By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur.com|October 27, 2011

Last week I wrote about the importance of creating and publishing original content as part of your overall marketing strategy (see Why Content Marketing is King). Today, I offer my 10 tips for better content marketing:

1. Be goal-oriented: You need to create a business-aligned communications strategy where everything links back to company goals. Without such a strategy, you’re shooting blanks. Let your strategy dictate your communications instead of knee-jerk reaction to events or “we need a blog post immediately because something truly inconsequential just happened.”

2. Use great writers: It’s the quality of your thoughts that are on display and you need writers who can relate them intelligently, easily switching hats from being conversational for socially engineered content, to being informative and logical for articles, white papers and case studies.

3. Calendar everything: Plan your work and work your plan, and that starts with creating and vigilantly maintaining an editorial calendar for nearly all of your content (i.e., blog posts, strategic social media placements, white papers, case studies, webinars, videos, etc.). Share the calendar with your entire organization and ask for ideas from everyone for new content going forward.

4. Distribution rules: If content is king, then distribution is the ace. Putting content in front of the right consumers — and lots of them — is key. Without traffic, your content is worthless. This means distributing your content using social channels such as Facebook and Twitter, aligning with the right content curators and securing links from relevant sites.

5. Wear a white hat: The worse thing you can do is employ keyword stuffing and bogus blogs to serve as a link bait to your website. The best way to generate a high SERP (search engine result page) is to…

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