Content marketing is a way to share informative content that is important, relevant, attention-grabbing, and helpful to your targeted audience. There are mainly four forms of content: The first one is the written word. Next is audio or podcast. The third is the video. If you talk about video, the first name will appear in your mind is YouTube. Yeah, YouTube is a way for content marketing. Those videos you have seen on YouTube every day is kind of content. Fourth is images. Yes, images can be content. Infographics are the biggest image form of content marketing.



We mainly talk about content writing, podcasting, and video marketing here. So we'll discuss in detail about each of those different kinds of content later in this post. The most crucial factor to remember is that it's your job to create valuable content. There's no value in creating any kind of content if your audience or reader doesn't get any value from it. It will be considered as worthless.
The Basic Idea Of Content Marketing

Your main target should be to solve your audience's problem. Help them with better content to improve their quality of life, to solve their problem, and let each of them become a thought leader. You should be the one your audience can rely on to guide them and show them the proper way through the problems they're currently facing as they can relate to your niche of expertise. Content marketing is probably one of the best ways to guide people. In this context, I want to share just a fact- I heard the term content marketing first from Neil Patel's blog. Before that, I was familiar with digital marketing, online marketing, but content marketing? What is it? Neil showed me the way. Now I can easily understand how important content marketing is.

Why Should You Invest In Content Marketing?


When you are creating a continuously good quality level that is up to mark, then you become a brand, a trusted resource. Your brand will become more and more valuable with time by keeping create useful content. The more you will help your reader/viewer/audience, the more your brand will get a reputation in your niche, and you will be marked as a leader in your niche. For example, Neil Patel. Have you ever seen an advertisement on his blog? Never. He does not need to do so. He continuously creates valuable content on his blog through writing, creating podcasts, and creating attention-grabbing videos.

Content marketing will help you to generate more and more passive revenue. You have to work hard until you are dominating your field. Content provides value to your audience, and your business is through organic traffic (Traffic that comes from search engine). This is a way where people will discover you on some kind of search platform or a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing or YouTube [Yes, YouTube is also a search engine. The second largest search engine followed by Google], or a podcast directory and visit your content.

Organic traffic is basically different from other kinds of traffic for one main reason— these visitors are looking not for you. They are continuously searching on the web for information related to their query. They visit the first site; if they find the first site's information is not up to the mark, they click back, and visit the second one— that's how they will discover you in the top place of the search engine like Google.

On every other platform, you're connecting with your audience whatever they're doing. But in content marketing, they're searching passively instead of active searchers. It's basically tough and challenging and much more costly to do that kind of marketing (For example- Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and basically every other type of advertising on the web). Moreover, it's a time-consuming process. For example, if you want to create content as a video form, you have to use video platforms like YouTube or Dailymotion. You can't expect your first video to get millions of views until you are a famous person like Zayn Malik. Here's the difference in brief so that you can understand it easily:

On those platforms like Facebook or Twitter, you have to reach to your audience. But with organic traffic (traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo), your audience will come to you. This will make you excited for some reason. Firstly, this audience is facing a problem. Secondly, they're aware of the problem they are facing off. And lastly, they want to sort out the problem and try to solve it. All these are crucial points for online sales, making content marketing uniquely suited to growing your business. 

For example, a few days ago, I wanted to buy green tea. But what's the difference between green tea and normal tea? This is called a problem. Yeah, really, it is. At least to me. And I was taken the issue seriously and looking to sort out the problem. Now, the first thing that comes into my mind is to Google it. I searched on Google- "Benefits of green tea." There were a lot of results. The first page is full of authority sites like HealthLine, WebMD, Lifehack, and some more.

Creating Your Strategy For Creating Content 


Now you probably understand the benefits of content marketing, and you are going to give a try. You need to build a perfect strategy that works. A content marketing strategy is nothing but a proper plan for creating an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading content frequently and continuously to help your audience, educate, entertain, or inspire to turn strangers into your fans and fans into your loyal customers. 

Like one day, I found backlinko by Brian Dean from Google. I read it. I loved it. And now, I'm a daily reader of backlinko to keep updated myself about SEO. I've also subscribed to their newsletter so that when they will come up with fresh content, I will get a notification in my email box. In other words, you're building relationships with your loyal audience and solving their problems.
Content Marketing
If you create valuable content for your readers with the proper information they are searching for, your content will succeed whatever the issue they're dealing with. If you don't put value into your content, create just some cheap content and put AdSense ad to make money- all the eye-catchy writing and eye-catchy headlines and strategies won't be successful. It is better if you can create valuable content for both the search engine and your targeted audience and make them aware of it and find a solution for them, you will get customers for life. 

