A key part of content marketing is to make use of cornerstone content and high-quality material. Content that you’ve spent time and money putting together to make both unique to your business, and entertaining to your target market, shouldn’t be wasted. Here, we’ll run through a few ways to make the most of that content to avoid it going to waste in an internet overrun with worthless text.
Firstly, try to work out where you traffic is currently coming from – your blog articles shared on social outlets, guest articles elsewhere, Google SERPs etc – and base your decision making process of that. If most of your traffic is from your own news page from social sharing, push on with that. Same with organic search. But if you find most hits are referred from other sites, you’d be best placed to think about how to build that avenue.
There are many reasons that placing your content on other sites is a good move. You gain more authority within the industry – an expert, if you will, from appearing in various online outlets. You boost the chance that new business opportunities make contact that may not have seen you otherwise. You broaden your brand reach further through featuring in other site’s newsletters. And, doomsday thinking, if your site crashes you’re still a chance to survive through the dark days.
Of course, where there are pros there are bound to be cons. By placing fantastic content on someone else’s site, you are indeed helping them. If they have a bad reputation in the market, yours could be unduly affected. The site may close, making your efforts pointless, or you content could be removed or misused. In other words, it might pay off, but it is a gamble. You lose control.
So the other side of things is to keep your best content marketing items on your own website and work off that. The pros with this version of events include driving more traffic to your own site and being completely in control of what happens – and doesn’t happen – to your precious content. This content, whatever happens with it, will boost your site’s authority, and link building using this content refers people straight to your website!
But remember that whole ‘where there’s pros there are cons’ thing? Well, there are downsides to being selfish with content: if your SEO campaign isn’t working, and you aren’t ranking on the SERPs, you lose valuable hits. If you’re penalised by search engines for any reason, you limit your chance of still finding traffic (think of it as not being diversified in your investments!). You may miss audiences you’d hit otherwise, and you may miss out on link building opportunities if your site isn’t particularly popular.
So, there’s a few things to think about. At the end of the day, what works best for a certain website will differ between brands.
If you don’t know where to start or where to go next, get in touch.
