Being a remote worker is fun… but I’ll tell you more about that later.

I recently made the quick drive up I-95 to The Dillon in Raleigh for my second Meetup this year. This month’s topic was all about content marketing. Casie Gilette, a contributing author for Search Engine Land and the Senior Director of Digital Marketing for KoMarketing, an agency in Boston, was the guest speaker. Casie was super nice and obviously an expert in her field. She shared some tips that I’m going to pass on to you so that you can use them in your content marketing strategy.

The main reason why I like working remotely is that I am in a completely different market than most of my coworkers. A different market means new opportunities to learn that aren’t available to everyone else. Being so close to the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, Cary), there are always free learning events and meetups focused on the latest trends in tech or marketing. If there are any free opportunities like this near you, I encourage you to attend as well. I find most of these meetings on Meetup.com or on the app. Meetups are a great way to learn more about your industry and to connect with other people who share the same interests as you.

Content Marketing can take on many forms – it can be blog posts, posts on social media, email newsletters, videos, etc. For today’s purpose, we’re going to focus on blog content.

When creating the first blog post for your website, there are some things to consider:

• Why am I creating this piece of content? Is it to engage my audience? Is it to grow my audience?
• What am I creating it for? This could be form signups, shares, a purchase, etc.
• Who is my audience? Small business owners? Teenagers or young adults looking for new fashion trends? Parents looking for a summer camp for their kids? Decide who you’re writing for and try to target your writing to that age range and their knowledge of the subject.

The content you write should be meaningful and serve a purpose. Content is king, but context is queen. It’s very important to have the right context in order for your readers to understand what you are talking about and engage with the content.

The second step, after writing meaningful content, is to measure your goals and decide on a baseline performance level. This will come a little bit later after you have published enough content to measure. I would suggest looking at your website traffic after about 6 blog posts to get an accurate representation of performance. Then you can look at the articles that performed well and the ones that performed below average to decide what topics your readers are most interested in. From there, you can keep creating content you know will perform well.

After a year or two, you can even begin to refresh content. There is no point in spending more time writing something completely different – take the old content that you already have and refresh it. You can update the content that performed well by giving it a new title, adding new pictures, or relating it to a current event.

Real life example of companies re-purposing content:

Content marketing is a great way to be seen in search results and get more traffic to your website. If you don’t have good content, chances are you will appear lower in the search results than your competition. At Goebel Media, part of our SEO process is optimizing existing content. We will go through each existing blog article you already have and add keywords that are specific and competitive to your industry and answer the questions that users are searching for. We use leading industry tools to find the best fit for your business. Interested in learning more? Give us a call or email us and we will tell you more about our SEO packages.