Even if there are other better solutions on the web, they won't care. You'll be their first priority; you will be the authority in their mind who helped them first. Before you start creating valuable content like a professional, you need to do three things.

First of all, you have to determine who your customers are? It all starts with who your customer is. That's very very important. What do they actually want? What are they struggling with? What are they looking for?

You need to understand how your audience thinks before you can begin thoroughly. You need to speak in their language. Language does not mean here English, Spanish, Dutch here. Language means the way they are looking for. Benefits of green tea mean "benefits of green tea" here, if you provide them an article details, what green tea is? How to harvest green tea? Best time to harvest green tea! Sorry to say- it won't work. So, most importantly, when you write a title, try to put all the information together in your content.

Your primary step is to research and create an imaginary version of your ideal customer. This character or avatar should represent you, who is trying to reach with your valuable content. You should make a clear image with great content based on the niche you come up with here. If you create some fantastic content on search engine optimization, you should be mastering the niche and stick to it. 

Secondly, find out what information they really need. Now you need to understand what they are looking for and deliver them the information to start your content making journey. What are the ways to deal with you? What do they need to know before purchasing something from you, and in which way?

This is your primary roadmap of content creation— your early pieces of content. Create some content that makes each step towards the journey to the targeted customer. While making my first blog, I learned a great thing from Ken Evoy, the founder of Solo Build It- the fact is- customers will never care about your profit, what they are looking for is- solution. They want a solution. If your product can be a solution to them, then they will be satisfied (if your product is ideal for them), and you will make a profit at the same time. So both will be happy.

The third point, you have to choose how to say it, how to represent your content to your targeted audience. Here you have to be a little bit of art. You have to decide how you're going to communicate with your valuable content to them. What content marketing format will you use? Podcast?Video? Or the written word/blog (Like me)? What stories should you share with your audience? What kind of tone and voice will be able to connect with them the most?

If you know better about your targeted audience, it will be easier to determine. Ultimately, you have to represent your content to your audience with your intuition, and then you have to experiment continuously and adjust. As time passes by, you'll get perfection slowly and succeed with your content marketing. 

Building a loyal audience


The way to building a loyal audience is to write useful, demandable, relevant content about a specific niche. You don't have to chase multiple niches. Just choose a single niche where you can show your perfection and master the niche. You have to build relationships through your writing/podcasting/videos. For example, you have come here from a search engine like Google to know information about content marketing, and you got this post. 

Hopefully, you will like it. Otherwise, you won't scroll down to here. So, you get a basic example of content marketing. You have to add content in your own style to the world. Before Neil Patel, who guessed to write a post consist of 3000+ words with proper screenshots and examples? He is the uncrowned king of content marketing. Truly he is.

Even nowadays, I do the same. I have written an in-depth review of SEMrush (8000+ words) and iPage review (3000+ words) to build this blog. Hopefully, people will find my content as useful resource. I was talking about Neil Patel. Brian Dean, the founder of backlinko, also does the same thing. He shared his knowledge, his ideas, his experience through his entire blogging journey as it related to one specific niche: online marketing and search engine optimization.

Brian's work grabs the attention of readers. They are interested in that topic and find it useful, and because the content is great, they stayed and returned again. They ultimately turned into returning visitors, or you can say a loyal audience. They subscribe newsletter to get the notification for every post made by him, shared it on social media, and created a community of people with shared interests on Facebook or Pinterest or Youtube.

While the number of websites and blogs is growing and it increases dramatically year after year, the web world looks very different from it was in 2010, but the interesting fact is that the basics are still the same. This thing guides me to criticize your content, whatever it is- video, podcast, infographic, or writing blog. To build a loyal audience, you need to earn their trust. You have to create great content that needs to assure them that you are providing the most useful resources on the web. Create some content that they start to trust you; they consider you a leader of the niche. In this way, you can earn their trust and create authority.

If you create an average content just to rank on the search engine and make money from advertising, your readers will visit it and lose interest quickly and back to the search result. This will dramatically reduce your content's dwell time, which may harm your ranking on the search engine.

People are too much busy nowadays. They need quick solutions. Your audiences don't have enough time in their hand for average or even below-average content anymore. So, the first step towards content marketing is to create high-quality, valuable content that can grab your audience's attention. But just creating the content and posting it on your medium isn't enough.

