I’m preparing a report on article marketing, content marketing, syndicated content and content marketplaces. What does this have to do with this blog? Well, first of all, it’s not so much about this blog itself since the report will be published in other media too.
As I wrote before, relevant and share-worthy content is key (as is using and highlighting the content your community produces) and one of the main challenges for (email) marketers will be to create relevant and timely content for their newsletters. So, the report is about the content market but also about the importance of content in social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, well, every form of marketing (including the words in the call to action buttons on your website).
Now, to have great content, sometimes this will require hiring a copywriter, maybe even buying content or syndicating it. Over the last few months, I have been trying out content platforms such as Associated Content, Constant Content and many others. I’ll report on my findings soon but of course the conclusion is clear: a big no.
Article syndication: the next step in my exploration
Now I’m checking out another way of obtaining content, if you really can’t write or get it yourself: online article directories where you can get free content and republish it where you want, as long as you let the name and links of the author.
I’m testing a few big players and already interviewed one of them: Chris Knight from EzineArticles.com. Will try to put it online this week. I’m also testing others such as Articlesbase. What I want to find out is what article marketing is all about for the authors (generate traffic, leads or whatever) and what it can mean for companies syndicating the content. I can only tell within a month or so when I dug deeper and check the stats of this blog, which I will use as a test case, over a longer period.
And then comes content marketing
A last but very important area I want to explore further is content marketing. There are several ways of using content as a marketing tool (besides the obvious ones like white papers and what I mentioned earlier), I have been doing it in a previous life myself and with great success (I used to be a publisher and specialized in creating leads for marketing companies via content).
And when you talk content marketing, you also have to look at custom publishing matching systems like Junta42, an initiative by a fellow early mover in the field of content marketing, Joe Pulizzi. Stay tuned as I explore the world of content syndication, article marketing and content marketing further and don’t hesitate to share YOUR experiences with any of the above mentioned services or ways of getting relevant and share-worthy content.