Content marketing is all about using your content to attract attention and engage visitors in a conversation. A blog is a brilliant tool to help you generate new content over time, with each new post acting as a new web page and drawing search visitors.

But there are two problems associated with blog posts:

• Categories: the category pages are not that useful. Just a list of posts. And to avoid confusing search engines with duplicate content, it is a good idea to stop them being indexed anyway.
• Invisibility: once posts go into your archives, they can lose visibility. You want your great blog posts to be visible at the right time.

We’ve recently come up with a new Wordpress plugin that tackles these problems.

It lets you match up Blog Categories to pages in your website:

• When a page is linked to a Category, the latest posts from that category will automatically be linked at the bottom of the page.

• Each post in that category will automatically have a link up to the the related page.

Once the plugin is activated, under Dashboard, Manage, Categories you can simply associate any page in your website with a category, and the automatic behavior takes over.

This makes it possible to create a page with a lot of rich content about a topic, and then each time you post on that same topic, the post is automatically linked on that page. It is a bit like a souped up Category page.

Our first implementation of this plugin is specific to the OM4 theme. In the future we hope to make this more generic so we can publish the plugin.

im only 13, but i think if every one pulls together we could save the plantet! come on, there is no other world in the universe that has the stuff we have. So save the world it is the only place with chocolate!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ellie, 13.

This comment appears as one of the many comments made about Jane Genovese’s Combating Global Warming Mind Map.

Jane (and her mother Sharon) created this mind map about 12 months ago, and the interest in it has been building and building.

If you search Google for images on global warming, you will see it up there on page 1.

And today the Digg community got involved. Jane’s mind map has over 800 Diggs and more than 300 comments - as more stories are hitting the front page, Jane’s map has moved on to page 3, but is still getting a lot of visits.

We’ve had big traffic events on our servers before, and have been staying ahead of these with capacity upgrades. But this morning’s event really hammered us. The server was at full capacity because of all the image serving - the server didn’t crash (we had plenty of memory and cpu), but responses were slow and it timed out on a significant number of pages for a few hours.

James and I implemented something we have been discussing recently, using Amazon S3 to increase the image serving performance. As soon as we got the mind Map onto S3, the problem just went away. It was pretty incredible to see the frequency of visits, even while it was on Page 2 of Digg.

Before we had increased the image serving performance, someone commented on Digg “if you can’t host it don’t post it”. I thought briefly that maybe he forgot what Digg was - Jane didn’t Digg her own mind map, other people did. But they had a point.

One of my objectives in launching OM4 is to make it easy for small businesses to get online and use the new tools of marketing. If you use Content Marketing as a strategy and are as effective as Jane, you will need to be able to cope with events like this - lots of traffic from StumbleUpon, Digg etc. You don’t want to be where James and I were this morning, in reaction mode.

Realistically, being able to deal with the technical issues involved in an event like this is not something a small business can easily do on its own. My objective is to make these kinds of issues as invisible to a business owner as possible. Running a business online has infrastructure requirements that aren’t always obvious at first. Just like an architect has to consider the potential for hurricanes/cyclones if they are building in a high risk area, so do we (the platform provider) have to consider the potential for large, one-off surges in traffic. And be able to deal with them.

Now Jane can get on with saving the world, thereby preserving the only known source of chocolate in the Universe.

Don’t you love it when someone takes a complex topic and makes it simple? And then offers simple steps to help you take action!

I’ve come across a brilliant example of that, and would like to share it with you.

One of the most effective ways of using internet marketing for online businessess is to use content marketing. What problems do your clients have? Create great content to help solve those problems! This helps you get their attention and build trust. And you need both before you can think about selling to them.

Used in this way, content marketing helps you solve your internet marketing problem - how to find customers and convert online.

It Starts with Ciaran’s Post on Organic Search Traffic

The Post. Ciaran McKeever has guest-posted an exceptionally useful article called How to Herd Organic Search Traffic to Your Blog. Please read the post and pay particular attention to points 1 through 5.

