2021 will be a great year if you follow these  Amazing Branding Strategies that I’m going to give you… These exact content strategies have doubled and tripled my consulting services client’s traffic, keep reading.
As an SEO consultant, I’ve worked on over 5 websites with more than a million visits per month. I have also taken websites from scratch – with under 500 visits per month to over 30,000 unique visits per month in three months.

Content Marketing, Brand Strategies, and Consulting Services:

Consider these valuable statistics in your next Press Release or even online marketing content:

How To Boost Your Traffic and Revenue by 78%:

PR Newswire reports that a study of releases on their wire service shows that:

• 1.     Adding a photo or an image increases views of the release by 14%.
• 2.     Adding a video gives you a 28% increase in views.
• 3.     Make that an image and a video and you’ll get a 48% boost in views.
• 4.     Go all the way and put in a photo, a video, a graphic and a download and you’ll see a 78% jump in the number of views!

Here are over 100 ways to increase your Brand Recognition and improve your SEO Content Marketing to double and triple your revenue this year. 
Step 1 – How To Write Great Content:

• Above All, Focus on Value to your Readers:

Focus your content on a specific question or problems your reader may have – focus on real visitor’s questions and needs rather than search engines.
The goal is to write a piece of content that will be shared or bookmarked by visitors. Search engines like content that is naturally shared.
 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en#3
Google changed their Guidelines: The line use to read, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.” Google changed the last part to read “by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”
So it is no longer about increasing the number of quality links, it is more about increasing people who want to use and share your content. Again, this is Google’s new messaging.
 How do you do this? This five step process will work:

• Find content that you think is great and imitate it.
• Find a second similar article and combine the two into one long article of your own.
• Give credit where credit is due. 
• Remember: Imitation is a compliment – Plagiarism is an insult. 

What is plagiarism? It is where you take content from another author and pass it off as your own.
When you do this, you upset the author – because you are taking their credit, but when you give them credit where it is due – and say why you think the article provides great content – you both win.
Note: You may also get penalized by Google for duplicate content (makes sense right) so why not be polite and give credit to author and just write an intro on the original article and why you think it is great. Summarize an intro to the article.
Step 2 – Get 78% More Traffic by Targeting All Types
 Once you have found a great Article – you should try to beat it.
How do you “One-Up” a Great Article? Easy – YOU ADD MORE VALUE TO IT – by adding a very professional Headline, Image, Video, Info-Graphic and if possible, a Download for your readers.
You don’t have to re-invent the wheel: Example: Create a “Motivational Monday” – find a motivational video on Youtube and write about it and post it every Monday. It doesn’t mean you have to film your own video! Use great videos that already exist.

• Go all the way and put in a photo, a video, a graphic and a download and you’ll see a 78% jump in the number of views!

Some people like to scan, some like to just look at pictures, some will watch videos and some will opt-in for a download. If you create a rich media post, you tailor to all groups.
Focus your content on a specific question or problems your reader may have – focus on real visitor’s questions and needs rather than search engines.
Remember: The goal is to write a piece of content that will be shared or bookmarked by visitors. Search engines like content that is naturally shared.
How do I do this? I regularly bookmark good articles and before I write I look through my own bookmarks and content I like – what did I bookmark recently and why, write about my own need and tailor my content on that.

1. Do Keyword Research on that Subject – Choose a single keyword to focus on and insert this into the title and description.

Once you have found the topic, do some keyword-research on that need. What are users searching for regarding that subject?
I would recommend focusing on one keyword on each article. This increases the strength and laser targets that keyword.

• 80% More Clicks With a Great Headline: Write a Catchy Headline less than 70 characters (Should be the Title) 
• Google Image Search! Create a Catchy Image and name it based on Keyword.

Name your image and use a caption underneath using your Keyword Focus. Be descriptive and concise.
Keyword-keyword.jpg

•  VIDEO! You don’t have to recreate the wheel. Find a high quality video about that keyword, on Google, Yahoo, Bing or other video sites – which allows sharing & add this to your article – if possible use a 3^rd party lead capture plugin like “LeadPlayer” to capture identities with your video and podcasts.

