It’s easy to think that content marketing is a puzzle that is so complex that you’ll never be able to solve it. Certainly, that’s the myth that many SEO and content marketing consulting firms tell their clients in order to convince them to use their services. eVisible takes a different approach: we want to demystify the content marketing process so you can understand exactly what we can do to quickly and effectively provide you with real results.

To help you out, we’ve pulled together a few very simple pointers that can help anyone to improve their content marketing and get results from their efforts — whether they are hiring a consultant to help or doing it themselves.

Keep Your Focus

It’s tough to create — or execute — a top-notch content marketing campaign if you aren’t sticking to your original plans and using your focus to execute tasks on schedule. Keep a to-do list of tasks that have to be done in order for your content marketing to succeed — and make sure that you stick with these deadlines as much as possible.

Don’t Worry About Negative Comments

If you create content that is being read by the public, there’s a good chance that you’ll get some negative feedback no matter how great the quality of your work. Dealing with critics is simply the nature of having work being read online. The good news is that people who nitpick every blog posts aren’t your real audience.

Keep Things Brief

People have a tendency to use too many words to express what could be said in a few. Readers have short attention spans and want you to get to the point as quickly as possible. If you struggle with brevity, you can use tools such as the Hemingway App (hemingwayapp.com) to check your writing for was it can be tightened. You can also simply read your content out loud to make sure it flows properly.

Be Excited About Your Writing

If you aren’t excited about the opportunity to use content marketing to reach potential customers, it will come through in your writing — this means that your readers won’t be enthusiastic at all. In fact, you can use your enthusiasm as a way to get readers engaged in your content. When you are thinking about story topics, figure out what makes you excited about your company and use this as a guide for the topics that you want to explore in your content marketing.

Always Write In Your Own Voice

As you read blogs to get ideas for your own content marketing, it’s common to pick up on the things that the best content marketers do that helps their work connect with their audience. While it’s great to learn from the best, you also don’t want to alter your unique voice in order to copy what other people are doing. These content writers are great because they have found their own unique voice. The more you write, the closer you’ll come to finding your own voice as well.

Be Honest With Your Readers

If someone is taking the time to read your content, you owe it to them to be upfront with them. This means not overselling your products and services or making false claims. This will always lead to angry readers.

Be Efficient With Your Content Marketing

You only have a certain amount of time each day to devote to content marketing, so it’s important to use your time wisely. Having a solid game plan will help you to use your time as efficiently as possible. Building a content calendar is a great way to make sure that your time each day is spent writing instead of hunting for topics. You can update this calendar regularly as new ideas pop into your mind.

Congratulations: your blog post has become very successful! People are reading it, commenting on it and sharing it with their friends on social media. It’s exactly why you hire blog writing services to help you with content in the first place. However, just because your blog post is popular doesn’t mean that it can’t be more popular.

eVisible provides article writing services for clients and helps them to take steps to seize the momentum of popular posts and make sure they are as effective as possible. Here are some steps to take once you realize that a post has the potential to be a hit:

Refresh Your Content Regularly

Go back to your old content and see which posts were once popular but have stopped receiving a high number of hits. There’s a good chance that these posts have not been updated in quite some time. You can reverse this trend by freshening up your content with updates, new information or just formatting it to make it easier to share with hot social media sites. Doing this will almost always lead to an increase in views for old posts.

Use Your Sidebar Space

Almost every blog has sidebar space. Chances are that you use it for banner “ads” directing people to your events, special activities or other sections of your website. Why not also use this space to highlight your most popular posts? If people see that the most popular posts on your site are in one place, there’s a good chance they will click on them to see exactly why they are so popular.

Include Popular Posts In Your Email Marketing

Your most popular blog posts clearly have content that your customers will find engaging, so it makes sense to integrate them into other aspects of your marketing. When you perform a drip email marketing campaign, why not have some space within the message to highlight two or three of your most popular posts? It’s even better if these posts are relevant to the same topic as your email.

Collect Information In Exchange For Access

A popular post is a commodity that you can utilize — if done wisely. You may want to have pop-up come up over the text or graphics of the post and make it so that readers have to choose whether or not to sign up for your newsletter in order to read the rest. If you take this approach, it’s important that you also give readers a way to say “no thank you” and read the post without giving you additional information or signing up for a newsletter.

