4 Content Marketing Examples

When it comes to online marketing and SEO, content is key. Google has spent years and numerous updates making sure that in order to rank organically on Google, you must continuously generate creative, unique content. Content can be a tricky thing and there are several different types of content to account for. If you’re not careful, using the wrong type of content for a particular purpose can be a significant detriment to your organic rankings.

If you’re thinking about hiring a marketing agency or if you plan on trying content marketing yourself, read through this post for some content markting examples and pay attention to the pros and cons.

4 Types of Content Marketing

Automated Content Marketing

Content Created by a Robot!

What is Automated Content?

Automated content is content that is typically created using multiple pieces of software. Individuals can than use these pieces of software to pull in targeted content by keyword, from major websites such as Amazon and New York Times. An extension of this process would be to take the pulled in content and run it through a spintax program in order “try” and create unique pieces of content.

Pros:

Automated content is cheap and easy to come by. Whether you use a tool to automate your own content or if you go through a service that sells automated content, it tends to be very inexpensive. Someone could also create many pieces of content very quickly that look to the end user like it’s legitimate and unique.

Cons:

There are not very many places where you can use automated content without consequences. Google has algorithms that can detect automated content, which in turn will negatively affect your rankings if it is used incorrectly. Automated content has its uses but they are quickly dwindling thanks to Google algorithm updates.

Another con would be for those that plan on using “content spinners”. If you don’t really take the time to QA your content, than chances are you’re going to have to deal with many grammatical errors.

Curated Content Marketing

Curation is like putting a puzzle together if all the pieces are from different puzzles.

 What is Content Curation or Curated Content?[gap height="15"]

The next content marketing example is Curated Content which is similar to automated content in terms of pulling small sections from multiple sources. The end user however would re-organize and re-arrange the content to their liking. Once arranged in a format that is pleasing, the content could either be rewritten sentence-by-sentence to ensure a proper flow and uniqueness or left as it is in the hopes of having enough content from multiple sources to justify uniqueness.

Pros:

Curated content can be very useful when used properly used. It tends to be a faster way for many people to create solid pieces of content that can still rank in Google. We just urge those that try this method to not take any shortcuts. Curate correctly and your content will work effectively.

Cons:

Curated Content is still not as unique as content would be ideally. Therefore, if used in the wrong context or situation, Google can still see it and it may negatively affect the website the content is placed on rather than helping it.

Licensed Content

What is Licensed Content?

Licensed Content is any content that was created and published on another site while their site is licensed. There are many forms of licenses in the online world, so being aware of what they are will help you avoid detrimental fees and burdens in the long run. What many end users don’t understand, is there can be licenses on images, videos, text, and other forms of media. Understanding how to separate the licensed content out will help you if you are trying to not have to spend money on a bunch of stock images.

QUICK TIP! - Hop over to http://images.google.com and perform an image search. In the upper right you should see a little gear icon which will provide a drop-down of settings. Click on “Advanced Search” and wait for the page to load. Once there, the very last search option is called “Usage Rights” with a variety of options. You can use this to filter the images you look for in Google to only show content that can be freely shared commercially and personally.

Pros:

Licensed Content is quick and easy to come by. You can find licensed content all over the Internet. This makes licensed content good in a pinch, it will almost certainly get some reads and can be good if you need fresh content and don’t have the time for curated or original content.

 Cons:

Licensed content is expensive. You will pay for this content eventually, one way or another. If you contact the owner of the content before publishing it, they’re almost always going to charge you a licensing fee. If you choose the less smart route and just put it up regardless, you can expect to hear from the publisher of the content demanding payment (often more than if you had just gotten permission in the first place). In addition, Google is not a huge fan of licensed content and your rankings will suffer if you use it too often.

Original Content Marketing

100% Unique Content

What is Original Content?

Exactly as it sounds, Original Content is the crème de la crème of content. Original content is content that is created by spending time researching your topic and keywords your going after (if this is the end goal). This is content that is written from scratch, and will provide absolute value to major search engines that crawl your website.

Pros:

Generating original, unique content will establish you as a leader in your industry. The perception is that anybody can use ideas from others to sell their services, but only a true innovator and industry leader generates the content that will help others in their industry. Original content is also going to generate more page views on that content; people want to read content they haven’t read before. Original content is also extremely valuable from an SEO perspective due to the fact that major search engines like Google love it! In fact, Google has an acronym called QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) which was released in 2012 which basically states that if your website is consistently generating unique content, your site will be rewarded for it.

Cons:

It’s more costly and time consuming than the other forms of content. Whether you write it yourself or have it written for you, it’s going to cost you. For example, if you’re a lawyer and you want to blog for your site but you don’t want to pay a writer to do it, you write the content yourself. We’ll say the blog takes you an hour to write; as a lawyer, that one hour of your time technically cost you anywhere from $50 to $500. Even if you pay somebody else to generate the content for you, it still takes them time to generate it and they will charge you more than any of the other types of content. That being said, despite the cons of original content, they are far outweighed by the benefits. If you only use one type of content, always use unique content. It’s the safest, most beneficial way to increase your website’s visibility.

Hopefully, this 100% unique and original content that you’ve just read will help give you an idea of what kind of content you would like to feature on your website or blog. Content is the most important part of your organic Google rankings and with each algorithm update Google releases, the value of original content climbs higher. So, keep that in mind when developing your marketing or SEO strategy or you could hire us to do that for you and get high-quality, dynamic, targeted content just the like the blog you’re reading now.