Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Small Business

Table of contents Contents Table of contents .......................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One .................................................................................................................................................. 4 What is Content Marketing? ..................................................................................................................... 4 Mind-blowing things that happen to your business when you get content marketing right................... 5 Content marketing can increase your sales .......................................................................................... 7 Content marketing generates inbound traffic to your business website .............................................. 8 Content marketing enhances engagement with your audience ........................................................... 9 Content marketing helps to build brand awareness ........................................................................... 10 Content marketing can position your business as "best in class". ...................................................... 12 Content marketing helps to beat your competition ............................................................................ 12 Where small businesses go wrong with Content Marketing .................................................................. 13 Lack of goals and objectives................................................................................................................ 14 Creating generic content .................................................................................................................... 15 Focusing on your product rather than on the customers ................................................................... 15 Lack of a content calendar .................................................................................................................. 16 Doing it alone ...................................................................................................................................... 16 Chapter Two ................................................................................................................................................ 18 How to create a Content Marketing Strategy that will Skyrocket your Engagement and Conversion .. 18 Know your Business Objectives .......................................................................................................... 18 Know what your audience .................................................................................................................. 20 Create a Content Formula................................................................................................................... 22 Measure Your content marketing ROI ................................................................................................ 35 Chapter Three ............................................................................................................................................. 37 How to recruit and Manage writers for your Business needs ................................................................ 37 Use your Staff or Outsource it ............................................................................................................ 37 Hire Experts, Enthusiasts or influencers ............................................................................................. 37 Chapter Four ............................................................................................................................................... 40 Popular Publishing platforms for your contents ..................................................................................... 40

Blog post ............................................................................................................................................. 40 Video ................................................................................................................................................... 41 Podcast ................................................................................................................................................ 42 Infographic .......................................................................................................................................... 44 Memes ................................................................................................................................................ 45 Chapter Five ................................................................................................................................................ 46 Proven Ways to promote your content .................................................................................................. 46 Organic/Free Method ......................................................................................................................... 46 Paid advertisement ............................................................................................................................. 48 Chapter Six .................................................................................................................................................. 49 How to measure your content marketing ROI using Google analytics ............................................... 49 Google analytics goal details ............................................................................................................... 51 Average Time on page ........................................................................................................................ 55 Reverse goal path................................................................................................................................ 56 Referral traffic ..................................................................................................................................... 58 Social referrals .................................................................................................................................... 59 Page views........................................................................................................................................... 60 Demographic reports .......................................................................................................................... 61 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 64 About Hephzysocial .................................................................................................................................... 65 HOW HEPHZYSOCIAL CAN HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS ............................................................... 65

Chapter One What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is not something new. It has been in existence for decades. It, however, received a huge increase in buzz among marketers recently. But a lot of small business owners still do not know or understand the concept of content marketing and how it can help them in their marketing processes. I will attempt to define Content marketing, but before I do that, I will give a definition provided by the content marketing institute. "Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action." - Content Marketing Institute Content marketing can be defined as the art of creating and distributing valuable, engaging and interesting content to attract and convert potential buyers into customers and customers into repeat buyers. In other words, you write content on the product/service you are selling to educate people so that they know, like and trust you enough to want to buy what you are selling. It is a fact that when most people want to buy a product/service, the first thing they do is to look for information that can enlighten them on the product/service. It is not only the potential customers that are looking for valuable information, Google is also there. Google wants to rank such contents high in the search results so that people can find it easily.

Content drives the internet and people are searching for information that can solve their problem, not sales letters disguised as contents. Content marketing creates an opportunity for potential customers to trust your brand, as you create information that will enlighten them about the benefit of a particular product or service. Most businesses and individuals using content marketing for their product and services tend to produce high quality content, without a sales pitch, mixed with occasional promotional messages. Below are the seven reasons why you need to include contenting marketing in your business campaign.

Mind-blowing things that happen to your business when you get content marketing right

A lot of business owners are involved in content marketing. According to a research carried out by eMarketer, 73% of business depend on branded content for marketing and promotion and 41% leverage user-generated content and reviews. If you are still undecided about what content marketing can do for your business, these seven (7) mind-blowing benefits of content marketing will convince you. Content marketing increases your leads A research carried out by Hubspot showed that B2b companies that blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not.

So, if you are struggling to generate leads for your business, create high quality content. Whether you are in the b2b or b2c business model, content is still the best way to generate quality leads for your business. You can use different types of content to generate leads. Below are the five types of content you need to start creating to increase your leads. They are: 1. Webinar 2. Whitepapers and free guides 3. In-person events 4. Slideshare presentation. 5. Case studies 6. Infographics 7. Ultimate guides These content types can generate enormous leads for your business.

A good example is Neil Patel's Kissmetrics business blog. The business sells analytics (heat maps) to businesses.

Neil uses content marketing to get 6 figure income on a monthly basis from the blog

(https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/02/04/how-does-content-marketing-

actually-get-you-more-sales/). A large chunk of his marketing dollars goes towards content marketing. He creates blog contents and infographics to drive traffic to his website. On average, he posts one or two articles per day and publishes infographics once a month. In January, he was able to generate 727,984 visitors to the website. Out of these numbers, he generated 5,057 leads from the blog. This means that the blog drove 62% of the leads for the month of January. The product pricing starts from $200. The business is able to generate 6 figures in new income each month from content marketing. His expenses for content per month stands at $5,000- $6,000 per month. This is a profitable investment!.

Content marketing can increase your sales According to custom content council, up to 55% of consumers are attracted to custom content and would likely buy the products or services of the content provider. Most small businesses desire to make lots of sales, especially when they are just starting out. But the problem is that they do not have a large customer base like their competitors. This implies that they will need to work harder to generate tangible sales.

Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate sales when you do it in the right way.

River Pools made $2.5 million sales from a single article on their website. The outcome took the company from a struggling business to a multi-million dollar success story.

