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.

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.

In the modern online world, all businesses are global. Customers from around the world can visit your site, browse your goods and services and contact you for more information or place an order. When you construct your website and create an SEO strategy, it’s important to consider international factors, especially if you plan on doing a significant amount of business with customers from outside of the United States.

Considering the international reach of your site allows you to accomplish two things: you can avoid issues that might harm your site’s SEO in other countries and you can take advantage of opportunities presented by the international reach of your site. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from taking a worldly approach to their SEO audit and considering global elements. Here are some of the things you need to check when evaluating your global website from an SEO standpoint:

Targeting Languages vs. Countries

The world is increasingly becoming a melting pot, and this extends to languages. Many countries have more than one official language. Other countries – such as the US – don’t have an official language but might have many different languages spoken within its borders. Depending on your business goals, you will want your sub-directories, sub-domains and ccTLDs to either be targeted toward specific countries or specific languages, and you’ll want to have a consistent and simple way of doing this throughout your website structure.

In addition, you’ll want to make sure that you remain consistent through on-screen and meta content if you are structuring your pages by country or by language. For example, if you are targeting for languages, you don’t want to have country flags be the icon for making a selection.

Optimizing Structure for International Sites

Each international version of a website needs to have its structure analyzed thoroughly. Website owners need to make sure that it isn’t overly complex or have unnecessary directories while also making sure that the URL names are clear and in the right language for the target audience.

Alignment, Indexing and Crawling Issues for International Web Versions

To further ensure that your structure is correct on the International version of your website, you need to make sure they are crawled and indexed correctly by search engines such as Google – along with local search engines popular in the regions you are targeting. Make sure that you aren’t block language or country versions through your robots.txt or that you are redirecting all crawlers to one version of your site.

Hreflang Annotations

Incorrect Hreflang annotations can directly impact your international search traffic. You need to make sure that you are using the correct language and country code and that you are correctly cross-referencing similar pages on your site with content for other languages or countries.

Webmaster Tools Geolocation Settings

If you are using sub-directories or sub-domains instead of ccTLDs, use the Geographic Tools in Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that you are targeting the correct countries.

Cross-Checking Content

It’s surprisingly easy to have your localized website content be different than what you expect. Make sure that you check each country- or language-specific website version to make sure that the right content is being displayed.

Avoid Cross Linking

Remember that cross-linking pages on various versions of your site can lead to penalties from Google. Avoid doing this as much as possible.

No matter what size your business, if you need to reach an international audience, eVisible can help. Our Internet marketing firm works with companies of all sizes to find online marketing solutions to expand their reach and attract new customers.

Website visitors react to what they see in very predictable ways. Study after study has shown that how a person encounters a website will have a significant impact on how they react to it. Even with the exact same content, one website layout can increase the chances of conversions while another can make the site more vulnerable to high bounce rates.

A good rule of thumb to follow throughout your entire website layout and design work is to focus on what you want people to do on the page. A big part of conversion rate optimization is to understand the purpose of the page and getting people to have a laser-like focus on the page elements that will push them to do the task you want them to do. Whether it’s signing up for more information or making a purpose, every element on the page should drive a visitor to do just that.

So how do you do this? Here are just a few of the ways that you can increase your likelihood for conversion rate success:

Limit Choices: Too many choices can leave website visitors paralyzed by options, so they wind up doing nothing. Instead of giving visitors multiple different forms to fill out, limit them to one choice. Instead of having all of the different social media sites listed with sharing buttons, limit the page to the few sites that make the most sense for your customers.

Top to Bottom, Left to Right: People read websites like they read newspapers. This means they expect the most important information to be “above the fold”, i.e. above the first half of the page. They also are used to reading left-to-right, which means that you want to make sure that valuable information is on the left side of the page. Keep calls to action and other secondary content on the bottom half of the page. If a person scrolls to this part of the page, chances are that they are ready to take the next step.

Headline Sizes Matter: People are attracted to big, bold headlines that spread across the screen from the top of the page. Design your site so the most important information is encapsulated within a headline at the top of each page.

Use Images: Especially of people. Studies have shown that website visitors react particularly strongly when they see pictures of people on a website.

