Online marketing is highly focused on content marketing. Content is the king and it always will be when it comes to marketing, especially online. If you think about it, though, content has always been the king - even before online marketing existed. Previously it was on TV and radio, in books, newspapers and magazines and at in-person events. It was in advertisements, in brochures, and more.

People are truly insatiable for more information. Now you just need more, and it can get quite expensive and overwhelming. {But there are ways to get more bang for your content buck.|There are ways to get more bang for your content buck.}

1. Know Your Audience-- All marketing begins and ends with your audience. The better you can get to know them through research, interaction and engagement, the more you can create and buy content that will appeal to them.

2. Create Goals-- Every single piece of content that you push out to your audience in every manner should have a purpose. It may be to spread awareness, build credibility, build your list or some other goal, but you need to know what it is before even planning it.

3. Plan in Advance-- The best place to start is with the goal and the product you want to make money from. {Then work your way backwards through your product funnel and marketing funnel so that you bring them in, educate them, inform them, and convert them.|Work your way backwards through your product funnel and marketing funnel so that you bring them in, educate them, inform them, and convert them.}

4. Create a Publication Calendar-- Part of planning is to have a publication calendar. You may have several calendars; one for each network, blog and goal as well as one main calendar so that you can see everything at a glance.

5. Incorporate Private Label Rights-- Content is so important that you can't really create it all yourself. You're going to have to fill the gaps with other means such as private label rights (PLR) articles, blog posts, eBooks and information. The fastest way and least expensive way to do so is via PLR.

6. Repurpose Everything-- One really good thing to learn is how to repurpose your content. A blog can become a video, a video can become a small report, and everything can be combined to make one big package or membership website.

7. Refresh Old Content-- Depending on your niche it may be possible to rewrite and refresh old content, making it new again. This is especially true in technology areas where things change very fast. When a fact changes, spend time updating old content, then remarket it.

8. Interconnect Your Content-- Everything needs to work together to some end. If you could look at your entire business on a map, how would it all connect? If you can't answer that, you will have gaps in your content coverage. If you can answer it, you'll rock and make the most of your content buck.

9. Push Visitors to Your Email Lists-- The ultimate goal of content is to sell your products. {But to do so you'll need to push your visitors (whether via social media networks, websites, YouTube, or blogs) to sign up for your email lists.|To do so you'll need to push your visitors (whether via social media networks, websites, YouTube, or blogs) to sign up for your email lists.} Once you get someone in your audience on your list, your chances of selling to them explodes over traditional marketing.

{Finally, it's important that you don't just publish content without promoting it.|It's important that you don't just publish content without promoting it.} Content needs to be promoted to be successful, and ironically you will use content to promote the content. That's why content is king.

It's tempting to try to run your business without a plan. It may seem like you can just get up each day and do what you want to do and the business will be successful. While that sometimes does happen, it's not likely. The main reason most businesses fail is due to lack of a plan and lack of follow through. It doesn't matter how large or small your business is; you really do need a plan.

If you really want to have a successful business, then you will need to go through the effort to create a marketing plan.

Marketing plans:.

* Answer Questions-- While doing the research for the plan, you'll answer a lot of questions that will help you in your business. You'll get to know your audience, understand the different marketing methods, and purposes and more.

* Assist with Decision Making-- The facts you uncover with the research that you do will help you make good decisions about your business on a daily basis. Without the plan you won't be able to make good choices easily.

* Help You Create Goals-- The plan will automatically help you define the goals for your business and the marketing that you do for your business.

* Identify your Unique Selling Proposition-- This is what makes you different than the competition. Discovering your USP will inform all future marketing efforts.

* Help Set Budgets-- While creating the marketing plan you will also be able to determine a good budget for your marketing efforts.

* Define the Market-- The research that you do will also help you define the market so that you can figure out where you fit in.

* Access the Competition-- As you create the marketing plan, it will give you the opportunity to get to know your competition. When you do that, you can identify gaps in your products and/or services and fill them.

* Help You Stay the Course-- The marketing plan that you make will keep you on the road toward success.

* Change with the Times - You can change it over time, but having the plan ensures your arrival to a planned destination.

If you think you can do all that without a marketing plan and get anywhere in your business within a reasonable amount of time while making a profit, you are likely to be wrong. If you want a direction, want to know what you're doing and where you're going, and how to get there, then make a marketing plan.

A successful long-term business needs a marketing plan, even if it's just one page long. Writing out the steps you plan to take, and how you plan to take them when marketing your business will not always ensure success - but not doing so will likely result in failure.

