By Roberto Garvin
Are you after search engine traffic?
You must be if you want to increase online visibility for your business.
Whether it is search engine traffic you want or even brand awareness, content is key to your marketing strategy.
According to findings released by Kapost, the report shows that content marketing costs 62% less and generates 3 times as many leads.
And it seems that 93% of B2B marketers already know this because they are using content marketing to grow their business.
So it’s really a no-brainer.
But mere knowing that content is king does nothing for you.
You have to develop a strategy, create high-quality content, and promote the breeze out of your content to get the best out of it.
Sounds expensive right?
Not necessarily.
Don’t get me wrong, content marketing can be expensive.
In fact, 65% of companies believe content marketing is too expensive. But at the same time, you can do content marketing on a shoestring budget.
Heck, you can do it with no budget at all.
In this article, I will show you how to launch a solid content marketing campaign that will multiply your results, without spending any additional penny.
Here’s the quick five-point sketch of doing content marketing without additional cost:
- Find content ideas
- Create regular top-notch content
- Prepare for promotion
- Repurpose your content
- Do SEO
Now let’s go in deep.
Find content Ideas
For there to be any content marketing, there must first be content.
And one of the best tools to use to source for content is Ahrefs, but since our goal is to spend as little money as possible, we will have to improvise.
If you want to get effective content ideas for free, then you must be ready to steal them.
Trust me; it’s not what you think.
Let me explain.
If you want to come up with your own 100% original idea, you might waste time and resource, and still come up short.
So why not use what already works?
Search for the niche you are into or the topics you’d like to create content about. Chances are, what you want to say to your audience has been said before.
And not just blogs; search for videos, listen to podcasts.
Another good place to check is Amazon. Enter the keyword or niche into the search bar and see which books come up.
Browse through the content of some of the most popular books to get a brief overview of what they are talking about. There are some great tools that makes Amazon marketing easier.
Create content
Now that you have your content ideas and strategy set out, it’s time to create your content. As much as it is important to put together content, equally important is to add value and create material that invites readership.
Add variety to it.
There are other forms of content such as podcasts, infographics, videos, etc. But first, you need to know your buyer persona in order to figure out the best content to develop for them.
Ideally, you can hire a bunch of freelancers or a content development team to create your content, but again, we do not want to incur additional costs.
Share content responsibility among members of your staff. After all, who knows your business more than the people that work in it?
If you run a one-man business, you will have to take up the mantle yourself. Be careful not to stretch yourself or team too thin. You mustn’t create content every single day.
According to a study by Hubspot, posting around 16 times a month will do the job.
Promote your content
Your content is only as good as the number of people that see it, hence the need for promotion.
One of the best strategies for content promotion is to get people to share your content.
If you don’t have a budget for outreach, include other people in your content.
How?
You can take a quote from a popular person in your niche and include it in your article. When it goes live, reach out to them on Twitter or via mail, and tell them what you have done.
You can also use Muck Rack to see who has shared content similar to yours and reach out to them to see if they will share yours too.
Repurpose your content
Don’t mind the mouth-full word, repurposing your content simply means turning the original piece of your content into something else.
Top-notch content takes a lot of time and resources to produce, so don’t expect to produce high-quality original content every single day.
It simply isn’t possible.
However, you can make one high-quality content work time and time again for you.
How?
For example, you have created an in-depth guide and published it on your blog this week, you can turn that blog post into infographics next week, and a SlideShare the week after that.
You are simply reformatting it to capture new audiences.
Do SEO
Search engine optimization is the quickest way to get seen on Google. The first thing is to check your website SEO score. The goal is to scan the pages to point out any SEO errors that need fixing. Try to bring your SEO score to at least 90%.
If you are using WordPress, use Yoast SEO to optimize your content for free.
Conclusion
70% of your prospective customers want to find out about your business from an article rather than through advertisements.
This tells you that content marketing is not an option, but a necessity for your business to thrive.
So whether or not you have a budget should not be a reason not to do content marketing.
Content marketing, if done right, will not only increase your traffic & revenue; it will also increase your authority in your industry.
So now that you know it doesn’t necessarily require a budget to execute an effective content marketing strategy, how about you follow these steps and start out?
Roberto Garvin is the cofounder of Mofluid. @mofluid
Content stock photo by eamesBot/Shutterstock