Think About Usability: If a person can’t navigate your website, they’ll click away rather quickly. Avoid this by utilizing a clean layout with a solid color contrast, plenty of white space and an avoidance of overstuffing the pages with too much clutter.

Keep Ads and Sidebars Away From Main Content: Whether you are selling ad space on your site or have internal links to other pages on your site, you want to keep these elements apart from your main content. Have a clear delineation between the main content and any sidebar content that might pull people away from your main message.

There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” SEO campaign. In much the same way that your business offers something different from your competitors, your search engine optimization efforts should also be individualized according to your unique needs. Delivering targeted SEO efforts for our clients is one of the things that set eVisible apart from our competitors and it’s something you should consider in everything you do with your website.

Much the same is true when it comes to developing the code and design elements on your website. You need to apply analytical thinking when it comes to how you create and deploy your website. Even experienced web developers can make mistakes that can impact the ability of their website to perform its best. Here are a few things that you should consider:

Start Small: Instead of launching your website with a huge set of features, start small with a clean, basic layout and design. You can always build it out as your business grows by choosing individual elements to add that have been carefully developed and beta tested.

Keep Your Code Flexible: While your platform doesn’t need to be completely scalable from the start, you also don’t want it to be so inflexible that making additions or changes in the future is impossible.

Make Your Code Easy to Deploy: Instead of trying to create a site based on the limitations of your code, work from the opposite direction and plan your features and try to come up with easily-implementable code that will get these features to happen.

Launch Your Website at the Right Time: Don’t rush your website to go live if the elements aren’t all in place. If customers come to your site and have problems with it, chances are they won’t be repeat customers.

Focus on the Customer: Think about how you can create a website that meets your customers’ needs. This should be more important than implementing any one piece of code.

Along with these code-based tips, there are other elements to remember as you start your business. eVisible – Internet Marketing Firm – can help you with this along with all other aspects of getting your company off the ground. A few things to consider include:

Focus on Big Picture Problems: Instead of developing a product or service that fills a niche need, try to make sure you have a model in place that will attract the largest amount of people possible.

Stay Involved…But Not Too Involved: No matter what your role is in the company, you need to know about every aspect of how the business is operating. At the same time, you need to let the experts that you hire or contract with take the lead in their areas of expertise.

Whether you are launching a new website or redesigning an existing site, the temptation is to pack as much content and information onto the site — particularly the front page — as possible. This can include lots of pictures, videos, product descriptions and content information. Unfortunately, this is a mistake that can cripple a site before it launches. When it comes to creating an SEO friendly design, simpler is better.

More specifically, you need to design your website to reflect the visual expectations that customers have for sites like yours. This doesn’t mean that you should exactly copy the look and layout of one of your competitors. What it does mean is that you need to do some research to understand what the major design elements are that similar sites to yours have in common and why they are so frequently used.

If you think about certain types of sites such as online clothing stores, real estate offices or news sites, you’ll find that many of them naturally have similar elements laid out in similar ways. A big reason for this is because of a concept called “cognitive fluency,” which essentially means that people feel more comfortable looking at a site if the information they need is where they expect to find it. This means having graphics, headlines and logos in places that are comfortable and familiar if they have also looked at other sites in your space.

In addition, customers don’t want to be confused with an array of visual elements when they go to a site. Studies have shown that complex sites essentially make the eye and the brain work too hard to process information, causing people to find the sites ugly and leave them quickly. Instead, people prefer sites that are not as complex. This includes simple images, only a few colors and liberal use of white space.

The bottom line is that every element on your website – especially your front page – should communicate something important. Research has shown that an adult is only able to store about five to nine pieces of information in their short term memory. You need to identify the big points that you want people to take from your site and make sure they are front and center in your design. Doing professional website development with this in mind will lead to a cleaner, more user-friendly site that results in conversions.

The rules of search engine optimization have changed dramatically in the last few years. Google responded to the glut of low-quality content with Panda and Penguin, algorithm updates that placed an emphasis on quality content and organic search engine optimization rather than keyword-stuffed articles and manipulating site code.

