Beyond Blogs: Inject Variety Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

Beyond Blogs: Inject Variety Into Your Content Marketing Strategy:

Beyond Blogs: Inject Variety Into Your Content Marketing Strategy is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The SEO industry is (finally) getting the message that making content user-centric rather than focusing so heavily on outdated, over-optimized practices is the path to better rankings, more traffic and more customers. It’s not enough just to focus on onsite optimization anymore, and content marketing (whichever of the competing definitions of that term you use) has rightly moved to the forefront of everyone’s minds.

But in the rush to make content marketing part of everyday internet marketing practice, a lot of marketers are defaulting to the one type of content they’re comfortable with: blog posts. There’s so much focus on this single, narrow form of content-centric link building that professionals are murmuring how guest blogging could be the next bubble for Google to burst.

And while I think you can blog in healthy ways that make your brand more authoritative and get you in front of valuable audiences, it really should be only part of your overall content strategy.

Focusing Narrowly on Blogs is Shortsighted

The blog “bubble” is another discussion entirely, but the very fact that we’re having it indicates that a lot of marketers are relying on guest blogging pretty heavily as a marketing tactic, and it’s preventing them from branching out into more diverse types of content.

It’s time to move beyond blogs and expand the menu of content that you offer to your audience. New content types will expand your reach to new niches, engage your audience in different ways and inspire natural linking activity that is good for SEO and drives qualified traffic to your site, which is what online marketing is really about.

What Kinds of Content can You Focus on?

This is where SEO.com is stepping in to help you. We’ve just published a stellar ebook (which you can download here for free) that outlines the types of content, including blogs, that everyone should be considering, even though they may not have the bandwidth to do all of them right now.

Here’s a preview of what you’ll find when you download 11 Types of Content You Should be Creating for SEO Right Now:

• Images: Discover how to create images that give people an insider’s view of your company, inspire people to share them socially and are accessible to search engines.
• Video: Learn what a search-optimized video looks like and how you can create videos people love without a huge production budget.
• White Papers: Reach sophisticated B2B audiences with long-form, data-rich content at the right point in the research and purchase cycle.
• Case Studies: Harness your success with existing clients for content that showcases your products and services in a substantive way.

There’s a lot more inside the eBook  and I think it lays out a broader view of what a fully-fledged content campaign can look like. You can use many of these new types of content together, re-purpose old content into multiple formats and increase the impact of every great idea that comes out of your marketing department when you’re not limiting yourself to blog posts.

Building Healthy Marketing Campaigns

There are a lot of voices in the online marketing space that are offering tips and tricks, talking about various strategies and pushing services; it’s easy to get information overload, especially while everyone is still debating tactics. A healthy marketing campaign is diverse, but it still needs direction.

When you’re overloaded with info, it’s hard to know where to start. Remember, though, that you’re the owner of your individual content marketing campaign. It needs to fit your company, your products and your customers. And while you may want expert advice on content marketing tactics that deliver, nobody knows better than you what conversations you want that content to be starting. You are the expert on your business, and your input is essential.

Start with the basics. That may be a blog. It might be a few web videos or sharing product photos on Pinterest. Whatever it is, make it natural, and beware getting too comfortable with any one type of content. Try something new. You’ll be surprised by the results.

Beyond Blogs: Inject Variety Into Your Content Marketing Strategy is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.