by Rahimah Sultan

Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.

With the surge of AI where everybody can publish generic blog posts, remember the foundation of high-quality content is sharing authentic, first-hand experiences.

In its latest search engine updates, Google says content should be helpful and come from human experience.



What is content marketing?


Content marketing is the publishing of written and visual material online to attract more leads to your business. These materials can include e-books, infographics, blog posts, videos, web pages, and more.

It isn’t just publishing a shallow piece of content that offers little value. The focus is on making valuable content that your audience can discover themselves while browsing.

Content marketing is the planning, creating, distribution, sharing, and publishing of content through channels like social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, press releases, apps, print publications, and more. The goal of content marketing is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, engagement, sales, and loyalty.

Some of the most common types of content marketing are:

1. Online Content Marketing

Online content marketing is any material you publish online, but specifically, it applies to your web pages.

With a strong online content marketing strategy you’ll be able to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and get in front of the right people at the right time and immediately engage visitors with specific content about your products or services.

2. Social Media Content Marketing

There are billions of social media users worldwide so it’s easy to see why many businesses invest in social media marketing.

There are several platforms to work with including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Snapchat. Each one offers various ways to create and share content, like photos, pre-recorded videos, pre-recorded videos, live videos, and stories.

3. Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand graphic format that includes a mix of simple wording, short statements, and clear images. These are a great way to effectively communicate your content. They work well if you’re trying to simplify an educational or a complex topic so all audience members can understand it.

4. Blog Content Marketing

A blog is a great source of inbound content that allows you to be creative in your choice of topic and writing. You can use your blog to promote related content using links and social share buttons as well as incorporate product information.

5. Video Content Marketing

According to research, 91% of businesses video as a marketing tool.

You can use video marketing to help build a strong bond with your audience, boost conversions, and improve ROI. You can also choose to share your video content on landing pages, social media platforms, or on a co-marketer’s website.

6. Podcast Content Marketing

Experts predict that in the future over 71 million people will listen to podcasts. That’s 10 million more than the current listeners across the Spotify and Apple Podcast platforms. This is the reason many businesses and media outlets create and share their own podcasts.

Since podcasts can be about any topic, you have plenty of room for a lot of creativity.

You decide the pace of episodes, guests, where you advertise the podcast, and the length of each episode.

7. Paid Ad Content Marketing

You can reach a broad audience with paid ads and position yourself in all the places you want to be seen. Pairing paid ads and inbound marketing is especially beneficial.

Paid ads can be shared on landing pages, social media, banners, and in sponsored content.



What are some content marketing trends?


Google says content should be helpful and come from human experience. This is one of numerous ways to increase your traffic.

Here are some ways content marketing is moving forward and how to use them to your advantage.

1.  Use of AI

The role of AI is to scale and improve, not to come up with the original insight that hasn’t been shared before.

AI writing tools base output on information already somewhere on the internet – other blogs.

For your content to work for you, it has to stand out. The best way to make that happen is by sharing expert insights. AI can’t give you unique, experience-based ideas.

Producing content requires much more than just pumping out text. For it to be valuable for readers, it needs a proper strategy, in-depth research, first-hand knowledge of the industry, and a person to put it all together in a way that’s relatable to readers.

It’s best to use AI to generate top-level outlines, like a skeleton to set a flexible foundation that can be modified later. Then using your expertise, you can elaborate on the details and add insights and depth that only a human can present.

2.  First-Hand Experience

Prioritize sharing first-hand experience. The public loves other people’s stories. If you don’t have expertise in a particular area, you can interview people who do and base your article on their insights.

3.  Source Content

One of the top-ranking factors for content marketing is backlinks, so publish “Be the Source” content to get more traffic, links, and shares from your content marketing.

4.  Authority

Participate in establishing authority in your area of expertise.

Google prefers content created by knowledgeable and reputable people. Setting up yourself as an authority in your area of expertise improves the credibility of your content.

This is really important now when there’s a lot of AI-generated content on the internet.

You want your content to have a face and a story. This will boost your content’s relevance and trustworthiness in the eyes of users and in search engines. Search engines like Google must decide between high- and low-quality content.

5.  Leverage

Use community contributions to boost the credibility and depth of your content by tapping into the collective expertise and experiences of a diverse group.

