One affordable, easy-to-use marketing option is the incredibly powerful tool of content marketing. While content marketing can get quite expensive (that is, when you're building tools, widgets, infographics, whiteboard videos, and other visual pieces that take a lot of time and effort), it certainly doesn't need to be.
That's because there's a cost-effective kind of content marketing that will help your small business: If you're a good writer and have some basic graphic design knowledge, or if someone at your company does, then you can do some basic blogging and content marketing on your own!
What do you want to market?
It all begins by looking at your products and services and compiling a list of relevant and long-tail keywords that you want to surround with your content marketing. Here are a few different tools to use to compile keywords for your blog posts.
- Google's keyword planner to get a good idea of keywords to go after. This is meant for AdWords, but can be used in brainstorming and targeting a variety of keywords and seeing their competition.
- SEMRush is definitely an important go-to, but has some limitations if you're only going to use the free version.
- Google.com. (Yes, straight to the source.) Use their auto-complete feature - just don't hit "enter." This gives you an idea of what people search for. Type your main keyword, then "a" and see what words follow; then "b" and see what people are searching, and so forth.
- Google-related search results. When doing a search for your keywords, look at the bottom of the results to get an idea of related searches and expand on those.
- Ubersuggest is similar to Google's auto-complete feature if you don't want to manually go through all of those.
If these aren't enough to get you started then check out this list of 70+ keyword research tools and sites.
What to do with all those keywords
Next, you export these into lists and brainstorm content ideas. "Listicles," or top 10 lists, are the most used type of blog post that goes viral. "how-to’s," surveys, interviews, ultimate guides, checklists, inspirational posts, contests, trending, memes, comics, and much more can be done in content marketing as well - and it really doesn't cost a lot of money to get done. Set up an editorial content calendar to keep on track.
Inside your blog posts, you'll want to include internal links to relevant services or products on your site. You'll be getting some traffic to these, so this allows you to channel visitors from reader to lead to sale. This will also spread any “link juice” that you get to that blog post.
Keep it coming
As you begin to blog more and more, Google will love your fresh content and you'll see that you're a) beginning to rank for many long-tail keywords surrounding your content, and b) that your traffic is growing.
You also want your readers and followers to see that you're constantly updating your content, especially if they signed up for your RSS feed or weekly email alerts.
Blog at least once or twice a week, but remember that typically those who blog 15 or more times a month will get about 5 times as much traffic as those that aren't blogging…as long as the quality is top-notch and the posts are resourceful.
That's just 4 - 5 blog posts a week, or once every business day for any mathematicians out there. If you can't do it, then find a content marketing agency. A content marketing firm can write posts for you, as well as developing some pretty awesome graphic design and performing outreach to promote your content online.
