content marketing

How to Show the Author Bio on WordPress Blog Posts

By |July 8th, 2016|

Displaying an author bio at the end of your WordPress blog posts is one way in which you can:

  • Build credibility and authority. Mentioning career achievements, general background and anything that builds your authority with your visitors can boost shares and opt-in levels.
  • Help build your list. Use the space to link to a suitable lead magnet that visitors can download in exchange for their email address.
  • Boost social followers. Author bio boxes can include social icons with links to your social profiles, encouraging visitors to connect with you. This is more useful where for example you have different authors contributing to the content on your blog.

Some WordPress themes have built-in support for author bio boxes. But not all.

So what do you do if you want to show the author’s bio box at the end of every blog post, but your theme doesn’t support it by default?

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Quora for Business: The Complete Guide for Business Owners and Marketers

By |June 6th, 2016|

Quora is not far off becoming one of the top 100 most visited sites in the world (Alexa), with roughly 100 million monthly unique visitors, half of which are from the US.

It’s based on a simple question-and-answer format, and incorporates elements of social media to help generate interactivity and wide exposure of content.

It has far more authority than other question-and-answer sites, attracting the regular involvement of authority figures and genuine experts, from industry leaders and CEOs to influencers and even presidents.

As such it attracts increasing amounts high quality traffic.

When approached in the right way, business owners can ride on the back of their success, and siphon often significant levels of traffic back to their own sites (as I show below, to the tune of several thousand visitors a month).
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The 3 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress (and How to Use ‘Em!)

By |May 16th, 2016|

This blog is currently experiencing rapid growth in traffic from search. Last month, search traffic more than doubled from what it was just a couple months previously. This month looks on track to continue that rapid upward trend.

In fact, last month had over 11 times the amount of traffic from search for the same month last year.

Of course, there are multiple factors involved, but they mostly boil down to three main strategies, the last of which I focus on here:

  • Regularly creating and publishing valuable content. The more content you have, the more search traffic you can start to claim a piece of across an ever-widening array of keywords. Each new piece of content is an asset that fuels your future traffic growth.
  • Continually building online authority through the repurposing of that content through various online channels. This includes social media and building up our social audiences (for example, we’re now past the 10k milestone on Twitter). As content gets repurposed, republished and shared, you build natural inbound links that reflect a growing level of authority, and helps determine how your content is ranked. In other words, your content assets grow in value for your business.
  • Optimizing the blog for search. As well as optimizing posts individually for search, and effectively linking between posts to help search engines determine what content is about, it also means getting the right SEO foundations in place for the blog. While there are a plethora of SEO plugins available, there are just three such plugins I consider essential and that this post focuses on.

So in this post, I cover:

  • The 3 best SEO plugins for WordPress.
  • Why you need them. In other words, how they help your site rank and attract increasing amounts of search traffic.
  • How to use them. I’ll cover how to set them up for best results.

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Using Tumblr for Business: The Ultimate Guide

By |May 2nd, 2016|

Should you be using Tumblr for your business? Perhaps.

It’s not a platform many businesses are familiar with. They struggle to understand it. At first glance, it’s all a bit overwhelming.

Some even dip a toe in the water, only to give up far too early.

Many others, still believing cheap shortcuts work for online visibility, post content on Tumblr as just somewhere-else-to-publish-confortent, with little real understanding or appreciation of the platform or its users. They consequently fail to get much if any benefit from it.

Is Tumblr just yet another social site? 

Or is using Tumblr for business worth investigating further? What are the benefits?

That’s what this post aims to help you determine, as well as show you what Tumblr really is, and exactly how to use it for business purposes. I’ll even show you examples of real businesses successfully using the platform.
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Duplicate Content and Multi-Channel Publishing: The Lowdown

By |April 22nd, 2016|

There is ongoing confusion around the issue of duplicate content, and how it affects search engine listings. The issue has been around for years.

In fact, I first started writing and talking to businesses about it nearly a decade ago.

While it’s fallen off the radar a little over the past few years, the issue has regained prominence again recently with increasing numbers of businesses pursuing multi-channel publishing to effectively reach their marketplace.

For example, are there duplicate content penalties if you cross-post content between different platforms?

Duplicate content myths – and bad advice based on them – abound.

So this post gives you the lowdown, with answers on important duplicate content questions, including the implications for publishing content across multiple content platforms.

