→ Online Marketing → Information Marketing Basics
Information marketing is one of the best forms of marketing that I am aware of when it comes to organically ranking your site with search engines and getting more direct traffic.
Once you understand the basics of information marketing, you can apply it to a variety of different purposes such as
- Creating better web pages
- Creating better product descriptions
- Creating better articles
- Creating better books
What is Information Marketing? |
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Information marketing consists of creating information and publishing it with the intent to get people to do something. Commonly, information marketing is used to:
The end goal of information marketing is to sell something, whether that thing be an idea, a service, a product, or something else. For the purposes of increasing sales at an online store, information marketing will consist of pre-selling products and getting people to your web site and/or online store. |
How can Information Marketing Help Your Web Site? |
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When used to get people to take a look at your web site, good information marketing does two primary things:
Targeted Visitors: By getting people who are already at least somewhat interested in your topic to visit your site, you are bringing people to it who are more likely to buy than random visitors. While it is true that many people may not be interested in buying what you have to offer immediately, it is also true that each visitor you bring to your site may remember it in the future and come back when they are ready to buy what you are selling. Backward Links (backlinks): By building links from the sites that you do your information marketing on to your own site, you will eventually raise the authority (or page rank) of your site in the eyes of search engines. The more authority they attribute to your site, the better your content will naturally rank in search results. Once you reach the first page of search engine results for the key words and phrases that you are targeting, you will start to see a reasonable increase in traffic to your site without any extra work. Once you take one of the top three spots for a particular search term, your traffic will jump even further as the top three spots get the vast majority of all clicks from people who use search engines. If you can take the top spot for a search term, you will typically get over 50% of all traffic for that word or phrase for that search engine. |
Five Methods of Information Marketing |
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There are a wide variety of ways to do information marketing, but the most common are the following five:
The methods which you use will depend largely upon what you are comfortable with, what you are willing to learn, and what you are trying to sell. Information Marketing via Text / Articles on Web Sites This consists of creating articles and publishing them on your web site, someone else’s web site, or some combination of the two. When you create a new article, you can publish it in one place, revise it, and publish the revised article somewhere else. Information Marketing via Forums This consists of placing information on forums or similar communities around the internet. While most people immediately think of forum spammers when they think of this marketing method, the fact is that you can gain a good deal of respect if you do forum marketing properly. Information Marketing via Newsletters This consists of creating articles for people who have decided to subscribe to a newsletter for one reason or another. Typically, such newsletters have subscribers who share an interest which the newsletter revolves around. Done properly, marketing via newsletters can be very profitable, in good part because those who are subscribed trust you and enjoy the information you provide. As long as you continue to provide good information and recommend only quality products, you will see great results. Information Marketing via Audio / Podcasts Audio marketing consists of recording audio and using it in the place of text. This kind of marketing can work quite well, especially when you are marketing to people who are busy and/or spend a lot of time traveling. By simply taking your text marketing and recording it to audio files, you can easily expand your visibility on the internet with audio marketing. Information Marketing via Video Video marketing consists of creating videos, whether live videos of actual happenings, slide shows, or other forms of visual presentation compiled into video form. Video marketing can work quite well, especially when you combine your video with both audio and text, primarily because it targets three of the major ways in which people gather information. |
The Components of Good Information Marketing |
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While information marketing is not a science, there are a few basic things that you should keep in mind when doing information marketing: Depending on how and where you do your information marketing, it will have a few different key components:
Additionally, your information marketing efforts will often involve:
Each of these is important, though they typically rank (in order of importance) as follows:
Don’t get me wrong, without keyword research your efforts will give much poorer results than they would otherwise. However, the above refers to keyword placement within the other sections rather than having keywords to begin with. When someone first sees your content, the things at the top of the list typically stand out on the page more than those at the bottom…and so they help to determine whether someone will pass on or read your article. |
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Recommended Reading: |
How to Find Excellent Topics for Information Marketing |
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The hardest part of information marketing for most people is continuing to come up with good topics to write about that other people will be interested enough in to read. Fortunately, with the internet at your fingertips you can have people tell you exactly what kinds of information they want, do any necessary research to fill in gaps in your knowledge, and then provide them with exactly what they want. To do so, you need to do the following:
Once you start using this method to do your information marketing, you will know that there is a hungry audience out there and have no shortage of topics to create informational content about. |
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Ranking Your Content |
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Typically, you will see reasonably good results from your information marketing efforts by simply publishing quality articles on the above sites. However, if you want your content to continue to bring in steady streams of visitors for quite some time, you should take a little bit of extra time to build your contents page rank and give them some extra traffic. Some common ways get an extra kick from your content:
While some of the above will depend upon the type of content you are placing up, they can all be applied to just about any kind of content…pages on your web site, products in your online store, content on other peoples pages, etc. |
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Tips:
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| Final thoughts |
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At this point, you should be more than ready to start creating good content to promote whatever you want. The next sections in this module provide information on putting this information to practical use. |
