How To Get More Bang From Your Content Marketing ‘Buck’ [Case Study]

We’ve all been there. Blankly staring at our computer screen not knowing what to write about. Time feels like it  slows to a crawl, and you might even swear to yourself that you saw the minute hand on the clock move backwards! It’s very frustrating!

If you find yourself in this situation, why not do what Brian Clark of CopyBlogger did, and re-purpose an older blog post or report into a different media format.

The following infographic serves as a case-study, showing how Brian re-purposed an older blog post entitled “21 Ways To Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have A Clue” by turning it into an infographic and adding one more tip making it a total of “22 Ways To Create Compelling Content”.

After checking out the infographic below, let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment!

Marketer Explains How He Made $438 From A Single Article With $1 Investment And An Hour Of Work

I love these types of success stories. While $438 may seem like a small amount of money to some of you, there are a lot of people out there that could really use an extra couple hundred dollars a month.

Problog from the Warrior Forum writes:

“1. First you’ll need an Amazon Associates account for this method to work.

2. Next you’ll need to create an article but not just any affiliate promotional article – it has to be an article that appeals to a wide range of readers. I’ll tell you exactly what topic I used – “Top 20 Weirdest Items on Amazon”; the reason I chose this topic is because it has the potential to go viral which it did. I wrote it myself but if you are not very good at writing you should outsource it. I used only plain text links like this:

20. {Funny commentary about product}{Affiliate link – plain text}

19. {Funny commentary about product}{Affiliate link – plain text}

etc.

If you guys want to see my actual blog let me know and I’ll post a link to it for you to see exactly how it looks.

Do not use image links or people won’t be as tempted to click and see the actual product.

3. I set up a free blogger blog for this but you can easily use your own hosting if you have it. At the time I just wanted to create something quickly so I went with blogger.

4. Publish your article and set up your social buttons like Share on Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.

5. Now you need traffic; what I did was I went to Mturk and posted a hit – Digg my post for 1 cent, that makes 100 Diggs for $1. For those of you who don’t know what Mturk is it’s a place where you can post small tasks – hits, for people to complete for just cents. Now, posting tasks like these isn’t really allowed on Mturk but I’ve seen many people do it and I’ve done it many times myself but last time I received an email from them to remove my hit so it would be a good idea to find an alternative for Mturk. I did some research and found that there are a few people on Fiverr that will get you 100 Diggs. The goal is to have your story on the first page of Digg.

My story quickly became viral, people were sharing it on Facebook and forums so I got $438 in my Associates account for that month from just that one article. Not bad for an hour of work.

Now, don’t just go and everybody write the same article about the weirdest items on Amazon, come up with something original and something that a lot of people will find interesting. Hope this will help some of you make some cash.”

These types of articles would be great to use in conjunction with my 2800+ visitors a day traffic strategy!

Are Content Farms Here To Stay?

I really hope they aren’t. There’s nothing worse than searching for some info only to find crappy articles on eHow or Ezinearticles.com that have been written in a assembly line manor of sorts. Sure, sometimes eHow has some decent content, but overall I feel it’s pretty mediocre. The only reason they get a lot of traffic is because they have massive amounts of content. It’s a numbers game for them. Which doesn’t usually bode well for quality.

With the recent Panda Update on Google these content farms have been getting slammed, as has been reported here and here.

Patrick McKenzie does however make a great argument (via Seobook.com) for why he feels content farms are here to stay. I’m not completely convinced. For now I do not submit articles to content farms or various article directories like a lot of Internet Marketers do. I seem to get better results keeping the content on my site, and just building that up.

“Much noise was made recently about Google taking a whack at so-called content farms — sites which apply industrial production techniques to the creation of content targeting the long-tail of the query distribution. This is a subject of huge interest to many Internet businesses, either because they advertise on the AdWords Content Network (and, by extension, on content farms), because they compete with content farms on particular searches, or merely because they hate seeing content farms in their search results. As luck has it, I am three for three. It pains me to say it, but content farming is here to stay. It is an economic inevitability.

The Attention Economy

Much of the Internet currently operates in an attention economy, a level or two removed from direct monetization. Facebook is worth in excess of 50 billion not just because they’re making money hand over fist — though they are — but because they have achieved a dominant position in the attention economy, and they command such huge rivers of attention that they can trade trickles of it to people for actual money.

Google is the dominant player in the attention economy — they harvest vast amounts of attention via controlling navigation on the Internet (via a commanding lead in search), they sell attention in the form of AdWords ads, and they provide a marketplace for attention with their AdSense product.

Individual publishers — from the New York Times down to the smallest hobbyist site on the Internet — are also largely in the attention economy. For a mega-brand like the New York Times, attention can be generated — they can literally make news. Disney has a repeatable industrial process which takes as input one female teenager and produces as output a cultural phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of rabid fans.

Smaller players — Google back in the dorm room days or hobbyist sites today — largely cannot create attention on these scales, they can only harvest attention which already exists. Attention exists in the world for things independent of their own existence. People play golf. People bake cookies. People read Dan Brown novels. People receive massages. For all these things and more, people demand content: they want to improve their golf swing, they want new cookie recipes, they want new Dan Brown novels, they want massage how-to videos. And they are willing to pay with attention, a scarce commodity which can be converted into cash.

The Economics of Content Creation

Consider a hypothetical Internet with no efficient way of converting attention into money. This is not difficult to imagine: it was essentially the Internet of the dot-com bubble, where everyone wanted “eyeballs” but “eyeballs” plus banner advertising resulted in…”

Continue @ Seobook.com