Author: quicksprout

You already know content marketing is the new SEO. So what are you waiting for? Might as well go out there and start blogging so you can get more search traffic, right?

Creating a content marketing strategy isn't as easy as it may seem. You can't just throw up hundreds of articles and expect them to magically rank well on Google.

Yes, understanding that you should be leveraging content marketing is the right first step, but before you launch your campaign there are a few things you ought to know:

30 quick content marketing tips

1. Writing content is only half of the battle. The other half is promoting your content. You should spend as much time promoting your content as you do writing it.
2. Content that is at least 2000 words tends to rank a lot higher on Google than content that is less than 2000 words.
3. Content isn't king, great content is king. You can't just pop up thousands of articles that are mediocre or even good and expect to do well. You should only put out great content.
4. Content doesn't just come in the form on text, you can leverage videos, photos, infographics, comics, or any other type of content that you mind can come up with. At KISSmetrics, infographics provide a better ROI than any other form of content.
5. Don't expect content marketing to produce a "direct" ROI. It can help you increase your sales, but more so indirectly. For example someone may read your blog, and then decide that they love your content so much that they are going to have to try out your product or service.
6. If you run your own company it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you should be leveraging content marketing. If you have a boss it can be difficult, especially because there isn't a short term ROI. So what should you do? This guide will help you convince your boss.
7. Content marketing isn't like link building in which you can start and stop it whenever you want. If you are going to start it, you have to continually do it even if you are tired and want to stop. As you can see from this article, being inconsistent caused my traffic to drop by 21%.
8. Days, weeks, or even months won't produce you results that you will be happy with. Be prepared to put in at least 1 solid year before you start seeing results from content marketing.
9. If you are having trouble coming up with titles, try this title generator or follow this headline formula as a starting point.
10. When writing blog posts don't write them like you would write a school paper. Write as if you were having a conversation with your friends. Essays put people to sleep, conversations keep people engaged.
11. The best form of textual content isn't one that is time based or news related. Ever green content, which is information that will still be relevant 1, 2 or even 5 years from now produces the best long term results.
12. Whether you are blogging on your own blog or someone else's, make sure you are using Google Authorship as it can help brand you and build up your author rank over the long haul.
13. When coming up with titles for your blog post, try to please both people and search engines. Think of a title that intrigues people and seems like people would type it in when searching Google.
14. The easiest way to drive traffic to any form of content is through social media. Make sure you spend time building up your Twitter and Facebook profiles.
15. Content marketing shouldn't only take place on your own site, make sure you implement a guest blogging strategy as it is a great way to build links and traffic.
16. Don't be a link whore, link out to other sites within your content. It doesn't matter if it is your competition, link out to whomever benefits the reader the most. This will help other sites to notice you and cause them to share your content and potentially even link back.
17. The best way to get people to continually come back and read your content is through emails. Collect people's email address and notify them when you have a new blog post.
18. Not all content is equal. Some content will produce better results for you than others. Test different content types to see what appeals to your. For Quick Sprout, guides create better results than anything else.
19. If you want more social traffic to your content, try out Social Metrics PRO. It will track all of your content and show you which ones performed the best on each social site. This way you can write more of the content that people love.
20. I've personally found that the most effective way to convert blog readers into customers is through webinars. This may or may not work for you, but it is something to test. Just make sure you collect people's information before the webinar and you do a soft pitch within the webinar.
21. If you are having trouble creating content, there are templates that can help you get started.
22. If you are going to create infographics to gain traffic and backlinks, don't forget to have embed codes at the bottom of each graphic. Without this you will get roughly 1/3 of the links compared to having an embed code.
23. Don't expect content marketing to help you rank for head terms, it's a long tail strategy. Quick Sprout gets over 90% of its' search traffic from long tail keywords and KISSmetrics generates over 91% of its' search traffic from long tail keywords.
24. Before you start your content marketing efforts you should create a content calendar. By planning out what content you are going to create and when you are going to release it, you will ensure that you'll continually grow.
25. There is a formula to creating viral content. All you have to do is follow it to maximize your success.
26. The worst type of content you could create is duplicate content. By taking other people's content and putting it on your site or by regurgitating the same old information, you won't be benefiting anyone. Take the time and effort to create something great.
27. If you are looking for a few inspiring places to spark your creativity, check out Pinterest, follow a few hastags on Twitter, check out a few stories on Storify, and check out LinkedIn Signal to see what you audience is up to.
28. User generated content is one of the best ways to scale your content marketing. From a forum to a question and answer site or even something as custom as YouMoz. Whatever form you decide to do, make sure you moderate the user generated content because once your users start creating mediocre content or spammy content, it can actually do a lot of harm.
29. People just aren't reading content on their computers or laptops. Make sure you content is compatible with tablets and mobile phones. There will be an estimated 788 mobile only Internet users by 2015. That means you need to have your site and content compatible with all devices.
30. The easiest way to build up your social profiles is to convert your readers into fans. Check out the tactic Wetpaint uses in step 3 of this article, it's very effective.

Conclusion

The SEO game has changed drastically in the last year. The one thing you can learn from all of the changes is that short term tactics that trick algorithms won't be too effective in the long haul.

So instead of focusing on building spammy links or cheating your way to the top of the rankings, try using long term techniques. And the best long term strategy I know of is content marketing.

Writing or creating great information that always benefits your readers will continually be valuable, no matter what algorithm changes Google or Bing decides to make.