Content Marketing For Beginners [Free Guide]

What is Content Marketing?

With traditional marketing becoming less and less effective, beginner marketers are moving on from traditional marketing to newer forms of marketing.

That’s where the concept of Content Marketing for Beginners comes to light. If you are just starting out, this content marketing for beginners will help you learn everything there is to learn about Content Marketing and most of the platforms out there.

The aim of content marketing for beginners, is to drive profits use technique of creating valuable content which attracts, engage, and acquire a clearly defined target audience. All distributed through relevant channels

Content marketing is something which broadcasts your message to your audience. Beginners should aim to write interesting and attractive content to make the visitor pause for a few moments and glance at your work.

Just imagine how good it would be when the leads are scrolling through your blog, immensely satisfied with your content!

If you want a basket full of leads then you need to consider what they need and want rather than what you have. A lot of beginners make the mistake of using whatever content they have for their content marketing plan. The best way is to analyse the present market, learn what they want, and create content in the said field. That data helps you in writing effective content.

What is Content Strategy?

Beginner’s content strategy is all about planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content. At the beginning of content marketing, content is not just words in-scripted on a page, but also includes images, videos and other multimedia.

Keywords for content marketing beginners: A content strategy is essentially a business blueprint that lays out exactly how its offsite and onsite content will be used to accomplish business goals.

Content creation without strategy often leads to disparate content with no core themes or purpose. As a content marketing beginner, you must learn this since this may raise confusion for your target audience and can negatively impact your brand’s credibility.

How is content strategy different from content marketing?

Aren’t content marketing and content strategy the same thing?

The answer is No.

Content strategy is all-inclusive while content marketing refers to a single part of an overall content strategy.

As a content marketing beginner, understanding the differences between content marketing and content strategy as well as planning how they can both work together is one of the most important things you can do fundamentally for your business to succeed online and beyond.

In short, Content Marketing is simply an attachment to the overall content strategy which consists of creating, measuring and publishing content marketing pieces for the audience. As a content marketing beginner, it is vital we remember this all the time, and not get distracted.

The Process of Content Building

Create

Before you create content you should know why and for what you are creating it. As content marketing beginner you need to identify the areas which may help in content creation like customer education, details of the clients’ company is holding, Employees and their training, income stream, marketing efforts etc. For content marketing beginner it is highly advised you brainstorm the areas you want the content to reach the common goals.

After having a brainstorming session, list out the ideas of content writing you came up with. In the long list of ideas, curate those ideas which you are pretty sure that they can hit the jackpot. Once done with idea curation, you will be left with 4-5 or a handful of ideas. Pick one of them that you think suitable and save the others for future use. Again, must practice for content marketing beginners.

Engage

The struggle of forming ideas, curating them, choosing the best one among many is just to engage the visitors in your content. Recently, marketers’ metrics of measuring content engagement is based on ‘time on a page/session’, ‘the number of shares or likes’ and more other vanity metrics.

A false metrics content marketing beginners should know, that considering the ‘time on page’ to measure content engagement is rather crude metric. Visitors may visit unnecessary pages like ‘about us’ or ‘contact details’ and that gets added to the content engagement, which in turn gives the false or manipulated result.

To know the accurate analysis, marketers need to set up cookies to the original content page, which gives the exact time on content. Such amount of time taken by the person for a page is averaged out to provide the benchmark. And the resulting time is termed as ‘time out’.

Content is what people share and hence, it’s what drives engagement.

Optimize

A common misconception among content marketing beginners is now the content is finally on the web and that’s the end of this process. But what good is compelling content, if it is not to be found? If it can’t be found by the audience, it won’t be successful, for which ‘content optimization’ is the crucial step in the process.

So, Website content optimization is crucial for all written text, but it is particularly important for pages that include information about other content pieces. As a beginner, you must learn some of the elements of optimization are title tags, meta description, URLs, meta keywords etc. When the audience opens a website, they frequently look for images and videos. So, the images displayed on the website needs to be optimized for discovery.

