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Since our first reader in August of 2014, we’ve steadily increased our traffic, and we're now consistently drawing 5,000 plus readers per month to our blog. Our traffic is increasing at a growing rate, and we're optimistic about doubling or tripling our traffic in the upcoming year. If you're a small company like ours — under 20 employees — you're probably wondering how we can consistently publish over 100 quality blog posts annually in addition to getting our “day jobs” done. The answer is in our process. There are five important steps that make up our process, and each is critical in helping us accomplish our goal of publishing 100 high quality new blog posts annually. These steps use the HubSpot blogging and social tools....
Some people give me a hard time about how long my blog posts are (you know who you are). They tell me I should break my posts into smaller posts, or suggest I consider a 500-word post for a change. I deserve the razzing, particularly when I publish a couple of 3,000-word posts back-to-back.
In the absence of column inch or word limit restrictions, I’ll use as many words as I need to get my point across. It’s not that I don’t know how to write short posts, it’s just not my preferred style. If I’m limited to 140 characters (for now at least), I’ll use 140 characters. If I decide to write a 500-word post about how to write shorter blog posts, I can do it.
To prove my point, you’re actually reading that 500-word post I mentioned. Here are six of the most-helpful tips I’ve come across for writing shorter blog posts...
Today, you’ll learn 9 strategies that’ll help you create highly engaging content that’ll draw your target audience in. To create a richer experience for your audience, your content needs to impact their lives and answer their questions. It also needs to be strategically planned. Don’t be like the 70% of marketers who lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.
Let’s take a look at the 6 content writing strategies that’ll help you acquire more organic traffic....
According to Demand Metric, 59 percent of B2B marketers consider blogs the most valuable channel.
So, Orbit Media Studios co-founder Andy Crestodina thinks the mega-population of the content creation nation stands to gain interesting insights by examining how their blogging brethren operate.
For the past two years, Crestodina and company have dug deep to uncover data revealing: - How bloggers do what they do - When and where they work on their craft - Who they write for - What they do to enhance their prose and promote their posts.
The 2015 edition of the research examines the answers to 11 questions and juxtaposes the data with the results collected in 2014 to reveal trends taking shape....
There are thousands of articles that have been written about ways to grow your social media following (some of which by myself), but one of the things that most articles fail to cater for is actually growing them from nothing.
We all know how Coca Cola, Pepsi and Oreo have built enormous social media followings, but what if you’re not a huge brand? How about if you’ve just set up a blog and had no real online presence beforehand?
This is what I’m going to focus on – the first 3-4 months of your social media campaign.
Most businesses view their website as a sales tool, which understandably leads to the idea that all content should reference product value. It’s a common mistake to place products at the forefront of every article or blog post.
The conclusion we’ve come to on this subject: If the sole focus of your corporate blog is to talk about your products, you’re going to find not many people will be interested in what you have to say. But people can be sold on your brand’s value beyond service offerings....
When you are running a blog, it is easy to get caught up in creating new content. It might even make you forget all about the articles that you have written before.
Yet, even if you only write one article a week for your blog, and one a week as a guest post on another blog, you will have a portfolio of more than 100 articles in just a year.
This collection can be viewed as an investment. It has the potential to earn you money, and just like any other investment, it needs to be managed.
You need to manage your content, measure its results, and make sure that it is bringing in the best possible return.There are several ways that your old articles can be used to your advantage....
Did you know: Some bloggers recommendyou spend as much time promoting your content as you do writing it.(Derek Halpern of Social Triggers has an 80/20 split: 80 percent promotion, 20 percent writing.)
Wow, this is an area I fall well short on. I’m so impressed by those who hustle to get their content out there and in front of as many people as possible who can gain value from it....
I’m going to drill down some of the hidden psychological ways which will help you to perform better as problogger and your blog will surely increase its brand-identitty.
These seven strategies can be a gamer changer for your blogging. Read these tips, analyze with your blogging, try to figure out how you can do better using these seven psychological ways to attract readers...
According to Social Media Examiner’s 2014 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING INDUSTRY REPORT, 97% of marketers engage in social media marketing, and 92% of marketers consider social media important to their businesses. But is social media content effective?
Based on our ANALYSIS OF 13.8 MILLION PIECES OF MARKETING CONTENT, the answer is resoundingly, “No.”
We analyzed the effectiveness of marketing content from 8,800 B2B and B2C brands posted across Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram over a 24-month period. Across the board, the data show that engagement with brand-generated social media content is declining.
Blogging has been identified as one of the best ways to attract new customers. 57 percent of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog, which means if you blog more, you'll get more customers.An infographic from Quicksprout shows that blogging highly affects consumer buying behavior even more than advertising. 81 percent of US consumers trust advice and information from blog and 61 percent of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post....
We did it by better optimizing the traffic we received from each piece of content that we posted online. We decided to blog smarter, and not just harder.The good news is that you can easily do it, too.Here are the 10 ‘hacks’ that we used to optimize traffic on our own blog. Most of them will make an instant impact on your traffic growth, so plan to implement a few as soon as you can....
Do you have a plan for your blog in 2015? Planning out your content for the coming year has a number of advantages to just writing by the seat of your pants. While there is something to be said for being spontaneous with your writing, having a plan ensures that you won’t run out of ideas or go months without posting fresh content....
