content marketing strategy

Build Your List With Content Upgrades: On Your Blog… And Beyond!

By |February 29th, 2016|

Want a more powerful way to convert visitors to your blog into leads for your business? How about a 300% to 785% improvement in conversion rates?

Welcome to the world of content upgrades…

In brief, it means offering more value to the visitor  – say in the form of a relevant download – in exchange for their email address.

But content upgrades aren’t just for your blog…

Content upgrades also work when integrated into content published on other platforms across the web.

In fact, thanks to the often higher engagement levels you get on these other content platforms, this can be even more effective. Yet few if any are really doing this right now…

I’ll share more on this below!

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How To Blog On Medium (And Why Your Business Should!)

By |February 22nd, 2016|

As any regular reader of this blog will know, I’m a big believer that you should be regularly publishing content across multiple platforms. It’s the most effective way to reach your marketplace, grow your traffic and build your online visibility for all sorts of reasons.

(Yes, your business now needs to “Be Everywhere“!)

Such content platforms include LinkedIn Pulse, SlideShare and YouTube, not to mention all the main social networks.

There’s another biggie to add to the list, and that’s the Medium blogging platform. It’s one of the most popular online sites, attracting millions of visitors, and has hundreds of thousands of users.

For your business, it’s another key content portal from where you can start to attract increasing amounts of traffic and leads over time. As I’ll show you, it’s an interesting mix between an intuitive, easy to use blogging platform and some of the viral power of social media.

In this ultimate guide to using Medium for your business, you’ll learn:

  • What Medium is and how it works.
  • How to publish content on the platform.
  • 15 top tips for using Medium effectively for business purposes.

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How I Grew My Traffic From Organic Search By 1,465% In 12 Months

By |February 12th, 2016|

Today you’ll learn how I grew the amount of traffic I attract from organic search from just 52 visitors 12 months ago, to 814 visitors clicking through from the SERPs last month. That’s an increase of 1,465% within the space of a year – or nearly 16 times the amount of traffic.

I didn’t do anything particularly spectacular or out of the ordinary. I just created content on a regular basis, and the results are exactly what should happen. As I’ll show you, this growth was based on publishing a new blog post just once a week. (Mostly, anyway!)

If anything, the traffic growth could have been a lot more. As I’ll show you, for the first three months my publishing schedule was in fact just one post a month!

And even once I moved to once a week, the odd week was missed here and there. In the end, we’re actually talking just 35 new posts over the 12 month period. But the result is that the blog now attracts hundreds of new visitors every month through the search engines, and that will only continue to climb.

Had I published the full 52 posts for a year’s worth of weekly publishing – a full third more posts – my traffic may have been a third higher too, nearly 1,100 a month from search.

So in this post I’ll show you:

  • The exact stats, how they’ve grown over the course of the past 12 months, and how that relates to the growing number of posts I’ve published. I also show you what they looked like for around a year and a half before that, along with some analysis of each stage, so you get the full picture.
  • How to harness that traffic, as it grows, for business purposes. There’s little point attracting traffic for traffic’s sake.
  • How the content created for your blog isn’t just for your blog. Find out how you can leverage it for a wide range of marketing activities.

And I wrap up up with five key takeaways you can apply to your own business.

Don’t Want To Read? View As A SlideShare Or Video

But first, a quick proviso…

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“My Customers Aren’t On Facebook And Twitter!” – Here’s Why Your Business Still Should Be…

By |January 15th, 2016|

An interesting email came in from a customer a few weeks back stating that Facebook and Twitter simply weren’t relevant to their business.

They were in a specific niche selling products and services B2B within a specific geographical location. Their client base, which they had an intimate knowledge of (of course, vitally important), certainly didn’t use either social platform either personally or professionally. It wouldn’t even be on their radar.

Unusual? With over one and a half billion monthly active users worldwide on Facebook alone, yes. But general stats are just that – general. It’s always smart to know your own market in fine-tuned, specific detail.

Instead, the best way for them to reach potential customers was through search (Google) and video (YouTube), backed up by a presence on LinkedIn because they were B2B.

Smart. They know their market. And as they saw it, Facebook and Twitter were completely irrelevant.

But, smart as they are, is that really the case?

Would Facebook and Twitter actually still hold value for them as a business?

In fact, this post shows that even if you’re not reaching your marketplace directly through Facebook and/or Twitter, there are still important benefits to be had.

Rather than ignoring these platforms (even if your customers do!), your business should still strive to build up a following and a presence on them. While you might not use them to reach clients directly, they can certainly help indirectly.

Here’s 3 main reasons why…
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How To Blog When You’re Not A Blogger (And Bring Big Benefits For Your Business)

By |December 18th, 2015|

A lot of small business owners shy away from blogging, despite all the benefits it brings.

