How does content marketing work? That all depends on what company you are and what your goals for creating content happen to be. Most companies dedicating serious resources to a such a campaign, however, follow the “hub-spoke-model” pictured to the left. It’s pretty simple to start out, and then you can make it as complicated as you want from there.
If your business is just learning about content marketing and how it works, here’s how you can start with a very basic strategy:
Hub – Your blog always acts as your hub, no matter how large your company is. On your hub, you should always have your best content because you want people to stay on your site. As you market your content across different channels, you link back to the most important pages on your website, and your home page is always the best page to link back to because it most frequently has the most authority of all of your pages. But, make sure you link to other “deep” pages such as your services pages and landing pages containing calls to action too.
Spoke 1: Other blogs – Create content and distribute it to other popular blogs in your niche. Make sure it’s original and doesn’t mimic any of your own content. Other blogs not only have highly qualified traffic, but they provide a high-value link as well. Many successful business and blogs have been built exclusively by guest blogging on other blogs.
Spoke 2: Social media channels – Whatever channels you have, share your content on them. But, make sure you follow the 80/20 rule of sharing content on your own social media channels. 80% of the content should be valuable 3rd party information, and 20% should come from you. If you exceed this ratio consistently over a period of time, you will notice less engagement and slower follower growth because your followers will believe you are only out to get something from them rather than being interested in helping them.
Spoke 3: Organic search – You’re always working on this spoke. Of all the spokes, this one takes the longest time to payoff. If you’re lucky (and this has happened to us), you can get an article indexed and get serious traffic within a couple weeks. But, you have to be really lucky for that to happen. In most cases, you have to create quality content over a period of 12 – 18 months before you see serious returns from your content marketing strategy. Many businesses don’t have the time to create their own content, so they outsource to SEO copywriting services
Spoke 4: Social bookmarking – Users submit interesting content to these sites, and you can get some fairly decent traffic levels from social bookmarking sites. But, users from these sites typically don’t become long-term readers at your site (although some might), and this type of traffic doesn’t convert well. What’s the benefit? People on these sites are looking to share great content – look at these sites as great opportunities to attract links.
Spoke5: Press releases – Google has reduced the value of links offered by press releases. However, they still are worth your time. You can get a decent amount of links for a relatively low time and financial investment. We recommend using PRWeb or OnlinePRNews.com
Spoke 6: Article directories – You have to be careful for this one. Google has reduced the value of links from these sites, and if you have a large amount of links coming from really low-quality article directories, that can do more harm than good. EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, and Triond.com are some high-quality sites where you can get links Google likes.
Spoke 7: Web 2.0 – These sites are similar to article directories, but they have some cool custom gadgets that make their sites more interactive. Squidoo, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Blogger are some popular, and useful sites.
For smaller businesses, that’s a pretty good hub and spoke strategy to begin with. The best strategies to use, if you’re short on time, are guest blogging on other blogs and distributing content on your social media profiles. If you’re a bigger business, you might also use some of the following spokes:
Infographic Creation – One that does a good job costs at least $1000. Infographics are probably past their time, but they still work.Youtube – This is a Web 2.0 site, but it has its own culture and requires special knowledge and of course, the creation of a video people will find interesting. Video marketing services are more costly, and a reputable video marketing company is harder to find.Images – If you run a business that relies heavily on visuals for marketing (a restaurant, real estate company, or interior decoration), marketing your images is a huge spoke for you. Publish them on your blog, and make sure the “ALT” text includes one of your primary search phrases.
Social media – This is a spoke for every business, but for bigger companies, if you have a budge for Facebook ads, you can add even more fans by distributing your content and “promoting” posts or creating PPC ads on Facebook.
Wise Swans Content Marketing