High-Level Benefits Of Content Marketing

Here are a few things every content marketing beginner should be aware of!

Customer Loyalty

Giving good information at regular intervals. As a content marketing beginner, you should be able to provide quality information every now and then. It helps to build a closely connected communication among loyal customers

Valued content, in turn, helps customers to invest their time in knowing your product.

Brand Authority

Brand authority is important to build trust among the customers, which drive their purchasing decisions.

Knowledge about your customers

Where does your customer hang out? The content delivered through social media like facebook, twitter etc., the feedback received on such content defines the attitude of the customers through which you can know about their needs better. You can know more about the product in the customers’ view.

Improves SEO

If you generate a blog with good quality content and connect to your brand, it can give you a positive repercussion. Such good content which is meaningful is not only picked by the customers to read but also by the search engines as preferred ranking.

Adds Value

People expect your websites/blogs and brand ambassadors to deliver insights. People want to go to your website so that they can get worthwhile information from your social media. Using videos and amusing pictures, make them return to your blog/website as a routine.

Getting Started

If you are getting started, these are tools you need to be aware of

Quora

It is a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users’ answers.

Here is a video on to Use Quora for Blog Content Ideas.

Inbound.org

It is a very promising community, basing from the reception it gained from active online marketers worldwide, considering it as a new home of the best educational web-based materials in the industry.

Feedly

It is a news aggregator application for various web browsers and mobile devices running IOS and Android, also available as a cloud-based service. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others.

Paper li

It is a free service that takes links from the people you follow on Twitter and organizes those links into a virtual paper for easy reading. It is a free tool you can use to publish a newspaper. This video clearly explains Curating an Online Newspaper with Paper.li

Alltop

It enables you to create a “personal, online magazine rack” of your favourite websites and blogs. You can create a personal collection from over 32,000 information sources.

Twitter

It is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. Registered users can read and post tweets, Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device app.

Reddit

It is an entertainment, social news networking service, and news website. Reddit’s registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site’s pages. The submissions with the most positive votes appear on the main page or the top of a category. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called “subreddits”. The subreddit topics include news, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, food, and photo sharing, among many others.

Buffer

It is a software application designed to manage accounts in social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Buffer is also the name of the company that creates this software.

Slideshare

It is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats like powerpoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself, on handheld devices or embedded on other sites. The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it has since expanded to also become a host of a large number of slides that are uploaded merely to entertain. Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. Slideshare also provides users with the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content.

Yoast

Yoast offers several plugins for WordPress to optimize your WordPress SEO, built around one core SEO plugin for WordPress.

Mailchimp

When you connect your store with one of MailChimp’s hundreds of e-commerce integrations, you can create targeted campaigns, automate helpful product follow-ups, and send back-in-stock messaging.

Trello

It is a web-based application/tool, designed for group collaboration and project management. It organizes multiple projects into boards and at the same time, you can see what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, where something is in process.

Evernote

It is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note-taking, organizing, and archiving. The app allows users to create a “note” which can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten “ink” note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notebooks can be added to a stack while notes can be sorted into a notebook, tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched, and exported as part of a notebook.

I felt these 11 Amazing Features That Make Using Evernote So Freaking Awesome –

Pinterest

It is a free website that requires registration to use. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage images known as pins and other media content (like videos) through collections known as pinboards. Pinterest acts as a personalized media platform.

Visual.ly

It helps businesses connect with their customers through premium visual content. Using their online collaboration platform, clients work closely with creative teams to create content that clicks, connects, and converts.

GIMP

It is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks.

Contently

It creates software that helps brands create and manage quality content and connect with freelance writers, photographers, and editors. Contently has a network of roughly 55,000 professional journalists, videographers, graphic designers, photographers, etc.

Now that there is a great demand for content marking, the above-mentioned points will help content marketing beginners create compelling content. Prepare a plan and follow the above guide to attract traffic. The images and video are helpful for beginners to give out good content.