Content marketing generates inbound traffic to your business website Are you are struggling to attract visitors to your business blog? Don't worry, a lot of small business owners do not know how to use content marketing to attract customers. According to Curata, 55% of business bloggers are getting 5% or more of their corporate website’s traffic from their blog. A good example is the PTC company. It is a big software company that sells software to other companies in high tech niches. The company needed to create awareness for their new product launch in a crowded space and also wanted the sales. They decided to use content marketing to improve awareness of the new product - Creo. It is a design software that solves CAD software problems.

They decided to outsource the content marketing to a content marketing agency because they did not have enough manpower and expertise to develop and execute a content strategy at that time. The content marketing agency created outstanding contents for the product and publishes a post every day. The content marketing effort generated 100,000 visitors per month over a period of one year.

Content marketing enhances engagement with your audience According to contentplus, 70% of consumers prefer to get to know a company through original articles. 78% of consumers believe the organizations behind the content are interested in building good relationships (MCmurrytmg). Content marketing is more than writing content, publishing and distributing it on different channels, it is a relationship building tool. When you use it properly, it will help you to build great customer engagement and keep interest throughout your buying circle. Most companies only see its impact through the numbers on Google analytic report. When you use it in the right way, content marketing can create interaction through comments on your blog and social media channels. You get to know how your customers perceive your products and services, what you can improve or what can be another opportunity of business for you. Engagement will also help you to acquire new customers cheaply. Have you ever thought about the cost of acquiring new customer versus how much it will cost to retain your existing customers? It is almost 7 times more. With regular engagement with different content types, you can attract new customers for free.

A good example of a company that used this strategy is ADP. The company developed a content marketing campaign to connect and engage with their target audience on an ADP solution using white papers and a diagnostic assessment tool. The campaign generated over $1 million in new sales opportunities with several deals closed within the first 3 months of launch. That is the power of content marketing.

Content marketing helps to build brand awareness According to content marketing institute and Marketingprofs, 84% of organization have a goal to build brand awareness through content marketing in 2015.

Producing and sharing high quality content will help you to build trust in your audience. There are different types of content you need to be creating to help you build brand awareness. Like it or not, the content you use can either build your brand or tear it down. Below is a list of content that can help you to build your brand effectively. 1. Blog content 2. Video content 3. Email content 4. News content

5. Social media content, etc A good case study of a company that did this well is Health Catalyst, a Utah-based B2B company. The company invested heavily in a content marketing team to build its brand and drive revenue. They published 2-4 new pieces of content every week for over a year. Within 18 months of its content marketing campaign, Health Catalysts signed massive clients like Kaiser Permanente and Partners Healthcare.

Not only that, they also become a popular brand within their

industry.

Content marketing can position your business as "best in class". According to Moz, 71% of all the clicks to a website on a Google search come from the first result page. The more content you create on your website on your subject matter, the more search engine will rank it high until it gets to the first page. Google will consider your site as an authority on the topic because of the content you create on it. This will help you to drive enormous traffic to your website. However, to keep it up you need to keep creating targeted content regularly. When you get to this authority level, your business becomes "best in class". Everyone looking for information in the niche, will visit your website and then you can charge premium rates for your products and services.

Content marketing helps to beat your competition A lot of business owners are afraid of their competition. With content marketing, you don't have to be afraid. All you need to do is to focus on creating interesting

and engaging content for your audience. Over time, the audience will prefer to do business with you. One way to go about this is to research the content your competitors are creating. You can you use buzzsumo to do that. Type in your competitor's url into Buzzsumo and check how many social shares each of their recent posts generated. Then, go ahead to create similar posts with higher quality content. That way, your content will rank higher. A company that does this well is Backlinko -an SEO company. He used the skyscraper technique (mentioned above) to outrank his competition and gained the first page position on the Google search result page. The benefits above are not difficult to achieve. All you need is to develop and execute a solid content marketing campaign. It is not easy for businesses that have no creative department or limited time and budget.

This is

where hephzysocial comes in. We can handle the difficult part for you, so that your business can grow, increase in brand awareness and get more sales while you focus on other aspect of your business. We can help you to create a solid content marketing strategy, blog posts, pdf downloads, presentations, whitepapers, how-to guides, e.t.c and also promote it to make sure that your target audience comes in contact with it.

Where small businesses go wrong with Content Marketing

Have you been engaged in content marketing for your business and you seem not to see any improvement whatsoever? Have you spent your time, energy and money on content creation without any tangible result? Did you sit down to wonder what you are not doing right? If these questions are in your mind as you read this e-book, then, you must know that you are not doing content marketing

according to the rules. Below are reasons why your content marketing will go wrong.

Lack of goals and objectives

Every successful business must have goals and objectives. Over time, I have watched companies/businesses writing articles without goals and objectives. They just employ the services of cheap writers on freelance websites to help them write articles without a purpose at the back of their minds. These are the kind of websites, Google pushes to the back when it comes to ranking. Lack of goals and objectives for your content marketing strategies will make it hard for you to track your results (ROI). Having said that, there are different kinds of goals and objectives you can set for your business such as: Driving traffic to channels, engagement, build community, generate leads, inform, educate, build thought leadership, generate sales etc. In the last chapter, I made mention of the benefits of content marketing, which includes sales, leads, engagement, brand building e.t.c. There is no way you can enjoy these benefits without having goals and objectives. For example, if you have a fashion and beauty business and want to use content marketing for your business. You must sit down to know what you want out of it. One of your goals should be to sell more of your products. Now, you can decide to write a content marketing strategy that will enable you to reach your goal. Then, you can measure your return on investment based on your goal. This is the reason you must not just write articles anyhow, but have objectives and goals of what you want to achieve with it before embarking on it.

