Image courtesy of The Writer's Alley
It’s not easy to consistently create high quality content. That’s a fact I don’t sugarcoat with clients. To make a B2b or B2G content marketing strategy succeed, you need to adopt the mindset of a publisher.
That means keeping your audience happy and engaged. And that’s not easy. My partner Marc Hausman writes about bouts of “content terror” in his Washington Business Journal column this week. He shares some ways to keep the quality level high, including tapping into third party contacts for their views and aggregating third party coverage on important topics, then adding your view.
The effort is well worth it. Earlier this month I wrote on how a content marketing strategy can also deliver more traditional PR benefits. Great improvements can be achieved for a client’s organic SEO rankings as well, as detailed here in a post from 2009.
High quality content can also uncover new audiences for your message. I’m experiencing that right now on this blog. The Gawker Media web property Lifehacker published a story yesterday that contained a mention and link to this blog. Since Lifehack has an Alexa ranking of 662 and millions of pageviews per month, that link has sent me huge amounts of traffic. At this writing I’m on pace to achieve almost a month’s worth of traffic in less than two days, and I’ve garnered many new direct subscribers.
That’s exciting stuff, and great motivation to find influential communities online that can deliver similar benefits for my clients. The challenge to create quality content never goes away, but neither do the benefits.