One way to increase your reach with your content is through content syndication. Content syndication licenses your content, or parts of your content, to be published on other platforms and can help lead new audiences to your website or blog. Content syndication can help you build a larger fan base, bring more publicity, improve SEO, and allow for more widespread sharing of your content on social media.

Choose the Right Syndication Partner

Syndication isn't about duplicate content; it's about forming a relationship with a partner that will help push your content out to their audience while providing a link back to your website, giving you more credibility and perhaps also putting you inside an advertising network of sites so that you can share revenue. Some examples of sites that do this well are SheKnows.com, StyleList.com, BlogHer.com and WomensForum.com.

Know Your Niche

Part of choosing the right syndication partner is to understand who your audience is, and what your niche is. If you have a technology blog, you don't want to syndicate on a food network and vice versa. Ensure that you choose a popular, legitimate, and well-run network so that it will pay off for you in terms of increased traffic and revenue.

Syndication Networks Legitimize Your Content

There are syndication partners in every niche that accept applications for participation in their network. One popular one is outbrain.com. Outbrain is focused on finding great content for their audience. It revolves around using the content on your site to recommend other content to your audience that resides on your site and other people's sites, depending on which plan you choose. When you sign up you put the code on your site, as others have it on theirs, and you each have an equal opportunity of recommending the others' content.

Syndication Offers Monetization Opportunities

As you can tell if you've looked at some of the recommendations, these syndication sites are advertising networks. While recommending your content to others and sending them deeper into your site, you will also share in ad revenue that the network sells based on having thousands of smaller sites banded together. This makes advertising sales more lucrative for even the small publisher.

{Build Your Traffic Up First|Build Your Traffic Up}

To syndicate your content, work hard to build up your traffic. The more traffic you have, the more leverage you will have with the networks you apply to. In the syndication game, traffic is currency.

Know Your Syndication Goals

Do you want to drive traffic? Do you want to provide education? Know your goals so that you can choose the right network that will help you reach those goals.

Work on Your Content Strategy

To be accepted by legitimate syndication networks your content needs to address your audience, be honest, not be spam, and look professional. Professional content has compelling headlines and benefits for the reader whether they choose to sign up for your list and buy from you or not.

Understand the Different Types of Syndication

There are free and paid syndication. An example of free content syndication is SlideShare.net. {Then there are advertisement-supported networks as mentioned earlier.|There are advertisement-supported networks as mentioned earlier.} {Finally there are licensed syndication networks like Outbrain.|There are licensed syndication networks like Outbrain.}

Once you have worked out these issues and understand your goals, you can work on your syndication strategy. Before joining any network, read all the fine print. You want to ensure that you never break the rules or contracts to make the most of a syndication network.

Goal setting is an important part of doing business. You have to set goals for every aspect of your business and that most certainly includes marketing. You've likely heard that goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time sensitive. The reason this is a good plan of action is that it gives you a place to start when it comes to setting out your goals. You might think that the goal of marketing is always selling, but it's not.

(Wikipedia link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria).

Know Your Purpose.

You may have goals for various purposes for your marketing such as spreading awareness, building your email list, getting more social engagement or something else entirely. The important thing is to understand the purpose of the marketing that you're doing.

Where Do You Stand Now?

{If you don't have much of a list or a social media following, then it's important to access what you should do first.|If you don't have much of a list or a social media following, then it's important to access what you should do.} Should you build more of a following and if so, exactly how will you accomplish it?

Where Do You Want to Be?

Look toward the future of when you meet the goal that you set for yourself based on where you currently stand.

Determine What Is Next.

Always knowing what you'll do next when you reach a particular goal is helpful to setting the best marketing goals for your business. It's always first things first-- build your blog, build your list, market to the list. Repeat.

Map It All Out.

Creating a map of where you have been, where you are now, and where you want to go will help you succeed in the marketing goals that you set for yourself. It will also enable you to see gaps in your choices so that you can fill them.

Don't Jump the Gun.

If you haven't tried content marketing yet, don't drop a grand on banner advertising. You want to start where you are now, and work your way up to where you want to be.

Understand Your Audience.

All marketing starts with your audience, and without knowing who they are it will be difficult to create a marketing plan that will work for you.

Know Your Products and Services.

Understanding how your products and services benefit your audience will also help you know where to start with your marketing efforts. Does your audience know that they need what you have, or do you need to educate them?

Do the research you need to do in order to know your audience, learn your products, and to evaluate where you stand today. This is necessary to ensure that you choose the best marketing goals for your business today and in the future. What works for you today will not work for your business tomorrow.

