In the last lesson, I focused on guest posting, and the role that it can play in helping you build out your content marketing efforts. In this lesson, I'm going to broaden your view of content marketing mechanics, and I'm going to focus on the core components and how they fit together to make a content marketing program. As we go through this, please keep in mind that content marketing's about building reputation and visibility first. If you do this, it actually turns out to be the best way to obtain the high quality links that you're looking for. You'll also likely trigger other behavior patterns online that search engines use as ranking signals, as well. So, first of all, there's this notion of publishing great content on your site. So here's an example of an article that I published on stonetemple.com, that actually got a link and a detailed write up from the Wall Street Journal. It was really great because that gave us really good visibility, built reputation for us, helped us with our audience, and it got a nice link back to the site. So this notion of publishing great content on your site Is one major component of a content marketing program. There's also the notion of publishing guest posts or other content on third party sites. This is the article I showed you that I published on a HubSpot, in the last lesson, where I published a guest post on HubSpot and got a nice link back to his Stone Temple site. Also really good for your visibility and reputation and got a nice link in the process. So now, let's look a little bit deeper into the process. If you have something on your site, there's great content that you published there, and you get links to that site, so now you're getting links to that great content on your site. And then you might elsewhere on your site have a highly relevant money page. Well, by passing link value into the content, that great content I'm showing there on the left, on your site, that external link value, some of that flows through to that highly relevant money page. And in fact, those links to that great content lift the authority of your entire site. This is why I call that a bank shot because it kind of has to flow through to that money page on your site. Another thing that happens with great content on-site is it can enable off-site publishing opportunities. So let's say I publish a fantastic study on our site with all this data-driven information that media people are eating up left and right. That actually can make it easier for me to go to those media people and suggest, hey, can I write a guest post for you? Or, do you want to interview me? Or, here's a video we did. Do you want to feature that on your site? And that actually might enable me to get links back to that great content on my site, and maybe even, in some cases, directly to that highly relevant money page. Now this is beginning to draw kind of a little virtuous circle thing going on, where everything is self-reinforcing and adds a lot of value to each other. So this is pretty cool. Another concept to think about, since I mentioned guest posting in the last lesson, imagine I have two guest posts. I have guest post one, that I'm showing over here on the left, and guest post two, over on the right. Guest post one is good guest post, links back to our site. That's great. But it didn't get any external links to it. So that guest post did get the value of an editorial vote from the site where I published it. That's good. Better than a sharp stick in the eye, if you like. But, guest post two over here has gotten additional validation because other people have linked to that guest post. That causes guest post two to be more valuable to my site than guest post one. So this is another reason to think about, gosh, it's really important that I'm always publishing really, really good stuff. What I tried to do in this lesson is give you a broader view of content marketing mechanics. A lot of content marketing revolves around how you interact with others and the value of the content you produce. As you saw, getting links to your commercial pages is good. But it's also good to get links to your other content, as well. All of these signals are important to search engines. It's also important to build an audience for your content, and in the next lesson, we'll start to talk about how to do that.