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When it comes to marketing channels, the newsletter is the dependable workhorse. New and flashier channels come and go, but the trusty newsletter has continued to be the backbone of content marketing distribution strategy – delivering vital traffic on a measurable and predictable basis. Setting up an infrastructure for your newsletter program is as important as the content that fills it and, sadly, many companies are operating blind when it comes to their newsletter success metrics. In this post, I’m going to walk through the five essential steps that you should be taking when you build out your content marketing newsletter optimization strategy....
Wondering what the future is for blogs?
Is blogging dead?
To discover what the future holds for blogging, Michael Stelzner interviews Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer....
I’ve had the privilege of my writing being published on Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch, Time, Fast Company, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur, and several other publications, and if you aspire to see your writing in mainstream publications like these, perhaps there is something in my story that will help you get there. The writing I’ve had published has brought me speaking opportunities, a book deal, and more than 1000% growth for my business. I’ve been able to interview and network with my marketing and business heroes, all in the last two and a half years. Prior to that, my writing had never appeared in a mainstream publication. I was just a guy nobody had heard of, posting here and there on my blog, with a small handful of readers. This is the story of how everything changed. ...
Many influencers talk about the 80/20 rule: you should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it. Although I think this ratio really depends on your job, needs and company, it does capture one thing: if you write amazing content but don’t shout out your did so, no one will hear you.
And as far as promoting your blog goes, you can pick and choose on the list above the items that make most sense to your company. If for instance you work for a very technical B2B company and your target audience is above 50 years old, you might want to consider investing in LinkedIn rather than Facebook, leverage influencers and invest time in guest blogging. It all really depends on your audience, where they are and what they care about.
There is one very important point I’d like to add to this infographic: it’s not content repurposing (which I thing is one of the leanest way to do content marketing, it saves an incredible amount of time), it’s content recycling....
Tumblr and WPP conducted an exclusive survey recently to know what readers are looking for on social media networks. Surprisingly, what they are looking for is content. Each of the apps that you’ll read about next was designed to take your simple content and boost its perceived value. After all, you can’t say that your content is high quality until the readers say so or benefit from it.
Let these nine content marketing apps reshape your vision, guide you on the right path, and revamp your content into content that drives traffic and leads....
Having not published original content on the blog for 30 days, we saw only a 4 percent dip in traffic compared to the previous month. The extra time off allowed us to experiment with content in some amazing ways. Our most successful experiments were these:
- Create new email drip campaigns based on Buffer blog posts
- Update older blog posts with new information, graphics
- Create SlideShares
- Republish content to Medium
- Bundle tools posts into Product Hunt collections
I’m happy to explain fully how we went about this experiment and all of the 14 strategies that we tried. And happy to clarify anything in the comments!
Nine months ago, I analyzed a report that would transform not only my role on the HubSpot blogging team, but also the whole blog's editorial strategy. The results have been nothing short of eye-opening. And I'm not just talking about the findings from the report -- I'm also talking about the business results we've generated from the shift we made in our blogging strategy because of those findings.
That shift is an ongoing internal project we call "historical optimization." The goal? Update old blog content and generate more traffic and leads from it in the process.
Great for us, right? Hang on -- it's great for you, too. I'm writing about all this because any experienced blogger who's tasked with growing and scaling the results they generate from their blog needs to know about it. The thing is, no one is really talking about it ... yet....
This is Medium, a blogging platform from the creator of Blogger and Twitter. It’s slick and snappy and could very well be worth a deeper look for digital marketers and first-time bloggers.
We’ve enjoyed experimenting with the best way to use Medium here at Buffer, and we’re eager to learn more about what the best practices might be for helping the Medium community and engaging with an audience. If you’re new to Medium, I’ve collected an overview of resources here in this post, and for those who have been Medium users already, I’ve added several tips and learnings that we’ve discovered along the way....
There are lots of things you need to do to have a successful blog. Not only do your posts need to be well-written, helpful, and relevant to your target audience, but you've also got to make sure you're promoting them correctly so they get in front of people who could become your fans -- and maybe even your customers.
Luckily, you have many creative options when it comes to promoting your blog content. In the infographic below from ReferralCandy, we hear from over 40 marketing experts about their favorite blog promotion tactics -- everything from relationship building to email segmentation to social media. Check it out....
It’s a fantastic opportunity for content marketers, and any other publisher looking to put their content in front of a highly engaged audience. Every day, millions of people, from CEOs to new graduates, browse LinkedIn for the latest news in their field or industry. LinkedIn posts are an ideal way to draw attention to an event or service, direct people to a landing page, or simply to build online profile.With all this in mind, we dug into our social data to find out more about the nature of sharing on the site. Here’s what we found from analysing six months worth of LinkedIn storiesavailable to us from Spike....
What I’m going to do today is show you a very deliberate formula and list of inclusions that I follow with my posts in order to ensure that I get results.
I’m not saying that it works every time, but I can guarantee that if you start to add these elements to your own blog posts you’ll start to get wins a lot more often.
Sound good?
“More content is being created in 48 hours than what was produced from the beginning of time until 2003.” –Eric Schmidt
It’s difficult to comprehend how much content is being produced, isn’t it? Did you know there are more than 2 million blog posts published every single day? It wasn’t long ago when I was updating web content once or twice per year; yet now you have websites like Huffington Post that update content more than a thousand times per day. Sounds crazy, right?
And creating all this content doesn’t come cheap either, as B2B marketers are spending more time, money, and resources on content than ever before...
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The story of how one HubSpot user built a strategy of publishing high-quality articles to increase their website traffic by 300%.