• The longer the article the better for search engines. Try to write long quality content 2021+ words is ideal.

In a recent Investigation, SerpIQ analyzed the top 10 search results for over 20,000 keywords and noticed an interesting pattern.
What did they find? The average content length for the top 10 results for any keyword on Google had at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has.

• The highest ranking pages have 2,000+ Words.
• The Average Word Count of Top Ranked Searches: 2416
•  Add an info-graphic (Google Search “[Keyword] infographic) add this to the bottom of your post.

This is the template that has worked very well for my clients: 
CONTENT TEMPLATE

Great Headline:
[Keywords in front] i.e. “Keyword Keyword – Secrets Revealed”
[Insert Catchy Image]
Paragraph 1: Personal Experience
Paragraph 2: Statistics from obviously credible sources
[Insert Video]
Paragraph 3: How To & Instructions.
Paragraph 4 – Add Authority to your articles.
– Why are you someone they should listen to?
– Show your authority.  How long have you been in the industry?
Paragraph 5 – You need to show that you care.
– Care about your readers. Show your care in this paragraph.
Paragraph 6: Add a Conclusion + Invite response with a question.
Ask your readers what they think about the topic.
[Insert Info-Graphic]
 Step 3 – Improve Existing Content:
Using Google Webmaster Tools to find and list out the top 5 keywords you want to improve right away.

1. Find and list the top 5 URL’s that you are already ranking on and improve those top five pages first.

Do not replace content on your best pages, instead  add additional quality content  to each page look for other similar questions you can answer for users and make your top pages even better using the four tips above.
Improve Internal Linking: Sometimes two pages will rank for one keyword. This is called “competing pages”. Turn the page’s keywords that you don’t want to win into an internal link on that keyword. Instead of removing competing keywords on other pages – you should turn the competing keywords into links to the page you want to win.
Step 4 – The Snowball Effect:
The Goal of each post should be to get the email address of the visitor using a download or a subscription to the site.
Free Courses, Downloads, and White Papers are a great way to get people to opt-in to receiving emails.
If you include an Irresistible Offer or Free-download on each page, SEO friendly lightbox, sidebar or bottom Ad on each article, you can capture identities.
The idea is to send an email alerting your full list of subscribers each time a new piece of content is added to the site.
This is called the Snowball Effect. Send an email out with a teaser to read the article or piece of content just posted.

Step 5: Google Authorship
Okay, so we all know that quality signals affect search engine rankings, right?  And we inadvertently know that click through rate is king in terms of PPC and (in part) SEO. So now imagine that you could increase click through rate and add user quality signals to almost everything you write on the Internet? Well, now you can– with a nice smiling picture of you. (Unless your picture frightens people away, in which case I may discourage you.) Read on to learn an easy way to do this.
Google has released a very FAST way to indicate you are the author of a piece of content – as simple as pasting a hyperlink in your text.  All you have to do is add rel=”author” with a link to your Google profile, wait a little bit for Google to find it, and ‘Viola!’ Google may even place your picture next to your article – Here are the steps:
“You can link content you publish on a specific domain (such as www.wired.com) to your Google+ profile.
1.         Make sure you have a profile photo with a recognizable headshot.
2.         Make sure a byline containing your name appears on each page of your content (for example, “By Steven Levy”).
3.         Make sure your byline name matches the name on your Google+ profile.
Verify you have an email address (such as [email protected]) on the same domain as your content. (Don’t have an email address on the same domain? Use this method to link your content to your Google+ profile”
Step 6: Going Global
The first step is to create a folder for each location and post each relevant article to each of these subfolders :
            Country:                   Income:                                 Code:

