Figuring out how to start a blog isn’t the hard part. Creating a content strategy, an editorial calendar, and writing your first post aren’t for the faint-of-heart, but many bloggers find that growing an audience is their biggest challenge. It isn’t easy, but I’ve succeeded at growing traffic to a new blog 1000% a month for 9 consecutive months with some pretty scrappy content creation and promotion tactics. And the benefits of improved blog traffic are pretty clear:
Hope you’re having a great marketing time this week. Today we are going to investigate the angles from which you can look at your content marketing strategy with a totally different perspective.
Between the hashtag and text speak, the English language as we previously knew it is gone forever. Print books and media have suffered as consumers worldwide turn to blogs and social media for discovery, education and product research.
While it certainly seems that content marketing is here to stay, as 55% of companies plan to increase their spending on custom digital copy, it’s a mistake to believe that you can abandon the principles of great writing to publish fresh articles as often as possible.
You can’t escape having a content style guide for very long. While it’s easy to share standards between one or two content marketers, it’s very hard to scale without a system in place. If your organization is among the 45% of companies with plans to expand their budget for content marketing and inbound practices in 2013, there’s no better time than the present to start brainstorming a style guide for blogging.
Technology and the internet have ruined the English language. Regardless of whether you’re for or against the abbreviated words and slang which are replacing traditional writing rules, there’s no denying the fact that content marketing best practices are way different than what you learned in college English.
Are list posts part of your content marketing strategy?
If they’re not, they definitely should be! List posts are the second most-shared form of content, after infographics. They’re easy-to-digest for readers, and have an instant viral quality. That doesn’t mean you can sit down to pen the perfect list post without effort, though. There are tactics you can use to improve your content’s performance. Here is some of the latest data to improve your approach:
Do blogging metrics really matter? Yes, they absolutely do. If the purpose of your content strategy is profit, customer acquisition or even brand awareness, it’s critical to apply regular analysis and take immediate action.
As Jay Baer points out, “without a statistical measure of your blogging process, adding content…can be an incredibly lonely proposition.” Unless you take a deep look into your traffic sources, page views and conversions on a consistent basis, you could find yourself at the helm of a blog that’s attracting the wrong type of visitors, or worse, just isn’t getting the attention you deserve.
How do you manage to create content without any time to blog?
Unless your company is in a position to hire a dedicated, full-time content creator, it can be challenging to work blogging into an already busy work schedule.
The era of being able to successfully get to the top of Google with smoke and mirrors is definitely over. We’re now in an era where quality content creation reigns supreme, and search engines are increasingly taking social signals into account to judge the quality and relevance of content.
That being said, keyword research still matters. Given that 89 percent of consumers still head straight to Google, Bing, or Yahoo to search for branded product or service solutions, a keyword strategy is a tool to ensure your company is ranking well.
How long does it really take to create content? Reports vary, but many experts claim they work on an article for anywhere between 2 hours and several days. Are people on the quicker side creating low-quality stuff? Not necessarily – they’ve probably just mastered the art of productivity. I’ve been creating web content professionally since late 2010. On a typical day, I write anywhere between 2,000-3,500 words of really great stuff. I’ve learned more than a few tricks to speed myself up during my years at the keyboard. I’ve decided to provide you all with unprecedented, exclusive access into how I get it all done and save time blogging on a daily basis: