While there’s nothing wrong with standard text-based content, it’s important that businesses develop alternative methods for “spicing things up.” When used in conjunction with quality articles, blog posts, and website copy, interactive features can really…
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Bygone days. It used to be simpler. Marketers would create super-well designed brochures and pay to advertise their product/service in front of their audience. Wait. What just happened? Internet of course. Internet changed everything. 90% of…
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Hi everyone, We wanted to share with you the Best Of Content Marketing articles we wrote in the past 3 months. And in extra, get the list of the best tools for the publishing phase…
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Last editions: #1: The best content marketing tools for the research phase. #2: The best content marketing tools for the creation phase. #3: The best content marketing tools for the optimization phase. We mentioned how much content marketing…
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“I like to compare evergreen posts to the foundations of a house. You may put up new wallpaper, patch up the roof, or even change the tiles on the floor – but rarely do you…
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A few weeks back I wrote an article called “How to write good blog posts for your audience and SEO and make sure they perform” in which I laid down the steps I used to 1. write good blog posts consistently, and 2. help them perform better. The above infographic is a great visual way to respond to #2.
Many influencers talk about the 80/20 rule: you should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it. Although I think this ratio really depends on your job, needs and company, it does capture one thing: if you write amazing content but don’t shout out your did so, no one will hear you.
And as far as promoting your blog goes, you can pick and choose on the list above the items that make most sense to your company. If for instance you work for a very technical B2B company and your target audience is above 50 years old, you might want to consider investing in LinkedIn rather than Facebook, leverage influencers and invest time in guest blogging. It all really depends on your audience, where they are and what they care about.
There is one very important point I’d like to add to this infographic: it’s not content repurposing (which I thing is one of the leanest way to do content marketing, it saves an incredible amount of time), it’s content recycling.
Imagine if radio stations had played Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean only once: would it have become the 80’s biggest hit? Probably not. This is the same with your content. If you want it to be seen among others, you have to share it on a regular basis with your audience.
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Content marketing is built on beautiful principles. Instead of interrupting people’s day to day lives with TV adverts, skyline-blocking billboards and glossy magazine ads, content marketers create useful resources for their customers and for each…
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The marketing definition of conversion is “get the prospect to take action.”
How do you get someone to take the action you want? You need to make them comfortable.
Marketers are hard to trust, right? We brought it on ourselves because we were “full of it” for decades. Or, at least, we were full of ourselves.
So when a potential buyer arrives in your marketing den for the first time, they’re not exactly in a hurry to proceed to the bedroom. Or relax into a chair.
At best, they’re curious. Realistically, they’re anxious. And usually, they do just the opposite of what you want. They leave.
Why? Discomfort. It’s the almighty conversion killer—the meanest mutha’ in marketing.
So here’s what I propose: drop the transformation ambition and aim a wee-bit lower. Aim to overcome the causes of discomfort. You need to craft your content to put prospects in their comfort zone.
Who’s in charge of the comfort zone?
The copywriter is the chief conversion officer.
The copywriter’s output must seal the deal or at least write something compelling—and comforting—enough to start some sort of relationship.
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Find out how you can double the amount of traffic and leads you get from “old” blog content through historical optimization.
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When I try to write good blog posts, it automatically becomes more difficult than it would be to have an interesting debate with someone, even if I had the same discussion and arguments. Ok first, what is a good blog post? It’s – of course – a post that converts. That brings you traffic. Leads. Revenue, you might dare? For that, your content needs to delight your audience. And if you want your audience to find this beautiful piece of content you spent hours writing, it needs to be SEO-proofed.
I was discussing with a friend last week and he asked me if I had a “process” in place that I followed when writing a blog post. No, I didn’t have a checklist with items that I crossed off to make sure I didn’t forget anything. But shouldn’t I?
That got me thinking about the methodology I built over time for my writing purposes (and that I’m sure I did not invent but whatever) and also to promote it accordingly. Unconsciously I use that methodology to try and write good blog posts, curate an existing post, or even re-work an article of a guest blogger. So I tried to lay down a list of these steps for you, hoping you can relate and use it at some point. Let me know if you liked it or if you’d add anything to it!
This is a very interesting case study by the team at B2B Content Engine on content curation and website traffic: it analyzes the impact content curation has on a B2B web site’s traffic. B2B sites typically have niche audiences which are hard to find from untargeted methods and costly to generate with targeted advertising.
What this study shows is that consistent content curation provided not only impressive results on traffic growth but also lead generation conversion at a 12% rate. In addition to many other great benefits such as brand visibility, awareness, etc…
It also gives an idea of the volume of content that was required to achieve that, which is very reasonable.
