15 Important Types Of Content Marketing Which Drive Traffic

There’s no a marketer who doesn’t discuss content marketing. Personally, I think that content marketing is the only type of marketing that small business owners can use to succeed.

Why?  Small business owners don’t have large amounts of money and it's so hard to get the consumer’s attention without a large marketing budget.

You probably know that some industries are extremely expensive on Google Ads.

With content marketing, everything becomes different. Marketers only need to create wonderful pieces of content and in the end of the day, visitors will convert visitors into customers.

In this blog post, I want to show you 15 different types of content marketing that you can leverage and use in growing your business.

Let’s explore them!

#1 Infographics

You know what they say: A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s true and that’s the reason why you need to invest in infographics.

But, the biggest reason is backlinks because infographics are a very linkable type of content and they will definitely increase the organic presence of your site.

According to Piktochart, there’s been an 800% increase in Google searches for infographics between 2010 and 2012.

But that was 5 - 7 years ago, and today, consumers are even more interested in infographics.

Designing a wonderful infographic is not so easy. Small marketing teams without a designer have two options:

• Hire a designer or an agency
• Design on your own

If you don’t have an infographic designing skills and you don’t know how to use Adobe Illustrator, then you should use tools like Piktochart and Infogr.am

#2 Videos

YouTube.com is, in SEO terms, a very strong domain. It has a Domain Authority of 100 which is amazing because YouTube.com domain will rank high in Google SERP.

Also, Google tends to display the following YouTube videos in search results:

• How-to videos
• Review videos
• Tutorial videos

But, how many views you can expect? Depending on the industry and niche you work in, you can expect a different number of views. Here’re some stats.

For example, if you upload a video in Science and Tech category, you can expect 6,638 views per video.

However, that’s only the average stats. Imagine that your videos are better than average, and your video gets 10k views.

That would be nice, wouldn’t it? It would, and now imagine that you upload 25 videos which have 10k views in average. That’s a total of 250,000 views.

Simply said, videos are a magnific type of content you need to try.

#3 Quizzes

Maybe you think that this type of content marketing works only in B2C, and not in B2B. You’re wrong. It works great both in B2C and B2B.

Quizzes are great for increasing the number of email subscribers. The only what you need to do is to avoid giving the results without providing an email address.

Now, let’s assume that you work in the digital marketing industry. Here are some quizzes that you might create:

• Which Marketing Channel Is The Best For You?
• Test your SEO Knowledge
• Check If You Are a True Google AdWords Expert

This way can easily target other experts and drive them to your site. Currently, you can see so many apps on the market, but the most popular apps for creating quizzes are Qzzr and LeadQuizzes.

#4 Interviews

Creating an interview with an influencer is so great for driving the traffic. When you present someone as an influencer, he or she will surely share it across different social networks.

I bet that will happen even without you ask because this way, you’re building influencer’s ego. Now, the question is: How to interview an influencer?

Firstly, I’d suggest you to opening a tool such as Followerwonk where you can easily find influencers. As example, enter content marketing in the search box, and click on Do it.

Now, you’ll see the list of Twitter users with “content marketing” in their profiles.

Keep in mind that they need to have a solid number of followers because that matters a lot.

For example, Jeff Bullas looks a great interview opportunity because he has more than 450K followers.

When he tweets, your site will see the traffic increase. Also, there’s a high probability that influencers will link to the interview which is good for SEO.

#5 Lists

List blog post is the type of content marketing that will make your visitors curious. Check out the following articles I’ve written:

• 16 Awful Email Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
• 10 Important Pros and Cons Of Email Marketing
• 15 Powerful E-commerce KPIs To Track Right Now

How can a visitor skip reading these blog posts? Very hard because, as I said, visitors are curious.

They would be worried if there’s something wrong with their email marketing, for example. But, that’s what I think, now let’s see what other bloggers think about list posts.

According to Shout Me Loud, there are three benefits of writing a list blog post:

• People love data in the form of lists
• Lists could be understood more quickly than paragraphs
• Makes your blog go viral

I couldn’t agree more. I have seen so many times how list blog posts went viral, haven’t you?

#6 Case Studies

Case studies are a very linkable content because every case study has something unique.

However, if you just started your with blogging and if you don’t have enough experiences, then I must say that writing your own case study will be hard.

But, you can write someone else’s case study and here’s how. Open HARO - the website designed to help journalists and bloggers.

You only have to write a query and explain what are you looking.

For example, you can write that you’re looking for small business owners that would like to share their A/B testing experiences in exchange for a link.

Trust me, people are always interested in link building, so lots of them will send a pitch. I haven’t tried this yet, but I know it works because some friends of me did it, but here’s what I wrote.

I’ve written a case study where I explained what happens when your site goes offline for 4 months and 12 days.

#7 eBooks

Writing an eBook is always amazing and available to everyone because you don’t need to find a publisher, and it doesn’t need to be a book of 200 pages.

You can write a book of 30 or 50 pages and it will still provide you great results. However, a book cover is something that needs to be VERY ATTRACTIVE.

Now, if you don’t have designing skills, you can hire a book cover designer on Fiverr. There, you can find experts who will design your book for $15 - $30 which is almost free.

Next, keep in mind that eBooks are wonderful for acquiring new leads. The only what you need to do is the following:

• Create an outstanding landing page
• Drive traffic to the landing page

You can even consider buying an ad on Google AdWords, but let me give you an advice - be careful. Don’t forget to measure your CLV, CPC and a Conversion Rate.

