Be Ahead of Your Competitors via Great Content

.

.

Your competitors might not often publishing fresh content. And even if they are, stay ahead of them!  Use your website, blog, guest blogs, newspaper/magazine articles, posts on LinkedIn or Google+ and even short videos on YouTube or slides on SlideShare.com “to tell a story”, giving free advice and tips for your existing or potential customers.  You will be rewarded eventually with people’s attention and lots of web traffic.  Provide valuable content for your customers, share it and people will come!
.
Authority and Trust via Content.
The longer and more regularly you publish content, the more authority you build in search engines - and in your audience’s eyes because they see a person or business that knows their stuff and is helping them. People you consider yourself to be influential and have authority – are publishing new content all the time.

.
How Do You Market your Content?
.
1. Share on Your Social Networks.
When you publish something new, share it to Google Plus first - this way it gets immediately and automatically on Google’s search engines, then on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tsu, Tumblr, Scoop.it and other places.  Share it on as many places as you can.  Make it easy for your readers to share your content as well.  Sharing buttons on your blog and website are a MUST.  Join as many GooglePlus communities in your field as you can and post your content there too.  Don’t forget: if you have a notable event, post it for free under events on GooglePlus.
.
2. Ask Your Friends and Employees to Share.
Having an employee network that is active and shares, is a goldmine for your business.  If your employees are vested in your business, ask them if they would share the business’ content on their social networks and sites.  Empowering them to take an active role in promoting the business will help to ignite your content.  You will see an increase in traffic when your staff members or friends share.

3. Join Blogger Groups
Content syndication is an easy way to get your articles out in front of more than just your own audience.  Take advantage of sites such as Triberr.com or Socialbuzzclub.com.  More possibilities to join groups for the benefit of pinging your content can be found in this article:  Hottest Tools for Content Promotion.
.
4. Influencer’s Help
Build a relationship with them – tweet them, mention them in an article (and tag them), send them an email. Befriending influencers and sharing their content FIRST will help your own content. In return they most likely will share your content on their social networks, and maybe even allow you to guest post on their site.  Building an authentic relationship with those in your industry will pay off – not immediately, as these things take time.
.

Have a Content Strategy.
Plan where and what you are going to publish and how to promote your content.  The days of ‘just’ posting on Facebook or Twitter are over.  Your content strategy is NOT hard selling, it is about delivering value for free to your existent and future customers, and a great way to proof authority and image your brand/business in favorable light. 

.
<><><><><>

Freelance Writing for Pink&Blue Parenting Magazine

.

.

Freelance Writer
Pink&Blue  is one of the fastest growing on-line parenting forums in Canada. We are committed to creating a space where parents can go for advice and information on the latest issues and hot topics. We are looking for content to be contributed at least TWICE a month.

Pink&Blue is also most importantly an open space where parents are invited to share and create a dialog with a growing community of peers.  Our forum reaches over 15 000 members!  We are currently looking for freelance writers to keep our content fresh and relevant.  We have many categories that writers can contribute in including:

Family and Life
-DIY
-Crafts
-Education
-Finance
-Travel
-Child related (all age levels)

Style
-beauty
-decor
-fashion trends
-makeup trends

Wellness
-Recipe
-nutrition
-health
-fitness

Our ideal candidates will need to be reliable, creative, social, well written and exceptionally strong communicators. We are looking for content to be contributed at least TWICE a month.  Specify the area you are interested in writing for in your cover letter. 
Deadline July 18, 2015

Category:  Freelance

Pink and Blue Magazine
18 Stafford Street
Toronto, ON, CA
M5V3W4
.

<><><><><>

Advertising vs Marketing

.

Do you know the Difference?  Or better asked: Do you like to watch commercials - or do you prefer to listen to, or read a story, get useful information, watch a video or slideshow, or be otherwise entertained? Authors are in a perfect position, they already have content and they don't need to hire someone to write for them.  Everything they write, other than their novels, are in a way content marketing:  Social Media posts, blog posts, guest blogs, short stories ...
.


 
Dot Com Infoway – Digital Marketing Agency

<><><><><>

More about book marketing on a shoestring:

<><><><><>

Marketing Lessons from Magazines

.

.

Michelle Hill, marketing manager at Red Rocket Media wrote a great post at the Guardian what companies can learn from Magazines:

Magazine teams consist of editors and professional journalists so if you're thinking of expanding your team, consider employing someone with these skills instead of another marketing assistant. Why?

They are trained to write in a commercially neutral manner – this type of content gets shared much more than self-promotional content. Other reasons are

• knowledgeable about media law, copyright, use of images
• strict about editorial reviews & quality writing
• highly skilled in creating stories for your brand

Other Similarities to Magazines:

• Create an Editorial Calendar
• Being careful about the publishing content 
• Interviews bring a personal element to content stories
• Content needs to increase brand awareness, Google rankings, and Social Media engagement 
• Don't talk about yourself:  You'll never find an article in a magazine talking about how great they think they are or why you should buy their magazine. 

Read the whole article here. 

.

.
More Content Marketing Tips

• Customers are now spending up to 75% of the buying cycle researching online before they choose where to purchase.  A priority should be to publish highly valuable content that educates them - and to be visible on the Internet.
• Content marketing is more cost effective than advertising to attract a large audience at the top of the sales funnel - and professional staff helps you to reach that point.
• Make your content super-useful and they’ll share it with their friends and colleagues.  Most of all, people love to share stories so make sure your content takes the reader on a journey...

.

<><><><><>

.

Content Marketing is Growing - FAST

. 
Content is King:
When looking at some of the amazing statistics that Jeff Bullas just published, I am wondering why not more authors, publishers and other businesses are dropping everything - or advertisements they planned - and start creating more content. See for yourself the startling numbers, displayed in the info graphic below. It also means good news for writers as the demand on great content writing is dramatically increasing!
Here are just some of the facts that should be considered in your business decisions:

1. Social media marketing budgets will double over the next 5 years
2. Email with social sharing buttons increase click through rates by 158%
3. 33% of traffic from Google’s organic search engine results go to the first item listed
4. 73% of reporters think press releases should contain images
5. 72% of “Pay per Click” marketers plan to increase their budget in 2014
6. Customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness for content marketers at 89%
7. Videos on landing pages increase conversions by 86%
8. 65% of your audience are visual learners
9. Visual data is processed 60,000 times faster by the brain than text.

.

Source:  webdam.com.

.

<><><><><>

.