Repurpose Your Content Into a New Format

Putting old content into a new format is a great way to recirculate your popular material and get fresh hits. For example, a text-driven post that was successful two years ago might make a perfect infographic today. Or you might find content in a post that now makes more sense to be picture-oriented so you can share it through sites such as Instagram.

You can also extend your content by getting more in-depth than you did originally. Research suggests that content that is 2,000 words or more tends to rank better than content that is 1,000 words or less. You can also tweak your post headlines in order to utilize tips such as making them “how tos” or “lists” in order to get new eyeballs.

Whether you are creating your own content for marketing purposes or working with an content marketing service such as eVisible, the steps that your content takes between the first draft and being published are critical. It’s in this process where you can fine tune your language, be more concise with your editing and ensure that you are hitting all of your key points. The difference between a good piece of content and a great piece of content often comes in the editing and revision process.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you review your content after the first draft but before it goes live to the world:

Read the Draft Out Loud: Reading your work out loud — even to yourself — will give you a better understanding about how the text flows and if it has the right tone. In addition, reading out loud is a great way to catch typos (such as missing or misused words) that might slip through while re-reading it on paper.

Use the Proper Amount of Keywords: Just like Goldilocks, you want to find a balance of keywords in your content that is “just right” — enough that is impacts your organic search engine results but not so much that it begins to seem overstuffed (which can lead to your content being marked as spam by Google). A good rule of thumb is to aim for about 75 words of text for every keyword phrase used.

Get an Outside Perspective: It’s very easy for you to become insular when dealing with your own content. After you’ve written and edited a piece of copy enough times, it can become difficult to tell if it’s good or not. The best way to solve this problem is to have someone from outside your organization read your content. This will give you a different perspective from someone who can tell you if the writing connects with an “outsider.”

Use Image Alt Tags: One of the most important things you can do with your content from an SEO perspective is to make sure you are using Image Alt tags. This is the code inside of an image tag that will display if an image will not load on a person’s screen for whatever reason. Search engines such as Google consider it a positive for images to have alt image text.

Aggressively Promote Social Media Sharing: After you’ve created great content, you want your readers to share it with friends and co-workers. So make it easy for them to do this! Make sure that your content has sharing “buttons” to let people quickly share your stories to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or other relevant social media sites. You can also optimize your content for social media sharing by coding in Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards.

Doing content marketing and doing it right are two separate things. Most people recognize that having lots of content is important to your search engine optimization efforts along with your online marketing program. However, fewer people take the time to think about the type of content tactics that will be most useful in building a successful strategy.

You can go beyond basic content marketing strategy by thinking about it as one part of your overall marketing efforts. A well thought out content marketing plan can help you to build your brand, create new connections with customers and improve your sales. As you get ready to plan out your content marketing strategy, here are five questions you need to ask first:

Who Is Your Target Audience?

You can’t craft a message designed to connect with a potential customer if you don’t know who that person is. You need to review all of your available resources in order to better understand who your target audience is and how you can effectively reach them. This can include researching your competitors and reviewing your current web traffic and demographic information. Use this information to answer questions about how your customers access product information and what information they are looking for when they go to a website.

Why Is Content Marketing Important To You?

This is ultimately the most important question that you can ask of yourself when developing a content marketing plan. Content marketing can help you attract the attention of new visitors while creating bonds with existing customers. However, if you don’t have larger plans for what to do with these potential or current customers, your content marketing work is wasted.

Where Can You Reach Your Audience?

By understanding who your customers are, you can also understand the best ways to reach them. Different customers will interact to certain types of content more strongly than others. For example, YouTube is a great option for customers interested in watching product videos, while Tumblr is an outstanding platform for visual content such as infographics.

When Should Your Content Be Published?

Along with how to reach your audience, you also need to understand when they are most likely to be online so that you can deliver them fresh content when they are ready to see it. You can leverage research from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to see when certain demographic segments are most likely to be active on their sites and use this as a guideline for when to post your content.

What Do You Want Readers To Do?

The point of marketing is to entice a reaction from the person receiving your marketing message. This can mean many different things: signing up for more information, asking for a phone call or purchasing a product directly from you. The type of content that you create will be partially determined by the action that you want your potential customers to take after viewing your content.

Determining your plan for content is only part of the equation. It’s important to be just as focused when creating and distributing your materials. Make sure you are working with the right content creators and know the right places for the content to live. Figure out which rich media sources are right for specific types of content. Once you’ve created your content, have a structure in place for marketing it and tracking its success so you know what is working and what needs to be tweaked.

