It’s not a secret anymore that creating quality content is a priority for any business willing to grow their blog and get more customers. Recent research shows that 61 % of clients are more likely to order products and services from companies that create custom content.

If you keep track of the current marketing trends, you’ve already made a decision to produce engaging and useful content to attract new leads and boost your sales. Great! But it’s easier said than done, right?

Every content marketing strategy should involve a plan for blog commenting. It’s entirely too easy to get stuck in a comfort zone of creating content, while keeping up on other blogs in your niche via RSS feeds or email subscription. However, taking the time to leave comments really matters, and it’s an integral part of your content promotion strategy whether you realize it or not. Content marketing expert Ken Mueller cites his regular commitment to leaving comments as a critical success measure, stating “[i]t has been incredibly important to my growth as a blogger, and to the growth of my business.”

Has your organic search traffic gone flat? Are you losing keyword ranking for critical search terms? If the answer to either of the previous questions is yes – or more importantly, you’re just not sure where you stand, it’s probably due time to do a content audit.

Every content marketer has a dream of penning a piece that will earn the same mass exposure as the uber-viral Gangnam Style music video. While that’s nothing more than a dream for many of us, greater exposure is certainly a goal that’s within reach. Guest posting can help you tap into other blogger’s networks, but it’s time-consuming to form the relationships and deliver original posts.

Content marketing is serious business. Over 90% of marketers are currently using custom content to generate leads, and sales, according to research by the Content Marketing Institute.

25% of the average marketing budget is dedicated to custom content. But how much should quality content cost? The short answer is, enough to get the quality you need to reach your goals. The long answer is much more complex.

The meteoric growth of web content has come with a crop of experts, who range from totally qualified to less than able to give sound advice. It’s truer than ever to take advice you find online with a grain of salt, particularly when the health and success of your small business is on the line. There’s blog marketing tips out there that can revolutionize your company, and there’s pieces of advice that are sure to hurt more than help.

Every day, 55 million Facebook statuses are updated. The stream of information on the internet is staggeringly fast. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has stated that every two days, the amount of information published online is equivalent to everything created between the dawn of time and 2003 – 5 extrabytes of data. The internet has fundamentally changed the way consumers discover information and connect, and one of the most significant ways is the rising concept of digital influence.

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Content marketers love earning page views. There’s nothing that feels better than putting hours of hard work and mental elbow grease into a blog article, and watching it pay off as the content make the rounds on Twitter and rack up thousands of hits.

However, I’ve got some news that’s probably no surprise for you.

Your CEO is probably more interested in leads. Not just any leads, either. Sales-qualified leads with an interest in buying your company’s product.

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There are few shortcuts to great SEO in the post-Panda update era. While quality content, and a powerful social media strategy are key to earning higher organic search rankings, your website can’t gain authority overnight. Or can it?

Guest blogging is a remarkable tool for earning backlinks to your company’s website, a component that Google and other major search engines use heavily to determine the rank of your content. Not fully convinced that a high search ranking matters?

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Can a company ever have too much branded content? The statistics seem to indicate that the answer is no way.

In spite of the fact that corporate spend on content marketing will exceed $118.4 billion dollars in 2013, 64% of B2B marketers struggle to produce enough blog articles, eBooks, social media posts, and video to meet consumers’ demand.

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