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How to Start a Quora Blog for Your Business

By |April 8th, 2016|

I hesitated writing this post.

Firstly, I don’t yet have a Quora blog myself – or rather, I didn’t until I put this post together (see my fledgling Quora blog here).

Secondly, stories about people blogging on Quora – along with successful Quora blogs – are hard to find.

But then I started digging a little deeper…

What I found made me realize Quora blogs are one big missed opportunity for additional, quality traffic and online visibility within an engaged community.

This post shares:

  • Some background on Quora.
  • The results of my investigations into Quora blogs to see just how effective they may be for marketing purposes.
  • Some example Quora blogs, along with some impressive data on the level of visibility and engagement they are achieving.
  • How to create and start your own Quora blog.
  • Some tips on promoting a Quora blog and using it to best effect.

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The Top Content Marketing Stats (and Why They Matter for Your Business)

By |April 1st, 2016|

While lots of sites publish a range of often fairly meaningless content marketing statistics, these are the stats that really matter and should make you sit up and take notice.

For example, I’ll show you how, when you extrapolate a couple of these statistics together (from the same research), they show that content marketing can potentially increase your sales ten-fold.

You’ll find the most relevant statistics on how content marketing relates to:

  • Advertising (and how content marketing wins out)…
  • Leads and list building…
  • Sales…

… and on the growth of content marketing within businesses and as an industry as a whole.

If you’re at all unsure about the value of content marketing for your business, these stats should put you on the right path, and quickly.

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Content Repurposing: The Ultimate List of 50+ Killer Ways to Repurpose Content and “Be Everywhere”

By |March 26th, 2016|

Are you creating content that you’re either not repurposing, or that isn’t itself repurposed?

If so, you are probably leaving 90% or more of the potential benefits of the content untapped.

What’s more, research shows that producing enough content is one of the top three challenges faced by businesses that pursue content marketing.

The good news is that repurposing existing content:

  • Multiplies the amount of content you have in circulation.
  • Is generally a whole lot quicker, easier and cheaper than creating the original content in the first place.

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How to Blog for Big Money

By |March 17th, 2016|

I’ll admit it. I’m frustrated.

Frustrated by the misleading and incorrect advice being given to people asking questions like, Is it really possible to make money from a blog?, Is blogging for money realistic?, yada, yada.

Here are a selection of just some of the replies I’ve seen. The following are taken at random from Quora – but there are multiple posts and other info out there giving similar ‘advice’:

You get the idea.

So this post helps to put the record straight, and shows what’s really possible with real examples and income data. And shows how you can do it too.

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How to Improve Your Email Marketing By Leveraging Content

By |March 7th, 2016|

When I first started online in the early 2000s, if you wanted to communicate (digitally) with your prospects and customers en masse, it was either email, or… well, email.

Facebook wasn’t yet a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye; Twitter was even further beyond the digital horizon. WordPress didn’t yet exist – if you wanted to blog, you headed to LiveJournal.

Publishing content on a website often involved a well-worn copy of How to Use HTML (or similar!), and late nights spent figuring out <head> and <body> tags, and everything in between.

Oh yes! I’m almost forgetting the painfully slow dial-up Internet connection that made publishing even the most basic bit of content painfully slow. (Not to mention hogging the phone line while you did it. Fun times!)

Zoom forward to the current day and you can communicate with (and build up tribes of) thousands of people in your market on multiple platforms, and across a multitude of devices. And do so quickly and easily.

Email marketing remains vitally important of course. Through communicating one-to-one directly with a subscriber, it’s one of the most powerful ways to build trust, credibility and a sense of relationship.

It’s also just another such content platform…

Yet many businesses still approach email marketing without any thought to an integrated strategy that more effectively reaches and communicates with their marketplace across multiple platforms, and at the same time creates long-term content assets for their business.

Instead, their approach is disjointed. Each platform, including email, is treated as a completely separate entity, demanding completely different content.

The resulting and unsurprising sense of overwhelm gives way to an either-or mentality that restricts their reach, and even leads to a gradual decline of online visibility.

It’s not their fault. They just emulate what most other businesses seem to be doing. They follow incorrect, or at best incomplete, advice that hasn’t quite caught up with present-day reality.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. There is a solution…

In this post, I’ll share with you:

  • Three common mistakes businesses make with email marketing.
  • How you can leverage content to both resolve these issues, and lead to greater online visibility as a whole. (And the amount gained far exceeds the extra effort involved…)

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