Use These 6 Principles of Content Marketing Physics to Outpace the Competition

Updated July 16, 2018

Understand content marketing principles by simply comparing it to something we’ve all studied in school – physics.  We’re not talking quantum physics, membrane theory or folding space… Just a straightforward way of coming to grips with content marketing by way of familiar physics basic concepts.

What is Content Marketing?

At its core, content marketing principles is nothing more than producing words that others will discover (and find interesting).  The hope is that through sharing informative, educational or entertaining pages (or posts) of words, new prospective buyers, as well as existing clients, will come to look at the brand favorably. Here, we look at content marketing strategies from an interesting perspective and hopefully, these marketing tips will remain with you.

Typically, a company will have a brand image that they want conveyed.  A new software company might want to be seen as leading edge.  An established financial services company might want to be seen as a safe pair of hands.  A beverage company appealing to a 20-something audience might want to come across with a bad attitude.  The important thing to remember is that your brand has an image that you want to come through in your shared written works, both in terms of what it says, but also how it says it.

Sharing those works means publishing them where people can find them, optimizing them for organic search rankings (typically Google searches), though often also includes word of mouth referrals via social media and other websites/blogs.

Sounds simple enough right?  BUT – there’s a lot more to content marketing than just putting some interesting words into a post on your blog and then mentioning on your social media accounts.

The Physics of Content Marketing

Principle 1:  Content = Mass

Writing one post on your blog is a start.  Publishing regularly, you’ll quickly accumulate a substantial number of posts.  That accumulation of content on a site is sometimes referred to as breadth, depth, body of knowledge or other equally “right” terms.

Physics Principle:  In the world of physics mass has gravity.  The more mass you have, the stronger its ability to attract other things.

Applied to Content Marketing:  Content is the mass of text on a site.  When you check your Google Analytics landing pages report and see X number of pages in it, you know that you have X mass on site.  In the world of content marketing a site’s mass has gravity.  The more pages of content you have, the more people will be attracted to your site, and will find it, via Google search.

Best Practice:  You should be regularly checking your Google Search Console -> Search Traffic -> Search Analytics – and looking to see what terms people are searching for, and clicking, to come to your site.  Having more pages in the top 10 or 20 rankings will mean more search terms in this report.  It’s a way of checking on whether or not your website mass is growing.

Applied to Web Hosting:  As your site grows larger, you will need drive storage space to accommodate this growth.  More pages = bigger drive requirements.  As your audience grows larger (thanks to ranking for more terms, as you publish more pages), you will need more CPU and Input/Output (IO) to deliver more pages to more people simultaneously.  More audience = bigger CPU & IO requirements.

Principle 2:  Rate of Content Publishing = Velocity

Physics Principle:  Velocity is a measure of speed and direction.  It indicates how fast you’re going and which way you’re travelling.

Applied to Content Marketing:   If you publish one article a month, your velocity is negligible.  Search engines might rank you for some terms related to that article, but you won’t develop a ton of authority for your site.  Authority is one measure of how strong your site is and has several different factors.  The most important to remember is that, all things being equal, more content (more mass) tends to have higher authority than lesser sites and higher authority sites tend to rank better, and get more traffic, than lower authority sites.

Not all website owners have the time or budget to have someone publishing multiple times per day, like large media sites.  In fact, if you can manage to publish a couple of times a week – you’ll be well ahead of most SMB’s.  Having that much publishing velocity is a great way to get your site noticed by search engines and searchers alike.

Best Practice:  Use an editorial calendar where you map out what topics you’ll be publishing about and when.  It will help you plan a consistent rate, or increasing rate of publishing.  Working without such a calendar and you’ll be at risk of slowing down without noticing it.

Applied to Web Hosting:  Web hosting is resource intensive.  More publishing means more demands on storage, CPU and I/O.   If you are quickly ramping up and publishing much more frequently than you have done, then you need to keep an eye on your web hosting resources.  With a managed plan, you could simply ask the technical/sales team to check and make sure your growth is being catered for in your current plan – and when you should plan on moving up to the next higher spec plan (for some this could take months or even years to think about upgrading because of publishing).  If you’re not on a managed plan, you’ll need to check your cPanel stats and find out how much breathing room you have for storage, CPU and I/O.

Principle 3:  Content Momentum = Content Size x Content Rate of Publishing (Mass x Velocity)

Physics Principle:  Momentum = Mass x Velocity.  Speed is important, but mass is equally critical.  Multiplied, they’re the reason you can die being hit by a fast bicycle just as easily as a slow bus, should you encounter one on foot.

Applied to Content Marketing:  The average number of words per page for #1 ranking Google search terms, in competitive areas, is over 2000 words.  Size matters.

You don’t always have to publish 2000+ word articles, but consider this:  When’s the last time you read a 300-500 word blog post and though the author, or the company associated, was remarkable?  Variety isn’t a bad thing, but remember, whenever possible to go big or go home.

