Internet Publishing: A Marketing Strategy for Your Company

Article summary: Many businesses could benefit from an Internet publishing strategy. This is where you publish new information online, and on a regular basis — just like a news website. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how you can develop and maintain an Internet publishing system for your company. Why bother? Because it has the potential to double, triple, or even quadruple your search engine traffic. And that’s for starters.

You have a website. Your competitors have websites too. You have a home page, an “about us” page, and several pages describing your products / services. Your competitors have the same thing. So the question is, how can you outperform your competitors online with so many similarities. How do you capitalize on the vast amount of Internet searches that occur every hour of every day? How do you get those people to visit your website, instead of the websites of your competitors?

There are several ways to do this:

1. You could spend a fortune on pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing, to make sure your website appears on all relevant searches.
2. You could spend endless hours on an SEO link-building program, to outrank your competitors in the organic search engine listings.
3. Or, you could turn your static website into an Internet publishing powerhouse, to unleash its true potential for rankings and traffic.

Full disclosure: I’m obviously in favor of the third option. The title of this article should have tipped you off. You’ll certainly have to put some time and energy into it. Internet publishing requires a concentrated effort over a long period of time. It’s not something you can turn on like a switch. It’s hard work. But, as you will soon see, it can take your Internet marketing program to exciting new heights.

Internet Publishing Defined

Internet publishing is more than simply having a website. Without regular updates, a business website quickly becomes stale and static. It doesn’t offer anything new. It doesn’t grow over time. It becomes … well … boring. It’s a competitive and fast-moving world out there. The last thing you want to be is stale and boring. This is where Internet publishing comes into the picture.

But before we go any further, a definition is in order:

Internet publishing — The act of publishing information online. That’s the basic, textbook definition. But in the context of this article, we need to expand on that definition. Here’s how I define it: Publishing new information online on a regular basis, with the goal of increasing the company’s visibility, search engine traffic, and overall marketing success.

As we continue through this tutorial, you’ll realize the many benefits of an online publishing strategy. It can multiply the results of your marketing program many times over.

7 Benefits of an Online Publishing Program

Internet publishing is hard work. In order to be successful, you’ll have to offer fresh content on a regular basis. Daily is ideal. Weekly is acceptable. You need to publish useful information that engages your readers. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not easy.

So what’s the point? Why should you spend so much time and effort to develop an Internet publishing model? And how does it help your marketing program?

Here are some of the benefits:

1. You’ll pull in more traffic through the major search engines (Google and Bing). Internet publishing is all about content volume. You publish new content on a regular basis, usually in accordance with a daily or weekly schedule. With all of this new content, people will have more ways to find you online. Your website will pop up in searches for a broader range of keywords and phrases. It’s simple math.
2. You’ll get more repeat visitors. This is someone who visits your website once, and finds it interesting or useful enough to visit again in the future. This is the brass ring of Internet marketing. It’s what separates top-performing websites from the also-rans. People like fresh content. So by adopting an Internet publishing model for your business, you are giving people what they want. You’re also giving them a good reason to come back to your site again and again.
3. By giving your readers a larger volume of quality content, you’ll be able to keep them on the site longer. You are giving people more to read, more to learn, and more things to do while visiting. Suddenly, your website becomes much more useful. It becomes “sticky.” This benefits you in many ways. It helps you with on-site conversions (e.g., turning visitors into customers). It also helps with search engine optimization, by lowering your bounce rates.
4. By publishing new web content on a regular basis, you will capitalize on Google’s “Caffeine” indexing system. This update to their ranking algorithm that was rolled out in the summer of 2010, and refined multiple times since then. Essentially, this indexing system finds and displays fresh content (news) at a faster pace than before. Have you ever thought about creating a news blog to cover your industry? Now you have more incentive for doing so!
5. An Internet publishing model can help you position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. From a content standpoint, there are those who lead and those who follow. You’ll win the marketing and PR race in the long run if you spearhead the information distribution within your industry.
6. A sustained publishing model challenges you to come up with thought-provoking ideas. The act of creation spurs creativity. (This is why some fiction writers sit down and start writing in the morning, before they’ve even identified a topic.) This newfound creativity can carry over into other aspects of your business. Who knows, it could help you come up with a lightning-bolt idea for a new product or service, or an improvement to an existing product.
7. Internet publishing can also help you transform your website into a valuable resource. It is no longer limited to providing static information about your company. It becomes a stream of useful information with regular updates and relevant, timely news. This improves your online marketing program in many ways. For one thing, it will help you attract links from other websites, which can greatly improve your search engine rankings over time.

These are not the only benefits of adopting an Internet publishing strategy — just some of the biggest. As you implement this kind of strategy to support your broader marketing goals, you will surely realize some benefits that are not on this list. For now, let’s move on to talk about the technical side of things.

The Tools of the Trade

When I mention the phrase “Internet publishing” to my clients, they often roll their eyes in doubt. “We don’t have the kind of manpower to pull off such a thing. We don’t have an IT department to get it up and running. We don’t have … et cetera.”

It’s actually not as difficult as you might think. Software programs exist that can handle most of the technical details for you. And with a bit of help from a content strategist (like me), you’ll have a plan on paper right from the start. In fact, your publishing system could be up and running in less than a week.

You need three things to get started:

• You’ll need some kind of content-management system (CMS). You can’t maintain an active publishing schedule with a regular website. It’s too much work. This might sound complicated and “techie.” But what if I said you could have a CMS online in only a few hours? I’m not being sensational. That’s how long it takes me to set up a new website using WordPress as a content-management system. WordPress is not just a blogging program, though that was its primary purpose. It has evolved in many ways over the years. Today, it can be used as a full-featured content-management system.
• You’ll need a publishing strategy. This should tie into your Internet marketing goals. Here’s an example: I will publish news relating to the widget industry. I will start a new website for this very purpose, to distinguish it from my company website. I will publish news and other content on a regular basis. Over time, the site will become “the place to go” for news about the widget industry. I will implement various lead-generation strategies on the site, to support my marketing goals. Now that’s a clear and purposeful strategy for an Internet publishing program!
• You’ll need a writer, or multiple writers. Somebody has to sit down and write all of this great content. The writer is the most important piece of the puzzle. So make sure you find the right person for the job, even if it means outsourcing. If you need help in this area, consider this guy.

When you have these three things in place, you are ready to start publishing. Be active. Publish useful content on a regular basis. Publish as often as you can without sacrificing quality. Those seven benefits will come soon enough.

Need Help Getting Started?

We offer a variety of services that can help you launch and sustain an Internet publishing strategy. We can help you set up a WordPress blog and customize it to support your goals. We can help you develop a content plan. We can even help you write some of the content, if necessary. For a project of this nature, you might want to start with a consultation call. Please contact Melissa, our client services manager, to get started.