5 Tips for Marketing Through Content

Gather.com is a site that started as a social networking site, but is now a demand-driven media company, attracting 7 million unique visitors per month (and growing), according to the company. Demand-driven media is certainly a competitive industry these days with companies like Demand Media, AOL, Yahoo and others all playing their roles.

Tell us about your strategy for marketing through content.

Content has always been "where it’s at", and that holds true as much as ever these days. Gather CEO Tom Gerace, who is also founder of the Social Media Advertising Consortium (SMAC), a non-profit organization working on the creation of standards for social media engagement campaigns, offered some tips on marketing through content to share with WebProNews readers. These tips are:

1. Start with Search. There are 15.9 billion searches run every month and a small percentage are customers looking for you and your competitors. Figure out your market opportunity by understanding how many searches, keywords and keyword phrases are related to what you do.

2. Think holistically about your budget. What do you spend today per customer? What is your average SEM spend? Content-based programs can help lower cost/customer acquisition because fewer people are doing it and competition, so far, is less intense. Plan to shift some budget dollars from SEM and other acquisition marketing efforts to content marketing – it delivers results with an improved cost structure.

3. Target your content creation. Content needs to be targeted to areas that align directly with your brand; where sufficient demand for your content will make content marketing worthwhile.

4. Make lots and lots and lots of content at a low cost. Search engines weigh recency heavily when organizing content. There is always fresh content at the top of search results pages, so 1,000 posts on a topic will capture more customers than a competitor with 5 – 10 posts.

5. Don’t go it alone. Managing dozens of writers, achieving top search engine placement, and establishing content creation costs to make content marketing make sense requires specialized knowledge and training. Find a partner and make them put their money where their mouth is on the numbers they promise.

Those are Gerace’s tips, but I’ll add that quality makes a difference. Not only does Google continually try to put more emphasis on quality with algorithm updates, but it also goes a long way when you’re talking about reputation, and obviously you don’t want to do something that will hurt your brand.

As far as search, Google’s Matt Cutts has said of the recent Mayday update, for example, that content farms are among the kinds of sites that are hit the hardest by the alrogithm change. That’s another reason why churning out sub-par content is not going to be in your best interest. If you can walk the line of delivering content that people are searching for, and giving them content that stands out, there are lots of benefits to be had.

Have your own tips for marketing through content? Share them here.

There are 21 Comments. Add Yours.

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Smart Payment Plan
October 20, 2010 at 8:35 pm

Your articles are very relevant and informative. This is great advice, marketing is so complicated these days. No longer do you print out some brochures and hand them out to customers. Now, all info is dynamic and constantly changing.

Ted
Smart Payment Plan

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mr.dindayal bhati
October 19, 2010 at 5:57 am

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on the brands Service timing : 10:00am To 9:00pm …(sarkarss001625)

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isoftsolutions
October 15, 2010 at 3:29 am

we are selling the software for gold merchants,it contains all feature for creating Company profile, client list, total accounting solutions
for gold merchants (sarkarss001651)

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k.raju
October 5, 2010 at 4:49 am

New Baby set
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(sarkarss001623).

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mr.kantilal shah
August 1, 2010 at 1:37 pm

we are selling all type of jain dharmik upkaran in whole sale
ratnadeep.upkaran@yahoo.com(sarkarSS001047)

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Article Writer for Hire
July 15, 2010 at 1:04 pm

These are great recommendations, and although I agree with them, I think most writers overlook one important fact; people dislike being told what to do. So, when I give recommendations I use plenty of personal experiences and accounts. I think that the more someone can identify with what you are writing the more popular your posts or tips will become.

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website designers gurgaon
July 8, 2010 at 5:27 am

Yah content part is utmost important and more so nowadays when all mechanism and tools are taken as archiac and search engines are become so so dynamic …….

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MKWeb
July 6, 2010 at 2:55 pm

With all the PLR (Private Label Rights) sites out there spitting out garbage content for those who are desperate enough to buy them and post them without any edits, this is a real heartbreaker.

If you find some good writers and they can keep up with the demand, you could create a great marketing venue for fresh, unique and correct content. I always like to make sure I have a mix of diffeent media in my articles. Maybe a video embedded in one and an audio in another and images splashed throughout the articles.

The hard part is submitting your content to article directories (where Internet Marketers and Bloggers go to find content if they are lazy or just lack the time to do the research on a topic) that do not allow the mixed media to be included.

