How To: Use Content For Promoting Websites

This article is all about creating content. This is a very important concept to grasp because the content that you create for a website is going to be the basis for how you will advertise and promote that website. Content, meaning articles, videos, and even podcasts is now really the new advertising. Instead of traditional types of advertising and instead of the traditional separation between editorial content and advertising, that has gone the way of the dinosaur. 

This is another way that public relations can be done nowadays. Press releases are great but if you want to get a lot more exposure for your clients then you'll have to start taking advantage of all the free places where you can place content on the internet.

You need to use content to attract people to come to a website. What you are going to want to do is to create interesting content, interesting articles, videos, or podcasts, about your product or service. Not about your company necessarily, but about topics of interest to people that are related to what you do. 

For example, if I had an Italian restaurant, maybe I would write articles about different types of dishes. Making videos is even better. Make a video on how to make lasagna, how to make spaghetti and meatballs, or whatever. Interesting things that people will want to look at. 

Every time somebody goes on the internet, what are they doing? They are looking for information and they are looking for all kinds of information. You might think, "Oh, people aren't going to be interested in what I'm doing," but you're wrong. There are billions of searches every month by millions of people and they are looking for all kinds of information. This is why you want to create as much content as you can about your business. 

And after the content is created you need to place it on as many sites as possible. YouTube, for example, is a site where you can place your content for free. Well, there are several dozen other sites just like YouTube where you can also place videos. And, there are dozens of sites where you can place articles and podcasts that you create too.

And it's all free. So are many of the press release sites that you can find on the internet. There are literally dozens – many with high traffic – that allow you to place press releases on their sites and almost all of them allow you to place at least one a day if you want. And they almost all let you include links in the releases that go back to the website you're trying to promote.

So it's great to place articles and releases about your clients in traditional media but it's also very helpful to get this information out onto the many sites that are set up just to accept free content. And every piece of content that you place on these sites acts like a billboard pointing right back to the website you're trying to promote by virtue of the links that you can include with or in the content you're placing.

Ask any business owner these days if they want more traffic on their websites and you know what they'll say. However, they usually have no clue as to how to achieve this. If you can help clients get more traffic to their sites you will have provided a valuable service to them and one that probably not many other people could have done so don't overlook this valuable avenue of exposure.

Tom Aikins is an SEO consultant and online marketing expert based in Bangkok who presents seminars on these subjects and also offers a complete online marketing training course on his website, http://www.seonorthamerica.com. You can ask questions of him by contacting tom.aikins@gmail.com.