Lesson: What is content marketing?/ExerciseL1

Listening Exercise

Every day more and more people are using

and social media to search for

and socialize on the web. You already know that

for your business to succeed in this

, you need to draw these people to your

, but how? With content marketing you can build a

of traffic, leads and sales. And best of all, with the right

you can do it for

cost of other forms of marketing.

What is content marketing?

It's

the creation, publishing and promotion of custom content, placed on

and tested landing pages. All done on a regular basis.

How does it work?

It all starts with creating

content, but not just any old content. In order to draw people to your website, you need to create

,

content that helps people solve their problems and answers their questions. Each

content you create should have a catchy title or headline that

people's attention and finally, your content must also be

keyword optimized to rank high in the search engines.

Once you've created your content, it's time to

to your website and to other popular sites on the web. Content for your website can be in the form of articles, blog posts, white papers, e-books, how-to videos and more. All placed on carefully

landing pages. Each page of new content you've published is another opportunity to draw more people into your site from search engines and

sites. And as an added bonus, adding all this great content to your site on a regular basis will build your site into a

in your industry. Keep your visitors coming back often and staying longer and increase your conversion rates.

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Now that your site is

each month with fresh custom content, it's time to publish more content on other popular sites out on the web. This means publishing your content to blogs, article directories, video sharing sites and other high-traffic sites. And since the content you've published in these sites

links back to your site you get more traffic and higher link popularity. Over time this causes the content you've placed on your own site to

in the search engines. Content marketing also involves promoting all of your new content using social networking and bookmarking sites. This is where you go out and

about all that great new content you've been creating. And since your content is so

or interesting, people tell others about it. And before you know it, lots of people are coming to your site to check it out.

And, now comes the part where all that time spent creating great content finally pays off. Once people find your content and land on your website you turn them into qualified leads using carefully testing landing pages with call-to-action links or contact forms.

To

, by creating, publishing and promoting helpful interesting content on a regular basis, content marketing will help you develop your site into a trusted authority in your field, increase your site's conversion rates, rank higher in the search engines for competitive keywords, build a permanent source of targeted links and traffic and

lots of qualified leads and sales from your site.