Article marketing can bring in plenty of traffic to your site and it may even be a long term strategy IF you are writing about something that is fairly stagnant. In other words, if the topic is consistently the same, one or two articles submitted to an article directory or five can bring in some traffic for months (and even years) to come.

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Financial Planning
July 5, 2010 at 2:55 am

Content Marketing is probably , one aspect where people are not focusing that much, as they should focus. Many time we read that content is king, but we rather than giving more focus on content, we usually give high priorites to building links, and other marketing stuffs, like adwords etc. Content syndication and marketing of done properly than can give much better results than the other means, at a low cost. So , I will say that Content marketing is a more effective and ecconomical way to get higher conversions.
Thanks for this nice article.

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Seattle Wills Attorneys
July 5, 2010 at 2:11 am

Having a sound keyword that is relevant to what you do in your industry, but at the same time should be informative to the readers.

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Killerwebs Web Design Studio
July 4, 2010 at 7:14 pm

Excellent article, very informative I’m defo going to be following your guidelines.

Interesting comments being made also, anyone got anymore useful tips? please email:

darren@killerwebs.info

http://www.bradfordwebdesigns.co.uk
Killerwebs Web Design Studio of Bradford

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Kurt Schmitt
July 4, 2010 at 6:49 pm

The Content Marketing Bible for individuals and small business owners is the Action Guide that Ken Evoy provides as part of the Site Build It! product. I’m always amused and somewhat amazed when I see people posting advice as though it’s a revelation, even though it’s been in the freely available Action Guide for years. His material can also be adapted to build and train a team of content writers if that’s what one wants to do. Of course, if you give a team the Action Guide, many of them will simply go off and start their own sites, but that’s always a risk I suppose.

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Nigel Martin
July 3, 2010 at 9:51 pm

We have been building a team of outsourced writers and editors over the last 12 months for content projects with clients and for our own web site business development purposes. Be interested in people’s input into successful strategies to find and retain good authors / editors?

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netbook
July 3, 2010 at 8:18 pm

Thank you for great info.
netbook

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Positronic Design, The SEO Company
July 3, 2010 at 5:40 pm

That’s why good content should always be combined with good anchor text linking, to get the maximum benefit. I’ve always been annoyed at the value sub-par content has been given by Google, and, similar to the Big Daddy algorithm changes, these new changes should only benefit my clients even more. I’m always happy to see quality-driven process upgrades.

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Mr.v.arjuna
July 3, 2010 at 1:30 pm

fashion stylish work,fashion History,Fashion Accessories, Fashion Video,Cosmetics, Lip Care,Skin Care, Hair Tips, Nail Care, Mehndi & tatto Email:fashion2010s@yahoo.in(sarkarooss1014)

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lalockus
July 3, 2010 at 11:34 am

‘Income for Life’

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Vince
July 3, 2010 at 11:07 am

Before I forget, here’s my article about using captcha: http://bloggervince.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-to-stop-spam-comments.html

Hope, this article will also help in some ways.

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Vince
July 3, 2010 at 11:04 am

I want to focus here on comment moderation. Usually, content marketing suffers from spam comments.

Most of these spams contain spam links which can also cause low page ranking. I highly recommend to use captcha to minimize these spam comments.

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Israel
July 3, 2010 at 10:39 am

My group, for instance, at Active Rain (http://activerain.com/groups/WEB20), has over 800 subscribers, with only 430 posts. The reason for this is more what I delete than what I post: you need to have user-filtered moderation: by deleting everything in my WEB 2.0 group that is not popular (I routinely delete even my posts that do not get comments) I am tracking the preferences of my audience in an interactive way. The better this dynamic works, the better the group works, creating user-generated, user-rated, user-filtered content as the group grows; this is the holy grail of group building.
This glass is half full….cheers!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAiXfmJEYwg&feature=player_embedded
Israel Rothman | Social Media Marketing
MoviePals Entertainment, LLC – http://www.MoviePals.com
Tel : 1.866.945.113 | Cell: 805-827-2450
CEO, Socialmediasystems.com
Cell 805-827-2450
Yahoo IM: izzyreal51
Skype: Israel.Rothman
MoviePals Entertainment, LLC

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Ryan Malone
July 2, 2010 at 6:32 pm

One of the mistakes that many content marketers make is around creating their editorial calendar. A sound keyword strategy is what should drive the editorial calendar. That ensures you are always focusing on creating content that has a purpose.

Ryan Malone
SmartBug Media
An inbound marketing agency and Hubspot Partner
twitter.com/ryanmalone”>@RyanMalone