Avoid 5 Things in Content Marketing

Inbound marketing tactics, like content marketing, have proven to be effective ways to attract and engage target audience members. Online marketing strategists constantly sing the praises of content marketing and businesses are finally starting to listen. However, bad content marketing is even worse than no content marketing. If you are going to spend time creating and sharing content, it’s important to avoid the following mistakes:

Spelling/Grammar

If you have a good idea and the words are flowing quickly, that’s great, but that’s also often when spelling and grammar errors pop up. It’s amazing that some content marketers don’t follow the rules that they should have learned in elementary school. Always go back and proof your work! Even better- proof it and then ask someone else to do the same. A second pair of eyes may pick up on something that you are missing.

Creating Too Much or Too Little

Content marketing online is a tactic that never really ends. It should be ongoing, but you need to determine what the right amount of content is. You don’t want to pump out too much content because it is a drain on resources, will affect the quality of the content, and target audience members don’t have time to read it all anyway. On the other hand, not having enough content means that you won’t get noticed. Find the right pace that works for your business and suits the needs of your target audience.

Posting the Same Content Everywhere

Gone are the days of posting the same article on numerous article directory sites. The focus is now on original content since article directory sites took a major hit after the Google Panda update. Instead of posting the same article everywhere, re-write it and take a different approach and only post it to a handful of places where you know your target audience is. Posting content to the same site over and over means that you aren’t capturing a new audience. Spend time looking for new opportunities.

Not Optimizing

Content published anywhere on the web can be crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders so it’s important to think about SEO when creating it. Target specific keywords in the heading/title and throughout the body content naturally. Do some keyword research using a keyword research tool or by analyzing Google suggested searches to find out how people are searching and what kind of information they are searching for.

Make it Known Who Created It

The whole point of content marketing is to get noticed by target audience members and get them to eventually visit your website and take some kind of action. Don’t forget to write a strong “About the Author” byline that includes links back to your website.