Creating generic content

I am guilty of this mistake until I learnt how content marketing works. In those days, I created generic content and expected to get traffic and make money from my affiliate business. But, it doesn't work like that, no wonder I got frustrated and closed up my affiliate business. For you to be successful in your content marketing campaign, you must produce contents that are based on your business goals and objectives. You must learn to produce content your audience wants to read. Before you can do that, you need to define your audience. To determine who they are, ask yourself these questions: * Who are they? * What are their needs? * Why should they care about you? * What unique value proposition do you have to offer etc. When you know the profile of people who are likely to buy your product, then you can tailor your content to their needs effectively. A very good example of this is the "HVAC company blog" . They sell heating, cooling and plumbing equipment which somehow relates to the kitchen. So, it is reasonable to assume that most of their clients will be women who loves to cook, hence the idea behind the recipe post on their blog.

Focusing on your product rather than on the customers

Almost every small business owner is guilty of this mistake. We tend to focus on how we can make sales from our product and services that we forget the need of our customers. Your customers care more about your knowledge than they do your products. If you are able to write engaging and educating information built around your product/service, you will gain their attention. On the other hand, if you decide to make all your content sounds like a sales letter, you may not get much out of it.

Lack of a content calendar

Ahaah! Many business owners and marketers are guilty of this one. Most of us do not have a Content Calendar for our businesses. This is very wrong. Creating a content calendar will help you to: 1. Measure, monitor and modify your content accurately in order to create the outcomes you desire 2. Align core business cycles with content that will support your customer engagement process 3. Make it easier for you to engage freelance writers 4. Avoid placing too much importance on one aspect of your business instead of providing a balance approach across several areas of influence. Therefore, for the reasons mentioned above and many more, your business needs a content calendar for at least three - six months ahead. This is why you need to hire a "content marketer" that understand and use content calendars.

Doing it alone

It was the former presidential candidate Al Gore, who said "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together". Content marketing is a team work. You cannot do everything on your own, you need the services of a "content marketer" who will help you to create, distribute and promote your content. Most business owners are frustrated because they only know how to write content, not how to promote it. Writing content is getting half of the work done, the main success comes when you take it to where your audience can read, engage and interact with it. So, can you see where you are missing it from the points above? Content marketing is a planned campaign, not something you can do haphazardly. If you do that, your results will be limited. You need to have goals and objectives, create

targeted content based on your business goals and objectives, focus on your customers rather than on your product or services, have content calendar and employ the services of a content marketer to make it easy for you.

Chapter Two How to create a Content Marketing Strategy that will Skyrocket your Engagement and Conversion

Content marketing as we all know, is the art of creating and distributing valuable content to attract and convert potential buyers into customers. Now, for this system to work properly, you need to design a content marketing strategy . Having a concrete content marketing strategy will enable you to get inbound traffic to your website, build brand awareness through engagement, generate natural link popularity for SEO, open a channel of communication through social shares and comments etc. In this chapter, you will learn about how to create a winning content marketing strategy in Six steps. These steps will help you to create a winning content plan and focused execution. You need a strong foundation of content that attracts prospective customers at every stage of the buying circle. Below are the best practices:

Know your Business Objectives

As a business owner, the first step to launching a winning content marketing strategy is to define your objectives. In doing that, you would want to ask yourself these questions:i.

What is the goal of this business and how can content marketing help to achieve it?

ii.

Do you need more people to engage with your brand?

iii.

Do you need to foster or build relationship with your audience?

iv.

Do you want to increase your sales and leads? etc.

These objectives will help you to properly design and measure a content strategy that will be successful. This is why you need to ensure that you get it right before you jump into content marketing. You don't need too many objectives to start your content marketing strategy. You can decide to choose one or two of the most important goals of your business to work with. For example, my business's (Hephzysocial) goal is to create awareness among small business owners who want to exploit the power of content marketing in their business, to help them develop, implement and promote content marketing campaign. Below are common business objectives you can choose from: Get more potential customers Content marketing is one of the best ways to acquire potential customers and then turn them into permanent customers. Most businesses uses content to drive people to their websites over a long period of time as seen in the case studies in the last chapter. Information and Education A lot of people appreciate quality information and education. Content marketing allows you to educate and inform your audience. In doing this, you need to clearly define your audience, put yourself in their shoes and provide information that will help them to make informed decisions. Brand engagement

You can use content marketing to put your product/services in front of your audience. If you do it correctly, they will appreciate the value you are adding to their lives and engage with your brand.

Lead Generation If you decide to use content marketing to generate leads for your business, you have to make sure that your contents is reaching your potential customers at the moment where they need to make decisions. Your content should be designed to help your customers through the decision process as they think and evaluate your products or services. Increase sales Every business owner is in business to make money. You can use content marketing to turn potential customers into real time customers. All you need to do is to provide a high quality content that is related to your brand/product or services and that directly meets the need of your potential customer. Then, you can offer them what they need to make an informed decision. Site rank Content marketing will help you to increase your website rank in search engines. This means, when someone search for your product/service keyword, your website will show up at the top of the result page. This will increase visitors to your business website.

Know what your audience The best way to get results from your content marketing efforts is to know your audience and deliver what they want for them. You need to know what your audience cares about, what their interests and motives are and their pain points.

This will help you to know the type of content you need to create for them. For example, the content a new visitor will need is different from the one you will create for a prospective buyer who is getting ready to make a purchase. You need to design content according to their buying stages. Below iss an image of your audience's journey through the buying stages.

There are four stages highlighted in the diagram above. When your audience first comes to your website, they are like suspects.. They want to know all about your products and services. It is at this stage, you need to provide insightful information about your products. For example, you can write how-to to-guides, how to articles, etc. These information will educate your audience about what you have to offer them. The second stage is the pro prospect stage. They have read your content and understood your product or services. They are seeking for more information to enable them make informed decision. This is where you can create e-books e and free reports. When they are sure you have what they ne need, ed, they will start interacting with your business. They can sign up to your email list or contact you directly.

The last stage opportunity is when your audience is ready to make a purchase based on your contents so far. These are the stages you need to take your audience through with your content marketing. This is a great content marketing strategy best practice that will greatly help you to attract and retain your prospects.

