In this weeks blog post, I provide some insight into the concept of “Content Marketing” – and how it’s the foundation and main pillar of your Inbound Marketing strategy.

In a recent blog post, I wrote about how Inbound Marketing needs to  become an increasingly vital component of your overall marketing strategy – if your unfamiliar with the concept of Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing, you should read my initial Inbound Marketing blog post for a brief intro on why Inbound Marketing must play an increasing important role in your marketing strategy.

Once you understand why Inbound Marketing has to become a important part of your marketing strategy – you can begin the process of developing a plan for the production of content to form the foundation of your Inbound Marketing strategy.

One of the quickest, easiest, and most affordable forms of Content Marketing to produce is; the basic written Blog Post … not only are text-based Blog Posts relatively cheap & easy to produce, they will also generally form the core foundation of your Inbound Marketing strategy.

In addition to being relatively cheap & easy to build, Blog Post’s also serve a vitally important function of providing Search Engines with basic contextual content they need to rank and assign Authority to your website.

Blog Post content also has the added benefit of being easy to enhance, modify, and/or re-purpose anytime in the future with additional content that broadens the “reach” and “rank” of your website … different types of content, such as; video, image maps, api’s, widgets, & more can be added to older Blog Post’s anytime in the future … enhancing and/or re-purposing older Blog Post content is one of quickest and easiest ways of boosting search engine rankings of your website.

Your Blog Post’s can also serve as the foundation of your Social Media Marketing strategy … without your own Blog Post’s from your own website, you can’t properly leverage Social Media to it’s fullest potential … without your own Blog Post’s; you are essentially limited to posting content that leads to someone else’s website – where your essentially building someone else’s brand & website … just about everyone has seen examples where people put enormous effort into building a Social Media channel on Facebook or Twitter using other peoples content – this is great for Facebook or Twitter; they get vast amounts of content built for them for free, while the person building the channel usually gets zero compensation for their efforts … with your own Blog Post’s; you can leverage Social Media to build an audience around your own brand and website.

Before you begin the process of building a multi-faceted multi-media Blog based Content Marketing strategy, I’d first focus on the basics of building a solid core-base inventory of aprox. 2 dozen primarily “text based” Blog Post’s – these Blog Post’s can have some pictures & video’s in them, but in the initial/early stage, I wouldn’t spend alot of time on the multi-media aspect – I would focus more on the production aspect – where text based content is the easiest and most affordable content to produce … however, if you are an expert in video or podcast production; it sometimes makes more sense to start your Content Markteing strategy in video or podcast – however, in most cases, the most effective place to start will be text based content.

Going forward with the planning phase of your Content Marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that your Blog Post’s can serve as the foundation of your Content Marketing strategy … your Blog Post’s can easily be enhanced, modified, and/or repurposed in the future to create additional value … and your Blog Post’s can also serve as the foundation of your Social Media Marketing strategy … even if you decide to start your Content Marketing strategy with video or podcast format, you still need to build that content strategically into your blog infrastructure.

I’ve included several video’s below that are helpful for somebody looking to learn more about Content Marketing …