Does content marketing work just on your own sites?

I've been considering the question recently about where it is possible to carry out content marketing. Or to turn this into an actual question: "Can content marketing activity only be done on your own sites?"

My initial answer to this question was a clear "Yes, all CM activity needs to be done on your own sites". Or to put it into more 'consultant speak'... Content Marketing activity only utilises 'Owned' digital sources and does not involve 'Earned' or 'Paid' ones.
Note: Owned online properties are those where you have the ownership and means to change the content. Company brand sites, eCommerce portals, brochureware sites, Facebook pages (where your organisation manages what is posted there) and campaign microsites are all included in this definition.

However, whilst writing a blog post to this effect and therefore thinking it through in more detail... I realised that this initial response might not the correct one. Most content marketing efforts do start on your own sites, but ignoring the paid and earned sources means you are missing out on a significant amount of content marketing potential.

To try and explain my thinking, I've pulled the following quick diagram together:

This diagram tries to explain the following:

1. Your owned properties can be used to push content into the earned space. E.g. Via the use of social sharing tools you can extend the reach and impact of your content.
2. Your earned media can help shape influence and therefore build traffic to your owned media.
3. Paid media can help to directly bring traffic to your site.

This might be presented in some other way that conveys value or link juice more, so as-always I reserve the right to revisit this diagram in some other blog post.

Content: Found, read, shared and measured

The title of this post basically sums up my approach to the growing discipline of Content Marketing.

These four terms are section headings for my simple and effective way to assess and develop your CM strategy. Below they are broken down into the essential areas that I think needs covering if you are putting together your own content marketing approach:

Found:
It's no good creating content if nobody finds it... so ensuring your text, images and other assets can be found on the web is bloody important. This is consequently the area where Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation come together the most; as using the correct SEO techniques and being correctly indexed by search engines can mean the difference between your pages getting lots of traffic and getting practically none.

Read:
Isn't there a wonderful phrase that goes something like "if a tree falls over in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a noise?"... Well, in my opinion the same goes for your words and pictures... if nobody reads them, are they really content?
I should also mention that the quality of your content is something to watch out for. It's no good just getting the office junior to write all your website content if they've no real idea of how to correctly write for the web. Therefore scan-ability, readability and understandability are all key success factors here.

Shared:
To get your content to as many eyeballs as possible, you have to encourage it's sharing across as many platforms and formats as possible. From RSS feeds through to seeding by simple social sharing functionality, your content needs to work as hard as possible when it is is used off of your website as it does when it is on it. Also links and content out on social platforms can now significantly contribute to you SEO efforts too.

Measured:
This is probably the area least understood about Content Marketing (and therefore probably the area most likely to be missed / skipped). However it's not that difficult to get your head around, especially if you have a person in your organisation who understand your website analytics package and can obtain meaningful engagement KPI's.

Let me know if this framework works for you or if you have a better one

So Is Google +1 going to work? History tells us it might not

Now, I’m a fairly obvious ‘power user’ of Google (as I run a digital consultancy that has an online marketing & SEO division) and have my Google Profile all set up and current… in fact I think I have a couple…. a personal Google account and an Ideal Interface one. So I’m not really your typical user out here, e.g. the person who may not have done this and may even know what a Google Profile is. So I therefore question the usefulness of this function and actually wonder how popular the +1 feature will be.

Hopefully this foray into Social Media for Google isn't as half-hearted as their earlier attempts.

1. Google Buzz hasn't really gained traction in a market already use to Twitter (perhaps because people were upset by its stealth launch into their Google Mail account rather than being something they requested)

2. Google Wave was touted as the successor to email, but turned out to unusable by many as a collaborative place to work and produce rich documents (however, that's not to say that it will have its day eventually, perhaps when people are more used to working in that way).

Only last week the ex-CEO Eric Schmidt accepted that he’d missed out on "the friend thing"…. which is not only a complete simplification of how social networks, it also gives us some idea of just how the search great generally views social media – e.g. it’s a thing to do, rather than a way to connect and even add value to search results.

