Where Should Your Content Live?

The essential steps toward effective content marketing include creating a strategy, producing great content, and promoting that great content. So how and where should you publish that great content? Where should your content live?

We’re not talking about real estate or interior decorating here. We’re talking about choosing the right platform for your content.

On your website

The most important place to have excellent content is on your website. Here’s why:

• You have control over your website.You craft your message. You choose what content to highlight. You decide what people can see easily and what they have to pay for or sign in to see. Social media platforms often have an algorithm that determines the reach of your content, and it may be tied in with your ad spend. That’s their right. They also often have their own look, brand, and layout. Again, they have the right to control their web content. So do you.
• You know your website will stay online as long as you need it to. Your fantastic Instagram posts? They’ll last only as long as Instagram does. We’ve seen social media platforms and other online sharing sites fold, change their policies, and ban users. If you have great content on platforms that aren’t under your control, you can’t count on them for the future.
• Your website supports your goals. Not LinkedIn’s goals, the goals of Huffington Post, or anybody else’s. That means that you can create, organize, and share your content in support of your goals only.

On your social media platforms

Social media is an excellent way to spread the word about the terrific content you’re publishing at your website. It’s a great way to reach new people, to engage with customers and patients, and to develop relationships that can benefit you and your organization as well as the larger community.

Share your great content on as many social media platforms as you have resources to support. Track your results and make sure that you’re getting the results you need. But be sure to include social media in your overall content marketing strategy.

Sites that link to you

The two most important factors for SEO are content and links. Once you have plenty of excellent content at your website — which means that you have excellent answers to all the questions that bring visitors to your website — you can expand. You can write guest posts for other websites, create infographics to share, and make videos for YouTube.

Do all you can to make sure that the sites for which you produce valuable content link back to you.

Bear in mind that great content on your website will naturally gain links from other websites. That’s why Google uses links as part of its search algorithm: human beings who link to your content are sharing their human judgements that your content is worth reading, watching, or listening to. So don’t skip your website’s great content in order to produce it for someone else.

Everywhere else

Websites that don’t link to your website when they use your content may still be providing citations. This can include news sites that write about you or use your graphics but don’t link to your website as a matter of policy.

They are usually less valuable to you than a high-quality site which will provide a link, but they can reach new communities or confer prestige.

Link to them from your own website.

Make great content for your newsletters, your ads, and other publishing opportunities, too. Add links to your website to encourage traffic, even though they won’t provide “link juice.”