7 Ways To Start Killing It With Content Marketing

Content marketing is the holy grail of internet marketing! Huge statement, I know. Yet it’s the truth. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will help you stand out faster than content marketing.

Why? Well because it is the very best way for you to demonstrate to your niche that you have the solutions to their problems. When they read, watch or listen to your free content and find that it provides them with actionable information they can use right now to start solving their problems, they will form the view that you are the go to person in your niche.

This means they will buy your products and services and give serious thought to every recommendation you make.

So the real key to content marketing is to provide people with free information that proves to them that you know what they want and need and can provide it to them through the products and services you sell and recommend.

Now that you understand the importance of content marketing, let’s look at 7 different ways you can use it to grow your online business.

1. The easiest and fastest way to started with content marketing is to write and distribute educational articles. As with all the other methods we will talk about, the key is to produce educational content.

A great mistake that most internet marketing newbies make is to focus on selling products and services within the content rather than educating readers on a particular topic. It’s a grave mistake indeed because we now live in a society that is more turned off by selling than ever before.

But only when the selling is done the wrong way. If you focus on educating people and then making recommendations that will help them solve their problems, your content marketing will be much much more effective.

I understand the need to sell. But focusing on selling rather than education is doing the exact opposite of what you need to do in order to sell! It’s one of those counter intuitive things.

Ok, I disgraced a bit but that was key. So to succeed with article marketing you need to write quality articles and submit them to websites, blogs and newsletters where your target audience is likely to be found.

This way, your articles will appear before people who are actually interested in reading them. This means they will probably try out your recommendations. You can also submit articles to article submission sites like EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, and ArticleAlley.com.

Publishers regularly visit these places to check for quality content that they can publish on their websites and blogs and in their newsletters. So they may just come across yours and publish it. If they have a huge base of prospects your article could receive HUGE exposure.

You can even take your article marketing to a higher level by using an article distribution service. This is a service that submits your article for you to several publishers, many more than you could manually submit articles to by yourself.

So your article could potentially be submitted to 100 publishers within a few days. Imagine the exposure! But the key is to use the right distribution service. Certain services can destroy your online business by distributing your articles to publishers who don’t want them, or to websites and blogs that have nothing to do with the topic of your article.

The service I use is Distribute Your Articles. You can learn more about it here where I have written a review about it.

2.  The second way you can use content marketing in order to make your online business more profitable is by creating and distributing short reports.

Now this is a method that most people believe is really difficult to use. I used to believe the same thing. I thought it was hard to write a short report because I would have to have a lot to say.

The truth is that it is not that difficult. All you need to know is effective strategies to use to create your reports. Here are 2 great ones.

Firstly, you can easily and quickly create a report in just a few hours by compiling related articles you have written into a short report. For example, if you have written a number of articles on how to improve your golf swing, you could compile 10 of those articles into a short report. You could name the report, “How to Swing it Like Tiger”.

See how easy it is? The second method you can use to create a short report is to buy a private label report and then edit it. You can edit it by adding more information or changing some of the information.

You could even make it shorter. For instance, if you buy a 42 page report on dog training, you could reduce it to a 17 page report by focusing on a fewer points or by giving an overview of the details of the longer report.

It’s really that simple and straightforward. So where can you get quality private label reports that you can edit? I get mine from Special Report Club. The owner does a great job of producing high quality reports which come with several different covers, bonus reports, articles and follow up marketing messages. She provides tremendous value for the money you spend.

Once your report is ready, you can use a method like article marketing above to let as many people as possible know about it. So you could write an article that educates people about the topic covered within your report.

At the end of the article you could then tell people that if they want to get more in depth knowledge of the things they just read, they can download your free report. You would then provide a link to the place where your report is hosted. You can use Aweber to host your report.

If you use a service like Distribute Your Articles to submit the article that contains a link to your free report, your report will get huge exposure. If it offers great actionable information, your reputation will soar.

3.  The third way you can use content marketing is by creating and distributing quality videos. I’m talking about video marketing.

It’s a wonderful method because it allows you to present information to people in a way that is most natural to them. People are used to learning by seeing and listening. And video allows them to learn that way.

So it’s no wonder that few marketing strategies work as effectively as video marketing. But as with creating short reports, the wide spread view is that it is very difficult to produce videos. Fortunately, that’s not the case.

If you have a basic Microsoft program like PowerPoint, you are good to go. All you need to do is create a short informative PowerPoint presentation and upload it to YouTube and presto, you have a quality video that will benefit viewers.

You can even take things a step further by using screen capture software like Camtasia to create your videos. This software allows you to show people what’s happening on Your computer screen. They will be able to see websites that you are talking about. They will even see the movements of your mouse and hear the sound of your voice.

I suspect you have probably come across videos like this on YouTube or elsewhere.

So it’s not that difficult to create videos. As I said, once your videos are up and running you can upload them to YouTube where many people in your niche will see them and hopefully watch them (because of your great headline) and then take the actions you recommend in them. For example buying your product!

If you want to take your video marketing to an even higher level, you can use a free service like TubeMogul to distribute your videos to several sites. That will give you far more exposure than just submitting your videos to YouTube.

4. The fourth way to use content marketing is to create an ezine. This is simply an online newsletter. And it’s a really powerful content marketing method because it allows you to create a lasting relationship with your prospects.

That relationship is the key to long term success because nowadays, unlike decades ago, people like to buy things from people they know and like. And one of the best way to become that person is by publishing an ezine.

