If what drew you to this post was the alluring image of Olivia Wilde on a cover, then I’ve made my point. In fact, even if you stopped at the top of this page and spent a few seconds wondering “I wonder what this post is all about” just because the image caught your attention, that’s good enough for me as a blogger and content marketer because I now have your attention.

Attention is a valuable commodity for any blog or website since we’re all up against millions of competing blog posts, articles, videos, graphics and photos that are published every day. As a content marketer, engaging an audience with  your content to drive inbound traffic versus the myriad of other options people can click through to and consume instead …is a challenge. To stay in the running, compete and still draw online users to your site, your content needs to stand out and appeal to them and this is something magazine publishers can teach a thing or two about to bloggers and content marketers.

Magazine publishers have been battling it out for years when it comes to competing for attention, grabbing a persons attention and getting them hooked to their content. They’ve studied just about every psychological aspect of consumers and readers and incorporated decades of best practices in the way they write new content, design, structure and deliver their end product to readers. Their attention to detail is what web sites, blogs and digital content marketing media will have to strive towards in the sea of user generated content to stand out as a quality source for content as opposed to just another blog.

 Attention Grabbing Titles

The general thumb rule is people will always scan first and then read if they decide to read further. Attention grabbing titles are essential on social media sites and search engine results as they are when you scan hundreds of magazine covers on the shelf at a magazine rack before picking one up.

 Awesome Images

No doubt that fantastic quality images are the number one draw to a magazine and all the best photographers and graphics designers in the world would contribute to the publishing team in a huge way. The same holds true for web content too and being able to source and use photography, graphics and imaging in your content will set it apart as a quality content source over the plain text and boring looking pages.

Layout & Design

Another key element which web content has adopted from the traditional publishing industry and evolved is layout, typography and design. Placing images, text, advertising, using fonts well, titling, sub titling and knowing user habits is all well thought out in a great magazine as it needs to be on a web page or blog. This is something every reader will subconsciously make a note of when they are on a professional content site or a casual novice blog.

Rich Glossy High Quality Feel

Don’t you ever relate to the quality of a magazine by how glossy or high quality the cover and the paper quality is? It’s makes the images pop out and create a much richer reading experience also adding to the value of the overall publication. Now some may ask how this applies to web content …and it does. Selecting a good publishing platform and theme with a great modern look and feel CAN change a users experience and perception of a blog or web site.

 Well Thought Out & Fresh Topics

Once you have the readers attention, following through and meeting expectations is just as important to have them engaged and keep them coming back. Magazine content teams sit and brainstorm new fresh topics that could grip their audience carefully selecting the best ideas keeping readers in mind. Every piece needs to evoke some reaction whether they read it and think, “this was useful”, “this was enlightening”, “this made me laugh”, “this got me excited” or even “this made me sad”. The last reactions you want for your content is “huh…waste of time”.

Put The Target Audience First

The magazine business model that publishers have followed since they first hit news stands is “be the number one content and information resource for people in our target segment to build a reader base around the magazine”. Only then target advertisers to promote their products to our reader base and subscribers. A poorly executed web content strategy thinks more about marketing products and repetitively talks about it’s own products and gets boring. A good content marketing strategy thinks about what readers would enjoy or find useful first and the promotion is an added bonus to this. Focus on giving the audience what they want. The marketing will happen.

Would You Rather Read This?

Or this?

So if you run a blog or content site that you hope will really become a marketing asset for your brand or business, think: how would I approach it if I were a magazine publisher and depended on building a reader base regardless of what I intend to market. Do that, and things will take a turn for the better!

Sell your content & not your product

That can make all the difference in the way you are perceived online and how people respond. All the most successful online marketers have been able to build a loyal following because their content is perceived as useful and not because they have been selling to people directly online. What is important understand to get your content marketing strategy right is to be able to separate intent from your social marketing strategy. Let’s take a look into my thought process while writing this blog post to distinguish intent and strategy.

Confessions

As a content marketer I have a small range of five solutions that I offer to businesses and my intent is to sell those through my website. I plan to use content marketing and leverage social sites to promote my solutions and my intention is to drive as many interested customers as possible towards my website and spread awareness about what BuzzFactory.net does to as many people online as possible. The most obvious thing to do would be to write blog posts about each of the solutions and post them to various social sites and keep Tweeting links to each solution everyday but that is not how the online world works. There is no value in this approach, no relationship building, no conversation. It’s just direct selling and as a social marketing strategy, that isn’t effective.

My strategy is to use this blog and create a resource that would appeal to marketers. Instead of selling my products directly, I write content like this post here which could be perceived as valuable among marketers who are seeking information on content marketing and social media marketing strategy hoping it will drive some of them to the website and attract them towards the solutions. My strategy is to sell and promote this content using social sites as much as possible to build more traffic towards the site and since this is interesting content and not just a sales pitch or product page in the form of a blog post (alright this particular post might be but lets assume the other content on this blog) it is not intrusive push based advertising and still has the potential to draw more relevant traffic and create awareness about the business. If you have come to this post through a link I’ve created trying to promote this post and read this far, half my objective of ensuring you’re aware about BuzzFactory has been achieved. If you go on to the site to explore our solutions, then that was my intent and it goes to show the strategy works.

My intent is to get customers but my strategy is to give users interesting and useful content, build a resource, create relationships, be a contributor to content in the vertical and  start conversations. The “getting customers” will happen naturally  as result of this activity.

So if you find your business blogging isn’t going anywhere despite efforts, people on Twitter don’t seem to want to follow you and social marketing is just not working for your business, try this simple tweak in approach. Create content that will appeal to your target audience and then sell the content not your product.