After spending time or resources on creating a fine piece of unique content, checking it’s SEO-friendly and relevant to your audience, you now wonder how it can achieve maximum impact. Do you send the content out via email marketing channels, do you promote it to industry publications or do you send it out via carrier pigeon? A great place to start is a little closer to home – adding the content to your own website. That sounds nice and easy, but just how do you maximise your content’s reach and build up your audience?
1. Make sure your content is well linked from the homepage.
Your content cannot stand alone; it needs support from your website. Promoting a new blog or whitepaper on your homepage will give it a fresh, up-to-the-minute look and attract more attention from your consumers.
2. Give your content a permanent residence.
Content needs a place to live and thrive. Create news, blog or press sections to showcase your work, positioning yourself as a thought-leader in your industry. A designated news section for example, elevates you from company to publisher and allows you to build up a strong following.
Each piece of content also needs its own unique, static page. In plain speak this means that URLs should contain the title of the article rather than a number, as having a keyword-rich URL can bolster performance within search engines.
Best practice: www.yourdomain.com/news/insert-story-name-here/
Avoid: www.yourdomain.com/news?id=133/
3. Content should be available via an archive.
Don’t get rid of old content as it is important that search engines and visitors can read all of your articles, even those that are no longer current. A monthly archive is easy-to-manage and allows for a clean page. Having an archive shows your readers that you have experience in producing quality content and that you are a thought-leader within your industry.
4. The article should include its publish date.
As a publisher, you should show off how regularly you produce engaging content by including the date it was published. All you have to do now is to keep up with creating engaging content… easy!
5. Add tracking code.
You’ll want to measure the success of your content so don’t forget to enable tracking code on the pages being created. Google Analytics is a great free service that can tell you how many visitors each piece of content is getting, how many people are coming into the site via your content and which articles are the top performers. If you want to get really technical, analytics can show how many conversions you are getting from your content and how your efforts have boosted awareness through brand-related keyword growth and direct traffic. Measuring the impact of your content is vital to future content marketing efforts and will help you focus on the most traffic driving topics.
Promoting content on your website is a fantastic way of helping to elevate your brand from company to publisher. Done correctly, it can encourage your consumers back to your site time and time again as they view you as a source of knowledge. Forget external advertising and gaining press exposure – your website is the best place to build up your brand through content marketing.