You need to drive traffic towards your content from the search engine or social media, whatever you want, or choose both options. In today's content marketing strategy, you will not get enough time to be discovered. You need to give your content a push. If you really rely completely upon search engine traffic, then let me tell you that SEO is the slowest process of content marketing. You can use Google ads, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Quora ads, or Instagram ads in the beginning.

You have to look at where your audience spends their time online and start posting your content there. It may be Instagram. It may be Facebook. You have to research properly. This option is called paid advertising. The benefit of paid advertising is that you will be able to show your content directly in front of a highly targeted audience. There are many options like country, region, age, sex, interested on which topic, relationship status, and many more.

But the negative side is that it costs money (obviously) when you advertise your content to your targeted audience and isn't guaranteed to build your audience. Moreover, I will suggest new content creators stay away to get traffic from advertising. The result may be unpleasant when you have invested money, and in return, you will get almost nothing. All money will go into vain. It takes three years to understand how to master advertising on social media and profit from it. Before that, I have wasted a lot of money investing on Facebook and Instagram advertising. 

Showing your content in front of the audience doesn't mean that they'll like it or want to read (for blog)/listen (for podcast)/see (for video) it in the first place. Last but not least, getting traffic to your content is to borrow someone else's audience (obviously on the same niche),. I way to say that to ask people who already have a great audience (fanbase) to share your content (you have worked hard upon that) with them.

You may publish a guest blog post on their website or blog, or maybe they share something on social media about your article (it can be paid). Besides that, content publishing as a guest post form is also a great (and generally free/some people demand a charge for that) way to get a huge distribution for your content. For some content creators, it's all they have to do. Like I do.

You have to remember that their audience has the same niche audience; they should look like your ideal customers. You just don't want any other audience. You want your audience who are looking for a solution to your niche. I have discussed the benefits of content marketing, how to create a perfect strategy that works, and how to build an audience online. Now let's take a look at the different forms of content marketing.

Writing


Writing an article is the vastly spread and popular form of content marketing. Actually, content marketing is a kind of storytelling. You have to write something that is easily readable, and your audience can understand so that they can relate them with their problems and find a solution from the articles. The amount of written content in the entire web is basically immeasurable, but that doesn't mean you should skip it for other forms of content marketing, more modern, fancy forms of content like infographics, Youtube videos, etc. Today's writing is more relevant than before, so let's take a look- how writing an article works as content marketing.

Blogging


The easy and best way to use writing as a content marketing platform is by writing a blog. Blogging is a kind of niche relevant content writing. People will consider you as a leader and expert on the niche. You have to solve their issue by writing quality content on a regular basis.

Blogs can be all kinds of forms. Anyone can have a blog. Just like you are reading this article, which is a writing form of content marketing. And this is a blog. And my profession is called "Blogger." Yeah, I post technology-related articles regularly. But among them, I love to write SEO related articles.

When you introduce yourself as a blogger, most people misunderstand this and make a different so-called meaning, like a person sharing their thoughts and feelings with the existing people on the web from their bedroom/living room. Those definitely exist; even I did the same at the starting of my blogging career, you will find here a lot of personal articles, my thoughts about those topics. But I'm not going to focus here on that topic.

I'm going to focus on using a blog to make an audience base, build relationships with them, and generate leads and sell and grow your content on a regular basis. A blog should be a part of your website, usually as a subdomain or as another part of your website. However, I don't use a subdomain to make a blog. But some popular bloggers in the industry like Neil Patel or Brian Dean use a subdomain as their blog. For example- the main domain of Neil Patel is neilpatel.com, whereas his blog's URL (address of a domain or subdomain) is "neilpatel.com/blog." The main domain of Brian Dean is backlinko.com, but he uses "backlinko.com/blog." 

From a technical perspective, blog creation is really easy. Most website creation platforms have a built-in blog feature that you can simply create your own blog with your preferred domain, just like I use blogger platform for blogging, and I registered this domain "sourajit.com" three years ago. A typical blog has three main components: posts, tags, and comments.

The post is what you are writing in a text form. Generally, bloggers use a single topic to discuss throughout the entire post. Though, if you check my personal posts, you will find- there is no single topic which I'm discussing about. My each "personal post" on this blog consists of multiple topics. However, I had to put a single headline as a title. So, I put the title, which has been discussed mostly on that blog post.