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The key to content marketing success is to publish good content, but also to publish more content: you need to blog more and to blog consistently if you want to get tangible results. The times where you could publish an occasional epic piece of content such as a quarterly white paper or a yearly survey report and be “good to go” are gone.
That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? You know that you need to have a blog, and a blog that doesn’t suck like many do. But having a blog and publishing a good piece of content every month is not enough. Why? Because for your audience to find your content when they ask Google a question, you need your content to answer the new SEO rules:
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I find the best titles come to me AFTER I have already written a post. Sometimes you need to have a clear idea of the ‘hook’ you’re using before you can come up with a killer title – and often that hook only comes to you WHILE you are writing the post.
Read the full article at kimgarst.com
Kim’s article is great: she gives you 6 easy and highly effective ways to create the perfect blog titles. And just like her, it takes me a while to find the title of my blog post: in fact I often have a title in mind but end up changing it until I publish it.
Why?
Because the title may be the last thing you should worry about when you’re writing a blog post. Not that you shouldn’t think about it and optimize it, that’s not what I said. But if you write a good blog post that adds value to your readers and is SEO-proofed, then the perfect blog post title should almost automatically be revealed to you.
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Companies tend to struggle to create and publish good content on their blog. If you’re a marketer, you’re most likely not a professional writer. Hence it can be difficult to figure out what your audience is interested in, write good content around those topics, all while running your other marketing tasks. And when your segment has many big actors with content marketing teams dedicated to maintaining an efficient blog, it can be challenging to try and compete with them. So it’s important to understand what matters in terms of content quantity and quality.
Publish good content, yes indeed. Here’s how.
If “Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left” – according to Seth Godin (best selling author, entrepreneur, marketer and public speaker) -, you want to do things right.
If you want to do things right and publish good content, you should…
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Do you read online? Come on… be honest. Because if you’re like most people, you don’t read online. You scan. According to usability specialist Jakob Nielsen, on average readers actually read only about 28% of…
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Despite what my friend Eddie would say, even Messi can’t do it alone. Let’s see if some of these quotes I heard or felt about my content marketing team sound familiar:
“I’m always behind on my publishing goals”.
“I know if I had more content to distribute I would have more traffic on my website, but I don’t have enough resources to write this content”.
“My co-workers who are supposed to write something for me keep pushing back the deadline”.
“I can’t constantly follow up with all my co-workers to make sure they share my content to their social network”.
Rings a bell? Don’t worry there are ways to cope with that.
First of all, if you’re still not sure how content curation can solve some of your content struggles, then have a look at this must-read post by Heidi Cohen on the 3 no-brainer reasons you should start curating content, and then come back here for more tips.
I’ve identified two reasons to expand your content marketing team that can really help you increase your content production and your content reach: extend the party committee so others can write and curate with you, and/or leverage your co-workers’ social audience.
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Obviously, one of the best ways to stay exciting is to look to what’s new—read up on industry news, check out your competitors’ blogs, and listen to what your customers are talking about, and use that information to generate some fresh, new material. However, this isn’t always possible. When it isn’t, you’ll have to look back at some of the older topics you’ve covered and find a way to present them as if they’re new—in a fresh, exciting way.
There are several strategies you can use to accomplish this.
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The launch of Sccop.it Content Director in February was a huge success and a number of you already love the product! We wanted to thank you for the continuous feedback to help us improve it, and are happy to announce the release of a new version of Scoop.it Content Director that takes into account the many enhancements you asked for and that will help you generate more ROI with your Content Marketing.
This new release is centered on three main areas:
– Scale your content marketing with contributors,
– Create engaging newsletters in minutes with a new drag-and-drop editor,
– Measure What Matters – improve and prove the ROI of your content with the new analytics.
We will host a webinar on May 20th to show you how you can leverage Scoop.it Content Director to improve your Content Marketing strategy and ROI. You can register here.
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When it comes to writing content, a question that often comes is: how much should I create? You can hear all sorts of advice ranging from quantitative analysis on the optimized size of a blog post to bloggers recommendations on the merits of 800-word SEO-optimized posts vs long form epic content.
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To calculate content curation ROI, all you need to do is to tally up what it took to do the marketing, and then what you got out of it. The first part of that is to figure out how long it took you to do your work.
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Content marketing has been the most successful method of acquiring users for our startup Process Street. A number of people ask me about my process (no pun) for creating and marketing content that drives users to our product, so I wanted to give the Scoop.it readers the inside scoop.
