ideaLaunch Blog

I recently finished up a freelance writing assignment that involved writing 78 different articles about weight loss surgery. As I sweated through the end of my final 250 word article, my husband sat down beside me to offer his support.

“Why would anyone hire you to write so much about one thing?”

I took a deep breath and resisted the urge to punch him in his face.

“It’s for content marketing,” I explained.

He looked at me like he was just finding out I had three heads. “What is content marketing?” he asked.

“It’s a new pair of shoes,” I offered. He didn’t move, and I realized I wasn’t going to get out of this conversation easily. “Content marketing is a way to help companies boost their rankings with search engines.”

Still with the blank stare.

“OK, say you are a weight loss surgical center. When someone does a search for weight loss surgery, you want to come up in their search, obviously.” He nodded his head. The man has, after all, used Google. “But a lot of times your potential customers will search for other information. Like, maybe they’ll look up ‘diet tips’ or ‘what is body mass index’. These are potential customers of yours, so it’d be great if they could find that information out from you. Once they are on your web site getting that information, they can find out about the products and services you sell.”

“Ohhhh,” there was a faint glimmer of understanding starting to spark in his eyes.

“But you can’t just throw up one page on a subject and expect search engines to find you. You have to talk about the same thing – keywords, we call them – a lot before they’ll recognize you. Plus, there are lots of possible keywords – or questions – that your potential customers could be looking for. You want to tap into as many of them as you can.”

“So content marketing is just something to do with search engines?”

I was beginning to suspect there was a good chance of me missing my deadline because I was stuck explaining content marketing instead of actually writing content. I wasted another three seconds considering the irony of that.

“It’s part of it,” I explained. “But the other part is building confidence. I mean, if you go to a web site and they have tons of information, free information, about something that’s important to you, when you finally have to buy something, aren’t you more likely to get it from this site that you think of as an expert?”

“So you’re an expert on weight loss now?” he eyed my Diet Coke and powdered donut.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” He giggled and went back to watching TV while I finished up my writing assignment and resolved to accidentally kick him under the covers later.

The truth is, I’m not an expert in weight loss (although I certainly know more about it now than I did three weeks ago), and I’m not even an expert in content marketing (obviously). What I am is one part of a bigger idea. Personally, I am the content writer. I know how to take the valuable information a client has and make it readable by a potential customer. I know how to lace an article with keyword phrases and write in a way that is search engine friendly and people friendly.

But in trying to explain what I do to my husband, in trying to accurately describe what content marketing is, I realized I’m just one small piece of the content marketing puzzle.  And that you should clearly be talking to an expert to see the whole picture.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer working to fill another shoe rack.  She is very good at puzzles.

Image courtesy of www.arpansa.gov.au

Tags: content marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 3:07 pm and is filed under content marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.