Among all the online marketing methods, content marketing remains to be one of the most recommended.
Internet marketing providers swear by the effectiveness of content marketing in increasing both brand recognition and audience engagement. Interesting content helps spread a brand’s name by becoming the topic of meaningful discussions. You can get free exposure in a way, just by your written content alone.
The real catch, however, is making QUALITY content.
Quality online content requires time, effort, intelligence and creativity. You can spend every day pumping out one blog post after another, but if it lacks effort and quality it won’t convert to new customers or more site visits.
Good content gets recognition, but quality content gets results.
Quality content is not only made through time and effort. It is composed of various elements which come together to create the kind of content that starts conversations and gets results. If your digital marketing efforts in the Philippines have not yielded the results that you desire, taking note of the elements listed here may help you out.
Headlines! Headlines!
If you want to get your content across to people, one of the first things you can think of is a catchy headline.
Headlines are the condensed form of your content. It gives the reader the push they need for them to keep reading. Your click-through and bounce rates all depend on how well your headline conveys your message.
What constitutes a good headline?
- Brevity and Impact. Your headline must be short enough for ease of reading, but it must catch the readers’ attention right away. Many people tend to scan over various listed titles especially when they’re on ‘search engine mode’, so making a good first impression is important.
- No Ambiguity. Your headline fails if its wordings are too vague or open to multiple interpretations. For example, ‘Stolen Painting Found by Tree’ can lead to several misunderstandings and in-jokes. Alternatively, your headline fails if what it says does not reflect the content at all.
- Numbers and Adjectives. Strong language combined with precise numbers can easily grab your target audience’s attention when done right. ‘Five Guaranteed Methods to Write Catchy Headlines’ is much more read-worthy than ‘Ways to Write Headlines’.
- Avoiding the Clickbait Trap. Clickbait-type headlines are easily distinguishable because of their sensational and misleading headlines. In most cases the stories they link to are totally unconnected to the headline or have a fairly low writing quality, which is why many savvy readers avoid them.
Tag that Keyword
Keywords and tags may seem like items best left to SEO specialists, but they play a vital role in giving your content the exposure it needs.
Proper tagging and keyword application helps in categorizing your content, making it easier to be found on relevant searches. Higher viewership increases a post’s relevance to a search term, raising its rank through online databases and further increasing its visibility to more readers.
Basically, keywords and tags fulfill these roles:
- Categorizing your content for search engines
- Curating your content for easier internal searches on your website
- Increasing your brand visibility to your target audience by way of relevant keywords and tags
However, you should be cautious not to over-emphasize the keywords and tags on your posts. Too many keywords in a single post can have your content flagged for keyword stuffing, while excessive tagging can put your post in the wrong categories accidentally. Moderation is key to ensuring that you have the right amount of keywords and tags that can lead audiences to your posts.
Tell the Story, Tell it Right
Your content’s quality relies heavily on how your content flow goes.
A strong narrative, theme cohesion, and smooth content flow will help readers understand your message easily. Rambling paragraphs and roundabout terms are definite no-nos. Once you go on a tangent, you risk losing readers. When it comes to effective content narration, a few points come to mind.
- Spelling and Grammar Issues. Nothing is worse than reading an article that is rife with spelling errors, mismatched sentences, missing punctuation marks and out-of-context phrases. Proofread your work multiple times as needed, whether by you or by your editor to weed out any grammatical mistakes.
- Images, Graphics, and Visuals. The monotony of walls of text can be a turn-off for a potential reader, leaving your otherwise excellent post to languish in the low ends of the SERPs. Insert relevant and eye-catching images, videos, and graphics that provide context for your content or are relevant to your topic.
- A good post does not show its age; it stays relevant throughout the year, whatever season it is. A timeless post means that it can be relevant even if used as a reference several years later. Usually keeping the content updated can help, but sometimes it can stand on its own if it is already of a high level of quality to begin with.
Link It In
You can further increase the value of your content by providing relevant internal links from related pages within your website.
With internal links, not only are you adding extra knowledge to your post, you are also increasing the visibility of your other pages, further promoting your brand.
Internal linking is fairly simple, but it still follows several rules to be done effectively.
- There is enough content to relevant topics that can be internally linked to. Internal linking will not be as effective if you only have five or six pages with brief amounts of content.
- There are relevant pages located deeper in your site’s architecture. These deep pages are usually links that are located far away from your homepage and other major pages, like a specific product page or a blog post in another category.
- The pages you link to must be relevant and must engage the reader. They came to seek knowledge, so any additional information that you can provide will definitely be appreciated.
Note that internal linking is meant primarily to boost the authority of the page where the link is added. This is your primary aim for internal linking; increasing the visibility and authority of the linked page should come as a secondary.
Sharing the Call to Action
The primary aim of your blog post is to impart knowledge to your readers, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t slip in a few call to action in there too. After all, you will want them to keep coming back for your articles, products and services.
The call to action is meant to incite your readers to act based on the content that they have read. However, the CTA can fail if the content is weak or if the CTA does not follow up well with the content. Here are a few tips to make your Call to actions more effective.
- Straightforward is the way to go. Be direct to the point if you want the reader to see more articles or view products and services related to the current page.
- Keep it conspicuous but not too eye-catching. You wouldn’t want to distract your readers from the content you’re providing!
- Like a headline, brevity for a CTA is key. A short CTA of around five or six words is enough to get your readers to click ahead.
Related to CTA is the shareability of your content. You have a higher chance of getting free marketing for your brand if readers find your content compelling and thought-provoking enough to share with family and friends. A strong call to action that caps off your already high-quality content can increase its shareability, further promoting your brand.
The content you make for your brand can easily make or break your business and reputation. The quality of your content reflects your brand as a whole; the better the quality, the better the reputation your business can get. Make the most out of content marketing by only creating worthwhile and valuable content, and your brand will go further than what you expect.