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:
Surely, success of your blog is defined by your knowledge of the topic. That and the ability to convey your message in a language that would be easy for your audience to comprehend. But if you don’t have the right tools at your disposal, chances of your blog becoming remarkable are pretty slim.
Whether you want to know more about tools for better productivity during writing, better formatting options, or maybe a plagiarism checker, please read on. Each one of these tools has been carefully tried out and reviewed, and only the best ones out there made the cut.
Effective online marketing starts with thorough keyword research. The right keywords help you attract more visitors, make more sales, and rank higher and appear more often in search engine results.
But knowing the keywords your prospects use to find you online is more than just good SEO — it’s also good market research. By learning what your target market is looking for and what kind of language they use to find it, you can create products and content that are more attractive to them and that truly deliver what they want. That leads to a better reputation and more traffic and customers.
In an age where blockbuster movie scripts could fit in a pamphlet and thoughts must be expressed in 140 characters or less, blogging has become a square peg trying to fit into a round hole scenario when competing for the minimized attention span of most people.
Blogging is in many ways even more difficult to increase penetration than typical social media campaigns, if such a situation is possible, but not all hope is lost. With a little care and thought, any blog with an empty viewer can be grown into an influential force by following 6 essential ideas.