Content Marketing: Content Is King, Distribution Is Queen

The phrase “content is king” in the context of internet marketing was coined by Bill Gates in January 1996. Google has since been a massive supporter of this philosophy. Since Google (used for the vast majority of all worldwide internet searches) and other popular search engines such as Bing and Yahoo base their algorithms around this fundamental concept, content creation should be the basis of any effective internet marketing strategy. There are several forms of content, including:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Images (i.e. gifs, jpeg photos)
•  Infographics
• Social media posts
• Etc. 

If you aren’t producing content on a regular basis, you are less likely to get noticed by your target customers, let alone Google. However, much like book publishing, content creation would not be effective without proper distribution.

The Importance of Content Distribution

After all, the famous Harry Potter series would not have become the best selling book series of all time without massive distribution from its publisher, Bloomsbury, and the support of many other distribution sources. Of course, regardless of its distributors, readers worldwide would not have had such a positive reaction to the book series if it weren’t for the creative mind and extraordinary writing abilities of J.K. Rowling.

You don’t have to write like J.K. Rowling to create good content; but as you can see by this example, strong content and effective distribution go hand-in-hand. Good content is original content that grabs readers’ attention, provides them with helpful information in an organized manner and gives examples or resources to back up its claims. On the other hand, effective distribution involves actively engaging with your community through other websites, email, social media, or paid advertising. In fact, Google and other popular search engines have continuously encouraged websites to engage in proactive content distribution by placing a great importance on links. By doing so, Google is encouraging websites to engage with other websites and readers in order to obtain more links from credible sites.

Distribution Means Link-Building

Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates are making this more apparent, as the search engine continues to place a higher importance on websites that have more “authority”. Website authority is measured based on several factors, namely the amount of credible sites that are linked to and from your website. Thus, the key to effective content distribution is link-building.

There are several different types of links, including:

• Contextual & editorial links
• Links from authentic reviews
• Press/News links
• .Edu & .Gov links
• Natural mentions from online communities
• Social media shares
• Etc. 

There are generally three types of link-building strategies:

1. Natural link-building: creating interesting, informative and/or credible content that other websites and users want to link to (“link bait”). 
2. Manual outreach: contacting other websites and asking for a link, usually by submitting a relative article or offering to link back to them in return.
3. Self-created: building your own links, usually gained by any of the following:

• Blog comments
• Press Releases
• Website/business directories
• Blog user profiles
• Forum comment links or signatures
• Etc.

As you can see, content marketing is focused on two fundamental areas: content creation and distribution (link-building). Thus, each one of the tasks performed for your website or business should be done with this information in mind.