1. United States            $15,940,000,000,000          example.com/us/
2. China                            $12,610,000,000,000          example.com/cn/
3. Japan                            $4,704,000,000,000             example.com/jp/
4. Germany                     $3,250,000,000,000             example.com/de/
5. Russia                           $2,555,000,000,000             example.com/ru/
6. Brazil                             $2,394,000,000,000             example.com/br/
7. UK                                  $2,375,000,000,000             example.com/gb/
8. France                           $2,291,000,000,000             example.com/fr/
9. Italy                               $1,863,000,000,000             example.com/it/
10. Mexico                         $1,788,000,000,000             example.com/mx/
11. Canada                          $1,513,000,000,000             example.com/ca/
12. Australia                      $986,700,000,000                example.com/au/
13. Saudi Arabia               $921,700,000,000                example.com/sa/
14. Argentina                     $755,300,000,000                example.com/ar/
15. Netherlands                $718,600,000,000                example.com/nl/

Use a CDN. (Content Delivery Network) like Amazon to serve fast results to separate countries from that country – so Google see’s country specific IP’s.
This video shows how we can do this:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en&ref_topic=2371325
If you are interested in hitting every major language, consider adding the following to your content strategy:
Translate and Report The Content Into The Top 10 Most Widely Spoken Languages using Google Translate: http://translate.google.com
English – 59 countries

• French – 29 countries
• Arabic – 25 countries
• Spanish – 24 countries
• Russian – 12 countries
• Portuguese – 11 countries
• German – 7 countries
• Italian – 6 countries
• Chinese – 4 countrie
• Dutch – 3 countries

Step 7: Indicate Source To Google Using +1 and Twitter
Before you blast your article out – you should post it to your site and use Google+1 and Twitter to indicate to search engines that you are the true source of the article.
Google used to have a contract with Twitter to automatically index every tweet immediately. This contract broke when Google launched their own “Social Network” Google+. However, Matt Cutts said that Google was able to fairly-immediately index Twitter on it’s own now.
You want to indicate to Google that you are the Author of the content so others do not out-rank you after stealing your information.

Step 8: Syndication Strategy
Syndication is the process of sending something out via multiple sources.
It is not enough to just write content – you have to tell people about it.
Create a “600 List”

Create a list of 200 Bloggers, 200 Website Owners, 200 Twitter Users.
No matter what industry you’re in, there are bloggers, website owners, and twitter users that all talk about the subject or similar subjects to what you are talking about. For example when you are inside the food industry [recipes], there are thousands of food blogs, Same with websites, there will be millions of pet related websites and a huge number of Twitter users who like tweeting about their recipe’s.
It will take a while to develop a comprehensive list, but it is worth it. Here is how I recommend you build your list:
Your list ought to contain at the least 200 blogs, 200 websites, and 200 twitter users.
Make sure Bloggers do not sell anything.
Stay away from people who sell products on their sites. For example it will be much harder to get a Store or to hyperlink to you than a blogger who is active.
 Make sure twitter users are active.
Make sure you only list Twitter users who are active. Check if a website hasn’t been updated in over a year or a Twitter user hasn’t tweeted in the last week, don’t bother adding them to your list.
If you don’t have time: It can take a while to create a good list, but through services like Freelancer.com you should be able to get it all done for under $100.
Make a spreadsheet of their full name, Website URL and email address.
Optimize the video, if possible, by downloading the video and upload it to Amazon S3 serving it on your own network. Also, add all the elements based on your targeted keywords:
Upload the video to YouTube.
Tip – transcribe every video to add more content and SEO value.
Set concise descriptions, tags, and be sure to link back to the post where we are going to put the YouTube video which we’ve drafted.
Upload the MP3 to Amazon S3 ready for podcasting.
Submit the video or podcast to iTunes.
Capture identities on your video! Embed the video on the blog using LeadPlayer or similar identity capture software.
Add keyword focused headline, the bullets with time codes, the full transcription and the image to the post where you’ve put the video.
This is now a fully rich post.
It has video, it has the headline, it has bullets, it’s got full transcription, it has an image and it has an audio.
Take the same video and put it into other blogs and rewrite the description and the bullet points a number of times and put it to a number of other websites that we own and publish them.
Write a Press Release about the video or podcast and send it out to hundreds of sources, recommend Vocus or other distribution network.