Put simply, I’m not convinced that Google still gets Social Media and sharing completely. If you want an example of just how little the Google +1 feature is integrated into the rest of the Google product set, consider how useful it would have been to have added a “+1” button into Google’s blogging platform (Blogspot) and how beneficial this would have been to the legions of bloggers who are so dependent on referrals from any source….. That’s really not something Facebook would have missed and perhaps why they lead the social media league table.

Google gets social sharing eventually

Google has now launched the +1 button, which is basically a way for your visitors to easily recommend your site within the search engine. By adding a +1 button to your site (you’ll probably need you site developer’s help in doing this) you are adding Google’s equivalent of a Facebook ‘Like’ to the page. This allows people viewing Google’s search results to see which links their friends positively rate and therefore add more relevance to the results. In other words… someone is more likely to visit a site found in Google if one of their contacts also thinks it’s a good link.

However, there are a couple of caveats to consider:

1. This functionality is currently reserved just for the main Google.com site, with other local versions due to get theirs subsequently
2. You need a Google Profile set-up and be logged into Google while you browse

But there’s a big positive consideration….. rumour has it that Google say they MAY use the +1’s as an additional signal for ranking pages. Yup, this means that your contacts could potentially help your SEO efforts if you add this little button to your site (and visitors click on it). Google have carefully said they will see how peer recommendations affect search quality before using +1 as a raking factor, so this isn’t yet a way of quickly gaming the engine by getting all your mates to promote your site. And you can bet that the ‘black hat’ SEO market will be instantly looking at ways to use this to artificially manipulate results in the future.

Whether this also means a +1 has an effect upon your site’s ranking in Google for everyone or just those who have linked contacts and are logged in remains to be seen.

Why buttons are helping sites

You will have seen social media sharing buttons crop up all over the web recently, with sites only too keen to encourage you to click, share and show your appreciation.

This is happening more and more, but why has everyone gone button mad?

As I see it… for one key reason… Share-ability (or in other words the pull & push of social media)

Buttons are now a very useful way to encourage visitors to share their content. When once it was all about content.... “content is King” we used to cry. Content is what search engines love and these same search engines are what get you traffic & recognition.... and therefore attention & advertising space or sales.
But now it is all about content sharing, your site content is far more valuable if it is read, shared and then re-read by others. There’s still the reassuring need to make money from content… but if you can use the power of social media platforms to share this content to a wider audience (whilst still retaining your revenue from all these disparate channels) then you are clearly onto a good thing.

Your site has to work as hard a possible. By providing buttons and the means to share this content beyond your current readership, you are using social platforms & their users as a means of free syndication.

Button mania

There have been two developments in the social media sphere over the last few days you might be considering if you need to grow your site traffic or your online reputation.


Both are similar pieces of functionality launched by Google & Twitter that you embed within your site and they mean bigger things for these two giants of the web (that I will explain in a series of small subsequent posts). But let’s be honest about what they are…. Buttons.

Everywhere you go on the web now, there they are….. buttons requesting you ‘Like’ the site, ‘Tweet’ and tell your personal or business contacts how much you like something, or further buttons to post this & that to a wall, blog post or some other social network.

Yup…. The pinnacle of web savvi-ness (if there is such a concept or word) is to have a site with a bunch of different buttons that look like virtual medals adorned across it. In fact, someone I know recently said that sites with all their buttons on are beginning to look like the side of war planes with their ‘kills’ stencilled heroically on their flank. (If you don’t believe me, just take a look at sites like The Huffington Post, where each article has an entire section on the page devoted to their social trophies).

As a concept you could even ask ”So where does it end?”. Perhaps you could get to a point where there are more buttons on a page than content. In some ‘Kenny Everett’ type comedy extreme, you would end up having a site where the numerous buttons scroll off the page, like unending medals given to an over-rewarded highly-decorated soldier.

Thank heavens for features like addthis.com which aggregate social sharing bookmarks into a single button.