“Is content marketing dead?“

I’m pretty sure this is not the first time you’ve heard about this. Debates after debates, I can conclude that content marketing is here to stay. I mean, look at Neil Patel’s $100,000 challenge.

After he wrote a blog post about how anyone can make $100,000 a month in revenue within a year, he decided to start a nutrition blog called NutritionalResource.com to prove that it’s possible.

If Neil Patel can do it, why not you? He started the whole new blog from scratch and he managed to grow the blog’s traffic to 218,811 visitors and revenue to $121,492.65.

Source: Quick Sprout

Content marketing is powerful that it can help to get the results that you want for your business. In order to achieve that, you need to have the best content marketing strategy. If you’ve done everything that you can and your website is still not doing well, then probably you’re doing it the wrong way.

Many people think that they’re doing very well because admit it, it’s hard for us to accept our mistakes. It can also be that we’re doing the mistakes without us realizing it.

So in this blog post, I’ll be telling you why your content marketing fails, and ways that you can fix it to get on the right track of content marketing.

1) Lack Of Content Marketing Strategy

This is the most common mistake that many marketers are making, with or without them realizing it. Content marketing strategy is the backbone of your business. If you’re not planning it thoroughly, you’re planning to fail. Just Like what Benjamin Franklin said:

Many people think that once they have started their website, they can write any topic that they like to. But honestly, that is a very wrong way to start. You have to firstly identify your target audiences, and then take some time to plan for your topics.

Just like what we’re doing in SEOPressor. Our main focus is on SEO and inbound marketing, which explains why we’re always writing about the search engines and content marketing. We write topics that are targeted to our audiences. We don’t write fashion or entertainment news because it is not our objective.

Therefore, you have to refine your content marketing strategy and provide useful information to the audiences in order to get more visitors. If you’re not sure on what are the topics that your audiences like, you can refer to Google Trends where it gives you a clear view of what the audiences are interested in.

Other than Google Trends, you can also use Blog Title Generator to get creative content ideas.

2) You’re Not Promoting Your Content

This is the quickest way to kill your content marketing. Creating content is only a part of your content marketing strategy, the other half of it would be promoting them. Content promotion is as important as content creation, especially for new websites.

It’s not easy to reach out to your target audiences without content promotion. Let’s say you have just started your business about SEO service, but there are so many other SEO services out there. How do you reach out to your audiences? The only best way is to reach out to them by promoting your content.

Here are some alternatives where you can do content promotion:

Social Media

What’s the best way to do content promotion if it’s not social media?

Personally, I promote my content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. In Twitter, use the power of hashtag to get more exposure for your content.

While in Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn, get into the communities and groups to share your content with the people who are in the same industry as you. There are still beginners out there who need guidance, or even experts who have overlooked something may find a helpful point from your content.

Email Newsletter

Other than promoting our content on social media, we also promote them through the email newsletter.

In SEOPressor, we use email newsletter to reach out to our subscribers about our latest blog posts.

Every month, SEOPressor will compile the blog posts that we’ve written and put it in an email to be broadcasted to our subscribers. In this way, subscribers who didn’t follow up on our daily blogs will get to keep up with our content.

Forums & Other Blogs

Hanging out at forums like Inbound.org and GrowthHackers are very useful for us marketers. It is where people who are in the same industry share their knowledge. Since it’s a forum, people often ask questions in there. So what I usually do is monitoring the forums and read through all the questions being asked.

Exchanging feedback with other marketers increases interaction, which helps to strengthen your network.

If I found anything that I can answer, I will help them by commenting down below and provide a link to my blog post as well if they’d like to know more. In this way, not only you’re able to help the others, but you’re earning links at the same time.

3) Your Content Sucks

I’m sorry to say this, but let’s face the reality. We all have our ups and downs when creating content. It’s not a 100% success thing.

When you first launched your website, I understand that you’ll feel excited and overwhelmed with the new site. However, you should not let the excitement took over and get lost in it. You may have many content ideas for your new site, but you have to remember the importance of content marketing – increasing brand awareness.

