Content marketing is something that can help small businesses succeed online in many ways. Small businesses can use website content to market to customers, market to prospects, and help them gain favor with search engines. Let’s look at the ways that writing and submitting content online could help you. Here is an example of content marketing, for example, for an SEO and internet marketing company.
Write an informative article that appeals to the target population: people looking for SEO services, internet marketing and website design. Optimize that article with search phrases that people looking for these services might use. Phrases can be: SEOsearch engine optimization/optimization.
By inserting specific phrases at key locations in the content, you tell search engines what the article is about. That could result in someone searching for one of those phrases and finding your article well written and that could result in a generated lead or possibly even a direct sale. That article will take people to a place where you can try to start a sale or at least start a dialogue with them that could eventually lead to a sale.
Submit that informative article online. Put it on your website, put it in an article directory, or create another page online, like a press release. Any or all of those pages would point to a specially created landing page where you could try to get the prospect to contact you for more information. It could even lead to a shopping cart page, where someone pays to buy that product or service. Making that item available for distribution could prove even more beneficial. Writing syndication-ready informational content could result in other websites publishing that article. Your byline and a link appear at the bottom and drive search engine rankings and human traffic to your site from various locations online.
Then link to that content from other places. Reference that article in a blog post, write about it in another article, favorite it from social bookmarking pages, tweet about it on your Twitter profile, and/or link to it on a Facebook page. All of these activities could draw attention to that content both from the perspective of sending potential people to read it, and from the potential of drawing attention via search engines. Search engines read links as popularity votes, so the more links point to a web page, the more likely search engines are to pay attention to it and possibly send more traffic to it.