Welcome to this week’s episode of the online marketing series for beginners! So far, we’ve covered the main tools of online marketing, and we’ve talked about websites and their key role in marketing. Remember? Well, today, we’re going to be talking about content marketing and how it relates to the online marketing tools we’ve seen so far.

If you’ve never heard about content marketing before – or maybe you have, but don’t really know what it means, you’ll find it very easy to understand, you’ll see! Content marketing is as simple as sharing valuable pieces of content with your audience. Easy as that! Now, you may be wondering how that works, right?

How Does Content Marketing Work?

Guess what you need for content marketing… Right! Content! So you’ll need to create – that is, write – and post valuable content for your blog, your website, your social networks, or your email subscribers (more about that in the next chapters).

Feel free to download this content brainstorming sheet if you struggle with coming up with ideas for your blog posts. I hope you find it useful!

These would be the two main steps you need to follow for your content marketing:

  • Write regular valuable content for your website.
  • Share your content on social media and per email.
Online marketing - valuable content

That’s it! Now, you’ll be probably wondering how it can be so easy, right? And why is content so important? Well, writing and sharing content is key for two main purposes:

  • Google, Bing and all other search engines work with words. So you need “words” to let them know what your site is about, and that’s why you want to be in writing mode every single week – as a minimum.
  • Writing valuable content will help you gain your audience’s trust. Which audience, you ask? The one you attract through search engines and thanks to your “words”.

What’s the best tool for publishing content?

The best tool you can use to share content with your audience is blogging. Yep. You can publish content wherever you want, but there’s nothing more powerful than having your own blog – as far as you update it at least once a week. If you aren’t sure whether you should have a blog, check out this post about blogging for freelancers.

And what does social media have to do with it all? Well, before your content marketing starts giving fruits organically*, your site needs a small push, and sharing on social media is the quickest unpaid marketing tool to do so.

* Unorthodox but real translation for “organically”: for free

Stay tuned for the next episode, where we’ll talk about search engine optimization (SEO), the first goal and most immediate consequence of a good content marketing strategy!

Alicia RG
xoxo - Born to Freelance
Born to Freelance

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