The demand for web publishing is consistently increasing with the change in consumer behavior, which is why it’s crucial that you become knowledgeable about the processes involved in content publishing.
A highly effective website is crucial for any business to thrive today. However, it doesn’t just stop with a beautiful web design, the user has to find value in your website to engage with it, ultimately, compelling them to take action — ideally, a sign-up, purchase, or subscription.
That value can be delivered through web publishing.
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What is Web Publishing or Internet Publishing?
Web publishing is the method of producing and publishing original content on the web. This includes creating and uploading pages on a website, as well as updating web pages. It’s also known as internet publishing or online publishing.
When done right, web publishing is a powerful digital marketing asset because it attracts valuable traffic and compels a web visitor to take your desired action.
Buyer’s behavior has changed, consumer behavior is evolving and most of your target audiences are now online. The importance for businesses to develop a strong web presence to engage and build relationships with customers has never been greater.
If internet publishing initiatives, such as blogging, aren’t part of your list of priorities, your competitors will overshadow you. Blogging alone is being used by 89 percent of content marketers for their content creation strategy. It’s not a question of whether you’re going to include it in your marketing campaign, but a question of how you’re going to use it to your advantage.
The Importance of Web Publishing for Business Growth
Creating and publishing content provides free and valuable information to your users. With the internet, you won’t need to stand outside your store and hand out flyers or samples. People will come to you because the content you publish will attract them to your website. Meanwhile, quality content also has the power to engage and retain existing clients.
Here are other benefits of web publishing:
• It Targets a More Specific Audience
Digital content like landing pages and blogs are a powerful medium to capture a more targeted audience. With proper research and content creation, landing pages will attract customers who are ready to buy. Meanwhile, blogs can be useful in engaging users who are at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
• It Establishes Your Business as an Industry Leader
Blogging is an effective way for your brand to establish a name in the industry. With your knowledge and expertise in the field, you can further enhance your trustworthiness and credibility. Aim to always provide informational, valuable and relevant content online.
• It Gives Your Business an SEO Boost
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo love fresh content. They tend to rank websites that publish new and relevant materials higher. When you consistently publish blogs, you’re always feeding search engines with new content to index.
You also get many opportunities to insert new and relevant keywords that customers are going to use to look for products and services from your business.
• It Enhances Link Building
Link building is an important way to rank your website as search engines put a lot of value on third-party websites linking back to your content. Of course, these websites should be of high quality and related to your business. Good digital content acts as a leverage to persuade other websites or social accounts to share links back to your web pages.
• It Strengthens Your Relationships with Existing Clients
It’s not just about acquiring new relationships but strengthening the ones you already have with existing clients. You want them to stay with you, and continue using your products or services.
• It May Reduce Your Costs
You will be saving more financial resources as you won’t have to spend much on data entry and printing costs.
What Does a Digital Content Publisher Do?
A digital publishing platform is a tool used to publish your digital content. It’s any platform that allows you to publish online materials, like blogs, e-books, landing pages, or any material that can be viewed and read online.
Having your content housed on a digital publishing platform places your content at your users’ fingertips whenever they need them.
Here are the top web publishing platforms:
• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Medium
• Zmags
• Squarespace
How Do You Get an Article Published?
Good content creation process is needed so that the hard work put into writing a blog post, producing a video or making an infographic, maximizes opportunities. This will ensure that any published content will be beneficial to your business growth.
Here are some steps you can use to ensure that your article is worthy of publication.
1. Do Keyword Research
Once you’ve determined a list of topics, it’s now time to do some keyword research. You can’t just write randomly, it will get you random results. Keyword research provides you with accurate data that connects you with what users are looking for.
Here are some ways you can conduct keyword research:
When you start typing a word on the Google Search Bar, a bunch of “auto-suggest” queries will appear. These are words and search terms related to what you’re searching for and what other users have already searched before. These are based on similarity or popularity. Using these keywords as backbone for your content will ensure that you have ready readers looking for the topic you’re planning to write.
Ahrefs and Spyfu are two of the most popular tools for marketers. Ahrefs allows you to target certain niches and groups of related keywods. Spyfu will let you see what keywords your competitors are using. Keyword tools give you more suggestions and ideas for topics. They also provide data such as search volume, keyword difficulty, as well as a list of sites that are ranking for those keywords. This information will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your content and make data-driven decisions.
2. Keep it simple for a broad audience
Readability is very important in creating digital content. Your readers aren’t looking to be impressed by your wit and vocabulary; they’re looking for straightforward and factual information that’s easy to understand. If they don’t find it in your article, or if they get confused, they’re going to exit and move on to the next article they can find.
3. Eliminate jargon and useless words
Following simplicity and readability, your writing should be concise and should not contain useless words. Every word should be important and delivered in the clearest way possible.
4. Use data to support your statements
Relevant and current data lends credibility to your article. Data is especially crucial for Your Money Your Life (YMYL) topics.
5. Have a catchy title.
Titles are important because it’s what a reader sees first. Make sure to have a catchy title that gives the reader an idea of what the article has in store for them.
6. Write a concise introduction
An introduction or your abstract can be used to pull in readers and editors so make sure that you come up with one that’s brief but will surely grab their attention. It should contain a short introduction of the topic, the pain point that the article is trying to solve, and a summary of what you will offer the reader later on.
7. Make sure that the conclusion is sound
The conclusion is the closing part of the article that solidifies why it’s a worthy read, and worthy of publishing. It should briefly summarize what the reader gained from reading the entire article.
8. Re-read your work and revise as you see fit
Be critical of your work. Re-read it and check if there are any confusing paragraphs, or sentences that don’t make sense. Shorten anything you find too lengthy and omit any idea that isn’t useful to the overall purpose of your article.
9. Avoid any spelling and grammatical errors
Always double check your article for spelling and grammar. One of the benefits of digital publications is that you gain credibility and trust from your audience, this won’t happen if they see simple writing errors.
10. Have someone you respect proofread your work
Sometimes, it can be hard to judge your own work, so have another professional proofread your work. Be open to criticism, likewise, before revising, evaluate whether the changes you’re going to make are justified.
11. Check the digital publication’s submission guidelines
This applies if you’re publishing it through a third-party platform and not on your website. Each website has specific guidelines on word count, font, formatting, image settings and citations. Make sure to follow them as the editors might return your article otherwise.
Also, make sure that you’re sending them to the right publications, journals, or brands. This means that they should be relevant to your business, or their target audience are the same as yours.
12. Publish it on your website and update accordingly
After you’ve edited and double-checked your work, you can now publish it on your site.
However, it doesn’t end with your article or page going live. There will be instances when you’ll notice that the article will need to be updated with new information and keywords. So you’ll have to revamp the content and add new keywords to keep it relevant for readers who may become customers and search engines that may rank your articles.
Start Web Publishing and Grow Your Business
Researching and writing the content can be a lot of work, and very time consuming. But the results of publishing on the web will all be worth it when done correctly.
Once you have the web publishing process down, you’ll be able to generate work that not only will attract new customers and delight existing ones but will also grow your business.
Learn more about the types of digital content you can publish from our guide. Or email us today when you’re ready to publish content relevant to your business.