If I told you that the only way to make money on the internet was through content marketing would you know what I meant by that? Most people would not because there is a lot of confusion and frankly misunderstanding about what is meant by ‘Content Marketing’. 
One of the reasons is the problem with content marketing is that it all sounds so simple and easy. After all, all you need to do is to market that product you just developed, right?
If you drill down into Content Marketing to it’s simplest meaning, it means nothing more than posting to a website (blog) on a regular basis so that people will have content to read, having at least paid some attention to the SEO content of it so that Google will find the content, right?
As long as you put posts on your blog with some regularity, it really doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. Hopefully, you have done some research to find out if people actually want anything to do with what you have.
What matters is, that once someone reads your posts, and sees that they are coming on a regular basis and that you are knowledgeable about the topic which interests them, they will start to follow your efforts on a regular basis.
Now, hopefully, you can see that there is a problem with this when you actually sit back and say out loud what is going on. Stick with me here and I will show you the reality of how ‘Content Marketing’ actually works.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
There is a popular belief out there that people are impressed by your web site on the first visit. Now, although this may happen on occasion, ‘occasion’ doesn’t pay your bills. This is mostly untrue. So you simply cannot plaster information on your web page, it needs to be specific to your topic, and in some way be interesting to readers while solving a problem that they may have.
In normal circumstances, we are looking on the web for some specific kind of information or maybe for strictly entertainment purposes. Two things can happen, we either search Google for some kind of info, or we click on a link that was shared by someone we know. At this point we are simply scanning for information, so we pay no real attention to any pop-ups that come up which ask for your email (why would we fill in that??). We most likely never even notice if there was a logo at the top of the page.
Content Marketing is a slow and steady process, so what usually happens is that things only start clicking for us after we visit a particular page more than one time. And again. Whether it’s just through a fluke of Google or its a friend constantly sharing the content, we start to notice the same branding crop up again and again.
Now it is only when this has happened that we start to recognize it. Only when this happens, do we then take a mental note of the site, and start applying a certain factor of trust to it. In other words, it now becomes one that we trust, and would like to hear from again and again. S0, as I said earlier, Content Marketing is a slow and steady process, not a quick fix.
And because of this, when we input our search terms, we do not search for a generic term such as “how to lose weight”, we search for a term such as “how to lose weight gaining muscle mass”. We do this because this has now become our ‘goto site’ for this info and we want to know what they have to say about it. So you also need to make sure that when you do your research, that you place an appropriate amount of keywords in your page’s copy.
Eventually, if we continue to have been impressed by the content that we see, it follows that we would start to read the regular content as well. So again, you need to make sure that you place an appropriate amount of keywords in your content’s copy Then, we might even subscribe to their feed if they have one. And when we do this, it’s like we get to know the person behind the content. We start to feel like we know them more, and thereby trust them more, that we might even consider joining their email list and that leads to the possibility that they might buy something.
The conclusion in all of this should be, that Content Marketing is no magic bullet. It is pure hard work and is only successful at all if you output quality work in a consistent manner.
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This is a guest post from Eric Willms, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.
