Just because a certain strategy works for your competition does not mean it will work for you. We're inundated with information every day on how to grow your business through the latest engaging marketing strategy. It becomes increasingly difficult to weed out the effective from the ineffective, especially when it comes to content creation and blogging. How do you know what will work best for your organization?
A Buffet Of Content
Websites like eLance, Zerys, Craiglist, and Social Media Examiner are avenues for finding affordable content creators. Once you have a mixed bag of different content, you can start tracking its progress and customer engagement just like a regular advertising campaign online.
But, what kind of artcles should you be creating? Here are some of the most popular types of articles out there right now:
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The very common and popular how-to article that provides useful information to the reader.
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A white paper which is much more extensive than the how-to article, utilizing much more information that is normally discovered in-house and shared with your audience.
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Case studies about your own customers or clients that can be turned into a marketable article on your website to ramp up sales.
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A "news" article which utilizes newly found data from your industry, while adding your own opinion about the matter.
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A general, part news, part how-to article that ensures your business can become an authority in the industry.
Article writing can come in lots of different forms, and there are countless other types of content that you can develop and monitor to see what works for your business. Besides the normal press release, you can have consistent content with low maintenance that brings in customers regularly.
Using Analytics
Creating and distributing the content is only half of it. Even before you publish the articles, you need to set some goals that your business can try to achieve with the content. Most professionals tend to measure page views, click-through rates (you should always implement a call-to-action in any article, hence the click-through rate goal), and even final sales.
Once you have published the articles, you need to keep track of analytics by using whatever you use currently to track views, engagement, click-through rates, and other such data. If one piece is exceeding goals, then it's safe to say that you can use that type again in the future. Have a different piece that fizzled out? Now you know to avoid that type of article, or try to improve its implementation if you're really determined.
Regardless of what you find, everyone's article writing preference is going to be different. What's your article type? Are you the savvy how-to article distributor, or maybe prefer the hard facts of the news article? Tell us about it!
