Content Marketing – Becoming Visible Within Your Business Vertical With An Online Publication

Creating content that is valuable to your customers and prospects is great for leveraging search traffic and generating interest for your business but owning one of the hottest online publications within your business vertical can be an invaluable long term asset. You can compare it to the ability to place an advertisement in a well known magazine versus actually owning that magazine. Similarly ad space on well known online publications can be expensive and at the end of the day those high costs are ongoing since you never really own the community around the publication.

Business vertical based blogs are a great alternative to high ad spend and are one of the most valuable mediums of inbound marketing. It’s important to note the main objective of such a blog or online publication is not outright push selling to a customer simply using the blog as a tool to do that. The objective is to create the most engaging and useful publication with great content for targeted audience in your business vertical. If you can publish a blog or online magazine which can do that, you will build a community of followers who will be pulled to your business website eventually simply because they enjoy your publication. It’s non-intrusive pull marketing. For example, if you’re reading this article on online content marketing and value the articles we publish, the chances are, sooner or later you will be curious enough to explore what we do and what we offer at Buzzfactory.net. The objective is: this article you find useful will lead you to our website and perhaps even contact us to see if we may be able to work together.

Thinking out-of-the-box and not restricting your content to revolve only around your business can play an important part in how others perceive your publication. For example, if you are hotel or resort located in Miami, a blog which talks about the hotel property itself may be interesting but can you really build a long term reader base around it? Instead, if you could build a blog with great articles on “Travel in Miami” which has tips, guides, advice and articles on what those visiting the city could do, that could scale into a widely read travel blog. In effect, the branding space on such a blog would be more valuable and the reader base perfect for those who may be interested in checking out the resort website and perhaps making an online booking. An adventure sports blog for an adventure sports apparel company, an automotive blog for a a car dealership or a boat & yachting online publication for a boat manufacturer are all along the right lines to attract attention online and build a good platform. In the B2B space the objective is the same. Create a publication that the audience finds useful and ask yourself, as someone interested in this vertical, what would you like to read?

Finally the success of an online publication for any business  comes down to it’s planning and execution. While many set of to create a vertical or industry blog or publication, few actually manage to keep up the momentum and publish fresh content as frequently as it should be. The way we approach completely managed publications for our customers is much the way a magazine would. Setting monthly objectives for both content and traffic goals is important as is a weekly plan of the articles that need to be done for the week. Once articles are published they need to be promoted on social networks shared through social bookmarking and the process needs a dedicated effort. It’s a gradual learning process which needs experimenting and constant review to understand what is working, what the audience respond to and how to stay creative and continue to make it valuable. It calls for a dedicated effort where you can consistently publish fresh content and continue to keep readers happy.

If you’ve looked at the best blogs and online magazines in your industry and have made up your mind to take them on with your own, our advice is “Go for it!”