Why Content Marketing Matters for Growing Your Business

Today, I'm at NamesCon 2017 (Domain Name Industry conference), and learning a ton about domain names and marketing.  There's a session I really wish you could be here attending"Why Content Marketing Matters for Growing Your Business" Sound familiar?  Here are my takeaways for you.

Having blogged weekly for over two years, I'm not a stranger to trying to balance writing content that is optimized for search engines while also trying to make an 'human' post that is designed for you, the reader.

Quietly is a company that 'helps brands and publishers create amazing content,' and they're the guys hosting this session (see team members Sean Tyson & Sam Wempe in the pic)

Before I share three ideas with you, here are two pertinent definitions:
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What is content marketing?

Content:  "Something someone would consume, like an article, social post, photo or video."

Content Marketing: "Content that provides consumers information to generate awareness, engagement or revenue for business."

Being at the Domain Name Conference, this is obviously relevant to domain name investors because more content on your domain means more web traffic, which makes the domain name more valuable. ​

These takeaways and ideas will help you if you are a company looking to pull more web traffic.

1. Search is indicative of intent.

Come up with good content ideas that hold value. Your website visitors must continue consuming content in order for you to capture their intent.  

Content has compounding value.  Many blogs and publishers start to see the ROI of investing time and money into creating content start to compound soon after the 6 month mark.  Stick with it and keep publishing valuable content!

Pro Tip:  Google actually measures how web visitors consume the content, so write for the reader so that they spend time reading the whole thing. Don't get too carried away with "SEO" and trying to please the machine.  Please humans, and that pleases the machine.  This was comforting when I learned this today.

2. Use Google Trends and Keyword Planner.

Have you ever considered leveraging regional interest?  How about knowing the volume of website visitors so that you can plan your content more strategically?  Look at the analytics to see what is popular and compare that against content for which people are already searching.

An example that popped out to me was that one of Quiet.ly's customers, Sotheby's, used search tools to generate content ideas and their page views went from 1% to 38%!  And even more impressive was that new entrances to the website via blog went up 64%.  That's some pretty solid proof that aligning your focus using Google Trends is probably a great idea if you'e looking for more quality web traffic.

Pro Tip:  Make sure to use content as a way to relevantly plug your services or products. If you make a plug when it's not relevant, I think we can all agree you've lost the user. If you don't plug your services or products you'll never make enough to invest more into your startup.


3. Distribution and backlinks.

After the presentation, I raised my hand to ask the speakers about content distribution.  Their whole presentation was about creating content, so I wanted their take on where you put it.

I told them that I publish weekly on first handshakin.com, and then Huffington Post, Medium, LinkedIn  BuiltInLA, BuiltInColorado, BuiltInNYC, BuiltInChicago, BuiltInBoston, and by answering questions on Quora.com.

They said I should consider publishing on:

• Reddit (similar to Quora.com)
• Relevant LinkedIn Groups

For backlinks, they said that similar to point #1, they are designed to be a result of other sharing your content since it's so great.  Don't try too hard to pump too many artificial backlinks. The main action item I pulled from their presentation was to re-consider getting a wikipedia page up, and I was proud that Handshakin.com has already been mentioned on John Paul Dejoria and on Techstars wikipedia pages.

Learn more about how we can help you launch a personal blog here.​