Content marketing has been hailed as THE current marketing trend. Some claim that it’s cheap, easy, and very effective.
It can be very effective. But it’s not that easy.
Here’s the first hard truth about content marketing: the success that you’re looking for, all of that golden traffic to your web site, comes from having a big archive of posts, articles, and blog entries. It’s not quick and it’s not easy.
From what I’ve been able to tell from my own customers’ programs, effective content marketing does begin to pay off immediately, but the real benefits are months down the road. And those benefits accumulate over time. Commit your organization to producing and publishing great content frequently and you’ll begin to see traffic grow significantly, month-over-month, but more evidently after you’ve passed the ninety day mark.
Start stacking up the years and you’ll see huge benefits. For example, I get a lot of daily readers on this site, but typically 0ver 90% of the traffic comes from search. Current posts and social media referrals account for less than 10% of any day’s traffic, except when something in particular catches fire. I can never tell in advance when something will catch fire, so it’s pointless trying to figure it out.
Fresh content keeps you in front of the public and alerts the great and powerful Google that you’re an active contributor. It’s your archive, all of the other things that people have read, linked to, and search for, that make up the real value of your content marketing program.
There are no shortcuts to content marketing. You can and should launch a content marketing program with a substantial amount of material published prior to launch. That means that when you manage to attract someone with a fresh piece you will have something else of interest for them to explore. But that won’t do you nearly as much good as publishing really great content every day from now own.
Content marketing is like so many other things in life. If you do the work, it pays off. But that payoff will likely be next quarter, not today.
More on content marketing.
The Content Marketing Hard Truth #1: Traffic & Success Comes From Your Previous Posts by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.