A vastly discussed topic is here- length of the post. How long should your post be? The longer the post will be, the better to rank on the search engine, right? There is no limit of words mentioned to write a blog post. It depends on the topic of the post and what you're trying to solve your readers' problem. Generally, a blog post should consist of more than 500 words to explain a topic. If the topic is complicated or needs more explanation to make it clear to your readers, you have to increase the length of the post. A typical blog post is between 500 to 1000 words. Generally, I write at least 1000 words for a blog post. Sometimes it needs less, whereas sometimes it needs more. It depends on the topic you are writing. 

If you check Neil's blog, you will see that every article consists of at least 3000 words. Sometimes it goes more than 4000 words. Recently I have written a blog post about the in-depth review of SEMrush. It is more than 8000 words. And the article you are reading now is more than 3500 words. Hey, don't go back. It's a very simple article with a detailed explanation. It may take a little bit of time to read, but this is one of the best articles on content marketing on the entire web. I bet. 

My general rule is to create content that you enjoy. If you hate to write super long blog posts, then don't do it. Skip the topic and find another one that you enjoy. Focus on a single topic that you enjoy and write in details with your experience like I do, then you can draw the attention of like-minded people to your article, so you will be able to make the right kind of audience for you. While discussing to build an audience base, let's move to one of the main ways you'll get traffic (organic traffic) to your blog: search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO

Search engine optimization is a process that decides where your content will rank on the search engine. I will not share any tricks to become on the first page, but you may rank on google higher if you follow some ranking factors. There were a few tricks. Basically, you can say some loopholes which are popular as black hat techniques, doesn't work anymore. Rather than, you may learn the way google ranks sites on their search engine. First of all, you must know how a search engine works and the motive of a search engine.

The primary goal of a search engine is to provide you the most important and relevant information possible to your keywords. Keywords mean the term which we use to search for information in a search engine. If a search engine can do their job better than other competitors, you will use that search engine rather than its competitors. For example, the most popular search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, etc. Among them, we use Google most because they can deliver the most important and relevant search results to you. The search engine serves advertisements on their search engine result page, which is relevant to the keywords. The search engine makes most of its money from its ads. However, search engines are free to search for any query.

So here is the question- how do search engines decide which is relevant or not? The process is a little bit slow. Every search engine has a program, which is called 'robot.' When a new page adds to the web, the robot, also known as a crawler, crawl the page. They check the entire page and understand the topic of the web page. It basically crawls every word, every link, every image, and gets the topic of the page. Then, they return to the search engine and include the page at their database. It is called indexing. That's how the search engine crawls billions of webpage and ranks them according to their relevance. Whenever you search any query to search engine, millions of webpage are shown to you. Obviously, nobody checks all of them. Basically, most of the users visit the first page, where they find the top ten pages most important and relevant based on the keyword you search on the search engine. I have heard the question most- how to rank my website to the first page of google? I will highlight a few points here for better understanding.

First of all, keep in your mind that you are working on a specific niche. The more specific your content is, it is better on the top pages of the search engine. Next, you have to think about your audience, who needs your content, what you are sharing, and what they are typing on the search engine. I always check the search console, provided by Google, to know exactly what terms have been used to reach my content. 

Yow have to narrower your content. For example, if someone searches "Hotels in Mumbai,". It's really a broad topic. A lot of authority blogs will be there in the first few pages. It's very tough to rank on a search engine for that specific keyword. Now I'm going to show you narrower phrase- "3-star hotels in Mumbai". It's more specific than before. That means less competition than before. Okay, then let me more specific "3-star hotels in Bandra" it is a very specific search term where your chance of ranking on the search engine will be easier than those two phrases. You have to use that specific term on your page, but that does not mean spamming. Put it on your content's title and first paragraph. Your main goal is to be the most important and relevant for that specific keyword so you could rank on page one of the search engine.

When people find your content and engage with them, find those useful, informative, important, and relevant. You will get a higher position on search engines, which means a lot of traffic, a great reputation, and all those connected with a chain.

Search engines nowadays give priority to user experience. If a visitor enters the medium (blog/video) and watches your content, and within a few seconds, they click the back button and go to the search result page to find a better solution. It may harm your reputation, at least in the eye of google. Otherwise, if they solve their problem, they might return on your blog/YouTube channel. As the days pass by, your blog will get older, get more content regularly, get the authority and get hundreds of thousands of visitors to your content, and that's a business that is completely owned by you.