The most important thing to think about when creating an SEO strategy for your website is the visitor experience. This wasn’t always the case; until recently, Google wasn’t concerned about the user experience when determining site rankings. This has changed, as Google is smarter about reviewing sites in a way that mimics how users interact with the site. In short, the best way to improve your link popularity is to have a website that provides useful content and information to visitors.

Adapting to the new SEO landscape means rethinking old tactics that were considered to be the industry standard just a few years ago. Here are four examples of how SEO strategies have shifted recently:

Build Blog Relationships Instead of Buying Links

While Google still places a high value on having your site linked on other sites, the concept of “buying” a high volume of  low quality links via a link network is no longer considered to be a good SEO strategy. In fact, if done incorrectly, you might get punished by Google for this. Instead, you should focus on doing outreach to blogs that are a natural fit for your site. Reach out to them and try to enter into a mutual relationship where you provide their readers with interesting content in exchange for links.

Focus on the On-Screen Design of Your Website

It’s still important to have a website that has a common sense architecture and that has a solid internal structure. But it’s now just as important to have a site that looks great and has content that flows naturally. Google’s spiders can read sites to analyze where and how content is displayed and you need to have a website design that takes advantage of this.

Expand Beyond a Limited Set of Keywords

Until recently, the prevailing method that search engine optimization consulting services used to increase a site’s page ranking was to focus on a limited amount of keywords and use them in the page content, title tags and header tags. Google is now smarter about how it evaluates keywords for rankings. It’s better to come up with keyword groups of related words and use them organically in your on-site content.

Concentrate on Branding

Google frowns on paying for anchor links on unrelated sites. Instead, it wants to see your company’s brand have strength. If this occurs, the power of your brand will give an extra boost to your related page rankings.

Doing SEO efforts, building social media platforms and other online marketing activities are useless unless you have a plan. Just like how you wouldn’t go for a hiking trip into the woods without a detailed map, you shouldn’t do online marketing tactics without establish your marketing plan first. Developing your marketing plan helps you to get the most out of your small business Internet marketing and maximize your ROI.

It takes time and effort to develop a cohesive and successful marketing plans. Here are seven steps you need to take in order for your marketing plan to have a chance at succeeding:

1. Identify Your Position in the Marketplace

Customers are drawn to businesses that they consider to be leaders within their industry. Just as importantly, if they feel that your company is made up of experts in their industry and are people who spread reliable and useful information to customer, they will be very receptive to your marketing efforts. Your marketing plan should include ways to interact with people within the industry to build your credibility.

2. Strengthen Your Brand Positioning

At its core, your brand is really a summation of the way that people feel about your company when they hear its name. Ideally, you want people to have immediate positive associations with your brand regardless of the situation. Engaging in brand reinforcing tactics such as charitable campaigns or non-product targeted advertising can give people a good feeling about your brand.

3. Build Long-Term Awareness of Your Brand

Many people ignore a company or their brand if they have no need for their services at that exact minute. But subconsciously they might remember the brand if it is reinforced. When they are suddenly in need of what your company has to offer, the building of long-term brand awareness pays off and you have a new customer.

4. Attract New Customers

Performing web analytics on your current customers is one of the best ways to develop tactics to attract new sales leads and turn them into customers. Do research to find out how customers decided to purchase your goods or services. This can be as direct as sending customer surveys or you can track the entry points that people used to get to your site and make purchases.

5. Retain Existing Customers

It’s a common mistake to get so concerned about marketing efforts designed to bring in new customers that you end up ignoring your current customer base. Remember that any place that your current customers come into contact with your brand is a marketing opportunity. This can include your website, social media sites, ads or even the packaging on your products.

6. Plan for Success

The online world is filled with companies who were so successful that they saw their sales skyrocket faster than their infrastructure could keep up. This usually leads to shipping delays, unfulfilled orders and dissatisfied customers. Your marketing plan should have plans in place for what to do if you meet — or exceed — your “best-case scenario” expectations for your marketing plan.

7.  Analyze Your Results

If you don’t know how to analyze the results of your marketing efforts, there’s no way that you can know which tactics work or why certain tactics failed. Make sure that your marketing plan has clear and quantifiable goals and has ways in place to measure the success of your tactics as you work toward your goals.