1. When I read about SEO and increasing web traffic, I often read that "content is king." What's your opinion of this maxim, based on your experience?
Content marketing to me is just a fashionable name for marketing. The expression "content is king" really defines the presentation of quality information to your readers or followers. We really visit websites for either information or entertainment. If we are looking for information, then we really want reliable, informative, trustworthy, and detailed information presented to us in a well laid out manner. That is the way it has always been and probably always will be. If we look at books, leaflets, magazines, or other print materials, the title, author, other content, references to other works, and/or research gave us confidence in the words.
2. What are a few things businesspeople should do to make sure that their social media presence is sharing the image they want to present?
Don't take on a digital persona. If you wouldn't say it in real life in that way, don't say it online. If you are an expert in your field, then you should establish what is important to those that you want to do business with; a great way of discovering these points is to ask your existing contacts.
3. What distinguishes "traffic" from "targeted traffic" when it comes to visitors to a website, and how can webmasters start to gain more targeted traffic?
That is a very good question. Looking at the first part of the question; if a regular bricks and mortar business had 300 people walk through the front door, walk around the store, and exit again without making a purchase, then they wouldn't be very happy business owners. So, with that in mind, targeted traffic is visitors who when they land on the website want to make a connection with the business. Be that making a purchase, interacting with information, completing an online form, picking up the phone, or emailing you.
How to bring quality visitors to the site is the million dollar question. The answer varies from company to company and has to be defined by what they would actually determine their ideal visitor to be, and what that visitor would do when he or she arrived on the site. An example would be if your company sold pens, your ideal customer might be a small to medium sized business owner who has a need for X quantity of pens which is where the business has the largest profit margin. Once a target has been established, you can then start to build a plan to attract those customers and also appeal to them.
4. When it comes to writing, what do you see as differences between writing for content marketing purposes and writing to connect with readers on a blog?
As far as I am concerned, the goal should be exactly the same. Google is making changes on a continual basis towards how it ranks sites, and one of the themes behind these changes is to mimic how a user views the site. Users are looking for well thought out, original, and engaging content; Google is now looking for exactly the same thing. This is one of the reasons that all of the search engines are now taking into account what is being shared on our social media pages. If it is important or valuable enough to share, then it is probably something that a search user would be happy to see in their results.
If your content is lazy, incomplete, and boring, then readers and customers can expect other interactions with the businesses to be the same.
5. What inspired your fiverr experiment, and what do you recommend to entrepreneurs wanting to improve their web presence?
SEO and web promotion are enormous topics, and the number of "gigs" which Fiverr.com offers is very impressive. Many of these gigs offer solutions to many of the most pressing challenges which small to medium sized businesses encounter when trying to build their web presence. Unfortunately, a large quantity of the offerings will actually provide very little to no benefit to a business, and I really wanted to work my way through a few of them to demonstrate that. On the flip side, once you start weeding out the gigs which are not going to benefit your site, there are a few which are not only great ideas but also represent amazing value at only $5 at a time.
At DWManages.com we try to build themes for our customers' content marketing campaigns, and I wanted to execute this for our own site as well. Rather than trying to come up with an amazing idea for a new blog post every time, think of one great idea that you can use for a multitude of articles, all focusing on different plus points of your business. Or, practice what you preach!
Thanks, Chris!
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