Ok, here’s something a little different. I just wrote this post in 15 minutes flat & published it without even reading the white paper that it is about. Why? It’s part of of a content marketing ‘experiment’ by Econsultancy from the UK. They’ve mailed 30,000 members all across the world, asking them to publish a story & link to their free Internet Marketing Strategy white paper, using the anchor text ‘internet marketing strategy.’
So that’s what I’ve done. You just read it. Their goal is;
“To see how this [content marketing campaign] impacts our natural search rankings for the phrase ‘internet marketing strategy’.”
Currently they are nowhere on the term. But they are trying to get there with a bit of content marketing. Now, Econsultancy are not stupid 🙂 Of course, it will work. They will get lots of lovely rich anchor text. I’m sure they’ve optimised their .pdf. They’ve done a nice little bit of PR there too with that email. Stuart Bruce (one of the guys I follow, that’s how I found this experiment) has already written about it & I bet loads more will too. They’ve also optimised their site for the basics & will no doubt get busy with some shameless blog promotion, & engagement in social media.
So the question will not be if it will work, it will be to what extent.
I’ll let you know as soon as they publish the results.
Meanwhile, why am I ‘participating’? Well, I just wrote a post on content marketing about half an hour ago & it seemed a little churlish not to 🙂
PS: although I haven’t read the report yet, I have read others, such as this SEO best practice guide. There’s always good stuff in there.
