruction progress of Apple’s Campus 2 get good hits on YouTube as also videos of people boiling an iPhone in Coke.
Your challenge is to come up with something that is both creative and cheap. Philippe Petit’s stunt from 1974 where he walked across the top of the towers of the World Trade Center would probably be a guaranteed viral sensation today but tougher security would probably make the walk impossible in the first place.
 
Repurpose Great Content
Repurposing content means converting one form of content into another. If you have a blog post, if it easy to convert it into a slideshow or infographic, or a podcast, or video. It depends on your level of familiarity with these different content formats.
By presenting your informative content in multiple formats, you are able to get the maximum return on your research effort that went into writing the original blog post. Also, you can reach a larger audience by presenting your content in different formats.
 
Guest Blogging as A Source of Free Content
You can create a guest blogging page on your site where bloggers can pitch their blog posts. Of course, you reserve the right to accept or reject these pitches. You may end up rejecting about 90 percent of them but you may find a few good pieces occasionally that are worthy of publication and make the effort worthwhile.
 
Content Marketing Tips
Become A Better Writer
It’s always a good idea to improve your writing skills. If you are planning to handle the bulk of content marketing yourself, you can work on improving your writing skills so that you can produce increasing better content over time.
One of the key enablers for you to become a good writer is of course to read good stuff — whether online or offline. There are lots of long-form content that is published regularly online on an ongoing basis: The New Yorker is one good source and there are content aggregation services like Pocket and Longreads Weeklywhich will send the best of the day and best of the week email newsletters if you subscribe to them.
Here are a few tips to write persuasive, compelling online content:
 Online content should be presented in easily digestible form. You need to craft a really good headline to pull the reader in.
 There should be good subheaders as well.
 Short paragraphs with up to four sentences is the name of the game.
 Use active voice and avoid passive sentence construction.
 Use short sentences with not more than twenty words.
 Use the word ‘you’ to address your reader.
 Make it punchy.
 
Ensure Your Content Is Factually Accurate
Donald Trump may have come quite a long distance despite many plainly inaccurate claims on the campaign trail — and he continues to venture into uncharted territory — but you cannot hope to make an impact as a trustworthy and informative writer if you do not care about accuracy. So, skip the hyperbole and be sober.
 
Ensure Your Content Is Grammatically Correct
Having silly grammatical errors creep into your content can detract from the impact it can have on the reader. So, find someone — your spouse or kids who might do a quick proofreading of your content before or after you hit publish; but preferably before.
 
Develop A Unique Voice
This is probably easier said than done. You can present personal anecdotes in your writing or talk about politics or be unique in some way. It should reflect who you actually are — be authentic and people will likely love it. Social media such as Twitter is a great tool where you can reveal the informal side of yourself to all.
 
Make Content Easy to Engage With
You should enable comments on your blog posts so that your readers can provide feedback or ask for clarifications. You should engage with your community. You can add ‘Click to Tweet’ functionality to your content to make your content more shareable. There are WordPress plugins available as well as various other solutions you can find by a Google search.
 
Different Formats For Different Folks
We have already talked about the benefits of presenting your content as blog posts, email newsletters, PDFs, infographics, podcasts, YouTube videos, and so on.
 
Rich Media Content
Make content attractive to look at. Use Instagram and Pinterest images, video embeds and so on to make your blog posts attractive.
 
Conclusion
The battle to capture eyeballs in the online space is huge and digital ad spending is expected to overtake television ads in 2017 or 2018. Along with the growth in digital advertising, content marketing is growing non-stop. Here is a useful overview of the whole content marketing landscape.
The biggest benefit of content marketing as a digital advertising technique is that it can be done as cheaply as you want. Whether you choose to do all of it yourself or opt to outsource your content marketing to adigital marketing agency or SEO agency, you should remember that this is something for the ‘long-haul’ and the benefits will show eventually.