What it Triggered. This post not only shares the concept, but also puts Ciaran’s theory into practice. The post title - internet marketing for online businesses - is predicted by Wordtracker to drive 26 searches a day. That is at the low end of Ciaran’s guidelines (he recommends 15 to 200). But I like his strategy of identifying a group of niche searches that collectively amount to a lot. Have you used the free Wordtracker researcher tool? If not, go back to that link and try it for yourself now - it will take less than a minute.

My site is about online marketing. That phrase - online marketing - has a predicted search volume of over 600 searches a day. Not as high as internet marketing (over 1,600), but about the same as web marketing. (Note: I posted last year on why I chose online marketing instead of internet marketing). This is a highly competitive phrase (and getting a lot more so), and good rankings on the core phrase will take time (and effort).

Which is why Ciaran’s strategy is such a good one. I cannot expect to hit page 1 for online marketing quickly. But I can expect this post to rank highly for ‘internet marketing for online businesses’ in a relatively short period of time. Using Wordtracker I can easily identify more keyword phrases that drive >15 predicted searches a day. I can use keyword phrases that related to online marketing, internet marketing or web marketing.

Write for People. A special note - when doing this, make sure you write useful articles for your primary audience - people. Try and identify the problem your prospective client wants to solve. And then help them solve that problem. Trying to write an article mainly for search engines is a mistake.

Four Steps to Content Marketing Success

In the interests of simplicity, here is my sooper-dooper-even-shorter-than-Ciaran’s checklist to use for your content marketing efforts:

1. Research. Each month go to Wordtracker and review one or more of your primary key word families.
2. Plan. Identify useful keyword phrases that have predicted search traffic between 15 and 200. Find a minimum of 4 of these, so you have at least one post per week.
3. Do. Write posts to help solve a problem related to those niche keywords. Use the niche keyword in your article title and link to related posts/pages in your site (and externally, of course). Include a Call to Action in each of your posts.
4. Review. Check your analytics and see whether these posts are driving traffic to your site. in Google Analytics, check Sources of Traffic to see if they keyword phrases deliver traffic, and check Content to see if your articles are being read. Analyse your effectiveness.

Bingo. Thanks Ciaran for crystallising a very important tactic in internet marketing for online businesses! Not only do you take a complex area and make it simple, you help make it easy to put the ideas into action.

And now for some deeper SEO analysis

About those other points (6 through 10). If you just follow Ciaran’s steps 1 through 5, you are onto a winner. But the tweak in me can’t help but add some commentary to Ciaran’s points 6 through 10. Like Ciaran, I think understanding how search engines work is very important. I try to apply the 80/20 principle, and focus on the few things that have the most impact. There are may different perspectives around this area - feel free to chime in if you have different views:

• Point 6 - page titles and permalinks. If you are using Wordpress, including the niche keyword in the post title means that by default it will also appear in the article title and URL. Meta keywords don’t matter. Meta descriptions do (they help readers a lot), so use a good SEO plugin that defaults a unique description for you or lets your write a custom one. We use the All In One SEO plugin, and in my experience it is the most useful Wordpress plugin available for SEO.
• Point 7 - include internal links. Linking to other relevant posts in your site is very good practice, a lot more so for search engines than I originally understood. Try to link back to an authority page for that keyword as well.
• Point 8 - add no index meta tags. If you are writing a content rich site you don’t need to worrry about this - Matt Cutts has recently said so. That said, we have included elements in our OM4 theme to minimize duplication by default.
• Point 9 - remove unnecessary links - don’t agree with Ciaran’s idea that it could penalize a site, so I wouln’t worry about this at all.
• Point 10 - tag clouds. If a tag cloud helps your readers, great.

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I love the style of content marketing practised over at Commoncraft, the outfit that produced the wonderful RSS video I have posted about previously.

What I hadn’t seen was the follow up post about the viewer stats. What a great example of how content marketing works.

Commoncraft RSS Video Statistics.

Courtesy of Donncha, I came across a great video explaining what a blog is. It is published by CommonCraft (definitely worth checking out, if you haven’t already).

I’ve got a few additional points for you to consider:

• a blog is personal and conversational - very different to a typical brochure website that is faceless and static.
• a blog is a tool that helps you learn what your business is really about (despite what you may think about it when you launch it online).
• because a blog is personal and conversation, it helps build trust.
• in terms of traffic, a blog is to a website what an engine is to a train (thanks Simone for that analogy).