Creating too much content that is targeted to the wrong audiences will never work. You’ll probably feel like writing as much content as you can get more traffic to your site, but that’s not true.

If you do not even know what kind of content to produce for your targeted audiences, how are you going to have a winning content marketing plan? Also, creating clickbaity headlines in your site will not bring you positive impact as well. (You can read more on why clickbait headlines is bad for your website here.)

Headline like this tends get many shares, but it’s low on actual details – Why should we believe it? And who is this girl?

We’re all creating content, it is an ongoing process and we will never stop. But we also have other daily tasks to complete that we don’t really have much time to create content. Hence, some marketers choose to simply hire ghostwriters for their content.

This can a smart choice if the write ups are good, but what if it isn’t?

Hiring ghostwriters requires an effort to understand them as well. You have to know what are they able to write, what do they know, and what do they not know. Let’s say you’re asking them to write about SEO, but how many people actually know about SEO? Turns out, your blog post about SEO will be worthless because it doesn’t provide the information that readers are looking for.

Readers want to read content that is engaging, in-depth, and valuable. Instead of just writing plain content, you should highlight your key points by decorating them with bold, italics, or underlined.

Not only headings are convenient for readers, it also help to improve your ranking on Google for specific keywords and phrases.

By doing this, readers who do not have much time can skim through your blog post in a glance, which makes things easier for them. In addition, this is also good for your SEO.

4) You Ignore The Power Of A Story

Our brains work differently when it comes receiving information and hearing stories. If you’re a good writer, why did you content marketing fails?

Readers love stories. That is why it is important to write your blog post through storytelling.

Other than that, you can also make your content more presentable by using images or infographics. In SEOPressor, we make sure to have a ratio of 1 image for every 100 words in the blog post so that we wouldn’t bore the readers.

Having an appropriate amount of images in your content help to keep your readers to stay longer on your website.

You have to give the audiences what they want. Users are on Google because they’re looking for answers to their questions. So you have to make sure that your content has the solution for them.

When they found that you’re providing all the information that they’re looking for, they will share your content around to help the others as well. With this, your website’s traffic will increase.

Another tip of writing a storytelling blog post is also by using conversational tone. Treat your readers like a friend and explain to them like how you would to a friend. Use more of first person language like I, You, or We, to be more personal to the readers. With this, readers will feel more comfortable and a relationship will be established from there.

Our readers not only need words, but they also need images and infographics to look at for better understanding. For example, this infographic about content marketing is by far the best infographic that demonstrates how you can reach new and different audiences.

Source: Copyblogger

To make sure that you’re producing a well-written blog post that has a story, the basic step would be making sure your readers can understand your content easily.

I have seen writers producing great content, but the content is just too hard to read. Don’t write content that your readers have to read twice to understand your message. It will not bring you any positive impact. Instead, you’re driving your readers away.

You can find out whether your written blog post is easy or hard to read at Readability Score.

5) You’re Impatience

When starting content marketing, remember this: content marketing takes time to show amazing results.

It is not paid marketing that brings instant results. Even for paid marketing, the results don’t last long. You can pay for 3 months for advertisements, but how many more 3 months can you afford to pay if the Return On Investment (ROI) is not met?

Therefore, you have to give some time for your content to grow and gain popularity on the web to get some organic traffic.

Seeing other successful companies and the amount of traffic they have generated from content marketing can be good. But if it’s the other way round that it’s giving you pressure, then you should take a step back and think about your content marketing strategy instead.

You might not be able to double your traffic like the others right now, but if you’re getting results from content marketing, you should be satisfied with it. Be proud that you’ve made it this far! Always look for gradual improvements because success doesn’t happen overnight.

6) Your Content Is Not Optimized

Content marketing and SEO comes together like best friends. You need both content marketing and SEO in order to get the best results.