It’s extremely important to include frequent content updates as part of your small business search engine optimization strategy. Google places a high emphasis on fresh content in rewarding sites with higher search engine placements. However, many small businesses struggle to come up with content on a regular basis because they lack the resources or ability to write and create content consistently.

However, content marketing isn’t out of your reach as a small business. With the right planning and foresight, you can manage your content marketing process and create pieces that will accomplish two goals: increase your reputation with Google and attract new customers. Here are some steps you’ll want to take as you building your content marketing strategy.

Make a Content Calendar

One way to combat this is to create a content calendar that lays out a month’s worth of content ahead of time. This saves you the headaches associated with feeling rushed to create content and lets you work ahead. If you have content on a calendar, you are less likely to not do it because you are busy with other tasks.

Do Your Research

Want to know what you should be writing about? Find out what is already popular. You can do research through Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to see what sites people are visiting and the type of content that is on those sites. You can also visit social bookmarking sites and do research to see topics that are getting buzz on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

Understand Newsjacking

If a story is trending on Twitter or Facebook, chances are people are interested in reading different takes on it. Be agile and ready to post stories about trending topics – even if your take is different than the mainstream. Trendsmap is a great resource for understanding the topics that are generating interest in localized areas.

Create Visual Content

You don’t have to be stuck doing nothing but writing. Infographics, photo slideshows and other types of visual content are very eye-catching and viral. Utilizing visual content can help you get out of a “content rut” and make your content stand out from other text-based items.

Get Interactive With Surveys

Web users want to be engaged and make connections with content. One way to do that is to survey your audience about trends in your industry or their preferences. You can use this to generate even more content and get some outstanding market research – something that always comes in handy when you are doing marketing for small business.

Try Video Blogging

You don’t need a fancy production studio to have your own video blog. Modern cameras and even smartphones have high-end video cameras. With some basic video editing equipment, you can post to YouTube and reach out to a new potential audience.

Look at Repurposing Content

If you still don’t have time to create new content, be creative with existing content. Take lots of information from different stories on a similar topic and turn it into an overview. Or revisit an old blog post and update it with new information.

Most people understand the importance of creating an effective content marketing campaign. However, it’s much more difficult to create a campaign that is destined for success. In fact, most content creation strategies are doomed to fail before they even get off the ground.

Here are a few of the most common issues that cripple content marketing campaigns and what you can do to avoid these mistakes:

Not Establishing Your Parameters Before Starting Your Campaign.

When This Happens: In the early stages of a campaign, usually when a company decides that it needs to do content marketing in the first place.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get excited about starting a content marketing campaign. It’s often so easy to get excited that you don’t think about why you are doing a campaign, who your target audience is or what your objectives should be.

How to Avoid It: Think about who the ideal person to read your content is, then write content that you believe will directly impact this person’s life.

Not Creating Content on a Regular Basis.

When This Happens: A few months into a campaign, as soon as the “newness” of launching a creative campaign wears off.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to devote a lot of energy into a content creation campaign at the beginning. But it’s also easy to give up on a campaign before it really gets off the ground.

How to Avoid It: You need to understand that Google rewards content only if it is done on a consistent basis. Set a schedule to post several times a week at the start of your campaign and stick to it.

Keywords Matter.

When This Happens: Poor keyword strategies often doom content creation campaigns from the beginning.

Why This Happens: It’s common to take the wrong approach to keywords, such as keyword stuffing or using keywords that are too broad.

How to Avoid It: Start by doing some effective keyword research to make sure you are targeting the right phrases that will connect with your target customers.

Failing to Create Internal Links.

When This Happens: At the start of a campaign before you even write your first piece of content.

Why This Happens: Many people simply don’t understand the importance of internal links and how much of a role it can have in helping the overall SEO on their site.

How to Avoid It: Content and links are two things that should work together and not independently of each other. Think about ways that you can internally link to multiple pages on your website with each piece of content.

Failing to Diversify Your Content.

When This Happens: Whenever a marketer fails to realize that everything they publish can potentially be content marketing material.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get locked in on a certain type of content (such as blog posts) and continue to produce it again and again.

How to Avoid It: Diversify your content. eVisible can help you to create high quality blog posts for your site. We can also provide you with the right mixture of premium content and link creation.

