Articles are not the only type of content you can create as part of your overall content marketing strategy. Mixing in other media types will help attract traffic to your site and to your pages on other properties.

Video and images are shared a lot more often than written content, so it’s important to include those media types on your site and your social media postings. In fact, if you look at the content that goes viral, it’s almost always a picture or a video.

In addition to the viral factor, search engine algorithms seem to reward websites that have a good mixture of content types, because people like to consume content in all different forms. While you do still need to have written content on your website for SEO purposes, incorporating other types of media can give you a nice boost.

Here are a few of the different types of media you can publish in order to reduce the amount of writing you have to do while still providing amazing value to visitors who love all forms of media.

Videos

Videos are an amazing tool for creating user engagement, increasing brand awareness, promoting your services, educating the market about your products, and making your content go viral. One of the great benefits of using video in your content marketing, is that there are so many forms to choose from:

• Talking head videos. Talking head videos are the kind of videos that you see on a nightly newscast. A person speaks directly to the audience while looking at the camera. These are effective for informing where visual examples are not needed.
• Educational presentations. These videos often show a person teaching in front of a whiteboard or a flip chart. They are very helpful for teaching and showing how concepts are related.
• Product demonstrations. A product demonstration is exactly what it sounds like. You show your audience how to use a product. Simple and straight-forward.
• Screen capture. Screen capture videos are useful for demonstrating how something on the computer or the internet works. They are particularly helpful with teaching your audience how to use software.
• Slide show recordings. When you want to teach a specific concept or provide “how-to” steps in sequence, slide show recordings are ideal.
• Animation. Animated videos are an amazing tool for grabbing a person’s attention and holding it until you are finished sharing whatever it is you need to share. They are great for sharing information, teaching concepts, and providing simple entertainment.
• Live streams. You can actually live stream any of the above types of video. The only difference is, you are delivering the information in real time rather than sharing a recorded version of the content. The benefit of using live streams is that search engine algorithms give them very high rankings.

Getting started on a great video is a simple matter of deciding on the goal for your video, picking the right format for your market, and clicking record.

Images

Images are powerful in telling a story to your audience. Interesting and unusual images get attention and bring a person’s focus to whatever it is you’re sharing. Here are some ideas for images you might want to create for your content marketing campaigns:

• Inspirational images (pictures with inspirational text)
  
• Picture collages
  
• Memes (pictures with funny sayings)
  
• Engagement images
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If you don’t know how to create your own high-quality images, sites like pixabay allow you to use and share their content without having to pay royalties. Just be sure you always check the license for any images you use.

Slideshows

Slideshows are popular because they allow the viewer to get the information they’re looking for at their own pace and in their own time.

Because slideshows focus so heavily on images, it’s possible to create them with very little writing involved. To create a quick slideshow, find or create the images that tell the story and write a short blurb to go along with each image. To use this method, make sure you have a specific topic outline.

For example, you could create a slideshow titled “10 Places To Visit Before You Die”. You would need to find a great photo of each place, describe the location, and tell people why you chose that location as one of the must-visit places.

Infographics

Infographics are visual representations of data; they’re used to present (sometimes boring) facts in a more interesting way that people can easily digest and understand. They are also a great way to deliver information without a lot of writing.

Infographics do very well on social media sites like Pinterest because they are visually compelling and take up a lot of screen real estate.

You can use tools like visme to create your own infographics and share them to drive traffic to your other web properties.

Video Roundups

A video roundup is a collection of videos about a specific topic. They are typically used on blogs as a way to share a lot of information in a relatively concise manner.

To publish a video roundup, select several videos (3-5) from a video sharing site like YouTube. Watch the videos to be sure they say what you want to share with your audience!

Embed the videos into a single blog post and write a brief but complete commentary on each one. Your commentary should express your point of view about the video’s content.

There are, of course, many other ways to share a variety of content types and have a greatly varied content marketing mix, but if you implement those shared here, you will have a very good start at broadening your exposure.