Create a Content Formula Content marketing is all about creating content that will help your audience solve their most pressing needs or problems. To do this, you will need to create a content formula that will help your customer make an informed decision. Above, i made mention of the kind of contents that will be suitable for your audience at each buying stage. Here you will see the formula to create those awesome posts. Below are three foolproof formula you can use: Formular 1: Create an editorial calendar We all know what a Calendar is. A Content Calendar functions pretty much the same way. A content calendar is a document that allows you to plan your content creation, publishing, promotion and measuring your content marketing efforts. The major benefits of a marketing calendar are: It simplifies the content creation process Content calendar makes it easy for you to develop ideas and topics for your blogs, social media websites (Facebook, twitter, Google+, etc), etc. With it, you are able to sit down and determine the kind of topics you want to share per time, either for a week, a month or months at a stretch. It helps you to plan and organize your content publishing around events, dates and launches

A content calendar helps you to plan content for your seasonal or yearly events, product launches, dates, e.t.c. Planning these events ahead will help you to have enough time to put in your best. Many big companies plan their contents in advance before it actually takes place and this positions them on top of their competition. It gives you enough time to create your content You have enough time to write or outsource your content creation as the case may be, long before the time you need it. You have enough time to conduct research, look into case studies and produce epic content that your audience and search engines will love to see. Features of a content calendar Time-frame Your content calendar needs to have a time-frame to make it easy for you to track and measure your return on investment. Although, everyone uses a different time-frame depending on business needs. However, the appropriate thing should be to develop your theme for the year. Your theme should spring from your business objective for the year. This includes what you hope to achieve in the course of the new year. Now, you can develop topics and ideas around your objectives. You can gather your ideas and topics over a year's period and then structure it out on a monthly basis. With this, you can measure your achievement on a monthly basis and then conclude it when the year ends. The content of the calendar In creating contents for your audience, you must know their needs. Knowing their needs will enable you to know what type of content to develop for them. You can serve your contents in different formats such as:


Blog posts




Videos




PowerPoint Presentations




Infographics




Podcast




E-books




Charts and Graphs




Magazines articles




Webinars and Teleseminars




Speeches, workshops, interview




Tutorials and guides




White papers and special reports




Newsletters

However, if you are just starting your content marketing strategy, I will advise you to start with your business blog. Then when you become an expert, you can add other types of content to it. Before you settle for the type of content to create for your audience, make sure it is something you can create and that your audience will like to receive the information in the format you are serving it. Publication Schedule It is time to schedule your publication. In doing this, you will need to decide the frequency, length and style of your content. The frequency of publishing should be according to your business needs. Some business owners blog every day, some once in a week and others on a monthly basis. You need to choose the system that best work for your business. In deciding that, you need to factor in the time it will take you to create other types of contents, engage with your fans on social media, reply to comments on your blogs etc.

The length of your contents also depends on your choice. Content marketing industry leaders advocate long posts (1000 - 3,000) as opposed to short ones (300-500) commonly seen around. The reason behind this is that long post allows you to delve into the heart of the topic to give your audience all they need to know about that topic, making you an authority in that regard. You also need to determine the length of your podcasts, video, webinars etc. There are different types of content style such as Chatty, friendly, business-like, brash, etc. Personally, I prefer to go with the friendly style. It allows your audience to connect with you easily, giving them a better understanding of your topic. Content calendar tools There are several calendar tools online for business owners who finds it difficult to create one. A calendar tool help you to stay organized and there are different types of it. The major thing here is to make sure that it has the features you need, such as sharing, follow-up, collaboration etc. Ensure that your team can utilize it effectively for content scheduling. Below are tools you can use for your business: 1. Google docs

Google docs is owned by Google and it is the same thing as using Microsoft Excel. However, you can get free templates to adapt to your business here. When you create your calendar on Google docs, it enables you to collaborate and edit as a team. Every team member can log in, check and know the publication dates, keywords, promotion days etc. WordPress editorial calendar

The WordPress editorial calendar plugin provides an overview of your blog and when you need to make your post. It has several features such as drag and drop feature to help you change your post dates, publish post titles, contents and times, see the status of your posts, manage posts from multiple authors etc. You can use this plugin if your business is still growing. It does not have the capability to track content nor feature for social media posts.

Hubspot editorial calendar

Hubspot editorial calendar is suitable for business owners who are new to content marketing. It includes type of content, keywords and dates. All you need to do is to type in your content ideas and start working on it. It helps you to keep your topics organized, track keyword and call to action use and ensure that content is developed witin the specified time and budget. However, as your team grows, you may need to look for a more comprehensive calendar. Coschedule

Coschedule provide a better WordPress plugin editorial calendar that is more comprehensive and you can try it out for free for 14 days after which you can upgrade to the paid plan. Kapost

Kapost has the best editorial calendar tools. It is used by top b2b business such as CBS, Cisco and Content marketing institute. The software has the capabilities to track your content marketing workflow from beginning to the end. It is good for big corporations that creates enormous content and have lots of team members. The Kapost software is not free, the price starts from $2,000 per month. Content calendar is a must, if you must track your marketing effects to know your return on investment. It also enables you to plan ahead of time, so that you can create useful content for your audience and be on top of your competition.

Formula 2: Use a List post

In a research carried out by OkDork and Buzzumo, it was discovered that list posts receive most social shares after infographics. List posts are very popular and can easily go viral. So, how do you write a great list posts: a. Use the right number of items. Ok Dor and Buzzumo analyzed 100 million articles and discovered that the most popular form of list post that receives the greatest share are the ones with the number 10,23, 16 and 24. b. Make your list post easily digestible. c. Include an introduction before you start creating the list just like I did above. d. Add pictures e. Write a conclusion ii. Select a Viral Topic The reason why most people don't succeed in content marketing is simply because of the topic they use in creating content. In those days, you can succeed

with any topic you want. But nowadays, competitions are stiff and a lot of people create content on a daily basis. So, your content needs to stand out. You need create a topic that will make people want to share your content and that will interest your prospects. The best way to do these are: a. Look at what works for your competitors There is no point reinventing the wheel. Check out your competitors' websites and look at headings that are creating a buzz on their websites. You can use ahref or buzzumo to find it out. You can then model your topic after their own. For example, if you are in the dog collar business and you are looking for article ideas that work. Go to www.buzzumo.com and look for articles that are receiving high number of shares.

