Off-Site Content

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Off-site content

Earlier we spoke about the importance of having links to your site from other sites, as a way of giving Google confidence that your site is an authority on whatever you’re talking about.

A good way to do that is through having off-site content. This is effectively content that you’ve helped to create that is on other people’s websites.

So the key things that we’re going to look at to do this are:

• Changing your approach to guest posts
• Varying your content
• Focusing on building relationships
• Giving it time and other resources

Changing your approach to guest posts

A lot of this is about understanding who your customer is in this sense. So go back to the example of the software that helps you view how people are using your website. So again there’s lots of people that are writing blogs about different softwares and different e-commerce tools, and effectively those people need content to put on their website.

And so if you can understand that and you can understand that you’ve got something valuable and interesting to say on that subject, and then you can go to those blog owners and say “You speak about this subject. I’ve got something interesting to say on it that I think would fit well with the rest of your website. I’d like to write something for you.” There’s a very good chance, because you’re giving them something that’s valuable to them, that you’re going to be successful, and that they are going to take your content and put it on your site.

Varying your content

However, it’s also important to understand that these sites are kind of indirectly in competition with each other. So it’s important that you, if you want to work with multiple sites, that you vary the different content that you give to each of those sites.

And it’s also important that you vary your content from the point of view of, you want to have content out there about your website, about as many of the different subjects that people might be searching for, that would all help drive relevant traffic back to your page.

Focusing on building relationships

The other thing to understand is that like with anything else where you’re asking for some sort of transaction, it can be much more effective if you’ve built a relationship, which is really about understanding what’s important to them, what is it that they’re looking for from you to help make their lives easier, and then helping to provide that for them.

And because this does involve doing things a little bit differently, having an overall strategy of who the different websites that you want to work with, what the different messages that are relevant to that website, but also relevant to the messages that you want to get out there.

Giving it time and other resources

It’s important that you give this the time and the resource it requires to get it done right. Running a small business, running an e-commerce business, your time is a very valuable resource as well. So it’s important that you allocate enough time to this to get it done well, but not so much time that you can’t focus on other things. So you need to be very structured, very strategic in how you get this content out there, who you work with, and what that content is, to give you the best chance of getting those valuable links from other people’s sites back to your sites.