Neil Patel is someone who really doesn’t need an introduction. If you do happen to be someone who hasn’t heard of him, Neil is one of the best known digital entrepreneurs out there, and has created 5 multimillion dollar software companies with his partners. Among others, some of Neil’s key areas of expertise include increasing website traffic, search engine optimization, and content marketing. This article is concerned with content marketing.
Content marketing of course, is a strategy adopted by various businesses online with the purpose of promoting their ventures in the virtual marketplace. In this marketing strategy, the ’content’ of their website is the front runner in attracting potential customers to access their website and purchase the products and services they offer.
As writer, you’re in the business of selling your writing services and/or your books and ebooks. Having a content marketing plan is vital in helping to increase awareness of your services, your work and your brand, and to help turn this into sales.
Let’s now take a look at what Neil Patel has to say about content marketing and how these lessons can help you as a writer.
“The best form of textual content isn’t one that is time-based or news-related. Evergreen content – information that will still be relevant one, two or even five years from now – produces the best long-term results.”
What Neil is saying by this, is to produce content that will stand the test of time. As a writer, firstly have a focus for the content you want to create and share through your website or blog. Once you’ve done this, consider how your content can really add value to readers coming across your material now, and also be of relevance to people who come searching for information, or answers to a problem in a few years from now.
For example, if you write fiction, then there will be certain principles around character development that will be timeless, which you can share through your content. Other writers can learn from you to help with their own stories.
“So, if you are going to write content, make sure you write it on a consistent basis. Whether it is one post a day, a week, or even a month, the number isn’t really as important as the consistency.”
The message Neil is getting across, is that in order to do content marketing effectively, you need to have content in the first place. With your own blog, create a regular schedule to publish content, and implement it. The more content you have, the more your content will get indexed by search engines like Google, which people can find through doing searches and the more content you have to share across your social networks.
“Infographics get shared more, viewed more, and loved more than most other content types. They are a powerful way to get your information out there in an explosively visual format.”
Neil Patel is a big fan of infographics, and their ability to go viral. Infographics are graphical representations of large pieces of information, and can be great to represent things such as facts, figures, trends, and relationships between concepts and data belonging to various topics and industries.
How can you utilize infographics as a part of your content marketing strategy and to help you share your expertise in writing and publishing? An example could be creating an infographic depicting information you have researched into certain book genres over the last 18 months, and reporting on which ones have been popular and which haven’t. Such an infographic would be valuable, as it would give insights to other writers on what types of stories are hot at a particular time, and hence give ideas on what people should write.
“Titles matter! If the title of your content sucks, no one is going to read it.”
Neil is as clear as one can be with this point. If the title of your content isn’t great, people won’t be inclined to read what you’ve produced. One approach you can use to make the titles of your content stand out, which Neil suggests, is to read popular magazines and newspapers. The pieces in these are usually produced by expert copywriters who know what types of catchy and quirky titles will maximise the chances of people reading a particular article. Check these out and see how you can use the structure of such titles and adapt them to content you want to share with your followers.
“A key requirement to a successful content marketing strategy is owning powerful social profiles. Make sure you build up your Twitter and Facebook profiles. You’ll need them to spread your content.”
With this advice, Neil is saying to build up your social media accounts and use these as vehicles to share your content. And he’s right. Facebook alone has already surpassed 1 Billion users. You have an opportunity to use social media to create a writer brand, generate a targeted and large group of followers of you and your work; both business networks and potential customers of your work, who you can share content with.
As your online profiles become more popular and your contacts increase, you can continue to share your content with a larger audience, giving others the opportunity to share your material further. Of course, these types of online relationships work in a reciprocal fashion, so be sure to share great content that has been produced by your online networks.
Image credit: SarahLeung1 on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]