4 Killer Content Advertising Tools for Growing Your Business

The digital space has become extremely crowded this last year with an increase in low quality and poorly written content. Major media sites show little concern for offering true value to their readers any more.

As we have come to hear personally from editors and bloggers for nationally recognized magazines, your specific job is to write a controversial story and to be sure to use the best exaggerated headline that will bait your audience into clicking to read your entire post.

For each page view received that can be attributed to your post, as a blogger, you are compensated. The result is that media bloggers for “top” online outlets continue to produce sh*tty and often times very irrelevant content merely for the sake of gaining increased page views and ultimately more monetary compensation from their employers.

It’s not the bloggers fault. It is a systematic flaw for which online media sites monetize via digital ad space. Since online ads are most often purchased on a cost per click basis or per thousand page views; it makes sense that the goal would be to drive as much traffic as possible.

The easiest way to drive traffic and online views is to write controversial, untruthful, and exaggerated stories. This is the type of news that evokes emotions, response, and increases the likelihood that a story is shared online. Think about it, people like gossip. It’s funny, exciting, interesting, and unforgettable.

If You’re Not A Magazine, Don’t Blog Like One

Driving page views is the ultimate goal for magazines and other big online media sites. It ultimately increases their ad revenue and their profit. But you’re not a media site. You are a CEO, business owner, marketing director, or PR specialist for a reputable brand and you are looking for the best and most appropriate means to growing your business. So what is your content marketing strategy?

The best content marketing strategy for an established business is to consistently write high quality articles, publish thought provoking case studies, write fact driven white papers, and impress with forward thinking ebooks.

The problem is that many businesses fall trap to the current internet marketing trend of over blogging and under writing. It will not impress your clients, it will not help you attract customers, and it can devalue your brand. Blogging for the sake of blogging is not hip and is not smart.

Blog Less, Write Better, then Advertise

Instead of blogging every single damn day about water cooler discussions and stressing yourself to come up with something relevant to write about just for the sake of producing content, consider blogging once or twice a week about meaningful and insightful topics when you have the opportunity to provide value in your words to others.

Before posting anything online you should always ask yourself, “If I read this on an external website, would I consider sharing this with friends, coworkers, or family on social media outlets?” If you answer yes, then most likely you’ve written something that is of value to others. If not, then you haven’t.

Once you’ve written a post, case study, or ebook that you feel others would enjoy reading you are almost ready to publish. Next, edit your content, add high quality images, optimize for keywords, and finally advertise like hell.

How to Win the Content Marketing Game

The key to winning the content marketing game is to do just that, market your material. By this we mean advertise, advertise, advertise. If you’re going to spend precious resources on producing industry leading case studies and writing ground breaking white papers, then you need to make sure people read your material. This is where content advertising becomes a major part of your content marketing strategy.

Content advertising is the concept of driving traffic directly to your blog post, press release, infographic, tutorial video, or case study. It provides you as the brand marketer, the opportunity to impress your target audience while they are in the consumption of relevant media mindset.

It provides you a great opportunity to sell the customer with examples and your extensive knowledge of a subject without directly pitching them on your service or product. The concept is quite interesting. You provide great value to your audience in the form of great content and in turn your audience will listen to you and allow you the chance to soft sell your business. A fair trade for any marketer.

4 Great Content Advertising Platforms Marketers Love

There are hundreds of content marketing platforms and mediums. Some offer niche audiences, others are more broad, some have minimal ad spends, and others include complex algorithms for which they recommend your content to specific readers. Which advertising solution you choose should depend on your brand, marketing goals, budget, and target market.

For starters here are a few platforms that are both easy to use and highly effective for most brands.

1.  Stumbleupon – One of our favorite social bookmarking and content discovery sites (be warned you can easily spend hours on this site discovering incredibly hilarious photos, reading about exotic islands, learning life hacks, and finding websites that will otherwise change your life); Stumbleupon is a very affordable advertising solution for your business and is guaranteed to drive immediate traffic.

It’s also very easy to use and manage. Simply copy and paste your blog URL, set your target demographics, set your budget, and you’re done. Most ad campaigns are approved within hours.

2.  BuzzFeed– You know the hilarious site Buzzfeed where you traditionally find an incredible list of painfully honest and hilarious truths such as, “15 Ways You Know You’re Almost 30.” They provide an incredible option for an ad campaign in which your content is almost guaranteed to go viral to a degree.

In fact their editorial team will work with you to write, publish, and promote a post on your behalf. This is a great option if you have the budget and the right target audience.

3.  Twitter Advertising – Don’t overlook one of the biggest social networks, Twitter. These guys provide an extremely affordable, effective, and easy self-serve advertising solution. Advertising a tweet with a link to your blog post is a great way to not only drive relevant traffic to your site and increase brand exposure but it is a great way to increase the number of inbound social signals.

Social signals are increasingly important to organic keyword ranking so this is a great marketing tactic. Of course Twitter provides measurable analytics as well.

4.  Content.ad  – Perhaps this is what you’ve been looking for? Content.ad helps marketers grow their audience and extend their online reach by promoting and sponsoring your content on third party sites around the web.

Whether you are a small company with a particular niche market or a large brand, Content.ad is easy to use and is an extremely effective means to advertising your content.

Blog less, write better, then advertise. It is a simple formula for great success and can do wonders for your brand.

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