Plan a Perfect Content Marketing Campaign for Any Website in 4 Easy Steps

Content marketing is always one of the best and most affordable ways to generate bulk traffic for any website. It doesn’t matter whether your site sells Delta-10 vape juice or pet supplies; starting a blog and publishing helpful and informative content is virtually guaranteed to bring a significant number of visitors your way. 

Planning and executing an effective content marketing campaign, however, isn’t going to be easy if you’ve never done it before. Adding a blog to your website isn’t a “quick fix” that’s going to immediately start bringing thousands of free visitors to your website every day, and you can’t just write about whatever you want and expect the traffic to start pouring in. An effective content marketing campaign is half research and half execution – and in this article, we’re going to explain how to do both. First, though, you need to make an important decision.

Decide Who Will Write the Content

The first step in any content marketing campaign is deciding who will write the content. If you’re an expert in your field, you would probably do a good job if you wrote the content yourself. However, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons. Although it’s hard to find anyone who can speak with greater authority about an industry than someone who actually owns a business in that industry, planning and executing a content marketing campaign yourself will take you away from running your business. You’ll have to decide where your time is best spent.

If you decide to hire a freelancer, all of the other pieces of advice in this article will largely be moot because a good freelance writer can manage an entire content marketing project for you. You’ll just need to supervise. Good freelancers aren’t cheap, though, so you’ll need to consider the pros and cons of the two options before proceeding. One option costs time, and the other option costs money. 

For the rest of this article, we’re going to assume that you’ve decided to handle the content marketing campaign yourself. If you have the room in your budget, though, it’s definitely worthwhile to consider hiring a freelancer to handle the work for you.

Conduct Keyword Research

Before you can start writing blog content for your website, you need to know what you’re going to write about. The article topics shouldn’t just be things that you come up with off the top of your head – your articles need to focus around specific, actionable topics that people actually search for. 

Your goal is to come up with as many relevant topics as possible so that once you’ve written all of them, your website will have a large library of informational content that brings consistent traffic to your site every day. In order to come up with that list, though, you need to know what people search for online and how much search volume your proposed blog post topics receive. To get that information, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool. There are many keyword tools online, but the good ones are rarely free. Be prepared to spend a modest subscription fee for access to a good tool.

Once you’ve identified the tool that you’re going to use, the next step is to start plugging keywords into it and see what you find. When you type general topics, the tool should provide lists of related keywords along with the monthly search volumes that those keywords receive. Your goal is to look for topics that answer questions and solve problems. Some of the best keywords for content marketing campaigns fall into three categories.

• Action terms: Action terms are search terms that explain how to do things. “How to use a drywall anchor” is an action term.
• Problem terms: These are the terms that people use when they want to solve problems with the products they own. “Dishwasher leaking” is a problem term.
• Comparison terms: Comparison terms usually include words such as “vs” or “difference.” A search term like “LTE vs. 5G” is a comparison term.

After keyword research, you should have a large list of article topics focused around high-quality keywords that receive significant monthly search volume.

Write the Content

Now that you’ve built your list of topics, it’s time to begin writing the content. For each of the search terms on your list, you should begin by thinking about the type of person who might search for that term. When someone searches for a term like “how to use a drywall anchor,” for instance, that person is probably looking for a step-by-step guide. Your goal is to write an article that fully satisfies the intent of that article’s primary target search term.

When you write your site’s blog content, remember that you should never try to shoehorn commercial content where it doesn’t belong. Feel free to recommend a product or other commercial page on your site when it would benefit the reader. When you’re writing an article that has no obvious commercial angle, though, just focus on making the content as good as it can be. Great content builds trust and brand recognition, so it’s valuable even when it has no immediate commercial benefit.

Don’t forget to conduct a bit of research when writing your content. Don’t just use your own point of view; look at other articles on the same topic and see if there are alternative points of view that merit consideration. Try to unearth interesting facts that aren’t widely known. Anything that you can do to add value will help your article stand out. That’s important because whatever you’re writing about has probably already been covered elsewhere.

Check the Competition Before Publishing the Content

Before you publish any article, it’s absolutely vital to search Google for that article’s primary target search term and see what currently shows up on the first page for that term. Compare your article to those articles with a critical eye. Can you honestly say that your article is better, or does it simply rehash information that’s already available in many other places? If there’s nothing truly unique about your article, it’ll never end up on the first page for its target search term. Don’t publish the article until you’re truly convinced that it’s the best resource available anywhere on its topic.