Best Practice:  Combining these concepts, publishing larger articles gives you a shot at ranking for more keywords, which means drawing more visitors.  Publishing more frequently, builds your mass more quickly and signals that your site is growing, rather than shrinking.  Putting the two together…   publishing larger articles frequently is the best way of establishing a high level of content momentum.  Consider publishing a couple of times a week as a start, measure results and go from there!

Applied to Web Hosting:  Momentum is a great thing.  Build it – continue it – enjoy it.  Focusing on your writing is how you’ll build momentum.  Don’t let other things distract or take priority, unless they must.  In this regard, consider managed web hosting.  By offloading the admin technical functions to the experts, you’ll be able to focus on what you do, and know, best.

Principle 4:  Social Syndication = Leverage

Physics Principle:  Leverage, in the world of physics, is where you amplify the effectiveness of an input force, to gain a larger output force.  The class example of this is the teeter totter, where by placing the center fulcrum closer to one end than the other, a small person can manage to lift the larger, despite not having their size or strength.

Applied to Content Marketing:  In content marketing, leverage is the process by which you get more people to see your content than would otherwise see it through your blog alone.  In other words…  Publishing on your blog might bring in 50 to 500 visitors a month.  Publishing on your blog, then mentioning on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, could amplify that reach, so you bring in 150 to 1500 visitors a month.

Best Practice:  Mentioning your new content on social media, as well as outreach to anyone you’ve quoted or mentioned in your content, along with a link, is a great way to gain leverage and reach more people than you ever would have through just blogging alone.  You can even spend a few bucks and boost your posts so that you get an additional reach!

Applied to Web Hosting:  Add social sharing buttons to your posts and pages so that people can easily share what they’ve found with others.  If you’re publishing remarkable content, you want it given a like, thumbs up and shared.

Principle 5:  Focused Effort = Hydraulic Pressure (Force)

Physics Principle:  In hydraulics, if you’re trying to build up enough pressure to do some serious work, it’s much harder to do that using a 3 foot pipe versus a 3 inch pipe.  Limiting yourself to the smaller pipe, much higher pressures are achieved – a bit like why a firehose is usually between 1.5 and 3 inches in diameter.  Firemen could use a 3 foot diameter hose, but the water would come out like a water fountain, reaching a few inches instead of squirting all the way up to the 3rd or 4th floor.

Applied to Content Marketing:  All too often a blogger or company will try to gain leverage everywhere humanly possible, simultaneously.  There will be 15 social networks, half a dozen feed aggregators, Twitter trains, and dozens of other attempts at gaining the most possible reach.  When this happens, people get spread thin.  Effort can get spread too thin.

The worst thing that can happen on a social network is for you to appear spread thin, seldom interacting, taking ages to reply or not replying to questions at all, and generally looking like every place you go is getting 7 seconds of your time.  The idea is to be sociable, to engage, interact, assist, impress.  You can’t plow for planting row crops by strafing or raking along the surface.

Best Practice:  Rather than socially syndicating, or mentioning your fresh blog post, on 15-20 sites, try focusing on 1 or 2 or possibly even 3, but no more.  Remember – focus your efforts to apply enough pressure on your social channels.  Doing so will get you enough work done that you’ll have a great chance of getting noticed and getting customers.

Applied to Web Hosting:  Again, focusing your efforts means not spending hours trying to solve a hosting issue that experts can handle in minutes, or seconds.  If you’ve chosen premium managed hosting, like KnownHost, you’ve got a team available to help 24x7x365.  Let the hosting experts handle hosting matters while you handle your business and your business marketing!

Principle 6:  Website Poor Performance = Friction

Physics Principle:   Friction is a resistance that slows things down.  It’s sometimes referred to as drag, such as when it’s air resistance.

Applied to Content Marketing:  There’s a lot of things that can slow down your content marketing progress.  One of the most obvious things within your control is how well your website performs.  A fast website that is rarely (if ever) offline is said to be frictionless (a great thing).  A slow website, or one offline frequently, has a ton of friction – it’s stopping you from achieving your goals.

Friction is where content marketing meets hosting.  You don’t want your web hosting to be the reason your website is underperforming.

Best Practice:  When examining your web hosting, ask yourself, “What could I do differently to reduce downtime and speed up my website performance?”.

Applied to Web Hosting:   Buying cheap hosting from cutrate un-managed hosting suppliers is like driving 200 mph on a cheap set of worn out tires.  The risk is ridiculous compared to the cost to avoid.  KnownHost proudly offers fully managed hosting built on premium hardware, using premium networking, supported by some of the best technical staff anywhere in the world.  We’re glad they’re onshore, serving you from Birmingham, Alabama, USA – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year!  Get great web hosting for small sites, fully managed VPS hosting for mid-range or a dedicated server for those large websites that demand peak performance.

Conclusion

Understanding online marketing is a bit like high school physics – there are some basic principles that can guide your success.  You should:

•    – Accumulate momentum: build mass and increase velocity.
•    – Apply sufficient force: use leverage to get extra reach.
•    – Reduce friction: maximize gains to momentum.

With a bit of content publishing effort, and with choosing the right hosting to deliver that content to the Interworld, you’ll be on the fast track to outpacing the competition!