I hope you’re had a wonderful summer. I’ve had quite the busy one myself and can’t believe it’s just about over. But it’s TIFF next week, my favourite time of year, so I’m quite excited.
This month we’ve got helpful articles and videos covering content marketing, social media marketing and SEO.
First, there’s a helpful, albeit brief, guide to creating content your potential clients and customers will actually want to read and share.
Then, we have a video on the perils of using social media as the only way to drive traffic to your website.
Finally, our second video is a little more for an expert audience: solving common SEO conundrums.
Enjoy!
This brief guide lays out a fairly straightforward way you can create content that past and future clients/customers will enjoy and share. The steps are
- Create buyer personas
- Finding your audiences pain points (including free ways of doing so)
- Creating a list of proven topic ideas
- Use the “CURVE” method to write your content (see the guide)
All of these are easier said than done, but the article gives some hints on how to do these things and a quick googling of any of the topics will find you many more articles on how to do these things. (Also, googling is basically how you accomplish step 3.)
Read the article. Just click on the X to ignore the signup box.
This video has some bad news. “Link building” – the process of getting other sites to link to you, thereby improving your position in search engine results – probably cannot be accomplished through social media. Social media is valuable; it’s valuable to share your content, products and services with people who won’t find it with the search engine, and it’s particularly important to building relationships and trust with your potential clients or customers. What this videos says is that what social media cannot do is elevate your search engine ranking in and of itself.
Watch the video.
Another Whiteboard Friday video – yes, I know, I share a lot of them, but it’s because they’re really good!
This one is more for experts. It examines 5 frustrating SEO experiences and how to possibly overcome them. Here are the five:
- Following SEO best practices doesn’t improve your ranking
- Your competition appears to be doing better than you through bad links
- I have no idea why my ranking goes up or down
- I can’t accurately quantify, predict or control my SEO
- Google is biased to big brands.
The content is definitely for people who know what they are doing when it comes to SEO. But if you do, this video is edifying.
Watch the video.
Learn more about marketing your small business online.