How to Market your Business Using Content Creation

Posted on February 19th, 2010
A blog post by DN (1 Comment)

A business can be marketed using a lot of different ways, from ads in newspapers and magazines to paid search ads and banners on websites. But a lot of small business owners forget the basic, free things, like social media and constant online activity, especially when they have a big advertising budget.
A good entrepreneur can get a lot of coverage and potential customers by creating some sort of viral campaign on social networks like Facebook or Twitter. And it would all be free (if you don’t count the few hours of work that need to be spent initially).

This article will focus on the most fundamental marketing method (especially for businesses that sell over the Internet): maintaining an online presence. Just by “being there”, your business can get a good reputation, new clients and recurring orders. And by regularly creating content and posting it online (as posts on your business blog, updates on the top social networks or discussions/answers on forums), you can effectively promote your business and show people that you are serious and you really care.

Here are some of the most basic ways you can promote your business using content creation:

1. Create and maintain a high quality, useful blog.
This is the first thing you should do to start promoting yourself and your services or your business online. A blog is your company’s face on the Internet, and the information presented on it should accurately reflect your main line of business. You should use a serious tone if you’re in the legal, medical, business-to-business or other similar industries and a fun, easy-to-read language if you are selling toys or some form of entertainment. A blog is basically a website (I mean the old, static type), with the main difference being that it is updated regularly, so you must post a few useful (for the readers) articles and updates about your activity every week.

2. Start writing guest posts on other blogs and websites.
This tactic goes hand-in-hand with the above one (and the other two on this list). Writing guest posts on other blogs and online magazines is one of the easiest and fastest free ways to get a lot of publicity and traffic. Most of the blog owners will be glad that an entrepreneur or business wants to post on their site, as it benefits them too. You mustn’t let them down and submit only the best articles you have, as it will basically be like a free ad for your business on another property, and you never want your ads to look bad.

3. Create and maintain a high quality newsletter.
Newsletters are some of the oldest online forms of one-way communication, and 4 years ago everyone was saying that they’re dead. But they are making a comeback (just like the pop-up ads), and the results are very good. Having a newsletter on your blog means having a more personal way of contacting you readers (via email), which will undoubtedly increase your conversion rates. And it doesn’t take a lot of work to set one up: just sign up for Aweber or a similar service, insert the subscription box on your site and start collecting subscriptions and sending the newsletters. Their content should always be high-quality, as your readers are expecting you to deliver more through this more private channel.

4. Create and maintain a high quality podcast and/or videocast.
This is one of the best ways of maintaining an online presence and increasing your conversion rates and sales numbers. It’s been proven that, when learning something new, a third of all people prefer reading, a third prefers listening and a third prefer watching. By having a podcast with a transcript you can deliver your message to the first two thirds (33% more than with a simple blog) and by having a videocast you can capture the attention of virtually everyone. Creating videos is more time-consuming, but once you get everything set and learn to avoid making mistakes while filming, you can have a 30-minutes video clip ready in 1-2 hours (including editing and uploading). And you can fit a lot more information into it than into an average blog post.
There are countless other methods that will allow you to market your business for free, and the above four are the absolute basic ones. Combining them with other techniques (like social media and article marketing) in clever ways will get you excellent results you never thought were possible.