It’s simple to get started making use of content marketing on your website, in theory at least. Just start by adding as much new content as possible! By adding as much content as possible to your website you can maximise the chances that it will be found in online searches. And you’ll maximise the chances that visitors will come back again and again to find the new information they want …. and ultimately to buy.

You can probably see …. 50 pages of content are much more likely to attract visitors and engage with them than 5 pages. 100 pages are much better than 10 pages and so on. Useful and interesting articles around your product/service area are much more likely to be found and read than basic product descriptions.

In some ways, content marketing is a numbers game.

That doesn’t mean that quality and relevance aren’t important of course.

So what kinds of content marketing are actually available to you?

There are probably more kinds of content marketing than you think.

Useful and interesting content around your product/service area is much more likely to be found and read than out and out sales content.

And avoid those samey blog posts too. A blog post wishing everyone a good weekend (yes, admit it, you know you’ve resorted to that sometimes) won’t get your site to the top of the rankings!

Here are 14 different ideas for quick, simple types of content marketing you can use:

1.News, about your business and your industry. Either reportage of news from other sources, or your own original news.

2.Articles relating to your business and your industry. These should look at the story behind the news.

3.Product profiles for each of your products (or services for a service business).

4.Staff profiles and news. Who’s joining/leaving/crawling up Ben Nevis for charity etc.

5.Press releases. This is content designed to be re-used by other news sources and websites.

6.Editorial and opinion pieces. What do you think about ….. whatever?

7.Reviews, of your products and your competitors’ products. Either created internally or sourced from users.

8.Surveys, and survey results. Run a simple survey and report your findings.

9.Research reports. Content that adds to the pool of knowledge on a subject.

10.FAQs pages.

11.How to guides, relating to your product/service/industry. Remember ‘how to’ is a very common search term.

12.White papers. Here’s an article about using white papers.

13.Photo and video content. This could include memes

14.Books or ebooks, paid for or free. This article explains why you should think about writing a book.

Tips and tricks :

* Add new content gradually, rather than all at once – to gain maximum benefit from your new content. Devise a regular programme for adding content.

* Add content regularly where appropriate. Such as weekly or even daily. This is a good way of keeping visitors coming back.

* Think quality and quantity.

* Make sure a majority of the content is unique to you, rather than taken from other sources. This is more popular with search engines and with visitors.

* Make sure your content is genuinely useful to visitors. Keyword rich content designed to appeal to search engines isn’t guaranteed to work and may turn off human visitors.

* Link to other sites and content on other sites liberally.

* Make it easy for visitors to share some of your content, with their contacts or with other sites – and into social media.

* Make your content mobile friendly wherever possible. Here’s an article that looks at how to write copy that works on a phone.

* Review and update/remove old/existing content periodically. Here’s some useful information about carrying out content audits.

More info. and advice: I have extensive experience of content writing, stretching back over a decade. I can devise ideas for types of content that will work well on your site and which should boost your traffic month after month. I can write just about any type of website content you might ever need. Drop me an email at mark @ markhempshell.com