Building an Online Business: Content Marketing

Newsletters have always been one of the biggest marketing tools. They are a great way to contact your members, build a fan base, and increase inbound links.
Newsletters

One way to increase inbound links is to let other webmasters use your mailing list. After they email it to their members, they post it on their website. This is a win-win situation. Another way is to sell newsletters for $10 each.

There are directories for newsletters, forums, and chats. Each of these increases exposure and adds another top-value inbound link to your website.

Articles

This often the most common method of using content to market your website or product. The trick is to write something that other people want to add to their website or newsletters.

Don’t write a press release, or a squeeze page. Don’t talk about how great your product is, or how much better your service is. When writing an article, solve a problem, entertain, and make life easier for the readers.

This is much better than trying to force an article to do double duty as both a marketing tool and to pre-sell your product. Pick one purpose.

Articles That Build Links: These articles offer cutting edge information designed to make the newsletter owner appear to have purchased a good article from an industry professional.

When writing this type of article you want to make sure your sig line makes you look like ‘the last word’ on the topic. The article should offer news, a new Point Of View, solve a problem, or make life easier for the reader.

Articles That Attract Traffic: These articles should solve problems and be entertaining. The tag line should make it look like the author is someone who loves chatting with their audience, has a lot of free items and is willing to answer questions. The content in the article can be as ‘top notch’ as in the first type of article, but you want to be more inviting.

These articles will rarely appear on the top sites. Instead, they will get most of their links through the content sites.

Articles that Sell: These should appear like ‘part 2’ to the above articles. Only place them on the home site. Their purpose is to prove that the product and service can solve the problem, as promised.