#8 Newsletters

Sending an amazing content directly in the inbox seems reasonable.

Email marketing is great for increasing the brand awareness, but it also good for sales because it has the greatest ROI comparing with other marketing channels.

However, email marketing isn’t perfect, it has its pros and cons, and here are five cons of email marketing:

• It takes time
• Mobile issues
• Some people don’t check the inbox
• Almost every company does email marketing
• Skills

However, the biggest issue of these issues mentioned above is that it takes the time to build the list.

The best way of building the list is growing the traffic on your site, and that’s not so easy.

#9 How-to Posts

Writing how-to blog posts are great because these posts are actually problem solvers.

Almost half of the published posts on this blog are how-to posts. How-to posts have amazing long-tail potential because people search for problem solutions.

For example, if you enter how to create a google adwords you’ll see the next suggestions.

As I said, people are searching for solutions to the problems, so you must know that writing how-to posts is necessary.

Otherwise, you won’t reach the full potential of your site. I mean, you can’t be a serious blogger if your posts are only infographics and lists. Solve problems and grow the authority!

#10 Podcasts

I remember the time when I was on the holiday last year. My favorite occupation was listening to Jason M. Lemkin podcast about growing a SaaS business.

Although thousands of people are listening podcasts on iTunes, I wouldn’t recommend recording a podcast until you don’t grow your website and email list enough.

Why?

Mostly because it will be hard to promote your podcast. I think your focus should be ok growing the blog traffic and the email marketing list, and after that, you can easily promote the podcast.

I know there’s a search feature on iTunes and you can do iTunes SEO, but… The blog is a priority.

#11 In-depth Articles

Many SEO experts say that you should write at least 2,000 words in the article. According to the photo below, Google tends to rank higher content with a high number of words.

The problem is that it takes time.

For example, Dorie Clark says that many companies are not patient and one post, or 10 posts, or 100 posts probably won’t make much of a dent in raising your profile, or your company’s.

But those companies who publish 300 or 500 or 1000 blog posts can expect something valuable, and not every company is willing to do that. Imagine how much time it would take to publish 300 blog posts with 4,000 words per post. That’s 1.2 million words.

#12 Tools

Tools are unquestionably the greatest type of content marketing when we talk about link building. Free tools are magnets for building the links, and here’s my own example.

I created a Readability Grader and I was able to build 732 backlinks from 23 referring domains.

In fact, I didn’t spend so much time in link building because I’m currently focused on producing as many as possible valuable blog posts.

But, if I focus on link building and if I invest enough money in promoting the tool, I’d be able to build lots of backlinks.

However, one of the best examples is CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.

According to Ahrefs, the tool has built more than 19K backlinks from 2.84K referring domains which is unbelievable.

Now, let me ask you: which blog post can bring you 19,000 backlinks? None.

#13 Quotes

Asking influencers for a quote will definitely increase the traffic of your site. We did that.

Specifically, we created a post where I asked digital marketing influencers for a quote about content marketing.

After I published the post, I asked influencers to tweet about it, and they did because they were presented as true experts.

The most beautiful part is that every quote has its most important sentence which is actually a link to a tweet.

In other words, your post will spread across Twitter.

Keep in mind that Twitter isn’t for every industry. Also, don’t forget that Twitter activity by day matters a lot.

It appears the best day for tweeting is the weekend because of its CTR.

Simply said, ask for a tweet on Saturday or Sunday.

#14 Presentations

Have you ever been a speaker at a conference? If you’ve been, you need to take all the benefits that SlideShare offers.

Moz toolbar tells me that SlideShare.net has a Domain Authority of 95 which means that domain ranks high in Google search results. That’s what Domain Authority predicts.

In fact, if you spy SlideShare on SimilarWeb, you’ll see that 79.85% of their visitors are actually organic visitors.

What I’m trying to say it that you must upload your presentations on sites like SlideShare because that’s the way to increase the organic presence of your business.

Never forget to embed your presentation somewhere on your blog because of the following two reasons:

• Linking high authoritative site helps your SEO
• Your presentation gets backlinks

There’s a big difference in Google’s eyes if you link spammy sites and if you link sites such as SlideShare, Forbes, Business Insider, and so on.

Linking sites with a high DA reduces the risk of penalty. Also, your presentation will get backlinks and that means the page will rank higher.

This way, you’ll hit two birds with one stone.

#15 Research

Creating a research will help you reach as many as possible industry experts. I think the best example in the SEO world is Search Engine Ranking Factors research from Moz.

Just think how many visitors Moz gets when they update the research where they tell SEOs the impact of Facebook total count shares on rankings, for example.

When you create such a great research you can definitely expect lots of new visitors from social networks.

But not only that, you’ll also see an increase of Domain Authority because the research will always increase the number of backlinks.

Basically, you can expect the same thing like when you create a new tool, but creating such a great research may require much more time.

Also, you can survey marketers (e.g.), create lots of useful charts and pies, and promote it across different networks.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading about these 15 types of content marketing.

Of course, you can’t focus on all of them because you probably don’t have a large team, but you can pick a few types and go with them.

For new bloggers, I’d always suggest focusing on lists, how-to blog posts, and building a tool because a tool tends to build lots of backlinks.

After that, you should consider infographics because they are also great but it might be hard to promote them. Once you write dozens of posts, you’ll be able to target lots of long-tail keywords. Good luck!