Content Marketing – Giving Away Your Content? For Free?

Content marketers have a strange position in the industry, this might be because a few of the aspects of content marketing might seem a bit backwards to the uninitiated. For example, the concept of giving your content away for free seems a little bit strange. It’s plausible you don’t see the value of it at first.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re giving away some great useful content about Google Panda and also Google Penguin. These are packed full of useful tips and tricks to avoid getting hit by these updates, and maintaining your search rankings. It’s the sort of expert advice we give to our clients, and we’re giving it away – why are we doing it?

We’re doing it to showcase our knowledge and assure anyone reading them of our authority on these subjects. We want to demonstrate our worth, rather than just talk about it.  This shows our audience exactly what we have to offer so they will hopefully be interested in more of our services – anyone operating online should do this to promote themselves, this is the essence of content marketing.

If you’re an artist, you might want to create content based around painting tutorials to build an audience. If you’re a carpenter then you could offer tutorials on tools or sawing techniques. Perhaps a chef or restaurant could offer some recipes, it all works to promote yourself and crucially it builds up your authority to the point that people realise you know what you’re talking about – and therefore, they are more likely to use your products or services.

Talk The Talk, Walk The Walk

At ThoughtShift we’re digital marketing experts – so we’d better back up what we say with action and offer some great insights into content creation. There’s no point saying you have to put out great useful content and not delivering ourselves! Here are some useful tips for coming up with content for your site;

• Stick To What You Know – there’s no point jabbering on about topics that you don’t know about. The biggest value for the user comes from the topics in which you have the highest expertise.
• What Are Common Problems Your Clients Face? – If your clients often come to you saying ‘Help, how do I do X, Y or Z?’ then create content that clearly explains how to deal with these problems. This means anyone facing these problems can find help, and you don’t have to deal with these problems as often if you’ve got an ace piece of helpful content to point people towards.
• Be Insightful – always try and offer some insights, as this illustrates your knowledge. You need to make the user understand something they didn’t before  or reveal something about your subject that they wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

So there you have some helpful tips about how to create good content, as well as the reasons why you should do it in the first place. Don’t keep your cards so close to your chest, it just means that potential clients can’t see what you have to offer.

Make sure you check back at the ThoughtShift Blog for all the latest news and updates.