In the image above, you can see different topics that are receiving a high number of shares. Look at the topic "22 adorable dog collars every dog owner needs". You can decide to make your own "50 adorable collars dog owners can't do without" b. Use Quora to look at the questions your prospects are asking. This will give you a clue as to what your audience wants to know. For example, if you search for dog collar, you will see different topic ideas you can use for your contents (as shown below).

c. Copy your competitor's URL to google keyword planner tool and look at their keywords. You can get an idea of what is working for them. For example, one of the top dog collar website is http://www.petsmart.com/. So, go over to google keyword planner and type in the website.

Click on "get ideas" and you will see lots of keyword ideas you can use (shown below)

iii. Create the post, publish and promote it Now that you know what type of content you want to create, you can create a top quality list post on your topic. After you publish the post, you will need to promote it effectively. If you do it well, it will go viral and you will have several eyeballs on it.

Formula 3: Create Search Engine Optimizated contents

SEO is not dead as some people make us believe. You still need to attract search engine traffic to maximize your earnings online. In order to create a content that will benefit both humans and search engines, you need to: i.

Use one keyword per page - Choose relevant keyword for your content and

optimize it appropriately ii. Use your keyword four or five times in your content. People who visit your website through search engines will want to read about what brought them there in the first place. iii. Use a minimum page length for your post. It is discovered that longer posts (1000 +) get more shared than shorter ones (300-500).

Measure Your content marketing ROI

After putting your best effort into content marketing, you need to measure your results. You need to measure your reach (measured by impressions, traffic, subscriber/audience size, share of voice, audience penetration across

organization). You need to measure your reach by the channels you are using for content marketing (website, blog, social media channels etc.) You measure page view, unique visitors, average time on page, engagement, conversion. etc. You will learn more about it in Chapter Six. Now, if you cannot write or you don't have a content marketing agency in your company, you can outsource your content marketing campaigns. Read more about it in the next chapter.

Chapter Three How to recruit and Manage writers for your Business needs Deciding who will write your content for you is a very important decision in creating your content marketing strategy. Although, it may look and sound simple, it needs to be a calculated step as highlighted below:

Use your Staff or Outsource it The first thing you need to decide is whether you will be using your in-house staff for content production or you will outsource it to professional writers to handle for you. This decision depends on a number of factors: One, the frequency of your production. i.e. whether you will be churning out contents on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Secondly, if the content is intended for your company's blog or for brand management and thought leadership pieces that are intended to engage consumers on your website, drive conversions or for lead generation. Now, if you will be producing content on a regular basis, say daily on your company's blog, your staff can handle that. However, if you will need to develop your brand awareness or create thought leadership pieces that is intended to boost your business sales, conversions etc, you will need to outsource your content creation to content writers out there. They are equipped to produce excellent articles that will be tailored to your own corporate goals and objectives.

Hire Experts, Enthusiasts or influencers If you decide to outsource your content creation to writers. You have the obligation to ensure that they are writers who can meet your needs. To know

this, you will need to find out whether you need experts, enthusiasts, or influencers or some mix of the three. i. Experts These are top professionals who have experience in the industry or subject area which you want to write on. These should be high quality writers that should have their own domain to show off their expertise. This is what we do in Hephzysocial. We have expert writers in any topic you want to write on. 2. Enthusiasts Enthusiasts are high quality writers who have deep interest in the topic you want write on. For instance, if you are looking to create content on baby products, it will be great if you can get moms with real world experience who loves to write to handle it for you. 3. Influencers Influencers are people who can affect purchasing decisions of others because of their authority, knowledge, relationship or position. It is a common word in the world of marketing today. You need such people for certain type of content such as social media engagement campaigns. You can recruit such people from any platform or website that measures how socially connected a particular person is in order to measure their influence. Below are best practices for you to manage writers 1.

There is a need for you to train your writers on your brand voice and style

preferences. This will enable them to know how to write for your website/blog. It is recommended you give writers a set of content guidelines they can refer to when creating content. This will enable you maintain your brand voice among different writers.

2.

You need to interview and vet your writers before giving them writing

projects. You can check out their writing samples and bio with relevant experience. You can also ask them to write a 'trial piece' to determine if the writer's style and tone is in line with your brand voice and style. 3. Ensure that your writers have the tools and training necessary to write for search engine optimization. Content marketing involves more than creating a few blog posts and it involves a huge commitment of time and resources. It is not easy to produce content inhouse most of the time, especially if you need professional services. This is where we come in. You can contact us for professional content marketing and we will help take your company to the next level. We provide well-researched, longer, high quality content for you and we also help to upload the contents on your blog. In the next chapter, you will learn about the best platform where you can publish your contents.

Chapter Four Popular Publishing platforms for your contents

Having learned about how to create a winning content marketing strategy, it is time to take those contents and publish them on the right platform that will help create brand awareness, lead generations and sales. In this chapter, we will be looking at where you can publish the different type of contents you created.

Blog post

The age of using programming codes and CSS is long gone. It is now easy for everyone to have a website without knowing anything about programming. All it takes now is to purchase a hosting account and install a content management system (CMS) within minutes and your website/blog will be up and running. There are different types of content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, Modx, TextPattern, RefineryCMS, Drupal, etc, with Wordpress the most popular being.

WordPress is a very easy platform where you can publish your blog posts. It has a lot of themes and plugins that makes it easy to customize according to your taste. You can customize the appearance, moderate comments, add widgets and integrate any multimedia of your choice. Once you are through with that, you can start posting your content.

