No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
No matter how great of a strategy you develop, you also need to have the right staff and budget to truly succeed in content marketing. If you think that you can just hire an unpaid intern or depend on volunteers to create your content, your campaign will fail. The GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) concept applies. If you’re not serious about creating quality content, then your readers won’t take you seriously.
Hamish Mckenzie from PandoDaily published a great article about the inner working of the journalism and blogging industries. Sites that are thriving actually pay their writers because they understand that quality content requires research and plenty of work. For example, Mckenzie cites that NSFWCORP pays its writers $1 a word for online pieces and the Brooklyn-based The New Inquiry pays its writers a minimum of $50 per article. Of course, if you want to include visual forms of media, the costs will be higher.
Takeaway
Content marketing works and at a lower cost than traditional, paid online media. A joint study by Kapost and Eloqua in June 2012 found that per dollar spent content marketing generates more than three times the number of leads as paid search. So if you’re spending $0 in your content marketing efforts, why are you complaining that you’re not getting any sales? Anything multiplied by zero will give you zero.
In order to make your content marketing work, you need a strategy and a budget. By putting in real effort in developing a variety of valuable pieces of content for your target audience, you’ll build a strong relationship with them.
Some other articles by Damian:
The Importance of Content Authorship on the Internet
Grow Your Business: A Market Research Primer
How to Build a Strong Online Presence