Not Integrating Images Into Your Content.

When This Happens: Throughout the entirety of a content creation campaign.

Why This Happens: Too many people associate “content” with “words” and don’t understand the potential value of integrating images into your articles, blog posts and onsite content.

How to Avoid It: Images make stories more interesting and help to improve SEO results. Use them every time you create content.

Not Using Social Media to Promote Your Content.

When This Happens: After the first blog post is a written and a content marketer simply expects that people will magically find it and make it viral.

Why This Happens: It’s a fundamentally lack of understanding about how content gets shared. You need to promote your content in order for people to find it.

How to Avoid It: Use popular social media sites to share the content you create. Come up with ideas such as mailing lists or forum postings to expand your reach.

Creating a powerful headline is important — maybe even more important than you think. According to recent research, 80 percent of people will read a headline on a website, but only 20 percent of these people will actually read the article. The quality of the headline can make a big difference between the articles that are read versus the ones that aren’t.

So what makes a compelling headline? The team behind eVisible content writing services knows that there’s no “magic bullet” to assure that headlines will grab your readers’ attention. You’ll need quite a bit of trial and error to discover the type of headlines that will resonate with your target audience but doing it properly can pay significant dividends.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Creative: A boring headline — even if factually accurate — isn’t going to drive people to your content. Any fears about using clever or “cute” headlines to draw in readers have been proven to be outdated with the rise of viral sites that get huge click-through and page view numbers with creative and witty headlines.

Consider Your Target Audience: It’s important to think about who you want to read your stories and what you want them to do when crafting a headline. If you are looking at closing sales, you need a headline that calls the reader to action. If you are simply looking to increase page views, you need to focus on grabbing their attention with the promise of something unique in the story text.

The Medium Matters as Well: You need to consider who your readers will engage with the headline when creating it. Sites such as Facebook allow you to use an image and, possibly, some additional “teaser” text as a sub-headline to attract a potential reader’s attention. Make sure you take advantage of these opportunities when you can.

Remember That People Are Curious By Nature: There are several types of headlines that have become popular in recent years:

• Lists
• Questions
• How-Tos
• Directly Addressing the Reader

But one of the most popular recent trends has been in headlines that use shocking language, over-the-top statements or emotional responses to get readers hooked. This is particularly true of viral news sites, which often use headlines such as “This Picture Shows Why Our Education System is Doomed” or “You Won’t Believe Why This Woman Was Sent to Prison for 20 Years.” They present bits of information that connect with people’s emotions and lead them on to want — and almost need — to click through to find out more. It’s powerful, effective and is a method that can make your articles go viral.

The start of the year is a great time to review your content marketing strategy. Whether your plans just need some simple tune-ups or you need to start doing content marketing, you can always benefit from a fresh approach. In the coming year, content will continue to be one of the driving forces of search engine optimization but how this content is delivered to readers and the correct type of content to create is always evolving.

With this in mind, here are four pieces of advice for your content marketing moving forward:

Have an Overriding Plan You Can Measure: Your content strategy needs to be part of your overall SEO and online marketing campaign and not just operate as its own entity. You can hire a provider of website content writing services to create killer content, but if it’s not helping you to drive visitors to your site or close sales, what is its purpose? You also need to make sure that you have metrics in place to see the patterns of your content’s readers and if the content is effective in spurring action.

Plan for Mobile Reading: A recent Pew Research study showed that 63 percent of all people with a cell phone use their device to go online. This represents a huge amount of people who are potentially reading your content on a phone along with other people using tablets and other non-phone mobile devices. Make sure you are using responsive design to ensure that the content works well on smaller screens.

Personalize Your Content: Whether you are drafting email newsletters, blog posts or guest articles on another site, it’s important that you make sure that readers feel like they are reading something unique and different. Speak directly to your audience and try to personalize your contact with them wherever you can. If you are the owner or CEO of your company, take the time to share your personality with your customers through your content. If readers feel a connection to you, they are more like to open emails and read your articles.

Make Your Content Informative and Useful: These have been two of the biggest buzzwords to come out of Google’s algorithm changes in recent years. While link building and higher search engine rankings might be a by-product of your content, you need to create this content in a way that provides readers with helpful information that is relevant to your industry. If you are working with an outside provider of content writing services, make sure they know your business well before they start writing on your behalf.