Video

One of the ways you can market/promote your business is by creating and promoting video content. A research carried out by comScore revealed that 188.2million people in the US watched 52.4 billion video content in December 2013 and for the entire year, 93 percent of marketers used video to boost their marketing efforts. This data shows that video can help you generate engagement and shareability of your content. This is the reason why it is necessary for you to start using it in your marketing campaign. There are numerous video sharing websites on the internet where you can host your video, each with its own distinctive features. Some of them are content restrictive (i.e. not all kinds of contents are acceptable), non-commercial, category specifics, etc. The platform you use will depend on your business needs and so you need to really sit down and choose the best one for your company.

Youtube is the most popularly used platform to host videos and many small and big businesses are using it to market their product and services. According to Youtube press page , 1 billion unique users visit Youtube every month and more than 6 billions hours of video are watched every month. This figure clearly shows that Youtube is the highest trafficked web based video publishing platform. All you need is to create an account on Youtube and upload your videos on it. Although, Youtube is free, you can extend your reach through paid promotions. It is a great platform for any business. Other video platforms you can try out are Vimeo, metacafe, Vitomy, Blip.tv etc.

Podcast

Both big and small companies are creating podcasts. It has become a new method of content marketing for businesses. There are several benefits of using podcast for your business. One, creating a podcast is one of the best ways to reach a large audience (1 billion smartphones were shipped in 2013 alone ). It is a great way to enhance your company's brand as it adds a new dimension to your marketing strategy.

Although you can host it on your website, but not all website hosts are good hosts for podcasts. This is because creating podcasts involve large storage space and this can bog down servers, hence the need for separate podcast hosts. You can use other online services such as ourmedia.org, archive.org etc.

E-book platform

There are several places where you can sell your e-books starting from your website. You can create a product page on your website and sell it right there. You can also decide to sell it on places like Amazon kindle. The platform holds 67% of the e-book buying market share according to bloomberg. With Amazon Kindle Publishing platform, everyone can buy your e-book. It is free to list your ebook on Amazon Kindle. The second platform you can use is Nook by Barnes and Noble. The platform has about 25% e-book sales market share. The third platform is the Apple's iBooks. The platform holds a mere 5% of the market share. However, the number is rising as e-books become more popular and sophisticated and more app-like. With the iBook Author, you can upload your e-book using Epub format which does not work well with Amazon Kindle.

Overall, the choice of the platform you use depends on the purpose of creating the e-book in the first place. If you want to use it to generate leads/subscribers, you will need to host it on your website or offer it free on Amazon Kindle. But, if you want to make some money from it, you can choose any of the platforms discussed above.

Infographic

There are several platforms you can use to publish your infographic content. Find them listed below a. Your website The first place to host your infographic is on your website. Hosting it there will help you to create credibility, support your search engine ranking and can even lead to sales for you. You can also use it as a means of generating leads by creating a contact form for people to fill before they can download it. b. Quora This is another great place you can host your infographic. It will help you to build authority and relationship with people who share similar ideas and interests. It will even be more helpful if you see a question to answer on quora using your infographic. c. Bookmarketing sites Bookmarking sites provide a wider reach to build your brand and create engagement with your audience. You can use sites like reddit, digg, stumbleupon, etc. This way, it will be easy for people to index your infographic faster and you also receive a lot of traffic in return. Other platform for hosting infographics includes Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Google+, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook etc,

Memes

You can share your meme on different platform, starting from your website or blog. From there, share it on your Facebook page, linking back to the page or post on your website or blog. You can also share on twitter several times a day as tweets tend to disappear fast. If you have a pinterest account, pin it to your board and include a link back to your blog. If it is a video meme, you can share it on Youtube channel. There you have it. You can use any of the platforms mentioned above to publish your content based on the type of content. What are you waiting for? Start publishing your contents right away! The next post will be on content promotion, keep it a date with me.

Chapter Five Proven Ways to promote your content

The next thing you need to do after publishing your content is to promote it by positioning it where your target audience will come in contact with it. This is one of the most important stages in your content marketing strategy. Creating content is not enough, you need to know how to effectively promote it. There are more than 2 million posts being published daily on the internet and yours will be part of it. No matter how good your content is, it will be useless if no one sees it. Therefore, you must position your content where your target audience will see it. Many companies use different channels to reach their target audience, such as Search engine optimization, social media, email, videos etc. There are two major ways you can promote your content and they are - Organic /free method and Paid reach.

Organic/Free Method Here, you will be using free methods to promote your content. The first method we will look at is using social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. Social Media Twitter Twitter is one of the easiest platform to promote your content. This is because it only involves 140 characters, you can use the @ reply to respond to anyone,

whether they are your followers or not and it has a lot of tools to help you share your content. For a start, as soon as your content goes live on your blog or website, you need to tweet it multiple times. You need to do this because your audience comprises of people all over the world and it is likely that everyone will not be online when your content is tweeted. However, you need to change the title of your post each time your tweet it to make it unique and fresh. Google+ Google plus is another great place to post your contents. As you post the link, introduce your post by a comment to set the ball rolling. Add hashtags to it to make it easy for people to see. Posting on Google gives you an upper hand when it comes to search engine rankings. This is because Google+ is a feature of Google and it is designed to be more easily found by the Google search engines. Therefore, when you post your content link on Google and your target audience interacts with it, it has a great potential to show up in search engines. Linkedin If you have a Linkedin account, post your content on your page and also share it with related Linkedin groups. Other social media channels to use are Facebook, Pinterest, stumbleupon, Digg, Youtube, etc. Guest blogging Guest blogging is a great way to get an external link for your blog/website. Guest posting can also be used to promote your content on relevant authority websites. It will not only give you links, it will also help drive targeted traffic to your website.

