Great content is the backbone of contemporary SEO and a “white-hat” link building strategy.
The days of re-hashing and re-purposing 300 word articles are over – with the release of its Panda and Penguin algorithms, Google has become wise to these lazy excuses for content. You need to be creating value-added content that your target audience craves, and is willing to share and link to.
In this article, I’ll run through four ways of diversifying your website content to engross your audience, enhance brand reputation and increase the likelihood of backlinks from authoritative websites.
#1 Infographics
A recent Adobe study discovered that whereas the average website visit lasts 8.8 minutes, media and entertainment websites pull in consumers for an average of 12 minutes. Entertainment sites offer a range of video, graphic and interaction media to captivate the user and improve stickiness.
Infographics look to engage the user with a vibrant, visual representation of data. Any empirical study gives your website journalistic integrity, and when combined with an effective PR campaign, makes it an important reference point for industry commentators.
Ideally, you’ll be basing your infographic on primary research in the form of a survey to make it more newsworthy. If not, try to think outside of the proverbial box. At Castle Casino, we conducted a study on the relationship between gambling and alcohol consumption rates across the world – a topic of genuine social and cultural resonance. And then to tap into furore surrounding the UK lottery’s plans to double ticket prices, our affiliate arm published an infographic on the chances of winning.
Taking a unique approach to infographic design and illustrations helps with brand differentiation. From a design perspective, an infographic should be more than a glossy set of graphs, which means forking out the extra buck for a designer who really understands concept and instructional design. Although it involves a more complex brief and lateral thinking from your creative team, I find the most engaging infographics adopt a storyboard format.
#2 Videos
Hubspot blog features an eclectic mix of stats highlighting the importance of video in content marketing. SEOmoz reports that posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than plain text posts.
And here are a couple of very pertinent stats for affiliates: “Pinterest generated more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, Youtube Linkedin combined. Of people with Pinterest accounts, 21% have purchased an item after seeing it on Pinterest,” according to PriceGrabber. Videos increase search-ability and the chances of conversion provided that advertising is refined and secondary to the content.
Videos – whether in a live action, webinar or animated format – are a more personable medium, and an informative, well-produced clip helps cement brand credibility and identity. Like infographics, you can share and embed videos seamlessly across social networking platforms to maximise virality. They’re also more tablet friendly than articles.
E-learning company PokerStrategy is the world’s most successful e-gaming affiliate with over 6 million members, and counts videos as fundamental to its growth. They are the perfect pedagogical aid – 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text according to 3M Corporation.
#3 eBooks and Whitepapers
eBooks and whitepapers offer a profound insight into a subject, boasting a longer shelf-life than the generic news article.
eBooks tend to be more informal, interactive and “how to” orientated, whereas whitepapers are more academic, analytical and focused on thought-leadership. You’d develop an eBook on how to launch your own casino platform, and a whitepaper analysing the relationship between region and average consumer spend on gambling. If you’re an active blogger, it could be worth collating all relevant posts into a single eBook.
Both are relatively inexpensive to design – the tricky part comes with marketing. Making the eBook free and including a creative commons license so people can share the material is the best way to get it out to the masses, but compulsory registration gives the impression of exclusivity and facilitates data capture to help you with other marketing initiatives.
#4 Podcasts
Casino affiliates find it notoriously difficult getting their content into the mainstream media, but an interview with a senior industry figure carries a lot of weight.
Publications such as Forbes and CMO magazine should find it hard to refuse an interview with the chief marketing officer of Betfair, which may draw on the ways gaming companies are deriving actionable insight from their customer data, or how they’re adjusting to the move to mobile. The gambling stigma shouldn’t apply if your focus is the profession.
Podcasts are relatively easy to conduct – all you need is a phone line, and Record Your Call does the rest. For the editing and MP3 conversion, Audacity is the software of choice. The key to production is consistency – keep the same tone, and intro and outro jingles to give your brand an identity.
Interviews can stand alone as podcasts, but they can also be embedded into a range of content types. You can incorporate key quotes into an article, or have the whole interview transcribed with Way With Words to be made available as a downloadable manuscript.
About David Merry
David Merry spent the first part of his professional career in the link building strategy team at London based search marketing company Greenlight Search.
He now heads the online marketing team at CastleCasino.com and focuses the majority of his time on SEO and their affiliate program. You can learn more about Castle Casino’s affiliate program atCastleAffiliates.com.
As well as this David is the founder of gambling media companyRightCasinoMedia.com.