I have been in the business of content creation for the past 10 years. My first startup, a motorcycle publication (BikeAdvice.in) succeeded because of content marketing. My current startup, a performance marketing company, also gets its best customers and clients from content marketing.

In this article, I want to talk about how you can grow your business using content marketing. We will discuss about the different types of content and the marketing strategies you can use to promote the content.

Let’s first understand why “Content” is very important.

It might look like a bold claim, but it is true: “If the world cannot live without the internet, the internet cannot live without content.”

Content is the source of all attention, online or offline. If you think about all the different channels of digital marketing, you will be able to realize that content is the foundation for every channel.

• People search for content in the search engines.
• People share content on social media, without which platforms like Facebook will not exist.
• We send content via email, without which email marketing wouldn’t exist.

Even if you think about pre-internet marketing channels like TV, Radio, Newspapers and Magazines – they got the attention from the audience because of the content they created.

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I am sure you have heard about simple interest and compound interest.

If you have 1 lakh in cash and if you deposit it in a bank, you will get interest out of it.

Let’s say you are getting 7% interest on fixed deposit and you are withdrawing it every year.

If you do this for 30 years, your total money accumulated would be 3.1 Lakhs.

The principal of 1 lakh would have remained and you would have earned a total of 2.1 lakhs in interest over 30 years.

You would have got a interest of 7,000 every year.

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Content marketing takes the priority in digital marketing compared to all the other modules. There is no doubt in that. It forms the foundation of all digital marketing activities. But good content doesn’t perform on its own without marketing. Good Content Marketing is about creating great content and also marketing it in the right way.

I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years now and in this blog post, I want to share my learning and experiences on content marketing. We will cover 3 major areas:

• Why content marketing?
• The different types of content and…
• The most common content delivery formats.

Let’s get started…

Why Content Marketing?

Before we get to the why – we need to look back a little about the history of content marketing. If you thought content marketing is a recent addition to the ‘tactics of marketing’, you would be wrong.

Content marketing is hundreds of years old and one of the oldest form of marketing that has existed. Not to mention, storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication and also is a form of content marketing. Stories have been traditionally used to communicate values and establish brands.

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If you are getting started with content marketing, you will soon realize that it is easy to create content but almost impossible to promote that content without having an audience.

Outbrain has changed their interface. A new and updated version of this article is here: How to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Posts with Outbrain

Many top digital marketing experts agree that content marketing is 50% content and 50% marketing. After all, the term contains the word marketing in it. Gone are the days when quality content used to go viral and bring traffic on its own.

Getting traffic to content requires an audience that can amplify your content. Bloggers like myself have worked for years to build an audience and hence driving traffic to new content is easy – meaning, I need not pay for traffic.

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