Thanks to Covid-19, businesses have been pushed from the offline to the online world at record speed, making digital marketing more competitive than ever. How can you compete in 2021?
1: If you haven’t already, it’s time to get serious about putting out plenty of great content. Whether it’s one sentence on social media or an entire white paper, you need lots of content continually flooding the internet on a daily basis.
2: Change the size of your content. Instead of making super long authority-type posts of maybe 3,000 words that comprehensively cover a topic, consider going smaller. Short articles that cover just one thing well are ranking high these days, perhaps because of people’s shorter attention spans and less time to read a long article.
Consider breaking up an authority post into small ones, each with a title matching what people are searching for. For example, instead of an article that outlines in detail all the steps to take when starting an online business, break it up into a series of short articles, one on each aspect of the topic (niche selection, branding, game plan, website creation, etc.)
3: While your written content should probably be shorter, your video and audio content needs to be longer. 10-minute videos are performing better than 2, 3 or 5 minute videos in the search results.
If you think about it, it makes sense that if someone is searching for answers, they’re more likely to click on the 10-minute video than the 2-minute video. But expanding your video or audio lengths only work to a point. Videos of 20 and 30 minutes are not doing as well as the 10-minute versions. People want the whole story but they want it quickly.
4: Speed up your pages. It’s more important than ever to have pages that load quickly. When you improve your page speed you’ll also increase your rankings and traffic. There are multiple methods and tricks to decreasing page loading times. Research what’s right for your site or hire someone to do it for you.
5: It’s more important than ever to rank high on page one. Google is going to be looking for additional ways to increase their income, which will likely mean increased paid ads, changes to algorithms and who knows what else. If you rely on free traffic from Google then don’t get lazy or you’ll lose it.
6: Repurpose your content. Turn that article into a video and a podcast. Take several small articles and make them into one big one and take a big one and turn it into several small ones. Remove the best bits and use it on social media, and then package it all up for a whopping comprehensive lead magnet.
7: Update your content. Take that blog post from 6 months ago or even 6 years ago, make it fresh and republish it.
8: Do some podcasting. If the time is right, start your own. If not, be a guest on other people’s podcasts. Compared to blogging, podcasting is still wide open and far less competitive. Plus, you can convey things like emotion and passion via voice that sometimes get lost with writing.
9: Backlinks probably aren’t going to matter as much. Focus on great content built on what people are searching for. Relevancy is king.
10: You better be branding. Brands are already dominating the internet because people know them and TRUST them. It’s easier to get followers, to reach people and get sales when you have an established brand.
Conversely, people out to make a quick buck and run don’t have a brand – they’re just somebody making promises into the void.
10.5: And this is a big one: Forget the, “HELLO – BUY – GOODBYE” of yesterday where you tried to sell someone the first time they saw your offer, and if they didn’t buy, you gave up.
Instead, find ways to interact with people at least 7 times. It might be through email, push notifications, messenger bots, social media, etc. I once knew a guy who was launching a brand new business. He guest posted on a hundred blogs and appeared on 30 podcasts all in the space of 6 weeks. While no one had heard of him in the beginning, by the sixth week everyone in the niche felt like they’d known him for years. His list exploded, he got JV offers daily, bloggers and podcasters asked him back repeatedly and promoted him for free… in the online world, that’s about as close as you’ll get to overnight success.
It may sound like a lot of work, but it can really pay off big if you apply yourself. Aren’t you and your business worth it?
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