content marketing

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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3 Sneaky Ways To Use Email Leads To Grow Your Social Media Following, Build Your Online Visibility And Better Connect With Prospects

By |November 27th, 2015|

Email marketing remains an important and effective marketing channel.

But why stick to email?

Did you know that reaching out to customers and prospects through multiple channels has a radical impact on profit levels?

Multichannel customers spend three to four times more than single-channel customers do.
sas.com

Furthermore, when you get a new email lead, that email address doesn’t last as long as you might think. 30% of email subscribers – that’s nearly a third of people signing up to your list – change their email addresses every year (source).

With this in mind, this post highlights three sneaky (but perfectly legal and ethical!) ways to:

  • Help maximize your return from your email leads.
  • Keep communicating with leads for longer.
  • Turn single channel email marketing leads into multi-channel prospects.

What’s more, if your list currently works on a double opt-in basis, it doesn’t even matter if the prospect hasn’t confirmed their subscription.

These techniques don’t involve you emailing them directly, so as long as you have their email address you can still benefit from those leads.

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Hashtag Marketing Mastery: Understanding Hashtags and How To Use Them For Your Business (A 5 Minute Guide)

By |November 19th, 2015|

This quick and easy guide to hashtag marketing was inspired by a customer support inquiry (always an easy way to get new ideas for blog content and to supply info your market is looking for). It went a bit like this:

What are hashtags? Can I make them up? How do I use hashtags? Is there a hashtag directory somewhere?

So if you’re a bit unsure about hashtags and how to use them, this post’s for you.

It aims to give you all you need to know for understanding hashtags and using them effectively for your business – and all in under 5 minutes!
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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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Should You Be Blogging As A Business? (6 Big Benefits)

By |November 6th, 2015|

If you had any doubts whether you should be blogging as a business, this post should clear it up once and for all.

Some businesses of course are a blog. Or they start life as a blog. Over time, they figure out how to start earning revenue. The numbers start to build, the revenue climbs with it, it becomes a business in and of itself.

But that’s not what I’m referring to here.

I’m talking about taking an existing business, and adding blogging to it as a new and lucrative marketing channel. Of course, you may already have a blog for your business. Perhaps you add the odd post occasionally.

But are you actually blogging as a business, with regular content and a proper strategy designed to attract your marketplace, build your traffic, generate new and highly targeted leads for your business, and feed into multiple other marketing activities that can explode your online presence?

If you’re not yet, here are 6 big benefits that may just persuade you otherwise.

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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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7 Key Ways To Increase Your Content Marketing Output (While Not Scrimping On Quality!)

By |October 22nd, 2015|

For it to be worth creating in the first place, there’s no real replacement to content quality. It’s an essential element of your content marketing – without a focus on quality, you gain little if any benefit.

But you also need the quantity. For effective content marketing, quality and quantity must go hand-in-hand together.

For example, if you create the odd sporadic blog post every two or three months, don’t be surprised if little happens.

On the other hand, with regular content production (and importantly, promotion of it – Kim Roach has some great tips on doing this), you start building momentum:

  • People get used to seeing your content regularly, building your relationship with them along with your own reputation and credibility. Shares, comments, click-throughs and other signs of engagement with your content increase.
  • For Google, regular content production and increased output means authority and your rankings start increasing accordingly, steadily building your traffic.
  • You get better at it! The more you create, the more skilled you get at it, the quicker you become, and the more in-tune you become with your marketplace and what works and what doesn’t.

In fact, Ana Hoffman of TrafficGenerationCafé (@anatrafficcafe) states that without such regular content production, her traffic and affiliate sales plummet, even while all other activities stay relatively constant.

However, the more content you create, the more time it takes. And you still have a business to run, right?

So just how do you boost your content marketing output, while minimizing the additional time commitment?

Here are 7 key ways …

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Content Quality Vs. Quantity: Some Answers On The Age-Old Debate

By |October 15th, 2015|

Is it better to pump out more content, and focus less on quality? Or to focus more on quality, but to have less content in circulation?

Yes, it’s the age-old ‘quality vs. quantity’ debate…

The real question of course is, would you be able to achieve your goal(s) more easily with a focus on content quality, or on content quantity?

For example, you could be looking for your content to deliver brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, traffic, and perhaps other goals.

But what exactly is meant by content quality?

In truth, it means different things to different people. Here’s a quick checklist – I’m sure you can think of other factors that should be included too:

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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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[Blog Title Secrets] How to Create Blog Titles That Bring You Traffic

By |September 11th, 2015|

Effective blog titles make all the difference between content that attracts traffic to your website (and business) on an ongoing basis for years to come, and content that barely gets noticed and has little benefit for you.

Even more significantly, when you repurpose your blog posts into say articles, videos, presentations, podcasts, and more, that difference in results is magnified many times over.

So spending time over your blog post titles is worth doing, and worth doing right.

Here are 10 sure-fire tips to help you create effective blog titles that increase your engagement and traffic.

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