Although SEO is more technical compared to content marketing, but it’s not hard at all. All you need to do is just start from the basics – keyword. Do keyword research and look for the keywords that people are searching for, then you aim for that particular keyword and rank for it. You can read this blog post to understand more about user’s intent.

If you’re already doing both content marketing and SEO but the results are still not satisfying, you could be doing it wrong. Don’t think that since you’re doing SEO, everything will go well. There may be a few things that you have overlooked and didn’t know about.

In this case, we usually use our WordPress plugin, SEOPressor to analyze our blog posts. In the SEOPressor on-page SEO analysis system, we can easily see our score and suggested optimization to do SEO the right way.

SEOPressor is like a checklist for us to analyze the steps that we’ve overlooked to improve our on-page SEO.

This saves a lot of our time and makes our day even more productive.

7) You’re Doing What Search Engines Dislike

After spending more than half year in doing content marketing, an important lesson that I’ve learned is that content is not only written for human, but search engines too. It’s hard to rank your content when search engines can’t even understand what your content is about.

Therefore, you have to always keep the search engines in mind. Never do anything that the search engines dislike, especially the black hat techniques. Other than that, if you’re still using the link building method, you should stop. Switch to link earning instead.

You could have heard this many times, but I’m just going to say this again – link building is no longer preferred by the search engines. Building your links by leaving your website’s URL on other people’s website can be treated as spam because you’re not providing any valuable information.

Link earning, on the other hand, is a better way to earn organic traffic. When people share your links because you have great content, you will automatically earn quality links and no longer have to build them.

Therefore, it is important to do SEO the right way for your content to be ranked on the top results of search engines. Once you’re there, your organic traffic will definitely increase.

8) You’re Not Measuring Your Results

From coming out with topics to producing content, then optimizing it – the whole process takes a lot of time. Now that you’ve gained organic traffic, do you know the exact amount of traffic that you’ve gained?

Measuring the success of your content marketing strategy is very important. You have to know how much you have progressed in order to go further. A favorite tool that most content marketers love using to measure the success is Google Analytics.

Make sure you use Google Analytics to keep track of your blog traffic.

With Google Analytics, you will be able to see the amount of traffic generated and where does the traffic come from. If one of the blog posts is not performing well, you can always check on it and make some changes.

In SEOPressor, we measure our results every month and analyze on how we can proceed from there. If things are doing well, we will keep it going. But if we have blog posts that are not performing well, we will switch to another method to fix the problem.

9) You’re Not Enjoying It

Hey, lighten up! You’re doing content marketing, I’m sure you love writing, right?

If you enjoy it, then you should show it and make content fun again because when you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, it shows in your writing. Content marketing does not need to be serious, it can be fun as you’re sharing your knowledge with each other.

Since Pokemon Go is the current trend now, you can even make a fun content and relate to it. You can also use memes in your content to be humorous, your readers would love that!

Readers love meme because it’s entertaining.

Here are more tips you can consider when publishing content:

• Use more LSI keywords to avoid keyword spamming. You can get more suggestions at LSIGraph.
• Always include keywords in your URL, title, and meta description for better SEO.
• Support your content with reliable sources to increase credibility.

Bring Your Content Marketing Back To Life

Now that you know the importance of content marketing and the mistakes you’re making, it’s not too late to save it. Don’t be like a friend of mine who ended his online business just because he wasn’t not doing well. There’s always time to make the changes and refine your content marketing strategy by following the suggestions above.

Most content marketing team creates a practical content marketing strategy to make it successful. It may take some time, but it’s gonna be worth it. What do you think is most important in content marketing? Do you have a content marketing plan that you’d like to share with us? Do leave us a comment down below.

SEO Checklist:
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Updated: 26 April 2024

About Winnie

Winnie is an aspiring copywriter & internet marketer in the vast world of digital marketing. She's as curious as she can be; constantly hunting for answers to her questions, never saying no to new experiences. When she's not spending her time typing up a storm, she is at home keeping up with her never-ending movie marathon & books.

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