Online Content Marketing

In the March issue of Deliver magazine, I read an interesting article on big businesses marketing to small ones.

Funny, I’ve been so focused lately thinking about small businesses being found online and the growth in numbers of people using search engines to try and find local businesses, that I didn’t even think about the small business owner searching online for products and services that they might want to buy from the bigger guys. And sure enough, one of the pieces of advice in the article is to be found online, meaning big businesses have to follow the same practices as small businesses marketing on the Internet. Search engine optimization using relevant, keyword-rich, updated content!

No matter the size of your company, search engine optimization is where it’s at because search engines are where your customers look. Make sure your SEO writing gets you found.

I used to be a strong advocate of email newsletters, probably because of my publishing background, but also because I believed in them enough to create a list of 25 reasons to publish an e-newsletter. I came across that list the other day rummaging through a file. I laughed to myself at how much my thinking has changed in the last 4 years. But then as I read through the list, I realized most of those reasons translate to blogging! So below are the 18—count them, 18!—of the 25 reasons I used to use to support enewsletters and now offer up as reasons to blog.

Blogging can:

1. Help your search engine rankings by putting useful, relevant content online
2. Give prospects an easy way to learn more about you, and for clients past and present to keep up with you
3. Strengthen your brand and market position
4. Lead to referrals
5. Drive traffic to your Web site
6. Market without coming across as marketing
7. Increase your credibility and that of your business
8. Evolve and change in a way printed material can’t
9. Offer cost effective testing and adapting
10. Communicate quickly and efficiently
11. Establish a dialog and enhance customer loyalty
12. Educate your customers in new ways to use your products and services
13. Generate leads
14. Reinforce other marketing efforts, offline and online
15. Cost the same, no matter how many people are reading it
16. Lower costs compared to printed marketing
17. Be tracked, showing you how many hits and where they come from
18. Build an ongoing relationship with your target market

I still believe in marketing with enewsletters, because what I’ve been preaching for years is still true: it’s not just what you say but how you say it. Delivering the right marketing message with the wrong marketing medium doesn’t work. So use blogs when they’re right, and create newsletters when they are.

Yes, optimize everything you put on your Web site, then think of other types of writing for the Web that would be appropriate and optimize that too. Because online, content rules. And the more quality, useful, relevant content you have on your Web site, the more the search engines will like you.

Even if you think you’ve done all the search engine optimization (SEO) you can, I bet you can find at least one more place to put up keyword-rich content on that Web site.

Here’s an easy one: press releases. Write them, optimize them with keywords, post them on your Web site (as html, not pdfs!). And better yet, submit them so they get out into the broader world. We just submitted a press release to PRWeb for our small business marketing tips ebook. We optimized the press release for search engines as part of writing it, and now we’re posting it on our site too, to add to our own content. It didn’t take much longer to write an optimized version, honest.

Other content you can add to your Web site optimize for search: case studies, whitepapers, blogs (like this one)

Just don’t spam. Keywords to remember here are quality, useful and relevant. Be customer-centric. Yes, you’re putting up Web content to help you get found online. But once someone finds you, you want them to stick around. And that ain’t gonna happen if they click through and discover all you’ve done is stuffed a Web page with keywords, or just gone on and on about your company and what you’re selling.