Reasons Marketing Plans Fail and What to Do about It 


The number one reason that marketing plans fail is due to a lack of seeing the plan through to the end. In other words: not following through. You can write a plan down in the minutest detail but without action to back up what is written, nothing will happen. Other reasons why marketing plans fail are:

Not Understanding Your Audience

Running a successful business requires a lot of research and dedication to getting to know your audience inside and out. That means not only for today, but for the future too. As time moves on, some things about your audience changes too. A good example would be Dove Soap. They’ve always had the same audience, but they can’t market to that audience the same today that they did 20 years ago or they run the risk of offending their audience.

Not Understanding Your Products

Do you know every product that you offer your audience and do you know why you offer them? What benefits do they give your audience? Don’t just know how to list the features of your products. The audience only cares about the benefits and you should be able to explain your products from their perspective.

Not Setting Measureable Goals

Many businesses just run advertisements without really knowing why. If you don’t have a specific goal such as increasing your email list by 100 subscribers in one month, it will be hard to know if what you’re doing is working or not.

Not Setting Realistic Goals

If you have a budget of 100 dollars a month, you may not be able to reach 1000 new subscribers in a month, or hire someone to write 20 new articles for your blog. Therefore, work with your budget or around your budget to meet a goal. However, don’t create a goal based on budget; only create the plan based on the budget.

Not Understanding Why

You want to add people to your email list, but why do you want to do that? What is the point of your goal? If you can’t understand the reason behind your goals then it will be difficult for you to execute them.

Not Knowing How

Many people are afraid to admit that they do not know how to do something and need more education. If you can find a way to identify gaps in your education, and find tutorials or coaching to teach you, you’ll be more likely to be successful.

Not Knowing Who

If you don’t know who is going to help you reach your goals and implement your plan, then you may not succeed. When you write out the plan, also write out who is going to do each part of the plan and when.

Not Following Through

Many business owners actually do all the planning but never implement anything. It could be due to fear of success or fear of failure but just like diet, if you don’t follow through you will not see the results that you want.

Marketing plans don’t really fail if they are made and then implemented. The reason is that a marketing plan changes with the times, objectives and goals. As long as you are working the plan, you will more than likely find success.

Are You Leveraging the Right Resources to Grow Your Business?


Marketing your business with online content is the ultimate way to bring traffic to your website. You can use articles, newsletters, blog posts, social media updates, FAQs and more to help bring traffic, but there are ways to do it so that you can grow your business the right way. Having a lot of followers isn't indicative of success. Earning money is. {So, if you want to grow your business you have to know which resources to leverage.|If you want to grow your business you have to know which resources to leverage.}

Content Is Still King

Everything revolves around content. Content is needed for every aspect of your business. If you create information products you need even more content. {However, even if you sell other types of product or service you still need a lot of content in order to educate, engage, and encourage your connections to buy from you.|Even if you sell other types of product or service you still need a lot of content in order to educate, engage, and encourage your connections to buy from you.}

Forms of Content

There are many different forms of content that you can use, such as blog posts on your website, guest posts and articles on other websites, inside print publications and online newsletters. Content can be text, audio or visual in nature. Having a combination of different forms of content will ensure that you reach more of your audience.

Have a Plan of Action

The other key to ensuring that you are leveraging the right resources is to have a plan of action. Don't just create or have content created without a point of view, voice, and the goals for the content in mind.

Create a Publication Calendar

{When you know what content you want to create, it's important to spell it out in a calendar so that you will do first things first.|When you know what content you want to create, it's important to spell it out in a calendar so that you will do first things.} {For instance, if you are launching a new product in three months, you can start whetting the appetite of your list now.|If you are launching a new product in three months, you can start whetting the appetite of your list now.}

The Email List Is the Most Important

They say the money is in the list, and that's as true today as it was five years ago. Social media marketing hasn't replaced email marketing; it has created another way to lead people to your email lists. Leverage your social media to build your list.

Develop Incentives to Collect More Email Addresses

The point of your blog posts, social media updates, and even webinars is to collect information from your target audience so that you can market to them within your email lists. Host webinars, ask for sign-ups on social media, and incentivize lists with free give-aways or low-cost entry products and services.

All Content Should Work Together

Starting with the product, service or event that you want to promote, work your way back to today to decide the different types of content that you will use to get more email subscribers to whom you can market and promote your wares. Decide what type of content they need to become educated and informed about your products and services so that they will purchase.

Consider Drawing a Workflow

Looking at how all your content works together to bring in buyers as well as encourage the purchase, may help you identify gaps in your content needs. Your content workflow might look like this: Email Subscription Bait > 7-Day ECourse > Webinar > Short Report > Long Report > EBook > Coaching > etc. Seeing it written out should help you decide what you need.

