Internet marketing strategy–free white paper from Econsultancy

Econsultancy is running an interesting little experiment in content marketing and CEO Ashley Friedlein has emailed its 30,000 members worldwide asking us to publish a story and link to its free Internet Marketing Strategy white paper, using the link anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy.

I haven’t had chance to read it yet, but many of the Econsultancy reports that I have read have been full of interesting and relevant facts and knowledge.

Econsultancy will turn this into a case study and publish the results, so we’ll all be able to understand exactly how well it worked.

Incidentally it’s with reports like this that tablets really come into their own. I find it hard to imagine ever buying an electronic book, it just doesn’t match up the real book reading experience, but for free reports like this it’s ideal. Before my tablet I’d frequently find and save this type of thing, but then never get around to reading it properly. Now I can take a quick look whenever I’ve got a few spare moments.

The full text of Ashley Friedlein’s email about Econsultancy’s content marketing experiment is below:

We’ve just published a 46-page Internet Marketing Strategy briefing which is free to download. It analyses five key current trends: customer centricity, channel diversification, data, social media and content strategy.

It’s a bit unusual for us to make something like this free. It’s an experiment in ‘content marketing’ – a hot topic in digital marketing and something we examine in the briefing itself.

Of course we’re interested to see how many visits and downloads we get, the tweets and social mentions, but we’re most interested in getting links to this page (ideally with the link anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy) to see how this impacts our natural search rankings for the phrase ‘internet marketing strategy’.

Currently we’re nowhere near the first page of Google, or other search engines, for this competitive search phrase. But could we be with a bit of ‘content marketing’? And what value might that drive to us?

We plan to publish a mini case study with the results of this experiment which hopefully you’ll find interesting and which might help put more concrete value to the effectiveness (or otherwise) of ‘content marketing’.

You can help with our experiment…

Of course we encourage you to download and read the briefing itself (we think it’s very good) but, ideally, you would send a link to this page (not the file itself – little SEO value there…) to relevant contacts or, even better, you’d link to the page from your blog, via social media etc.

In an ideal world you’d even use the anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy to the link to the page.

I’m sending this email to around 30,000 of Econsultancy’s members globally so, if you do your collective bit, then we should stand a good chance of building some great, and relevant, links…?

Will we shoot up the rankings as a result? Or get punished for the suspiciously quick build-up of links with the same anchor text? Who knows… watch this space.

Obviously we’re not incentivising you to do this in any way because that would be ‘paid links’. 😉

All the best and thanks for any help.

Ashley

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
Econsultancy