Digital Marketing — Why content writing only works with a proper online distribution strategy.

Digital marketing is receiving more and more traction as a brand building and lead generation strategy. A major part of digital marketing is content writing — the ability to write interesting and compelling content that engages with your audience on a variety of levels, but secondary that it is found by Google to help with your search engine optimization (SEO) and your organic listings. We can spend a good amount of resource that may include outsourcing content creation on our digital marketing strategies. Great content should not only interesting to read but ideally includes themed keyword links and use the art of semantic writing. According to Forbes, 78% of marketers content creation was the biggest factor in their online success, though admittedly it does not define what “success” is. But content creation cannot be ignored as a lead generation strategy.

But from my experience, what is continually overlooked is content distribution. It is split into two camps. The first is to engage with your audience. The second is to use it as a fundamental part of your SEO strategy. It tends to be the former that marketeers only use a standard thus limiting their online content distribution to their primary and secondary network. SEO is where the real gain can be made by distributing your content to way beyond your normal boundaries. This is where the biggest gains of audience engagement will be achieved, uncover projects that were previously unknown, and your brand building story can occur complete with lead conversions.

In the first camp, most marketeers will take their content and push it to their own website and put links to the content on their social media accounts. A few will make posts on LinkedIn with keyword links. The SEO juice here on social media is limited to almost nothing. You are relying mostly on contacts you already know to read your content and Google largely ignores it. Despite what some experts claim, it is my belief that re-sharing of content by your primary network on social media has little effect in terms of brand building or engagement.

With press releases (PR), there is an opportunity to post to your circle of journalistic contents and news portals relevant to your market vertical. If you are not doing this, then you really should do this as an absolute minimum. It is very easy to do, often it is free, and some news portals allow you to keep your keyword themed Url links intact which will add SEO juice to your website in terms of organic listings.

In the second camp, we want to do everything the first camp does, but we want to push the envelope. Or post the virtual envelope. With the content. And remember there is a lot of content out there. A lot. And you need to stand out amongst it to be effective.

There are many places to post content and finding portals where you can do guest postings, while in many cases keeping your themed links, will help enormously. It will take some research but there are some of the big popular ones like Medium but there will be many smaller and specialized ones for your industry. It takes a bit of research but worth the effort. I am not revealing all the sites that I use as part of my work for my content writing services for broadcaster technology companies as it was hours of effort and is added value to my own content writing services. But some of the main ones include ReadWrite, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, Recode, Forbes and Quora. But ensure you follow their guidelines for being a contributor.

It is also possible to approach marketing and other online journals as a guest poster. Approach them and ask. Sometimes I have posted content on LinkedIn and been approached directly by other online platforms as a guest blogger. Can they use my content on their own guest site? Assuming it’s not illegal then absolutely!

If you are worried about being penalized about duplicate content across many news web sites, you shouldn’t be. The latest information from Google does not mention duplicated content, it is more about copied content, in other words, plagiarism. When importing some blog or PR posts to external websites and if you are really worried about duplicated content, you sometimes have the option to use a canonical tag, which is where you can state the original Url source on your website as the master copy. Don’t believe me about duplicate content? Then Google it! Alternatively, make the effort to create unique content for the guest postings where you think it is worthwhile. The more unique content you make, the better your visibility and listings.

Do not underestimate LinkedIn — I have found it invaluable for brand recognition and lead development. When writing posts, you can reach out to specialist groups in your area of expertise. You can post directly to these groups. Often, they are closed groups but when you apply, assuming you don’t just want to spam them, then they allow you to become a member. To date, I have never been refused membership and regularly push specifically crafted content to them. According to the opinions on Quora, there is some SEO authority to be had from backlinks in your LinkedIn profiles and posting, which adds extra value to your content creation and organic SEO listings.

Incidentally if you have a slide deck, why not stick it on Slidr? We have one for our What is Digital Marketing presentation — obviously not all content is text filled with pretty images.

Content can be truly multi-media. YouTube and Vimeo can become a distribution channel.

And one last simple thing. Don’t forget your content can be distributed via newsletters but also by your internal people. Ensuring your sales team view and have access to the content gives them the opportunity to put it directly in front of the people that really matter. Sometimes the simplest actions can have the most profound effect.

About Rain Dance Digital: Serving global technology companies with their lead generation and brand building. Inbound lead generation mainly for video and broadcast technology companies written by people with the rare combination of technical know-how and marketing expertise.