Paid advertisement Although, using organic, free methods to promote your content is good, you may need to incorporate paid advertisement to widen your scope. This is especially good when you are just starting out. Below are paid methods you can use to promote your content. Facebook ad Facebook permits companies to target their post to their audiences. With Facebook advertising, you can target your audience to a great extent. This is one area where Facebook is better than Google adwords when it comes to advertising. Facebook has so many options to use in targeting your audience. You can target them based on Geographical location, Age, sex, Language, relationship status, Education level, job titles, interest, behaviours etc. Promoted tweets Twitter allow you to promote your tweets. This is a superb way of positioning yourself in front of the right people and join social conversation. You can target users by their interest, gender, device, Geographical location, etc. All these will enable your tweets get directly in front of your target audience. Reddit Ads Reddit generates about 5 billion pageviews from more than 86 million unique monthly visitors. It has over 6100 targeted communities organized around every topic you can imagine. It is the largest and most engaged community on the internet. Based on this stats alone, many marketers love to use it for content advertising. However, it involves spending time on Reddit. All the methods mentioned above, whether it is organic or paid reach are viable means of promoting your content to target audience. In the next chapter, we will discuss about how to measure your result on content marketing investment.

Chapter Six How to measure your content marketing ROI using Google analytics

If you are like me, you probably will not like the word "analytics". I don't like anything with statistics or analytics. It sounds technical and hard to understand. Can I tell you a secret? Will you promise to keep it to yourself? Ok, thanks. I had low marks in Mathematics while at School. The numbers were just too much for me to remember. Lol. Now back to our topic. I thought I could avoid using analytics because of the fear of analysis. I tried doing that for years. I was just creating contents nobody wants to read. I don't even know my audience. When I got tired, I quit. Since then, I have been reading topics like SEO, analytics and content marketing. They are strategies you will need to master in order to make notable impacts in content marketing. So, here, I am going to simplify it for you. I will break it down into simple steps that will fascinate you. Are you ready, let's go!

A lot of marketers measure their content marketing by the amount of traffic they get. That is a tiny part of the analytics, which is not sufficient enough to determine your ROI. Again, content marketing success is not dependent on the amount of contents you create. It might interest you to know that over 1,400 posts is created every single minute. That is a lot of content!. How many of these posts are actually read? How many of them are successful?. Very little! A major factor in content marketing success hinges on creating content that your target audience loves. This is the only way you can get them to interact with your post, share it, get subscribers and turn them into paying customers. How will you know which of your content is performing well? The simple answer to this question is by using a web analytics. It is reported that 41% of marketers confirm that they receive positive ROI in their content marketing strategies. Do you want to belong to this group of people? Then, you need to produce targeted content that will bring a great return on your investment. In this chapter, you will learn how to use a free tool, Google analytics, to measure your success in content marketing. Although, there are better tools that can go deeper than Google analytics, such as Kissmetrics. You can still make do with Google analytics for now. It is the best free web analytics on the internet so far. It is very popular, more than 28,365,107 websites are using it. Setting up your google analytics tool is not as difficult as you think. If you are not currently using it, you can sign up for it using your gmail address. Then, connect your website to your google analytics account. It is pretty easy!

Once you have it connected, check out the following features and use them effectively. Below are things you can measure to determine your content marketing ROI.

Google analytics goal details

Online business owners should have a goal of what they want to achieve on the web. There is no way you can measure your content marketing success without setting business goals in place. You can set goals to: 1. Track visitors who viewed a landing page or a post. 2. Visitors who clicked a button, filled a form or download a free e-book on your website 3. New subscribers to your blog 4. Subscribers who opened your email and clicked through to your website 5. Webinar registrations 6. Sales made over-time, e.t.c You don't have to set lots of goals. Infact, Google analytics only permit you to set a maximum of 20 goals. Every goal you set will appear in your reports. If you have too many goals, it will look clumsy. You can start with a few goals to get familiar with the report you want to generate. Now, let's start. We will create a goal to track how many people views the "thank you page" for your email newsletters page. You will want to know how people get to this page, where do they start from and what content lead them to it. This will enable you to have a better understanding of the content marketing strategy that works and then leverage more on producing such contents to get more leads. Below are the steps you need to take to achieve that: 1. Log into your Google analytics account

2. Click on "Admin"

Then click on "Goals" in the third column (under "All website data)

Click on "new goal" as shown by the red button in the pic below:

On the next page displayed, under the goal description (2), type in the name of your goal, and specify the type.

For this example, we will choose "destination" because we are setting the goal for the email newsletter subscription. So click on Destination and then "continue". This is the last page of goal setup. Now, here under the "destination" section, type in the url of the page you want to track. For our example, we will track the "thank you page".

If you want, you can set the value of your goal in monetary term. That way you can see what each visitor that signs up is worth to your business. You can verify the link you supplied to make sure it is working by clicking on "verify this goal" When you are done, click on "create goal button" Click on "savings".

There you are! Goal number one created. Now, go and try to create measurable goals for your business.

Average Time on page

Measuring the time spent by your visitors on your website will let you know what kind of content they love to read. The page that receives the highest number of views is also telling you that - visitors love the content. To check out this data: Click on "report" at the top of your page Click on "Behaviour" , then "Site content" and then "All pages"

Click on "average time on page" to sort out the highest time spent on the page, followed by the lower ones. With this report, you will know which of your posts visitors are spending time reading. Your content is not useful to your readers if most of them leave after 3 seconds. One of the parameters Google uses to rank websites is known as the dwell time. When a visitor comes from Google and spends 5 minutes on your website and another one comes from a different website and spends 5 seconds, Google calculates it as dwell time. If visitors are spending more time on your website,

they assume you have useful content that is beneficial. If, on the other hand, they can't wait to leave, they know something is wrong with your content. A good example of this are two restaurants located in the same environment. The first one is always filled up, while the second one is always empty. If you look at it closely, you will discover that the quality of service or food on display is different. People love good things and that is why you need to create content that your readers will fall in love with. They will always come back for more. If your content is able to fulfill your business' goals, then it is termed successful. Then, you can create similar posts to increase conversion. This will give you a targeted focus that will increase your ROI on your content marketing efforts.

