A Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is the future of online businesses. It not only establishes you as a thought leader in your market, but it also can generate large volumes of traffic. While I have helped other companies achieve large traffic and revenue through their content marketing strategies, I’ve always been quite poor at implementing it on my own sites.

Why?

Because, too be frank, doing it well is very time consuming.

There’s no two ways about it. If you want to be successful at it then it’s going to be all or nothing.

Don’t bother playing around at doing bits and pieces, it won’t work. I know because I’ve tried.

But when you do take the plunge then you’re going to be very pleased that you did.

Which is the whole point of today’s post. I’ve put together a content marketing strategy that we’re going to start implementing on one of our sites. There will be somebody managing it and while we will outsource the majority of the work, you don’t have to.

By writing this post I am forcing us to implement the processes in-house and I will update you on the results in a few months.

And… I’d like you to join me!

You can implement the exact same strategy as we are and let me know how you get on. This is a strategy that people pay thousands of dollars to find out, and even more to have done for them.

Let’s start by taking a screenshot of where we are at for this site:

The impressions fluctuate between 50,000 and 100,000 per month and users is between 7,000 and 10,000 per month.

You can see that the average number of pages per session is 4, which is good and the bounce rate is very low.

Avg. Session Duration is just under 3 minutes, which isn’t bad but I feel could be longer.

The traffic channels show us that Direct traffic is the primary source, with Organic Search a poor second.

38% of the traffic to the site are new users but only 24% of organic search traffic are new users.

The average sessions duration is pretty similar across all channels except for social where users spend an average of 16 minutes on the site.

The goal for our content marketing strategy is to increase the Organic Search and Social Traffic to become equal or greater than Direct.

We want the majority of these two channels to be new users and to have longer average session durations.

The site is heavily optimised for generating leads and has a very strong email sales funnel in on it’s backend.

Currently there is an average of two pieces of content being published each day. These are relatively short pieces of content with a long piece being published between once and twice per week.

There is also a huge archive of content on the site containing nearly 1.5 million words. This can be used to help increase the initial speed of the content marketing strategy.

And this is how we’re going to do it…

1. Create Social Media Snippets

Each piece of content published we are going to take between five and twenty short snippets from to publish on social media. These will then be scheduled to be pushed across all social media platforms using Hootsuite at the rate of two per day.

The longer this process is continued the more snippets being shared each day.

2. Turn the content into a video

We want to appeal to a different audience by using video, and build our video channels. Each piece of content will be turned into a simple video and shared on YouTube. The description will link back to the post on the blog.

If we see this starting to have an impact, we may expand the platforms we are publishing the videos on.

3. Turn the content into a slide deck for Slide Share

SlideShare is in the top 150 sites worldwide according to Alexa. We want to grab some of that traffic by turning our content into a slide deck to share there.

Descriptions will link back to blog post, with link showing above the fold.

4. Turn the content into a PDF

We will turn the content into a PDF file and share this on DocStoc, Scribd and DocDroid.

5. Share content on Tumblr

Share the content on Tumblr using a snippet of the content and then a link to the rest of the post.

6. Use digital magazine platforms

Each piece of content will be added to a Flipboard digital magazine, linking back to the original post on the blog.

7. Use StumbleUpon Ads

Create a budget for each piece of content and use StumbleUpon ads to drive traffic to them.

8. Create weekly roundup posts

Create a targeted list of sites that are influencers in your niche. Each week create a post that links to the five or ten most popular articles of the week. Also include the top five or ten most shared social media comments and links.

9. Turn content into an Infographic

Turning the content into a daily infographic and posting to your site and sharing on Pinterest can be a great way to build up a visual following.

10. Sponsored Tweets/Facebook Posts

Allocate a budget to sponsor at least one Tweet and Facebook post each day.

11. Create a Podcast

Turn one piece of content each day into a podcast and publish on site and iTunes.

If you’re thinking that looks like a ton of work. It’s because it is. But doing this has generated large volumes of SEO traffic and conversion for my clients.

The next stage is to plan how this can all be done each day for the minimum cost possible. This is both monetary cost and time cost.

I will write a new post when we have our strategy for implementation so that you can copy it should you want to.
If you’re going to follow along with me while we do this, then please leave me a comment to let me know how you’re getting on.