9 Ways to Use Content Marketing to Boost Online Sales

Content marketing has become a very important method for businesses to reach out to their target audiences. It involves providing content online that your customers might find interesting and/or helpful. Valuable content will help you engage potential customers and bring in new business. Here are 10 types of content marketing you can use to boost online sales. Whether your business already has a content marketing plan or you’re just starting out, hopefully you’ll find something useful in this list for your online business.

Blog Posts

Blogging is one of the most potent content marketing tools at your disposal. Blogs allow you to provide as much useful and interesting content as you can and easily spread the information to lots of people. If you’re not sure where to start with your blog, try to provide general information about your product or think of questions that customers have asked in the past and give the answers. You can also look and see what other similar businesses are talking about on their websites for inspiration.

Guest Blog Posts

Once you get comfortable writing your own blogs, you can expand your reach by writing guest blog posts. These are blog posts that you write for other websites that are relevant to your business to try to expand your reach to new people. You need to build a relationship with the owner of the site to get permission. You might offer a trade of guest posts so both of your websites receive more traffic.

Email Lists

Having a list of emails for current and potential clients is an amazing resource for spreading content. Posts to social media sites such as Facebook may only reach a small amount of your followers. Emails are guaranteed to at least go through to everyone on the list (though whether or not they read it is up to them!) Start your email list ASAP by adding an email subscription form to your website. Then you can send content as a regular newsletter containing whatever information you want. If you add incentives, such as a chance to win free products, you’ll get even more people interested.

Videos

Videos are a great way to provide content, and people love watching them. Since they are more visual than regular text, you can express yourself in many ways that don’t work as well in a blog. You can supplement your blog with similar information or provide completely different content. Set up a YouTube channel for your business, create videos, and link them to your website.

Images and Infographics

Images are a powerful tool and can relay a large amount of information to your audience. Use photographs, illustrations, or other types of images to spice up your content. Link them to your website, blogs, and social media posts. Infographics can be even more useful since they can combine the visuals of pictures with informative text. However, when choosing pictures to use for your content marketing, make sure that they are ones you made yourself or that you have permission to use. Otherwise you can get in some legal trouble.

Podcasts

The popularity of podcasts has exploded in recent years. People listen to them in the car, at work, while doing chores, or while hanging out pretty much anywhere thanks to smart phones and laptops. Record interviews, stories, or other information about your business and post them as podcasts for your customers to download.

Ebooks

Anyone can make an ebook to either sell or give away online. You just need to combine enough information about your business into one package for distribution. After you’re done writing and putting together the information, provide a download of it on your website.

Surveys and Interviews

Your content doesn’t always have to come from your own mouth: ask around for information from your audience or other people in your profession or niche. Surveys and interviews are both great ways to get information to your customers in a smooth and easy-to-understand way. Use them to bring more interest to the topics related to your business.

Testimonials

Similar to surveys and interviews, testimonials also allow you to get content about your business from the points of view of other people. Testimonials are endorsements from customers that provide proof of the value of your business. New customers tend to feel more comfortable with a business if they can see that other people have already tried the product and support it. Urge your customers to provide feedback about their experiences and put them on your website or social media.

Content marketing is a great way to boost sales for your online business. Use these methods as a starting point and get the content flowing on your website! You can also check out more ways to spice up your website and boost online sales with VMA's blog here.

Social Media and the Unfiltered Internet

Do you remember The Dress? The one that no one could decide whether it was gold and white or blue and black. The one that was being talked about all over the place in 2015. Did you know that the original post for the dress was a Facebook post that got fewer than 20 likes? It was only later, when it was posted to Tumblr and Twitter, that the dress picture because the phenomenon of The Dress.

Filtered Internet Content

The Internet is a huge place that’s expanding every day. In fact, we can only see a tiny portion of it. And that portion is further shrunken by the social media platforms that we use to browse for entertainment or work. The general population adds to these sites constantly, providing an ever-expanding source of content. The question arises though: is there too much content?

Even if you browse social media sites all day every day, you won’t be able to see even a small fraction of their content. This poses a problem for the companies running these sites. They want people to stick around and continue to browse the site, because the more viewers they have, the more money they get from advertising. If a viewer’s feed is too bogged down by uninteresting or irrelevant content, they are more likely to stop going to that site altogether.

This problem has caused most social media sites to start filtering content in one way or another. For example, Facebook decides what to show on your feed based on many underlying factors, such as your sex, age, marital status, and the types of websites and links you tend to visit. In general this is a good thing, since it makes our feeds more interesting and pertinent to us. However, it also causes a sizable underlying layer of social media that gets lost and unseen in the shuffle.

Hidden Content

This hidden content is public and recognized by search engines, but it only reaches a tiny audience and is difficult to find if you’re looking for it. To give you an idea of how much content is hidden, here’s a study from 2009 that showed that 53% of YouTube videos had under 500 views!

Hidden content (besides the spam) often feels more honest, since it doesn’t contain the repetitive formulas of mainstream traffic that keeps those posts more visible to search engines. It also tends to be more amateurish, of low quality, be too short or too long, and have titles that are difficult to find in a search. In general, the hidden content feels more candid, intimate, and human.

If you’re interested in sifting through this forgotten content, several resources have popped up to help you. These include Oviews for unwatched YouTube videos, SadTweets for unseen Twitter tweets, and Forgotify for unheard songs on Spotify.

Using the Unfiltered Internet

As with every resource, some people have actually found a way to get money from the underbelly content of the unfiltered Internet. Some companies search through public photos that people post online looking for recognizable brands. They then sell the photos to the brand’s company for demographic information or advertisement.

Some of the unpopular content is eventually discovered and becomes extremely popular for a time. When content goes viral like this, the original poster very rarely profits from their fame, and sometimes it can even cause them harm. Imagine having a video you posted go viral to the point where you get hundreds of notifications per hour. It would get old quickly and make it impossible to actually find the notifications that you want to see. This is what happened to the girl who originally posted about The Dress. Her phone kept crashing from the influx of notifications. In the aftermath, BuzzFeed posted about a party they were throwing to celebrate The Dress as their largest post ever. It’s impossible to know exactly how much money BuzzFeed made off of that post, but it is known that the original poster didn’t really benefit.

What is interesting (and disconcerting) is that the biggest post on one of the most popular social media sites was taken from another site, which was also taken from another site, without the permission or knowledge of the act from the original poster. No one was compensated for this string of events, and the post was eventually taken down due to copyright infringement.

The Internet is becoming more and more centralized and controlled by corporations trying to subsist on other people’s content. Some of these companies last a long time, while others disappear and are quickly replaced by something else. The future of these companies and social media in general is unclear. It’s similarly hard to tell what will happen to the enormous amount of unseen content that makes up the majority of the unfiltered Internet as it continues to expand every second.

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