10 Steps To Content Marketing and ONE SEO Secret!

What is Blogging?

Blogging is simply putting content on the web for Google and the other search engines to consume and add to their database.

Why would someone do Blogging?

Blogging and content marketing are done to leverage the power of search engines.

If someone types in the keyword or long tail keyword (multiple words) and my content appears on page one then I have a good chance of getting a visitor to my content.

The other reason is to create your own platform for marketing your services. They come for the content and sprinkled in along with the content are ads or engagement devices that will draw visitors into your funnel and get them to request your lead magnet.

How much content?

If we are talking about a web page, or blog post then more than 300 words, at least one typed page of content. If you don’t even have that much content on your page you will be ignored by the search engines because you are not answering anyone’s questions thoroughly enough is their reasoning. This is the big trick to content marketing.

Does it have to be SEO optimized?

Absolutely! The blog post or web page or even YouTube video needs to be SEO optimized for it to even have a chance of making it to the first page.

To be really effective at this you need to start with keyword research and find the long tail keywords with little or no competition that you can create content around and optimize your page around. To learn more about keywords read our related articles.

SEO Secret Revealed

You need to publish content on a schedule! You need to publish new content at least once a week. Why? Because, the search engines especially Google learn your publishing schedule and crawl (revisit) your site more regularly to index the new content.

What Google knows is that someone that can continue to produce content week in and week out is interesting. When I met Rick from the TV show Pawn Stars he said, “Everyone has an idea for one episode of a TV show, what people really want to see is your plan for ten episodes and beyond.” What is your plan for generating ongoing content?

This is why you need a page full of long tail keywords that you are going to generate content for. A year is 52 weeks long your keyword list should be that long. You need to commit to generating and publishing ongoing content. This is the other content marketing secret.

Why is your publishing schedule a SEO Secret?

People do not have the patience to test it because it takes multiple years to prove this. I am going to share with you the story of TeamBuildingActivities.org (I have recently moved the content to DiscoveringNaturalAbilities.com). Yes this a real live site, one of our sites.

I decided to build TeamBuildingActivities.org when I was introduced to a vendor of a hosting platform called Site Builder (SBI), they have a SEO page analyzer built in, along with a very good keyword research tool. They have some of the best keyword training and site optimization training available.

I sat down in November of 2013 and started writing. I wrote the first batch of content probably the first thirty articles. The file creation date is the column on the right in the image below.

This gave me enough content to launch the site and have content in the bank that just had to be published. This is the true secret, be creating content ahead of when it is being published. Again think of TV as the example, while you are watching this season the actors have already had their vacation and are filming next years content. The further out in front of yourself (your publishing schedule) you can get the easier it becomes to continue to produce content without pressure.

The pressure really builds up when you have to produce something for publishing tomorrow. We all have enough stress in our lives you don’t need this one as well.

You can also hire people to create content for you that you can just edit and make it sound like it came from you. This is a great strategy for building that initial base of content.

I loaded all of that initial content into the SBI platform and search engine optimized it. Then I began to regularly publish content to the site. As you can see the traffic to the site continued to grow until its peak in June of 2015 of 2030 sessions.

Remember I said this was a secret because most people do not have the patience to test something like this. Below is what has happened from July 2015 until now after I stopped publishing content.

The number of sessions has dropped all the way down to 471 in June 2016. When you compare the two time periods the orange line represents the period where I was publishing new content regularly and the blue line when I stopped publishing new content.

Blogging Update November 15, 2018

Below is the graph of new users visiting the site over almost a five year period. When I was actively publishing content on a schedule each week. I was increasing my number of new users. It then trailed off, and is now a steady amount of new users. Content marketing should really be called content publishing!

The 10 keys for Blogging:

1.     Choose a theme for your content. In my case it was anything related to team building activities.

2.     Keyword Research – Generate a big keyword list

3.     Commit to doing this

4.     Create a publishing schedule. I.e. Thursday morning

5.     Create content enough to get ahead of your publishing schedule

6.     Search Engine Optimize and publish your content

7.     Don’t look at your analytics for three months. (it will only drive you nuts)

8.     Pay attention to your Google Webmaster tools specifically content errors that will negatively affect your rankings.

9.     Keep publishing.

10. Make sure your content pages highlight your lead magnets, because ultimately we want new leads for our business.