Unlike a free report or video or article, an ezine allows you to get into contact with your prospects and customers on a regular basis. When they subscribe, they know and understand that they will receive content from you on a weekly or monthly or bi-weekly basis. Perhaps even a daily basis.

So they join your list with an expectation that they will receive your ezine as frequently as you promised on the sign up page. This is a wonderful realization indeed. It’s wonderful because if you don’t send the ezine as promised, you will upset your prospects.

Why’s that wonderful? Are you on crack Bruce? Well it’s wonderful because your prospects want to hear from you. That’s one of the hardest things to achieve as an internet marketer.

I mean, how many emails do you receive from internet marketers that you actually want to read. Not many I suspect. So if they want to receive your emails because you have promised them a power packed ezine every week, that’s awesome!

Essentially, it means you have a chance to send promotions within your ezine and be welcomed for doing so! But of course you have to remember that the reason people subscribe to an ezine is to receive high quality information on a regular basis. At least in most cases.

So I’d encourage you to start your own ezine and build a lasting relationship with your prospects that will benefit both you and them for a long time. After you have one thousand subscribers, you can submit your ezine to the Directory Of Ezines, the best collection of ezines online.

This will expose it to several people who search for ezines using the directory and so will help you build your list of subscribers.  As an added bonus, it will also enable you to sell advertising to advertisers who frequently visit the Directory Of Ezines to search for targeted audiences they can advertise to.

5. The next content marketing method you can use to grow your online business is creating a website the Solo Build It way.  Solo Build It is a hosting company that provides extremely powerful software for creating websites that receive huge amounts of organic traffic from search engines.

It provides you with a method of creating a content rich website that really solves the problems of your niche by revealing to you the keywords that they are using to search for solutions at the search engines.

In other words, when you use Solo Build It to create a website, you know for sure that a good number of people want to read EVERY article you include on your website. That’s internet marketing at it’s best!

And that’s the reason why I use Solo Build It to create my websites. It takes your content marketing to the next level. It allows you to create a number of content rich pages in a very short period of time by enabling others to easily publish their content on Your website!

So, for example, you can invite 100 people to each submit an article to your website. All they have to do is to load the article using a link that you provide and presto, the article is live on your website. So it essentially enables you to get other people to build your website for you.

Of course you have to monitor the submissions to make sure they all make sense and provide real value. But I hope you can see the power of including Solo Build It in your content marketing strategy.

With a content rich website, you will establish yourself as an authority in your niche and will have several ways to generate additional income. For instance, you will be able to sell advertising space, join Google Adsense, write paid reviews or promote affiliate products.

So I really encourage you to use Solo Build It in your content marketing.

6.  Another really smart way to use content marketing is to create and sell resale rights products. In this case, all you need to do is to write short reports and then offer other people the opportunity to sell them.

So instead of distributing the reports yourself as in the earlier method, you would sell them to other people who would the re-sell them to their own prospects and customers. This is a really powerful method because it lets you use the power of other people’s marketing to get your content into the hands of as many people as possible.

And an added plus is that you get to make a neat profit too when people first buy the report from you. But it’s important to remember that the aim with this strategy is to get the reports into the hands of as many people as possible so their price should be low.

$7 - $17 would be a good price range. In that range people won’t think too much before buying the report. It’s also important for you to include terms and conditions that instruct your resellers to sale your reports within a similarly low price range.

That will allow them to make many sales too and so get your information into the hands of many more people. So sell resell rights to your reports. It’s an underused but effective strategy.

7.  Last but not least, a great way to do content marketing is through blogging. We can’t talk about content marketing without mentioning blogging. It’s one of the tried and tested methods of marketing your content online.

And the wonderful thing about it is that it’s 100% free to set up a blog. All you need to do is go to Wordpress.com and get one. Within a few minutes you will be able to set up your blog and start publishing content for the world to see.

The reason why blogging is such an effective marketing method is that it allows you to form a relationship with your niche. Just like publishing an ezine. When you publish great information, you gain the trust of your niche and they respond by visiting your blog more often.

Eventually, they start to live comments on your blog and ask you questions. This interactivity only helps to strengthen your relationship with them. Better still, when people visit your blog often, many of them will eventually subscribe to receive notifications whenever you publish new content. As with ezines, this will allow you to connect with them regularly and make offers to them on some of those occasions. So blogging can actually increase your income.

Blogs also receive free traffic from search engines so they enable you to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly you create value providing content. Secondly, you create a traffic getting mechanism.

An ezine won’t get traffic unless you market it. The same applies to a blog but to a lesser extent because it will receive some traffic just by you publishing content regularly. But of course you need to do things like creating backlinks and using integrating your blogging with social media in order to get significant amounts of traffic.

If you do these things, your blog will really assist you to create a more profitable and stable online business.

So I hope you find these content marketing methods useful. They are proven methods that currently work for many online marketers and have done so for a very long time. As you can see, you don’t even need money to enjoy massive success with most of these methods.

And that’s the thing that most people miss. It’s right in front of our eyes but we can’t see it. Have you noticed that the biggest online businesses in your niche use content marketing. They produce several videos and write a colossal amount of short reports.

Why do they do this? Because content marketing works. So open your eyes and jump on the band wagon. You don’t need any money to start succeeding with content marketing today. You can write a 20 page report right now and go and sell it on Kindle immediately. You know how much that costs? Zero.

By the way, I’ve written an article on how to sell on Kindle elsewhere on this website. But my point is there is no reason why you can’t succeed with this strategy so at the risk of being extremely repetitive, get started right now.

You can learn more about content marketing here.

To Your Success!

Bruce

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