At the heart of content marketing is the concept of providing valuable, informative, and entertaining content to attract, engage, and influence your target audience.

The Content Marketing Era

Content marketing is the new SEO. The team at www.make-a-web-site.com believe that high quality content marketing is going to drive the web in the future. The recent Google updates, especially panda, have weeded out low quality content and placed an emphasis on the reader, effectively sending a message to all webmasters saying “stop doing SEO” start making exceptional quality content and the links will come.

What we believe it is going to be central to that is Google +.

Google Plus Overview

Google Plus is a social networking service launched by Google Inc. in June, 2011. With more than 500 million registered users, this platform has become a major part of the virtual social space. Google Plus comes with a host of unique features that allow you to categorize your contacts and interact with groups of people. Here are some features of Google Plus that are extremely useful for content marketing.

• The “Circles” function allows you to group your contacts into customized groups. This makes it easy for business to group their customers into specific circles and share content targeted at specific customer groups.
• The “Hangout” feature allows business to hold video conferences and group chats within the members of a circle.
• The “+1” feature allows users to recommend and share content. And the “Ripples” function provided statistics for public posts, like number of +1’s and average chain length.
• The Google Plus Brand Page will allows you to position your business using Google Plus. This function allows business to connect their Google Plus Brand Page with the company website. This Brand Page have a higher probability of appearing in Google searches.

The following article provides a comprehensive guide to setting up a Google Plus Brand Page.

Jumping onto the Google Plus Bandwagon

Google Plus is often overlooked by social media marketing professionals. One of the main reasons for this is that Google Plus is considered to be the new kid in town. Many people make the mistake of looking at it as just another social media profile that needs to be created and maintained.

Content marketing strategists with foresight are already beginning to incorporate Google Plus into their campaigns. H&M, a global fashion retail firm, has used Google Plus to engage with more than one million users. The firm makes daily posts with trendy fashion-related photographs and videos that are tailored to interest its audience.

The most interesting aspect of the H&M campaign is that the firm has linked its AdWords account with its Google Plus page leading to greater visibility of their Google Plus page as well as improved effectiveness on their AdWords campaigns. You can read a detailed case study of the H&M Google Plus content marketing strategy.

Why Google Plus?

Content marketing campaigns are time and resource consuming; however, if they are not well-planned than the impact can be very low. Because of this, many businesses are unsure whether launching a Google Plus content marketing campaign will be worth the effort.

The answer to this yes, it is worth the effort. In fact, given that Google Plus is closely linked to Google Search, it is huge disadvantage if you don’t have a Google Plus profile. Creating a Google Plus account has the following advantages:

• It increases your ranking on Google’s search engine results.
• It can be integrated with all your other Google applications, such as Google Calendar, Gmail, and Google Voice.
• It ensures that your business shows up on Google Local and Google Map. This improves the online visibility of your brand and facilitates user reviews.
• It allows you to use Google Analytics to monitor how your content is being viewed and shared.
Since Google Plus is a new frontier that is constantly expanding and improving, joining this platform now will enable you to reap the early-adopter benefits.

Incorporating Google Plus into a Framework for Content Marketing

More than 90 million people use Google, and the company is currently channeling all its energy into Google Plus. Once you are convinced that Google Plus can improve your social marketing, you need to create a strategy to optimize your business’s Google Plus account.

Here are some tips on how to maximize the effectiveness your Google Plus Page.

1. Make Your Page More Appealing
Business’s often fail to use search optimized content while creating their Google Plus pages. Make sure the your provide a brief summary of your organization in your About Page. In addition, you can use your business-specific images and graphics to make your page more attractive.

2. Be Active on Google Plus
The more effort you put in into posting regular media-rich content, the more effective is your Google Plus page in drawing customers. Visit the Google Plus pages of brands like Pepsi to get an idea of the post frequency and content that works best.

3. Create Communities
You can use the Google Plus Circles and Hangout features to create communities of users based on common preferences. For example, Cadbury groups its fans according to the candy they prefer the most. The firm asked their fans to leave a comment on the Cadbury Brand Paging stating their favourite candy to get added to a specific candy circle. Read this article for some great tips on using the Hangout feature for promoting your business:

4. Connect using Hashtags and +Mentions
Using hashtags around keywords in your posts will help search engines to locate your content more easily. Also, when you mention other brands, business, or people, you can type a “+” symbol before their name to tag them. These practices will not only increase your internet presence but also encourage others to follow you on Google Plus.

5. Use Google Authorship
Google authorship feature allows you to claim authorship for all the content you publish on the web. This is done by linking your Google Plus page with the content you publish. If you have used Google authorship to mark your online articles and posts, those posts come up in a search results along with your profile picture and a “More by Author” link. This makes the content look more authentic and personalized, it improves the visibility of both the author and the business, and leads to improved SEO.

You can get started on using Google authorship here: https://plus.google.com/authorship. You can also read this comprehensive article on using Google authorship

Make Your Site More Valuable

A solid content marketing strategy will boost your sites value to Google. Neil Patel recently posted search results about high quality long content pieces and how they rank better in the search engines. It may also make your site more valuable when you want to sell.

So what are you waiting for get writing now!