Content marketing seems to have a lot of things happening in there. About 2 Weeks of hibernation otherwise called as “Vacation” and back to the routine that I like the most – content generation, and I pick the topic of “content marketing” only to find about 20+ interesting topics for the weekly roundup.
I had to spend about an hour to decide on which ones to pick for the roundup and which ones to discard.
Something that I noticed while I was browsing through so many interesting posts is that most of these posts were pretty much around the same broad topic.
And I could infer a one very important thing out of it. That “the basics are pretty much the same”.
It also meant that a proven content marketing strategy had nothing more than following the absolute basics.
So let us see the posts that guide us on these “absolute content marketing basics”.
Content Marketing Basics Weekly Roundup
I used to be a fan of a site called as “My Blog Guest”. This site was an aggregator of all guest blogging requests and provided a nice platform for blogging who were looking to guest blog.
But after one the updates, Google took them down. While the objective with which it was done was right, I somehow felt that the taking down of “My Blog Guest” was not the right step.
Anyways, the point I was trying to make was the importance of Guest Blogging. It was and still is one of the best ways of getting better mileage for your content.
And we will start this week’s roundup with a post on Guest Blogging.
Guest Blogging: 7 Steps to Generate 8000 Visitors With One Post
Guest blogging is one of the proven ways to drive targeted traffic to your blog posts. People misused this strategy to build links to their sites and as expected Google found them and took them down.
But guest blogging did not lose its sheen, at least for people who were using it the right way – to find a new audience for their content.
In this post you will learn 7 simple steps your should follow to do “guest posting” the right way.
What is guest posting? In case you didn’t know, a guest post is a blog post you write and publish on someone else’s blog under your name (or your brand’s name).
Note: Guest posting will work for you no matter what industry you’re in. Lawyers, eCommerce stores, SaaS companies, and nearly every other kind of business can benefit from what I’m about to teach you. I’d also like to say that you don’t need a blog to do this.
Here’s a picture of my analytics. This is just one day of traffic from the guest post I wrote for Social Media Examiner (not including the repurposing I did). The post currently has over 7,000 Shares as well:
In this guide, I’m going to walk you through the exact steps I used to get guest posts published on sites like Social Media Examiner, Content Marketing Institute, Search Engine Journal, and more.
Proven Ways to Increase Content Engagement on Your Blog
Content marketing is all about generating content that engages with your audience. And this is precisely where most content marketers go wrong. They just don’t care if their content is engaging enough.
But how do you ensure that you content engages your visitors?
This is a nice post with some proven ways to increase content engagement on your blog.
Creating a perfectly engaging blog can be a real challenge. You have to contend with billion bytes of information and the short attention spans of readers. Crafting something your audience will enjoy and want more of may seem like trying to be heard in the back row of a rock concert. But there are ways to stand out above the rest.
Use the proven guidelines below to increase content engagement on your blog and build a powerful reader base.
Knowing your target audience is critical for engagement. Your blog has to serve a purpose to your readers. So provide information that can help them solve their problems.
read more at searchenginejournal.com
3 Ways to Re-Use Your Content Magnets to Dominate SERPs
Creating a lead magnet takes a lot of time and effort. It follows a thought about process and needs some concrete planning. And all of this effort is to capture an email or, another form of contact information.
But after all of the effort that you put into creating these lead magnets, would you be satisfied with putting it to use at this one single place to capture a few leads?
Definitely not. In fact, if you look at the amount of hard work required to put together a lead magnet, you would definitely want to be able to reuse it.
And this post shows you 3 unique ways in which you can re-use these lead magnets.
A lead magnet is a piece of content aimed at motivating consumers to take an action. At the top of your conversion channels, lead magnets spur interest and tie a visitor to your brand but don’t necessarily drive a direct sale (e.g., provide contact information, sign up for a newsletter, join a free trial.)
Creating a solid lead magnet is hard work: You invest hours of brainstorming and research, creation, and design. The good news is you should be able to further your investment by converting them into attractive assets on third-party sites, which in turn could strengthen your presence on search engine result pages for relevant keywords and queries.
read more at contentmarketinginstitute.com
The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO
One of the content marketing basics is Search Engine Optimization.
SEO or, search engine optimization used to be a nightmare for me and to some extent it is even today. I am sure a lot of you would also be of that same opinion.
How much ever a pain SEO may be, you can still not ignore it because SEO is which will generate the most amount of FREE traffic for you.
So when you come across a guide that shows you simple SEO tips, then you would never ignore it.
Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.
Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.
Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.
I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.
Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.
Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.
How to Write Faster: 10 Crafty Ways to Hit 1,000 Words Per Hour
There are times when my fingers would just not move on the keyboard. My mind would just not work and ideas would see a drought. I would spend hours in front of the computer, but would hardly be able to write a single paragraph.
Are you faced with similar situations?
Pretty much every blogger faces this situation.
Writing is an art. And if you master it, then you could be writing a 1000 words in an hour, even in your worst days.
The schedule gods have given you a break, and you have a rare hour to actually sit down and write. You could produce an entire blog post! An article! Maybe even a short book chapter! Your research is all done, so all you need to do now is write.
You apply ass to seat, fire up your laptop, start typing …
… and it’s like watching a video in slo-mo.
Once the hour is up, you do a word count — and let’s just say the final tally is less than impressive.