Blogs are the ace-in-the-hole for content marketers, and anyone interested in marketing online.

‘We interrupt your peaceful reading of this article to show you this ad about snowboards’.

Hmm, well I WAS enjoying reading that article about visiting Mt Kosciusko in the spring … I’m not a snowboarder anyway …

This post is about interruption marketing versus content marketing. In the example:

• The article is the content marketing.
• The ad is the interruption marketing.

Which is more likely to get your attention? Which is more likely to drive action? The content or the interruption?

Content marketing is a great tool to implement permission based marketing. Its the opposite of interruption marketing.

I like the post Joe Pullizi wrote about interruption marketing on Facebook: Facebook: Ads Still Interrupt, Even if they Come with a Photo of My Sister.

Joe makes the point:

… as ultra-targeted as this is, it’s still advertising. It still interrupts.

Exactly. Just because something is targetted, it is still an interruption.

I’m not suggesting interruption marketing is wrong - it can be annoying, yes, but if you don’t like an article with an ad in it, you can read something else.

But if you are investing in online marketing, what is the better investment?

What did it cost to operate the snowboard ad campaign? To publish the content?
What is the effectiveness of each in driving action?

Consider what you spend to market your own business? How much have you spent on interruption marketing? How effective has it been?

What have you invested in content marketing?

Do you want to be the content or the interruption?

Search Marketing is all about maximising the chances prospects have to find you when they are using search engines.

Content Marketing is all about publishing great content that attracts the attention of the right people in the right frame of mind.

A recent post from Brian Clark at Copyblogger raises the question is Google evil?, and then addresses the task of educating us in How to Stop Worrying About Google Once and for All. Definitely worth reading (so if you haven’t, click through now).

It is a masterful post, and demonstrates exactly why a Content Marketing strategy trumps a Search Marketing strategy. Now given I’ve shown you the results of the Google Fight between “content marketing” and “search marketing”, you may think these are pretty brave words (and if you are into SEO, you will realise if I used “search engine marketing” as a phrase the comparison is even worse).

‘Content Marketing’ is not a common term - yet. Content marketing is a strategy that involves publishing content to interest an audience, in the same way a magazine publisher produces content. Good content is often of interest to other web publishers, who may introduce your content to their audience. This builds an audience without search being involved. And to repeat Seth Godin’s formula: Attract people in trouble–>Help solve their problems–>Build your reputation–>Sales happen.

Search is a last resort. People use search when they can’t find what they are after. If you are reading a website or blog that you trust and see a reference to another interesting site, you follow the link. Why search for a great copywriting resource when Copyblogger points you to them? Search is often a last resort, if you haven’t already got access to a resource through your trusted sources of information.

Avoid dependence on one source of traffic. If you attract an audience through great content, your connection with your audience is not dependent on search engines. Sure you don’t ignore search engines, but building an audience is faster when you use the approaches Brian Clark outlines so well.

Quality is more important than quantity. If you are running a business with high value products or services, then qualified prospects are valuable. You don’t need a big readership to benefit. This is very different to websites selling advertising, where getting large volumes of traffic is required to get a financial return.

Running a business that is dependent on Google traffic is not good. A Content Marketing strategy helps you build your online business without this type of dependence.

Blogs are great for marketing. But not if your definition of marketing is interrupting your prospects, or promoting your service instead of helping them solve a problem. Interruption marketing and blogs don’t go together.

There are a lot of misconceptions about blogs, and whether they are useful for marketing or not. But if you approach them from the perspective of sharing information to help readers solve a problem, then blogs are excellent marketing tools.

A recent post by Seth Godin expresses the concept concisely:

The most effective marketing use of blogs seems to be when the advertiser/marketer uses the blog as an opportunity not to sell a product, but to attract people who are in the right mindset. Joel Spolsky rarely writes about his product, but that’s fine. The people who read his writing are the very same people who need his product, and his proximity to the valuable ideas (and his reputation) makes it not such a leap to go ahead and buy what he has to sell.

Attract people in trouble–>Help solve their problems–>Build your reputation–>Sales happen.

You can read the full (short) post if you click here.