Here are just some of the reasons – or excuses – provided:

  • “I don’t know what to create content about”
  • “I can’t write”
  • “It’s just not something I want to do”
  • “I don’t have time”
  • “My type of business is different”

Perhaps you can relate to one or more of those? Or maybe you have a different reason (let me know!)?

Either way, I wanted to show you how you can still blog as a business, and enjoy all the benefits of blogging and content creation in general, without needing to consider yourself as a blogger. In fact, you don’t even have to create any content yourself if you don’t want to.

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How To Use Facebook Notes To Market Your Business (And Why You Should Start Now!)

By |December 11th, 2015|

Facebook Notes is available on your Page (as well as Profiles) and means you can publish longer content directly on Facebook. This allows you to reach more people on Facebook, potentially by simply repurposing content you may already have published elsewhere.

Find out how to use Facebook Notes in this post… along with more info on why you should start incorporating it into your marketing now.

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Top Content Marketing Predictions For 2016

By |December 4th, 2015|

As one year draws to a close, it’s normal practice for business owners to start reflecting on the year past, and consider what they want to achieve for the coming year and how those goals will be achieved.

Marketing is of course central to business growth and success, and it’s a fast-changing scene. One of the most important changes over the past 12 months is that there is far less distinction between online, digital marketing and more traditional, offline marketing.

As online access and smart phone usage has become ubiquitous and central to most people’s lives across the world, it’s now all just marketing.

Regardless of your type of business, if you want to reach prospects and customers, you have to be where they are. And they are everywhere, and across multiple devices.

The only way to reach them effectively is through content. Content allows you to be where they are, to attract them through ‘pull’, inbound marketing, to build up trust and relationships.

This is of course content marketing – using content for marketing purposes. According to Seth Godin, content marketing is the only marketing that’s left. Those businesses still ignoring it are ignoring marketing and will struggle.

So with content marketing central, how’s it shaping up for the next 12 months?

Here are my key content marketing predictions for 2016…

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How To Promote My Blog (10 Must-Do Steps For Every Post You Publish)

By |November 13th, 2015|

I’m on a journey of expanding the reach of my blog, and shared previously how organic traffic to the blog has increased not far off 6x over the course of 6 months. It continues to rise, with organic traffic for this month already 50% up on the same period last month.

I’m now aiming to ramp things up a gear – not just for organic traffic, but for traffic in general. Continuing to learn and explore how to promote my blog effectively is an exciting challenge!

Of course, I already have in place some of the required steps in place – or it’s likely you wouldn’t be here reading this! So far, so good…

But to further increase my traffic, more steps are needed…

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Blog Content Ideas: 57 Ways to Effortlessly Generate Engaging Ideas For New Content

By |October 30th, 2015|

While a regularly updated blog is a key part of an effective online marketing strategy, a lot of businesses fall at the first hurdle. They struggle to come up with new ideas for blog content, and because of that never really get going and consequently miss out on all that blogging has to offer for their business.

Why should you blog?

In terms of measurable results from blogging, three of the main benefits are:

  • Enhanced search engine visibility – in other words, increasing levels of traffic from organic search
  • Support for social media activities and other forms of content distribution – you have regular content to share or repurpose into other forms and distribute elsewhere. You build links and traffic, as well as build visibility, authority and credibility.
  • Improved sales and lead generation – your blog content attracts your market to you through different channels, which you can convert into leads for your business and monetize. Did you know content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as other types of marketing, while costing 62% less (DemandMetric)?

(Want three more? Here are 6 big benefits you get from blogging as a business).

However, without the regular supply of blog content ideas, none of the above is achievable. The good news is that generating new ideas for your blog is a skill like any other, and is easy when you know how.

So here are 57 different ways to generate engaging ideas for new content for your blog — or indeed any other type of content to attract your marketplace to your business.

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25 Top Places To Publish Your Content And Market Your Business

By |September 25th, 2015|

Please note the information in this post is now out of date—click here to see a brand new and updated version for 2021, over on Takanomi’s new blog.

One of the biggest content marketing mistakes people make is only publishing their content in one place or on a single website. Minimal exposure, minimal visibility, minimal results.

If you’re going to create content in the first place, the next job is to give it the widest audience and greatest exposure possible. That means publishing and promoting it in as many places as possible where it’s going to be of benefit to you as a business.

It also involves repurposing content as and where required.

For example:

  • Create a new version of a post on your blog for publication as a guest post elsewhere.
  • Summarize the main points of a post to provide an answer on Quora. Link back to your post for those who want more in-depth information. (Caution: You might run into problems if you do this the wrong way. See the section on Quora below for more information).

Not all these of the places listed here will be suitable for all businesses – but many of them will be. And it’s far from an exhaustive list. As you ramp up your own content marketing activities, develop your own list of places that work for you.

(Note: These are not listed in any kind of order of importance… except perhaps the first).

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