The Joy of Content Marketing

Are you looking for new ways to attract a desired target market? Then you're a prime candidate for content marketing. That is, the deliberate creation of content designed to appeal to a particular audience.

Content marketing isn't about selling. It's more subtle than that. It's purpose is to attract the right people to your site by offering genuinely useful information. What kind of content?

Articles
Audio podcasts
Video
Interactive demos
Games

The list can be as long as you want it to be. It's not the type of content that matters, but the quality. It has to be genuinely useful and desirable in and of itself, before it can attract your desired market. When you get it right, the nature of the Internet means it will spread like wildfire right across the web.

Note: Content marketing isn't about selling content. It's about attracting a specific audience so you have a base of repeat visitors you can then sell to.

How do you make money from content marketing?

Turning free content into money is the current goal of millions of web site owners right around the world. In most cases, these businesses seek to turn their traffic into money in one or more of the following ways...

Advertising
Upgrade to paid membership
Up-sell a specific service
Up-sell to paid version of content
Lead generation for third parties

In my experience, you're likely to extract money from between 0.1%-0.5% of your visitors. This means most web sites will never turn a profit because they don't attract sufficient interest in the first place.

A determined content marketer first needs to work out a way to generate a lot of content on a regular basis. S/he then needs to work out how to attract sufficient traffic. Once the content and traffic are sorted, it's time to look for ways to generate revenue.

This flies in the face of traditional business practise, yet it's the way the world's most successful web business (Google) did it. And when you think it through, it makes good business sense.