Regardless of what industry you are in, your audience is seeking information and it’s in your best interest to be the place that provides it for them. High-quality educational content has many great benefits.

However, is it better to keep the content on your site, or push the content to other sites in an effort to get the most bang for your buck? The best strategy is a mixture of both.

I’ll explain the benefits of each.

The benefits of keeping the content exclusively on your website include:

1. If the content is placed solely on your site, this can help attract new site visitors. If you push your content to multiple sites, you are essentially competing with yourself in terms of search results. Unless you have a very authoritative site in the eyes of the search engines, you may find your site ranking below others.
2. If your website consistently has fresh content, search engines will crawl your site on a more regular basis. Failing to add fresh content to your site regularly, the amount of time between visits by a search engine increases. Keep them coming to your site.
3. Fresh content also encourages your current customers to return to your site. A regular content schedule promotes return visits. Think of it like a television series. You know your favorite show airs on a certain date and can make plans to watch it. Make sure that your audience gets used to seeing your content on a regular day so that they can anticipate and look for it.
4. Prospects most likely visit your site on a regular basis. These prospects could be potential customers, or future employees. Good educational resources and fresh content can help to show these visitors that you care. This can provide a sense of who you are as a company beyond just the information about your products and services.

The benefits of publishing your content off-site include:

1. The ability to reach new people. By regularly publishing that content on community sites within your industry, or in trade magazines, you’ll stay top-of-mind with potential future customers. This can help build familiarity and brand you as an expert in the industry – someone who knows what they are talking about and is worth listening to. While readers may not be in market for your service now, they certainly may be in the future – or know someone who is. If you’ve been visible to them on a regular basis, the chances increase that, at the very least, they consider you.
2. It is in the best interest of these sites to promote their content by syndicating it to members. Oftentimes, these communities or trade magazine’s websites are ad supported. That being said, they cannot simply e-mail ads to their members or subscribers. They need content as well. In most cases, they also need the help of industry experts to provide it. They appreciate your content and provide you with an opportunity to reach a huge database of people in your industry.
3. In most cases, these sites allow the author to include a bio in the content as well as a link to the company website. This can increase your website’s authority in the eyes of search engines.

The solution that seems to work well is to keep long form content exclusive (white papers, case studies, etc.) on your website. Many companies require an e-mail address to access the content. This can help increase any database for future marketing.

Short content, such as blogs, seem to perform well when shared within communities and/or with trade magazine’s or news sites. Keep a good mix of both and you’ll be on your way to a rewarding content marketing strategy.