Okay, Content Isn’t the Only Thing
The better the content on your website or in your newsletter, the more likely people will find out about your company and start to develop a relationship with it. However, that can take a long, long time, and you probably don’t want to wait forever. So don’t discount traditional marketing techniques. They may not be as effective as content marketing in the long-term, but they’re invaluable (and necessary) when you’re just starting to build an audience…unless you have a few years.
I think about this a lot regarding one publication I worked on. We started a blog and e-newsletter that featured bootstrap journalism. It was original content and high-value information to our audience. We had no marketing budget, so we did zero marketing for a year. And our traffic started to grow.
In a year, we had nearly as many people visiting the site as subscribing to our print magazine. But I always wondered what would’ve happened if we’d had some money to spend on marketing. In fact, we did do some marketing…in the print magazine. It was the only outlet we had to promote our new ventures, and it seemed to help. But what if we’d had some money to promote magazine subscriptions? How much more traffic could we have reached in a year?
What I’m trying to say is that content marketing helps your business, but it will help faster if spend some money to market the actual content like a product or service at some point. Content marketing isn’t promotion, but it could stand to be promoted.
