Content marketing has become somewhat of a buzzword. In an effort to jump on board, many distributors are publishing content but not seeing the results they were hoping for.

There are a number of reasons why your content is not producing results. A very common one is publishing content that is not original. This happens when you use a service that provides mass-produced content that many other distributors also use.  This type of duplicate content is not indexed by Google, and therefore “ignored” because it’s found in many sites.

What Constitutes Good Content?

Good content speaks to your target audience about things they want to know as it relates to the products and services that you provide. It communicates your knowledge and expertise. It has educational value and it’s not a sales pitch.

The goal of creating content is to satisfy your prospect’s need for information.  You want your website to be the one that provides that information. That’s how you engage your ideal prospects, demonstrate your expertise, earn their trust, and ultimately, win their business.

Effective content does one of these three things: Educate, Inspire, or Entertain your target audience.

To be effective, your content must be based on your audience interests and not yours, therefore knowing your audience is key.

To be of interest to your ideal client, your content must address the questions and concerns they have about sourcing promotional products. For example, the questions they ask you when discussing their projects, especially during the first conversation. Basically, these are the questions they’re typing on their browsers, which are the keywords you want to build your content around.

A good place to start is making a list of those questions and doing keyword research on those phrases. There are several tools in the market that will help you with this research, such as the Keyword Planner by Google,  which is free.  This tool will provide an invaluable point of reference as to what your audience is searching for.

Producing and Publishing Your Content

Your content is an asset of yours and the right place for it is your website, which is the hub of all your content. WordPress has become the platform of choice for many reasons, one of them being that it’s very user-friendly.  It is also search engine friendly, or easy to find by search engines when setup properly. You can add a WordPress blog to your existing website very easily, even an industry cookie-cutter site, as explained here.

Content can be presented in many forms besides a blog post. In fact, once you write a blog post you can present the same ideas on the topic in various ways to get more mileage from your effort.

Some examples of types of content, in addition to blog posts:

• eNewsletters
• Video
• Infographics
• eBooks
• Checklists
• Research reports
• Case studies
• Slide Share slides
• Graphic images
• Projects showcase

The point is, the more you publish information about your products and services, the more chances you have to be discovered by search engines when people search.

Content production takes time and effort but it is worth the investment. If you don’t have the time or writing is not your strong point, you might want to consider outsourcing your content creation to a freelance writer, or better yet, hire ACTION for a turn-key service,  where quality content is created based on your business focus, your point of view, and your values, and then distributed via social media platforms and newsletters.