Content = Online Visibility
After several years of online promotion training and hacking my way through the jungle of social networks, I have discovered the key to any online marketing campaign. If you have it, you can take the world. If you haven't cracked this one element, you're screwed.
Content.
Don't have a way to create content? Forget it. Able to create content? You're in.
Content: the number one priority for any online marketing campaign. Should you have Facebook and all the other social networks implemented into your "marketing mix?" Sure. But you don't own those. Plenty of business owners have had their Facebook business pages removed without recourse. And social networks are a little on the fad side, tending to disappear after they saturate the market. Or at least, they get overshadowed by the next "big thing." Remember MySpace? Yeah, I haven't logged in for about a year...
Content is king because you can create it once, and use it about 5 different ways. And once it's posted, it lives forever online (potentially). Keep posting content consistently and you'll eventually beat out most of your competition. Add a little SEO sense and you can take over the top ranking competitors and they'll probably have a hard time catching up if you can out-content them.
Competition analyses over the past few years have revealed to me that about 20% of companies in any category show up on the top of search results simply because they are consistently creating more content than the other 80%. So while it might take a long time to beat out your current number one online competitor, you can still make your way onto the first page of search results with relevant content your audience will read and interact with consistently.
It's not the amount of content only, it has to be high quality. If it doesn't resonate with your target audience, and if it's crudely copied from some other content (or worse, simply copied from another sitestraight-up plagarism), Google will penalize your site eventually. Google's rooting for the consumer to have great, useful content, and you should too. If that's not a priority for your, your website won't be a priority for Google Search Results.
A Quick Case Study: From Zero to Hero
One of my clients, The Association of Film and Video Producers, started a new boot camp for Canon video-capable cameras three years ago. While they had a website for video production and commercials, nothing existed on the Canon Boot Camp because it was new. I implemented a special blogging platform and got busy creating content. When we started teaching classes, it took all month and several people promoting to fill the class. Now we get the same number of people and 90% or more of the students find us online through search. Many of them remark to me how the Canon Boot Camp shows up on the first page for various search terms. Here's a graph of the number of visits and organic visits (red) daily since we started the new blog:
A common "objection" business owners tell me is that they "don't have anything to write about" for their blog. Look in emails, past newsletters and even just everyday conversations to answer questions for content. Online content can be very conversational, not sales-oriented most of the time, and still be very effective.
In most cases, say online what you already say in person, and most of the time it'll work and you'll get more visible online. To understand more about how online promotion works, watch this video.