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In the article I wrote on April 16th, “How We Addressed our Main Content Marketing Pain by Outsourcing to Freelancers”, I explained the process of selecting and using a freelance writer. We did not take…
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There are so many content marketing formats that it can be hard to decide which to focus on. White papers, ebooks, slideshares, blogs, infographics, curated content, videos, etc. They all have their merits but don’t…
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With so many advances in smart technology these days, marketing professionals, content creators, and their teams need to keep up with the availability of tools that help reduce their workload and maximize their output.
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Who doesn’t want more website traffic? Like money or good looks, it seems like it’s just not possible to have too much traffic to your blog.
Trouble is, traffic is tricky. You can buy it, sure. But if you don’t convert that traffic into dollars, you’re losing money. And to actually see ROI, you have to not just make back the money you’ve spent on advertising. You’ll also have to cover the overhead for your business and the time you spent managing it all.
If you go the other way and build up free traffic, you’ll have to get enough results to justify your time. Anybody can spend an afternoon building traffic to their blog. But did they get enough traffic from those efforts to justify the time spent and the opportunity lost?
It is, of course, possible to get an ROI on your blog traffic work. I’m about to give you specific ideas for exactly how to do that.
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“According to the experts, a blog will solve all your Internet woes. Blogging will increase your traffic, expand your audience, improve your engagement, position you as an authority, and allow you to shape the message in your space. So should you blog?”
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Blogging remains the pillar of content marketing, particularly for SMBs. But when you browse many company’s websites, you realize their blog is under optimized.
1. It’s hard to maintain the discipline: even when you have an in-house team of content writers, creating content is time consuming and it takes a lot of efforts to maintain the rhythm. Publishing great content on a consistent basis costs a lot.
2. It’s easy to get demotivated by the lack of impact. Initially a blog doesn’t get much traffic so for ROI-driven management team, it’s tempting to dismiss it into the “tried this; didn’t work” category.
Fortunately, getting results out of your content marketing in general and out of your blogging efforts in particular is accessible to anyone. Sure, it requires some particular techniques but the good news is they’re not particularly hard to implement.
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“A few years ago, blogging and social media were separate. Blogging was long-form, serious, and crafted. Social media was short-form, personal, and spontaneous. Some people predicted that social media would replace blogging because of declining attention spans. Now blogging and social media not only amicably coexist; they complement each other. The trick is to use a blog to enrich your social media with long-form posts and to use social media to promote your blog.”
Source: blog.marketo.com
Last year, one of our most successful blog post was titled: “Social Media Publishing Is Dead (as we know it)“. Its premise was that because of declining organic reach for brands and pages on Facebook (that the company was open about and that in fact is impacting all other social networks), social media could no longer be considered as a standalone publishing activity.
What do we mean by that?
Historically, many brands and companies have considered their Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ pages as some form of web pages they could maintain by publishing content to it and generate engagement, independently of their main website. Community Managers who were independent from Content Strategists were managing these pages with different objectives than the ones being defined for the company’s Content Strategy.
This doesn’t work any more as many now agree, including Guy Kawasaki, the well-known evangelist and author of the Art of Social Media.
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One of the main ways to to leverage content curation for business is to add curated content to your website or blog. By selecting the most interesting content for your target audience and adding some context to it, you will naturally show your expertise to your visitors – a good objective in itself. But, if you do it right, you should also enjoy the following benefits:
Audience engagement as readers can now discover more interesting content than just your own stories or product news: loyal visitors will stay longer, hopping between related curated pieces, and have reasons for coming back or even subscribe to receive your email newsletters.
SEO as your Website now contains more quality content on your niche topic which can be indexed by Google. Not only will that content be well targeted and relevant but it will also be organized and contextualized which is what Google is looking for (more on seo benefits of content curation here).
Social Traffic as your readers can share content they like while directing traffic to your site (more on why you should use a content hub for your social media publishing here).
Conversions as readers of your curated content are not just clicking on links in your tweets or Facebook posts to end up on third-party websites, but are instead being directed to your own website that now acts as a content hub. You can incorporate call-to-actions in your hub to either contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or request a demo of your product (more on how to use content curation for inbound marketing and lead generation here).
So how do you integrate curated content to Wordpress in the right way, to reach these objectives?
Not all integrations are created equal, and some integrations will not deliver the above benefits in an optimal way. Here are the pros and cons of key integration options that you should be aware of:
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“Content is king!”
“Content is the new SEO!”
“Content is the new PR!”
What isn’t content these days? You hear about it all the time, you know you have to do it, you might even be doing it. But, are you doing it right? Just because you’ve started a blog, doesn’t mean you’re a content marketer. Don’t worry, though, I’m here with a few reasons why your blog might suck and some tips to change that
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