DIY Content Marketing Guide
Blue Swing Media • February 12, 2020
The Simple DIY Content Marketing Guide
Do you want to become a content marketing superstar? If you believe that you’ve got what it takes to conquer Google Search but are just missing that final shove in the right direction, we’ve got your back. With the help of our content marketing guide, you are guaranteed to turn into a champion of the SERPs!
Why Bother With Content Marketing?
Did you know that 60% of people enjoy reading relevant brand content and are inspired to seek out a product after reading about it? According to this Demand Metric infographic, 90% of consumers find custom content useful. High-quality content makes them more likely to take action, so on average, companies with blogs increase their leads by 67% a month.
That data clearly shows that content marketing is the most effective and viable way to raise awareness of your brand. Never has it been more vital to keep potential customers engaged with quality content than right now. The goal is to succeed in giving site users the information that they seek and to answer all their queries. If your business insights prove valuable to them, you will establish yourself as an industry leader and an authority in your niche. As a result, you will inspire more trust in your consumers and experience an increase in sales.
★ Check this out for more on Content Marketing
What Your Content Should Deliver
High-quality content has to be effective on several fronts. Namely, for the content to generate leads effectively, it:
- Has to provide a genuine solution to the problem that the target audience is trying to resolve
- Must meet the audience’s needs and expectations
- Has a system for attracting continual website traffic
- Guides visitors further down the funnel
- Nurtures brand loyalty
★ For more content-related information, here’s how to breathe new life into content that you already have.
How Can You Get There?
Having clearly identified content marketing goals is a great place to start, but how can you successfully bring your ideas to fruition?
The first thing to do is to get to know your target audience. What are their problems, and what are they aspiring to do? Once you’ve got the answers to those questions, you will know just how to address them.
Next, you need to identify the best channels for your content. Create engaging, long content pieces and dedicate them to your top channels.
Last but not least, build a conversion funnel and carefully structure every step of the customer’s journey from marketing and promotion to sales.
★ Learn how to speak to your audience and customers through your blog.
How to Master Google Search — All There Is to Know
If your goal is to dominate Google’s search engine results pages, there are two things you need to keep in mind:
- Building organic traffic
- Building brand awareness
You want potential customers to be able to find you in the SERPs easily and to be familiar with your brand image and your goods and services. In order to build organic traffic and boost brand awareness, there are several steps you ought to implement.
Step 1: Focus on Keyword Research
The first step of the way is to find the keywords you want to rank for. Choosing the right keywords is essential as the keyword query is the starting point of the searcher’s journey — and you want that journey to lead to you.
We suggest you use the Google Keyword Planner. This free tool will help you identify keywords and ideas that most accurately describe the products or services you are offering.
Another convenient tool is SEMrush. Use this SEO tool to do your keyword research, monitor your competitor’s keyword activity, and do SEO of your blog.
Also, make sure to track your current keyword ranking with Google Webmasters. This tool helps you stay on top of your site’s visibility and performance with ease.
Once you have determined the keywords you want to rank for, use Ubersuggest
to check if they are worth spending your budget on. This tool will show you how your competitors rank for the same keywords.
★ Want to know more about this topic? Learn how to choose the right keywords
in this article.
Step 2: Create and Distribute Valuable Content
Now that you know which keywords to use, it’s time to envelop them with some high-quality content. Enter a keyword or your domain name into BuzzSumo
to generate ideas for high-performing content.
The goal is to create SEO friendly content and distribute it to multiple channels. Make sure to crosspost your content on blogger.com, medium.com, and other RSS and CMS channels. Dedicate the content to your mailing lists and newsgroups. Encourage your coworkers, fans, and followers to share the content with their networks. Also, expand the content to forums and social media pages, such as Facebook pages, Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn pages, LinkedIn personal accounts, Slack, and others.
Step 3: Keep Track of Your Content Ranking
Once you have singled out the keywords and created, published, and distributed the content, the work doesn’t really end. Now it’s up to you to analyze the content you’ve produced.
How does it rank? Verify whether the new keywords have an impact on your website’s visibility. If you keep track of your content’s rankings, you will be able to optimize it by altering the metadata, such as the meta description and the title. If a given keyword scores well, you may start to introduce long-tail keywords to your article. That way, your ratings are bound to go through the roof!
Step 4: Work on User Engagement
Google rewards content that provides a positive user experience. Show that people enjoy your website by creating backlinks and building a returning visitor base.
For instance, use Ahrefs
to locate your competitors and monitor their activity. Research and seek backlinks to strengthen your link building.
Send browser push notifications and regular newsletters every time you produce new content. Subscribers.com
offers custom, schedulable, and automatable push notifications.
The Best Tools That Will Help You Reach Your Goal
To recap, let’s have an overview of the most useful tools and apps that we’ve covered in our content marketing guide.
Contact Us
Best keyword and content research tools:
- Google Keyword Planner
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Ubersuggest
- Buzzsumo.com
- Google Webmasters
- Subscribers.com
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A lot has changed since I published Digital Marketing with Tortoise & Hare in 2017. Back then, the digital marketing conversation was heavily centered on websites, search rankings, social media consistency, and building momentum over time. Those principles still matter, but the landscape has shifted in a big way. Even the way people discover businesses and consume information has changed. My book was published on June 12, 2017, and in many ways, that feels like a different era of digital marketing. One of the newer terms getting a lot of attention right now is GEO , which stands for Generative Engine Optimization . If you’ve been hearing people throw that term around and wondering whether it’s just another buzzword, you’re not alone. But there is something real behind it, and it’s worth understanding. So, What Is GEO? GEO is essentially the practice of optimizing your business, website, and content so that AI-driven search experiences can find, understand, trust, and reference you. Traditional SEO has focused on helping your website rank in search engine results. GEO is more about helping your brand show up in AI-generated answers , summaries, recommendations, and citations. In simple terms: SEO helps you rank. GEO helps you get referenced. That’s a meaningful distinction. Today, people are no longer just typing a keyword into Google and clicking through ten blue links. More and more, they are asking full questions and receiving summarized answers from AI tools. That means your content is not only competing for rankings anymore. It is also competing to become part of the answer itself. Has SEO Been Replaced? No. Let me say that clearly: GEO does not replace SEO. It builds on it. If your website is poorly structured, your content is thin, your service pages are weak, and your business has little authority online, then GEO is not going to magically fix that. The same foundational principles still matter: a technically sound website strong service and location pages clear messaging helpful content consistent brand signals trust and authority In other words, the tortoise still matters. Steady, strategic digital marketing still wins over hype, shortcuts, and shiny-object syndrome. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that now your content needs to be useful not just for human readers and search crawlers, but also for AI systems trying to summarize the web. Why GEO Matters If AI-powered search experiences continue to grow, businesses that are easiest to understand and trust will have an advantage. That means the question is no longer just: “How do I rank for this keyword?” It’s also: “How do I become the kind of source that AI tools want to cite, summarize, and recommend?” That changes the strategy. Businesses that win in this next phase will likely have content that is: clear direct well-structured specific trustworthy supported by real-world authority The businesses that struggle will often be the ones still publishing vague, bloated, keyword-stuffed content that says a lot without really answering anything.
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