You can do this by:

a) Collaborating with industry experts in your field to create content and inviting them to share insights.

b) Organizing Q&A sessions with experts or influential people in your industry through live streams, webinars, or interviews.

c) Develop collaborative projects where several contributors can add their expertise. This could be a blog post, a webinar, a research paper, or an industry-related guide.

d) Leverage UGC (User-Generated Content). Urge your audience to contribute their ideas or experiences. This can be through comments, social media interactions, or guest posts.
Promote their work on your platforms as part of the collaboration.

Be sure to give proper credit when you use other people’s content, whether it’s from experts or UGC.

6.  User-Generated Content

A bit more about UGC.

Users or customers create and share content about your brand or product which may include images, reviews, social media posts, or videos, which you can then use in your marketing endeavors.

Instead of using traditional search engines like Google for information, many young people turn to platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Especially when they’re looking for how-to guides or local restaurant recommendations.

There are two main benefits of using UGC:

They prioritize content that comes from other customers, such as unboxing, reviews, and lifestyle videos featuring your product and now that users are creating content for you, you get to:

1. Accelerate the content generation process
2. And you get authentic content that your audience can relate to

7.  Repurpose Content

A great way to scale up your content marketing, without starting over each time you want to create a post for a new format, is repurposing your content on different platforms. Content repurposing is now a hot content marketing trend.

But, over the last few years, people’s standards for content have risen a lot. You can no longer just copy and paste a section a section from your blog post and publish it on social media nor can you just read an article into a microphone and call it quits.

But you can match the content to each format.

For example, repurposing a blog post for a YouTube video requires you to add elements at the beginning like a relatable story, use strategies that work well for the video, and rewrite portions to make sense in the new format.

Another example is reusing steps and tips, as you don’t have to repurpose a total piece of content. As an alternative, take the best sections from a current piece of content and reuse them elsewhere. Using this approach allows you to highlight specific, valuable parts of your content on platforms or in different formats.

8.  Emerging Topics

Another way for your content to stand out is jumping on developing trends BEFORE they take off.

Use Google Trends to confirm that a keyword is growing or shrinking. And check out the “Related queries” section for your chosen topic.

First, check out a keyword you think might be trending up.

Then, go to the bottom of the page and check out the “Related queries” list.

Although Google-related queries are helpful, a check for exploding topics is better.

9.  Improve Content Design

Improve your content design and user experience to suit Google’s algorithms for site speed, navigation ease, and user interaction when ranking websites. When your site loads fast, answers users’ queries, and is easy to navigate, people will stay on your site and interact with it, and they’re more likely to visit other pages of your site.

To improve UX (user experience), you need to:

a) Improving site speed

b) Being thoughtful about pop-up use

c) Design an easy-to-navigate page layout

d) Make call-to-actions and monetization contextually relevant

e) Link only to genuinely helpful content

f) Answer user intent early in your content and not hide important information at the bottom

10. Explainer Visuals

Custom explainer visuals like videos and graphics like screenshots and custom diagrams, are essential in explaining complex concepts.

Focus on creating content that is informative, engaging, and visually appealing.

Design graphics that visually represent data or explain steps needed to do something complex. Establish a YouTube presence. It’s a great place to distribute your content, and Google features YouTube videos on the first page of SERP.

Embedding YouTube videos in your article makes it more engaging and it’s an even greater way to distribute your YouTube videos. If you have a blog and a YouTube channel, embed your videos in your articles to help readers understand the topic even deeper and to increase your video views.

11. Distribute Your Content via Email

Continue distributing content by “personalized” email which involves providing value, encouraging interactions, and building trust. Email is still an important marketing trend.

12. Streamline Content Operations

Streamlined content operations refer to the structured and efficient management of content creation and distribution processes that include:

Setting clear content objectives
Having clear roles and responsibilities
Mapping your content creation process
Organizing tasks and projects
Incorporating effective tools for content planning, writing, and SEO optimization
Continuing to optimize and repurpose your content


Here you have 7 of the most common types of content marketing and future trends. Now you can put a strategy together and work on creating content that will offer real value to your audience and significantly increase your website traffic.


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by Rahimah Sultan

Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.

Affiliate marketing is a versatile flow of revenue that you can leverage no matter what your niche or industry. It’s a great way to monetize your web traffic and earn added income.

