Smarter Content Marketing PLR Ebook

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Introduction

Even in the age of video, live streaming, and social media, content marketing is still the reigning King when it comes to building successful campaigns that will drive in traffic, and bolster sales and prospect activity. It’s also still the most effective way for both new and seasoned marketers to connect with potential leads, and to build organic traffic funnels from the major search engines.

But the days of writing a short article, getting a few backlinks, and sitting back while the traffic pours in are long gone. There’s just too much competition for those forms of marketing to be effective, and the search engines have changed the way they place value on content in terms of providing exposure through keyword searches made by those in your niche.

Successful content marketing requires more effort and thought, and it requires a more complex strategy than ever before, but it’s certainly not difficult to do. If you create a powerful strategy based on the smarter content marketing tactics in this report, you’ll be able to quickly funnel traffic into your websites while ensuring that your campaigns are designed to achieve long-term success.

In this guide, you’re going to learn about some of the key metrics you can use to judge whether or not your content marketing strategy is a success, and how to formulate a winning strategy right from the beginning, requiring fewer tweaks and limited trial & error.

There is a system – an absolute formula – for creating successful content marketing campaigns, and I’m going to lay it all out on the line for you in the coming chapters.

You’re also going to learn about some very specific ways you can generate even more traffic to your website through content-based campaigns, and how to figure out exactly what your visitors are interested in, so you can deliver the best possible on-site experience to your prospects.

So, without further delay, let’s get started!

Out With The Old

To begin, I want you to know that the older (and outdated) methods of content marketing are simply no longer effective. They’re either marginally useful, not useful at all, or, at worst, damaging to your ability to generate leads and create effective traffic-generating campaigns that will stand the test of time.

For many years, content marketing relied almost exclusively on search engine traffic, but that strategy is no longer as viable. There’s just too much competition and search engines highly favor older sites that have established trust and authority, over new sites that have yet to build on an overall quality score, or history. Getting ranked as a new site is very difficult, though definitely not impossible.

At one time, all you had to do to rank well in search engines was use targeted keywords throughout your website content. In addition, repeating keywords throughout different areas of your website (such as meta keywords, page title, header tags, etc.) would also help score a better ranking in search engines. This was often referred to as “keyword stuffing”.

When ranking based on keyword stuffing became extremely competitive, and search engines grew wise to the methods people were using to manipulate their website’s ranking, it became far more difficult to get anywhere by using those methods.

They simply became outdated and ineffective.

To combat the changes in the way search engines determined what websites should appear when specific keywords were entered, website owners started to focus instead on building backlinks from authority websites, essentially leeching credibility from other established pages. With a decent number of backlinks pointing to your website, and with on-page SEO used to optimize your pages to target those keywords, you could usually count on your website ranking in the first few pages of the major search engines.

Then, the search engines changed their algorithms yet again, and webmasters were scrambling to figure out exactly what the search engines wanted to see on their website to assign decent ranking.

Here are a few tactics that either don’t work anymore, or don’t work as effectively as they once did. Keep an eye out for these, so you don’t end up penalized by the major search engines:

• Keyword Stuffing – Never, ever include the same keyword any more than necessary to convey the point of your article. You could get penalized or even banned from search engines if you try stuffing too may keywords into your content.

• Backlink Farming – While it’s still important to build backlinks to your websites from authority sites, getting too many backlinks too quickly, or obtaining a lot of low quality links will do nothing for you and may even cause your site to be penalized by the search engines. Instead, focus on building quality links over a longer period of time. Slow, and steady.

• Keyword Domain Names – The tactic of registering keywordbased domains in order to rank better in the search engines isn’t always successful. While it won’t get you penalized, it won’t necessarily help your ranking either. Instead, register domain names that are easy for visitors to spell, are relevant to your website’s content, and help you build brand recognition. And make sure they’re memorable!

Smarter Content Marketing

• Overuse Of Anchor Text For Backlinks – Years ago, it was vital that you use your main keyword in all, or most, of your backlinks, but these days you could be penalized for that. Instead, you should spread your backlink anchor text amongst a range of components, such as your page and article titles, main keyword used within content, keyword variations, etc.

• Pages For Every Variation Of A Keyword – Many people used to create a brand new article (which was usually just a slight variation of another similar article) for every single variation of a keyword, but these days that’s not a good idea. One long, high quality article is much, much better than 10 or more thinner articles.

So now that you know what to avoid, here’s the great news. You don’t have to rank in the search engines for major keywords in order to be successful! In fact, you can run a successful business without any search engine traffic whatsoever.

So, what DOES work for SEO and content marketing? Well, that’s a tough question to answer because SEO is such a complex topic. It would take a lot more than a short report to cover it all.

Since it takes so long for newer sites to gain traction in the search engines these days, it’s actually a better idea to focus more on getting traffic from other sources, like social media, rather than specifically focusing on search engine traffic. Not only will you get more traffic faster, but you will actually boost your SEO rankings significantly! A basic strategy would look something like this:

• Write long, high quality articles between 1,500 and 3,000 words each and post them to your website or blog.

• Optimize them for the search engines with relevant keywords used throughout content, article titles and create a linking strategy that directs readers to other relevant articles on your website.

• Make sure you have social like/share buttons on every page of your website or blog.

• Share all of your content to your own social media profiles.

• Ask your followers and visitors to like, share, and comment.

• Build links naturally.

Key Performance Metrics

In order to gauge the success of your content marketing efforts, there are a few key performance metrics you should pay attention to. Most marketers just look at their traffic logs to judge whether their content marketing is successful, but there’s so much more to it than that. Let’s take a look at a few of the different metrics you should be paying attention to when deciding if your content marketing strategy is working as it should.

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