Content Marketing and WordPress
Content marketing is the practice of creating a piece of content that is useful to some members of your target market. This content is usually free but often hidden behind a sign-up form but can also be through low-budget distribution methods(ie: social media, low-cost PPC etc)
Content Marketing Vs. Interruptive Marketing
To make sense of this it would be easier to compare it to a more traditional form of marketing such as advertising(which is considered interruptive) basically interruptive marketing gets in the way of what the consumer is doing, a good example of this is youtube with their adverts. This form of marketing breaks your concentration and ruins your experience with the content you are interested in. Content marketing works because:
- You don’t interrupt your audience and take them away from the content that they want to see.
- The content you have created is what you are interested in.
- You are giving the consumer something of value and makes them more open to your business
Content marketing can be done through any form of Content Management (CMS), but WordPress is specially designed for all your content marketing.
Content Marketing and WordPress
Over the last decade and a half, WordPress has become much more than that — it’s become the weapon of choice for millions of web developers, marketers, and SEOs who want to turn content marketing to their advantage, and along the way, it’s accumulated a veritable smorgasbord of content-marketing-friendly plugins.
Not only that but WordPress is also one of the best CMSs out there if SEO is part of your traffic generation strategy. Content marketing and SEO are heavily dependent on one another. WordPress has so many SEO tools in make WordPress a good choice.
Suggested Plugins for Content Marketing on WordPress
These are the basic plugins that I would suggest:
- Yoast SEO
- OptinMonster for pop-ups
- Gravity Forms for lead capture
- Google Analytics for checking the performance of the content
These plugins will help perform the few functions that are needed in order to perform content marketing effectively. These functions are:
- A method of capturing leads and emails
- A way of evaluating your content effectively
- A method of optimizing content for searches
So with this said let’s dive into Yoast which is the foundation upon which is the foundation of which all your content will be built. Yoast only works well when you have chosen the correct and quality keyword phrase.
Here is how to use Yoast properly for your site:
- Use a keyword tool to do some keyword research.
- Choose a relevant, long-tail keyword phrase. Work that phrase into the post in all the appropriate areas
- Publish the blog post according to the content schedule with a clear call-to-action that sends users to another page, a page which then attempts to convert traffic into leads or simply hopes that OptinMonster will grab leads with the pop-up that’s been set up beforehand.
- Distribute on social and encourage interaction
- Check the performance of posts and compare them to other pieces of content.
- Create a new piece of content that links to the previous piece of content and to other pieces of content on the site in a deliberate, well-thought-out pattern.
If you do all that, your piece of content is going to take a lot more work, but it’s also going to have a much higher chance of doing the following:
- Increasing traffic to your website.
- Increasing leads/conversions.
- Increasing the authority of your website, making all your content worth just a little bit more.
- Introducing your brand to a wider audience and establishing you and your brand as an authority figure.
One very common example of this is the creation of a custom post type for portfolio entries, but you can apply the principle to just about any type of content you can imagine.
The savvy content marketer will set up a variety of custom post types for some of their more valuable pieces of content, such as:
- eBooks
- Downloadable tools
- Product checklists, comparison sheets, or spec sheets.
When setting up custom post types, these pieces of content can be sorted and displayed on your website separately from your other types of content, which can be important when you’re, for instance, creating a resource centre or hiding certain resources behind a lead capture form.
