2013 brought a lot of surprises to owners of websites far and wide, seriously. 2013 was a bad year for many people who make their money online. Google rolled out updates to Penguin and rolled out the Hummingbird update. Combined, these two updates destroyed many website’s Google rankings. Many websites said good-bye to a huge river of free targeted Google traffic. All these sad developments really highlight the importance of content marketing for online marketing success in 2014. If you want your online business to succeed this year and in the coming years, you have to pay serious attention to content marketing, It is no longer what you thought it was. Content marketing continuous to evolve. However, certain things never change. Read the following commentary to get on the same page as many other content marketing experts. Your online marketing success in 2014 and beyond will depend on how well you implement the following ideas.
Content Marketing then, content marketing now
It used to be that when people mention the word content marketing they automatically thought about search engines. In other words, they would use content to draw free traffic from search engines. It is no surprise then that content marketing in the past was defined primarily as keyword-centered content. It didn’t really matter if the content was readable, as long as, it drew attention from search engines. This is definitely true regarding the content marketing subset of article marketing. However, things have changed. After Panda and after the Google Penguin updates, content marketing is back to where it should be: quality. That’s right. Content marketing now is all about writing for flesh and blood human beings with real identifiable needs. Content marketing is not so much about keywords as it is about building a solid brand by offering useful information.
It all boils down to branding
When you offer real value and real information to people, they trust you more. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. You have to do this over an extended period of time. After all, on the internet, branding is a marathon. It is never a sprint. Branding is built on trust. The more people trust your content, the more they will come back. The more they come back, the more they will tell other people about it and the process starts again. If your content builds such a high level of authority, your content establishes a solid on-line brand. You have to focus on this when it comes to the content marketing component of your overall on-line marketing campaigns in 2014 and beyond. If you leave the branding component out, you are really missing out. You are basically just living on a day to day basis hoping that Google will not change its mind or go through hiccups, and all your hard-earned traffic will disappear overnight.
Brands build trust
By focusing on branding, you build long-term trust. People will only buy from you if they trust you. People will only deal with you if they think you are trustworthy. That’s all there is to online brands. They build trust. Content marketing, by focusing on high-quality content, builds trust. The more your content helps people, the more trust you build. Again, this doesn’t happen overnight. This happens over an extended period of time. Your success is only as good as your last piece of content. There has to be a stable and sustainable quality for content marketing to truly work. Online marketing success in 2014 and beyond depend on your ability to build trust on-line. The most cost-effective way to do that is through content marketing. Content marketing is fast becoming a crucial component of on-line marketing. It used to be just another option for on-line marketing success. Thanks to Google’s recent changes, it is fast shifting to the center. It cannot be ignored.
