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If you own or operate a website, whether it is your main business or just a marketing tool, content has a key role in communicating with your users and may be your main method of making money. However, whether intentionally or not, content has additional roles including getting traffic to your site, retaining your users and serving as part of your marketing efforts. This is how you can best use your content for your business' advantage.
Content as an Acquisition Strategy
With Google being the de facto gate (and gate-keeper) of the Internet, the content you have – and specifically its quality and quantity – is a main factor in determining your site visibility to online users. The formula is straightforward: the more, the better quality, and the more search-optimized content you have, the more people will find your site. As a result, online companies have been, for a long time, investing heavily in content creation, aggregation, and optimization as a primary customer acquisition tool.
Whereas it was evident that this strategy has worked in the past, it is still to be determined how effective it is nowadays. It is not as easy as it used to be, for three main reasons: First, the abundance of content of every kind and shape makes it harder and harder for yours to be found. Second, Google (et al) are notorious for updating, tweaking and changing their search algorithms, which not only comes at unexpected times but also typically works against you. And third, as social portals are becoming more and more a primary destination, there is some evidence that the role of search engines as we know it is destined to change and be replaced by other means.
Content as a Retention Strategy
People will stay longer and return to your site for not many reasons. Primarily, you either (1) have a product they like and/or need (American Express, Amazon), (2) your site is interesting and engaging enough for users to browse and come back (YouTube, Facebook, Blogs), or (3) you just have so much content (and great SEO and/or strong brand) that it’s just too hard to avoid you (Wikipedia). Assuming not many are capable of replicating #3 above, most online businesses use content to engage users and create an interesting and memorable experience for the users to come back. Creating a sense of urgency to return and check out the latest fresh article or status updates is a primary goal of content creators. That, along with building a sense of trust, social proof, and a solid email and mobile marketing engines that notify users of updates and new content can go a long way in establishing user loyalty.
Content as a Marketing Strategy
Having a solid and continuously fresh content foundation, whether it is articles, news, user generated content, reviews or other, can be easily leveraged to establish a successful email campaign. Sending out new or relevant content to users on an ongoing basis in pre-established templates can be a minimal-effort low-cost approach to engage users and get them clicking back to your site. On top of that, the more you can segment the users and match your content to their previous actions, interests, or needs, the more effective this campaign will be.
On top of emails, find a way to republish and syndicate your content around the web. Whether through guest posts, article syndication engines, distribution of research or white papers, RSS and other news feeds, once you establish this mechanism your content will start working for you. You will start seeing referral traffic, plus your site general SEO should benefit and you should start seeing increase in search traffic as well. Just make sure you keep those link-backs to your site.
Finally, no need to mention the various social marketing tools that you can and should leverage your ongoing fresh content through: Facebook/Twitter posts, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc.
Content as a Monetization Strategy
At the end of the day we’re all about making money (well, most of us). Nobody plans on investing thousands on new fresh high quality content with no expectation of return. However, in many cases content by itself is not what makes money: Firstly, content can be created as an ancillary and supporting tool to help sell your main product or service. Secondly, content can be uses as an environment for other monetization engines such as ads and lead generation forms. And thirdly, content can be simply sold (one-off or as part of a subscription plan).
When talking about content monetization strategy, most of us think about the second. Google would not be where it is today if it weren’t for the fact that online businesses primarily monetize content through advertising. Displaying ads on, above, alongside and embedded in content of any form (articles, videos, etc.) used to be, and still is, a main valid monetization strategy for online businesses. eHow.com, About.com, Facebook and YouTube’s revenue streams are almost exclusively such. In addition, the ease of implementation and low maintenance makes it very convenient even if your main business is different, as long as it fits well with your content and doesn’t take away from your other products.
To summarize, investing in content was and will continue to be a main priority for successful online businesses. While the specific benefits and minimum requirements from good and effective content may increase and change over time, the importance of content generation, acquisition, aggregation, licensing and optimization for your business is probably higher than you think. At the same time, with competition rising and more and more sites creating similar content, it is essential to innovate, think outside-the-box and make content a business priority rather than a necessity.