While it is possible to “earn money while you sleep,” as you’ve seen advertised, it takes work. Affiliate marketing is certainly one of the best ways to generate nearly passive income online, but you must go about it the correct way. This article covers some general information that you can use, if you want to get started in affiliate marketing this year.


What is affiliate marketing?


Affiliate marketing is promoting and selling someone else’s product or services for a commission. Although it’s a simple concept, the actual process can involve a lot of moving parts.

In affiliate marketing there are sellers who create affiliate programs and make available unique links that the affiliates use to promote the seller’s products. These links are unique to each affiliate marketer to track which marketer makes a sale.


How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

When someone clicks on the affiliate link, a cookie (a small file used by web servers to save browsing information), is stored in their browser. This cookie lets the seller know who sold the product or service and lets the affiliate earn the commission even if the person decides not to buy immediately. Cookies have an expiration date, so to get credit for a sale, the purchase must be made before the cookie expires.

For example, if you’ve clicked on an affiliate link that expires in 30 days but decided not to buy the product and you go back a few days later and make the purchase, the affiliate marketer will get credit for that purchase because it occurred within the 30-day window of the cookie being stored.


Who Are the Participants?

There are three to four key participants in affiliate marketing that include:

Affiliates: people who promote the product or service

Sellers: the creators of the product or the people who are selling the product or service

Networks: networks managing the affiliates (optional)

Consumers: end-users of the product or service


Now, let’s take a closer look at each of these participants.


Affiliates

Affiliates, sometimes called publishers, can be individuals or businesses. More often than not, affiliates are content creators in the same niche of the product they’re promoting. They promote products and services through content like social media posts, blogs, videos, and a number of other types of content. Affiliates can also use paid ads to bring in traffic, but there are typically rules around the keywords that affiliates can use for the products they’re promoting, such as not using the brand name or trade names of the products.

Sellers

The sellers, who can be individuals or companies, create the products or services that affiliates promote. They also pay affiliate commissions for sales.

Networks (optional)

An affiliate network connects publishers with companies who want to promote their products or services like influencers or blog owners.

Many sellers choose to work with an affiliate network to manage their affiliate marketing programs. This network handles third-party checks and manages relationships between sellers and affiliates. ShareASale, Awin, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, and Rakuten Advertising are some of the top affiliate marketing networks.

Consumers

Consumers are the people who buy products and services through affiliate links.


How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid?

Usually, affiliates are paid when a person completes some type of action like a click, form submission, or sale.


How Much Do Affiliates Make?

Affiliate earnings can vary greatly depending on what industry they’re in, the program they join, the commission rate, the price of the products they’re promoting, their marketing skills, and audience size.



What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?


Passive Income

You can make income any time of day or night with affiliate marketing, which makes it a nearly passive income option. You only have to create content and do promotions. You don’t have to be actively participating in the transaction to make it occur. With a system set up to keep things running, you have the potential for a large return with very little continuing effort.

Flexibility

You have incredible flexibility to do what you want and still bring in revenue for your business. You don’t have to create, store, produce, ship, or provide support for the product, you just sell it. This saves you many hours of work. Just choose products you like and think your audience will like, create the content for promoting the products, and then do the actual promotion.

Cost-Effective

It takes money and sometimes a lot of money to start your own business, especially one selling physical products. Affiliate marketing offers you a low-cost way to start your own business and you’ll only need to consider the time it will take to create content and promote.

Low Risk

Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that it’s low risk. As an affiliate, you don’t have to invest money to create or store products. Your only role is marketing and promoting the products to your followers and paid traffic (if you decide to go that route). Even if you use blogging to promote affiliate products, it won’t take a lot of money and if you decide it’s not working out and you quit, it won’t be huge loss. There are large numbers of affiliate products and services you can promote. If one doesn’t work, try another.

No Customer Support

An affiliate marketer doesn’t have to worry about customer support for the products and services you sell. For many affiliate marketers, this is a great relief and gives you the freedom to start your own business without thinking about how to deal with actual customers.

Be sure that the products or services you promote to your followers are of good quality that you would actually use. You want people to get to know, like, and trust you. So, be particular with the affiliate products and services you promote.


You can promote affiliate products through product reviews, in your email newsletter, product comparisons, paid ads, on your blog, and more.

Now that you have a relatively good idea of what it’s all about, you could get started in affiliate marketing this year, even today.


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