The great thing about content marketing, aside from the fact that it is an inexpensive form of marketing that works, is that it’s a true investment in your business that pays off over and over again, year after year. When you create content today, it will be working for you a year from now. Creating content isn’t only about marketing; it’s about educating and engaging your audience, too.

Content marketing is also a simple concept to understand and implement for marketing success. Follow the four steps to content marketing success.

1. Create a Website for Your Content

It’s important that your content has a home. You want to drive all traffic to that home. The home is your website. You don’t really want to drive traffic outside of your website. Any content you put anywhere should drive traffic to your website. It doesn’t matter if you have a bricks and mortar business or a strictly online business. Driving traffic to your website will ultimately drive traffic into your store to buy or to purchase off your website.

2. Create Optimized Content in Multiple Formats

The content that you create should be, as mentioned previously, engaging, and work to educate your audience about your products and/or services. Repurpose content into different formats to stretch the life of any content that you create. There are many forms which this content can take. Blog posts and articles, both on and off your website, short reports, eBooks, videos, podcasts and more are all types of content that you should produce and promote for effective content marketing.

3. Build Your Email List

The key to successful content marketing is building your email list. Use content to build your email list by writing keyword-rich content to attract your target audience to your website and directing them to sign up for your email list. Once they sign up for your email list, you can market your other content to them, educating and engaging with them and encouraging them to purchase your products and/or services. This will be easier because they’ve given you permission to market to them.

4. Market Content on Social Media

Social media is a great way to market your content in a way that your audience can share with others. Share all your content on social media, including your blog posts, articles and more. Place buttons on your content so that other people can also share your content to their social media networks. This gives you an opportunity to attract the friends of your audience so that you can build a larger following.

Finally, simply keep repeating the above throughout the marketing cycle. If you plan out in advance the content that you want to create for every product or service that you’re marketing, using a publication calendar or editorial calendar, it will be easier to create effective content on a regular basis – content that is educational, engaging and gets the results that you desire.