It’s time to pull you out of that rut. Here are ten ways to produce great writing in volume. Using these tactics, I can write a full 1,000-word article in under an hour; I bet they’ll speed up your output as well.
Using Commonly Asked Questions to Fuel Your Content Strategy
One of the places to find content ideas for my blog posts have been Quora. There are thousands of questions that are asked and each of these questions can be the base idea for your next blog post.
In the olden days when Yahoo Answers used to be the go-to site for questions, content marketers used to flock to the site to look for content ideas.
So the idea of using commonly asked questions to ideate for your blog posts is not new.
If you need a guide on how to use these commonly asked questions in your content marketing strategy, then this post is a good one.
Writer’s block has haunted the best of us. Sometimes it can be really hard to find inspiration for what to write about.
Anyone who works in content marketing will remember having a content roadmap to produce or a post to write and staring at the dreaded blank screen, with no idea what to say.
But sometimes the question is not ‘what should I write’, but ‘what questions should I write about?’
Questions can be your untapped best friend – or, more specifically, Q&A sites and query reports can swoop in and save your strategy or post.
Question sites and query reports are basically your audience (and potential customers) telling you what content they want to read. And, in the case of Q&A sites, users haven’t been able to easily find the answer anywhere online, so they’ve had to revert to posting about it on another website, hoping for an answer.
read more at socialmediatoday.com
Why Pitches Are the Key to Great Content Marketing
I still remember the first day as a sales executive and my sales trainer asked me to work on a sales pitch.
I asked him, “what is a sales pitch?”
As I realized the importance of the sales pitch, I learnt that [social_quote duplicate=”yes” align=”default”]my incentives were directly proportional to how effective my sales pitch was[/social_quote].
Fast forward to today and as a content marketer, I realize the importance of pitches in content marketing.
Go find a six-year-old—preferably a nephew or niece, not some random kid at Whole Foods—and ask them to make up a story. Watch as their eyes light up, how their words jumble together with excitement and wonder. Observe how their arms wave and their fingers spread, as if they’re conjuring a tornado of imagination. Listen as they come up with characters and ideas that you never would’ve thought of yourself.
Then give them an assignment. Tell them what it has to be about. Are they as excited about the story? Is it as imaginative and filled with wonder?
If your nieces and nephews are anything like mine, the answer is probably no.
I use this analogy sometimes to explain one of my deeply held beliefs about content marketing: Your greatest weapons are passion and creativity. To bring that out, you need a system that lets people on your team pitch stories that interest them the most.
How Neil Patel Managed to Write 4294 Blog Posts
Is that a typewriter, a keyboard or, a bot? No. That is Neil Patel!
Neil is one of the greatest content marketers I have come across and the speed at which he churns out articles is unmatchable. I once attempted to match his pace and publish an article every second day but eventually had to give up after 3 weeks because I was unable to cope up with the pressure.
And then I came across this post.
If you want to learn how to write articles after articles, then you need to absolutely read this post.
People always ask me how the heck I’ve been blogging for over 10 years. And how I’ve written thousands of blog posts (4294 to be exact).
I usually tell those people that blogging is like any sort of long-term relationship. Some days are great. Others aren’t so great, but you’re in it for the long haul.
Blogging also requires a lot of time, and when you’re starting out, pretty much every day is a hustle.
In other words, blogging successfully takes a lot of work. But that doesn’t mean blogging has to be difficult.
After several years of blogging, I realized there was a process behind it all. I learned how to cure blogging burnout, and I pinpointed the important things I was doing to keep up my blog.
I still find myself working a lot, but it doesn’t feel like work. After you hit the gym for a while, exercising becomes just another part of your day. It’s the same with blogging. And these important things help to make it all easier.
5 Writing Techniques that Stir Your Audience to Action
The end result from a content marketing campaign is to make your audience take an action. And that is why “Call to actions” are always so much important.
But is a good call to action enough to push your audience to take action?
Probably not.
You need to build that into the audience by the time they reach the call to action and then push them to that final step of acting.
And you do this by letting your content do this.
This post at Copyblogger is a masterpiece on how to trigger that feeling of acting in them, through the words in your posts.
We all want a positive response to the content we work so hard to create. Not all positive responses, however, are created equal.
I’m reminded of this David Ogilvy quote from Ogilvy on Advertising:
“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’”
In other words, if you’re looking for something more than “Great post!” comments, then you’ve got to prompt action. And that means you’ve got to stir something in the audience before they’ll do something.
Over to You
So which one out of these content marketing basics, do you think you were missing out on?
What post from the above was your favorite and why?
We would like to hear from you. Please comment below and let us know your thoughts and we could start a discussion.
Hello, Dilip!
“Content” is I love the most.
And love to create more and more.
Though I am inconsistent with the length, sometimes more and sometimes less but that’s worth creating.
I so enjoy writing it.
The resources you mentioned in the roundup posts are too apt ones!
I so love CopyBlogger because it is always (most of the time) stressing the need of content to grow yourself.
Thanks for the great ones! 🙂
~ Adeel
Hey Adeel,
Thanks for visiting.. On inconsistency – yeah! I too am guilty of being inconsistent with the length of my posts but these days I target writing long posts (in fact I am following Neil’s advice).
Cheers!
Dilip