Why Content Marketing is So Valuable For Small Business Owners

Content marketing and your website form the heart of doing business in today’s world. Each is dependent on the other, and neither exists successfully alone.

What do I mean by “content marketing”? Writing and publishing information online. What kinds of information? Mainly “how to” pieces that teach people something or help them solve their problems in some way.

The form that such information takes is becoming ever more creative and varied. For example, it includes website pages, blogs, white papers, e-books, special reports, news releases, and online articles (like this one). It also includes teleseminars, vlogs (video blogs), podcasts, audios, and YouTube videos.

Building Relationships

Content marketing is a wonderful way to communicate with your online visitors and demonstrate the value of your knowledge, skills and expertise.

In many cases, it is a good idea to give away such information for free because it enables more and more people to experience the value of what you have to offer first-hand, creates goodwill and trust, and develops positive relationships.

As a result, whenever your visitors need your product or service, they will come to you first!

SEO Benefits

Probably the most important benefit of content marketing is that it greatly increases the visibility of your website. In other words, it builds off-page SEO.

What do I mean by that? Well, when people find that your articles, blogs and white papers are valuable, they will pass them along to others. This often means that they create a link to the page on your website where the information is located.

The wonderful thing about this is that search engines place an extremely high value on the outside links that point to a page on your site-especially if the links come from valuable websites with lots of traffic and links themselves. In fact, about 75% of SEO is based on off-page links! (Only about 25% is based on the onsite SEO you can do yourself.)

As a result, the more links that point into your website, the higher you will rank in search results. This enables growing numbers of potential clients to discover you-whether your audience is local, regional, national or global.

For all of these reasons, it is well worth the time and effort it takes to create and share content with others!