4 Fabulous Off-Site Content Marketing Solutions
Posted by Anita Oye on Tue, Aug 21, 2012
Do you have an eBook, white paper, tutorial, or video that’s proven itself successful for gaining customers or generating leads? Creating off-site content that links to it can drive even more traffic to your site.
A successful content marketing strategy uses a website with frequently updated content combined with social media sites, blogs, directories, and review sites. While your website is important, creating off-site content that drives new traffic to your website is crucial. Your off-site content will get your brand noticed and talked about, help you establish or gain more recognition for your brand, help you develop important relationships, and boost your site's SEO power.
The following off-site content marketing solutions are fabulous ways to drive new visitors to your site:
Social Media: Boost SEO and Develop Important Relationships
Social media sites offer places to join communities, post content, develop relationships, and drive new traffic to your site. When your links are shared, your content ranks higher in search engines. Using this principle, you can increase the value of your website content. Every time your links are shared, your SEO gets a free boost.
Use a short bio, a strong headline to gain people's attention, and well planned links to your site. You may want to design a different bio and headline for different networking sites. Networking on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Google+ also allows you to establish important relationships.
For customer relationships in the social media space, develop a plan that includes links to specific landing pages and forms that target specific customers in your market. A successful landing page effortlessly guides customers to take action, like making a purchase. Whenever possible, make your landing pages smartphone-friendly.
Another successful use of social media is to establish relationships with those who influence others in the social media space. These are the prominent bloggers, social media gurus, and web journalists within your business niche, or a community within the same marketplace. Once you’ve established these relationships, you’ll need to nurture them with a steady flow of concise and substantive content. Once you gain their attention, offer informative content that benefits them, this reflects well on you.
Blogging: Keep the Conversation Going
Blogs provide an easy way to publish content. If you've just begun to develop your content marketing strategy, focusing on the right topics now will allow you to keep cross-referencing your content and link to it in the future. Links to your website will bring you visitors, and more links will boost your site’s SEO.
Create your own blog and post new content frequently. Write content on blogs within your business niche or community as a guest. Every time you post as a quest, you have an opportunity to leave your bio with a link to your website.
Your writing should directly relate to the topic being discussed. Find ways to mention your content within the context of your post and provide a link to your relevant content. You can also use your writing to lead readers to a closely related topic and provide links to your other content.
Directories: Highlight Your Website
Directories provide an excellent way to highlight your product or service. Although search engines have de-listed many of them, DMOZ, Yahoo! and other review sites remain valuable directories for listing your website. The strategy is very similar to posting on blogs as a guest. For best results, submit fresh content that doesn’t appear anywhere on your website, but is similar enough to provide consistent user experiences.
Review Sites: Gain Recognition and Identify Customer Needs
Amazon and Yelp offer effective ways to get customers to communicate. Every discussion provides an opportunity for your brand to gain recognition in the marketplace. These discussions also provide you the opportunity to find out what’s important to customers. This can lead to product improvements and allow you resolve issues promptly to reduce risk. Dialogue on review sites can also help you develop promotional offers specifically tailored to consumer needs. Relevant content plus promotion equals links, and another way to boost your SEO.
When creating off-site content, link to content that’s successfully helped you gain new customers or leads in the past. If you’re a start up company, determine your most successful content. Then use it strategically.
Do you have any questions about developing successful off-site content or suggestions to help others? Please post them below!