Step 9: Google NEWS
Getting into Google and Bing News Can Double Your Traffic.  Google News wants to see Newsworthy articles published every day.

“News general guidelines

“News content: Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. We generally do not include how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.
“Journalistic standards: Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.
“Authority: Write what you know! The best news sites exhibit clear authority and expertise.
“Accountability: Users tell us they value news sites with author biographies and clearly accessible contact information, such as email and physical addresses, and phone numbers.
Readability. Clearly written articles with correct spelling and grammar make for a much better user experience. Limiting your use of distracting ads and auto-load videos also allows users to more easily focus on your article content.
Finally, you may want to review the many different types of content we include in Google News.”
Step 10: Create A NEWS Sitemap
https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/74288:

• Your News Sitemap should contain only URLs for your articles published in the last two days.
• You’re encouraged to update your News Sitemap continually with fresh articles as they’re published. Google News crawls News Sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.
• A News Sitemap can contain no more than 1,000 URLs. If you want to include more, you can break these URLs into multiple Sitemaps, and use a Sitemap index file to manage them. Use the XML format provided in the Sitemap protocol. Your Sitemap index file shouldn’t list more than 50,000 Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server isn’t overloaded by serving large files to Google News.

Once you’ve created your Sitemap, upload it to the highest-level directory that contains your news articles. Please see this page for further instructions on submitting your Sitemap.”
Step 11: Get Your Content Indexed Much Faster

Google and Bing can sometimes take weeks to find new content on your site. If you have dynamic sitemaps for every type of content on your site – I have seen indexing in under two hours. (Meaning your new content shows up two hours after you publish it)<>
Google and Bing both allow webmasters to submit sitemaps. These are the sitemap’s they recognize:<>
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en&ref_topic=8476
In addition, you can also use Sitemaps to provide Google with metadata about specific types of content on your site, including video, images, mobile, and News. For example, a video Sitemap entry can specify the running time, category, and family-friendly status of a video; an image Sitemap entry can provide information about an image’s subject matter, type, and license. You can also use a Sitemap to provide additional information about your site, such as the date it was last updated, and how often you expect the page to change. We recommend that you use a separate Sitemap to submit News information.
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.”

Conclusion

2021 Content Marketing Cheat Sheet
This is your 2021 Content Marketing cheat-sheet.

• Write great content by focusing on value (goal: bookmarks, likes & shares).
• Write viral headlines, add keywords to the headline, URL, image, and sub-headlines.
• Increase views by 78% by adding a unique image, video, graphics + a download.
• For SEO: Try to write long high-quality content 2021+ words = ideal.
• Use Google webmaster tools to improve already winning keyword ranking.
• Add an irresistible offer to capture email identities on all pages (growing your list)
• Email blast your contacts to get more visitors to your website and sign up (snowball effect)
• Add authorship = 15% more clicks: Add authors’ face to Google plus and verify your authorship.
• Internationalize your website: Consider going global (target countries with webmaster tools).
• Add links to get more views: Make obvious links to your other content – people will click – in your article.
• Use Google+1 and Twitter Share on the article (to indicate you are the source).
• Syndication Strategy: Upload your podcasts and video to Amazon & iTunes.
• Send to 600 List: 200 Top Blogs – 200 Web Sites – 200 Twitter Leaders.
• Write a Press Release about the podcast/video/interview for back-links.
• Google News: Publish an article every day for at least two months.
• Create a Google News sitemap. 
• (After publishing every day for two months) submit your site to Google News.
• Sitemaps! Create an image, video, and content sitemap and submit these to Google & Bing Webmaster Tools.

Conclusion:

Can you add any content strategies that you have used to increase traffic with content?