By knowing what your goals are for the content that you create, you'll be able to use it more efficiently to grow your business far beyond what you thought possible.

The best way to get strategy versus plan straight is to realize that you need to develop goals (strategy) before you can create a plan of action to reach those goals. {First you come up with the strategy and goals, and then using the goals you will create the plan.|You come up with the strategy and goals, and then using the goals you will create the plan.} They go together and you need both to be successful when marketing your business.

Here's an example:

Marketing strategy: Increase email subscribers in order to market XYZ product

Marketing plan: Create and promote a freebie report targeted toward a specific audience for the purposes of increasing email list subscriptions.

You have to know what you want do before you can determine how you're going to do it. This is why creating a marketing plan is an important part of owning a successful business. Come up with the right strategy so that you can create good goals, then from those goals develop a plan of action that provides for you daily, weekly and monthly tasks to perform toward reaching the goals and seeing the strategy through.

The step missing here is the doing. If you were to create a workflow for developing your marketing strategy and plan, it might look like this.

1. Define the Goals-- Measurable and attainable goals spelled out. If you can't write it out, you haven't dug deep enough. Name what you want. If you plan to increase your email list subscribers, then by how many? Which list? With whom?

2. Identify Why-- Know why you want to meet the goal. Do you know why you're building your email list? You should know that you're building it to promote XYZ product.

3. Create a Plan of Action-- List all the tasks you must do to reach the goal. What does it take to create the freebie? A writer, an editor, a delivery system and promotion; what else?

4. Implement the Plan-- Organize the plan and implement it in the order necessary to succeed. {Always remember first things first.|Always remember first things.} Set the time limit or deadline, then work your way back to today to start filling in when you need to do each task.

5. Measure the Results-- Determine if you met your goals by seeing how much you exceeded or how far you are from the measurable goal that you set.

6. Adjust and Improve-- Throw out what isn't working and keep doing what is. If you did not reach your goal, determine why. If you did, make a new one.

7. Repeat-- Do it all over again for every goal.

Understanding the importance of understanding how you will go about meeting a goal is about as important as creating the goal. As you work through the marketing plan you may determine that you lack skill or education. That will then determine that you need help of some sort from a contractor or technology.

Are Press Releases Well worth the moment as well as Initiative?

Among the earliest advertising schemes around is the antique news release. Do they still function? The brief response is that if you have a relevant need to release a news release, after that of course you ought to do it. News release still have fantastic belief for several factors. They still obtain outcomes, although not consistently the kinds of outcome you may anticipate.

* Inexpensive-- News release are still fairly reasonable means to obtain the word out concerning a brand-new item, solution, or occasion. This holds true whether you do it on your own or employ a solution to do it for you. If you are particular regarding when you send out a news release in addition to to which it is sent out, the expense will certainly be a great deal a lot less compared to various other kinds of advertising and marketing.

* Boosts Search Engine Optimization-- Today, among the most significant perks of a news release hinges on the Search Engine Optimization worth. Google Browse still positions a news release at strong belief in regard to material. This is primarily due to the fact that fraudsters do not normally invest a great deal of time, cash as well as initiative on generating news release, so if your company does after that you need to be reputable.

* Prospective for Wider Direct exposure-- Also when you target your news release they could be gotten by others, as well as frequently are if they match a newspaper article a person intends to inform. You have a big capacity to get to so several even more folks compared to through typical advertising and marketing techniques.

* Becomes Component of the Document-- News release, specifically supplied online, enter into the document and also could be discovered long after the position, item launch or various other relevant occasion. By doing this, a person that is looking could locate a document of your company.

* Sets up Experience-- The document and also combo of launches will certainly assist develop you and also your company as specialists in your particular niche. They assist obtain your good name or the good name of your company related to an expert company.

* Boosts Reputation-- Individuals which do not take their company seriously do not send out news release. By sending them out you are developing that you're a significant competitor as well as company company, which will certainly offer you reputation with your audience.

* Enhances Branding-- Any kind of means that you could frequently obtain the word out concerning just what your company is doing, with blog sites, posts, as well as news release, will certainly enhance your brand name's photo, particularly if you make it component of your typical advertising initiatives.

* Viral Prospective-- Every news release you send has the capacity of going viral if you send it to the ideal individuals at the correct time. Make sure to not just send them out, yet likewise to discuss the on the internet variation on your blog site, internet site, as well as by means of social media sites accounts to assist the procedure.

You need to send a news release at any time you open up a brand-new company, include a brand-new services or product, or have anything that is relevant to state regarding your company to the globe. Furthermore, it's important that you discover ways to target where your news release go to make sure that they enter the hands of the appropriate individuals.