I’ve been a little light on the posting over the course of January – busy with Iddictive, man-flu and client projects.
However, this site continues to receive traffic – in particular traffic from the search engines. Why? Simple enough really, the content that we’ve created both onsite and for 3rd party sites continues to deliver new visitors.
Today, for example, over 100 people have read a post that I wrote back in October after it was Stumbled by a reader.
The point is that, unlike advertising, when you create solid content it continues to deliver long after you created it – it becomes an asset.
How should that affect how you advertise your business?
Every business has both short-term and long-term marketing needs. In the short term, content is often a hard sell – i.e. the time or money spent developing it rarely pays off as quickly as say, an advertisement in a trade magazine.
Content can drive huge amounts of business quickly – but it’s not the norm.
Where content comes into it’s own is when considered over the longer term, en masse or in developing a brand and reputation.
Weaning With Meaning
With that in mind, our advice to clients is often quite simple – keep doing what you’re doing, but use content to slowly wean yourself off short term advertising costs.
For example, if you currently spend $1000 a month on Adwords to generate 1000 site visitors, then shutting Adwords off over night will likely cost. However, if you invest in developing content assets, next month you may only need to ‘buy in’ 900 visitors – the balance coming from organic search and links to your content.
Month two might mean just $800 spent on advertising, month three $700 and so on.
Ultimately you replace the business which comes from paid advertising with business delivered by your content. You also build a readership/viewership/listenership which means each additional piece of content stands a better chance of being spread organically.
Of course it’s only one benefit of putting content at the heart of your marketing, but for those of a practical ilk, it’s certainly one to consider in tough economic times.