Reverse goal path

At the beginning of this guide, I made mention of setting goals for Google analytics for tracking. If you have goals in place like we did at the beginning, you can check the "reverse goal" feature to find the post or content your visitors read before they subscribed or take the action you specified in the goal. The goal path is the steps your visitors take to reach the goal. It shows three steps that users took before completing the set goal. Here, you will know the type of content that motivated them to subscribe to your email list or take a particular action. To use this feature, click on "Conversion", then "goals", "reverse goal path". (see it below)

Choose the goal you want to track from the drop down list here

In the picture below, the goal was set for contact form subscription. If you look at no.6, you will discover that the visitor was on about us/contact page, then moved to the blog and then went to "why lunametrics" before they subscribed.

This report will show you that the content is more compelling to visitors and inspires them to act. Therefore, there is a need to create more content on the benefits of lunametrics.

You can put the newly created content in prominent places on your website where visitors can have access to it.

Referral traffic

Referral traffic report shows you where your website visitors are coming from. For instance, if a visitor clicks on one of your links on Facebook and they get to your website, it is counted as a referral traffic because Facebook referred the visitor to your website. To measure your referral traffic, click on "acquisition", "All traffic", then "Referrals"

This report will show you how your content is being distributed and promoted online. Most likely you will have where you are sharing your links e.g. email, content curation websites, social media networks, e.t,c. If your content is useful and beneficial to your audience, they will share it. As they do that, you will see the list of your referral traffic increasing. So, the level of referral traffic you see is the level of your effectiveness in promoting your content. Once you know the websites that are giving you the most traffic, you can increase your level of participation on those websites. For example, in the image above, best-seo-software.xyz, business2community and getfreesocialtraffic are the three websites bringing in the traffic to the website (although, there is no much content promotion on the website). So, what you can use the report to do is to promote more on the websites bringing in the most traffic. Social referrals.

You can also check the social media platform that is giving you the highest number of traffic. Scroll down in the dashboard to "social", click on "overview" and you will see the chart displayed as shown below:

From the picture above, you can see that Facebook is bringing in more traffic than the rest of the platforms. Like I said earlier, the website used for this analysis is fairly new and there has not been much promoted on it. For this website, there is a need to increase the level of participation on Facebook and Linkedin. They are

the one bringing in the most traffic. This will enable you to focus on the social media that is working for your niche.

Page views

Page views show the number of visitors that visits a particular post on a page. This number depicts your readers' interest in the content. This will show you how popular and useful your content is. You can then produce content on topics that have higher hits to get more views. You can check the page views in different ways: i. By views ii. By source iii. By title. So move up to the "behaviour" feature, click on "All pages". You will see the post with the highest number of views.

You can create more content on the most viewed posts.

Demographic reports

You need to know the demographic of your website users. This will enable you to create a perfect buyer persona for them. You will know what they like and dislike. To get this data Go to the "audience" section, then click on "Demographics" Click on "overview" and you will see the data

This report will show you the number of users who are men or women and their ages, the engagement and conversion rate. Recently I used this information to run a Facebook ad. When setting up a Facebook ad, there is a place where you will choose the age, gender and interest of your audience, you can use this data effectively to generate good ROI for your advert. From the overview page, you can change the little drop down from session to:

% New sessions to help you see if you attracting the right demographic audience Avg. session duration - to know which gender and age stays longer on your website Bounce rate: to show the gender that can't wait to leave your website Pages/session to see who is engaging more with your content. You can see how interesting it is to use Google analytics data to produce better content for your audience. It is time to stop churning out contents and start analysing what you already have. When you do that, you will save a lot of time, money and energy in creating contents that no one wants to read. Google analytics reports also lets you know your ROI. It will tell you whether your content marketing campaign is working or not. With a tweak here and there, you should get it right in no time.

Conclusion Wow! This is really an ultimate guide you can use to start your content marketing campaign. One thing you need to remember is that content marketing is not a quick way of building your business. It takes time to see the results, but once it starts showing it can last for a very long time. Therefore, you need to be patient, keep posting continuously in order to get a tangible result from your marketing effort.

About Hephzysocial READY TO TAKE YOUR BUSINESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL? Then you are in the right place. Here's the deal: If you need contents to: * Generate leads to follow up by sales and marketing teams * Help your sales team close sales more quickly * Generate interest in your products * Build and repair public opinion about your brand and products * Develop friends and fans who interact with your brand socially * Help customers get the most from your products Then you are in the right place. HOW HEPHZYSOCIAL CAN HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS I'm a big believer that every online marketer must master the art of content marketing and promotion. But with the increasing amounts of information out there, how can you find practical techniques that will help you to achieve the goals highlighted above? That's where Hephzysocial comes in. Hephzysocial has grown into one of the most popular content marketing agency on the web for one simple reason: Everything I publish is super actionable and designed to help you get more leads, customers and sales.

About me:

Hephzysocial was founded by Hephzy Asaolu, a professional content marketer with lots of experience. She is passionate about creating top quality content that is clear, informative, entertaining and wellresearched. Find our content marketing packages below: Content types

Silver package

Gold package

Diamond Package (Authority content creation)

Content Creation Article (List posts, how-toguides) Blog article Infographic Ebooks/ Ultimate Guides/How-to Guides

Word count 10001500

Frequency

500-700 X X

Word count 20002500

Frequency

4x per month X X

500-700

4x per Month

N/A

1x per month

N/A 3,000

Frequency

1x per month

Word count 20003000

4x per month 2x Per year 2x Per year

500700 N/A 5,000

8x per month 4x per year 4x per year

8x per Month

N/A

12x per Month

2x per month

Content Promotion Relevant and Interesting Facebook posts

X

Relevant and Interesting Twitter posts

X

4x per Month

N/A

8x per Month

N/A

12x per Month

Content Marketing Strategy Competitor Research Content Ideas Guest posts Feature image Content Marketing Calendar Google analytics monthly report and Optimization Price Per Month

N/A

Yes

Yes

N/A N/A 1 N/A

Yes 2 /Month 1 Yes

Yes 4/month 2 Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

$2,000/month $10,000/ 6 months

$3,500/month $20,000/6 months

$5,500/month $30,000/6 months

Make your choice and send a mail to: [email protected]. Take action now and enjoy a profitable year (2016) ahead.