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Marketing Executives Are Now Pumping Out Content Daily or Hourly

November 9, 2017 No Comments

Is the world becoming swamped with content?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A recent survey by 10Fold has revealed that marketing executives now focus a substantial portion of their budget on creating and constantly delivering new content at an ever-increasing frequency. According to the research findings, nearly one-third of respondents are now producing content daily or hourly.

The report looks at current and planned content marketing budgets, frequency, type, development and measurement of content programs. It found that three-quarters of technology marketers plan to generate three times more content in the next 12 months than they did in the previous year; and 42 percent will spend €250,000 or more in the next 12 months on content.

Measuring the effectiveness of content is still a challenge for marketing executives. But it seems that soliciting customer feedback never goes out of style.

Key Research Findings:

Social media, video and webinars are cited as the best content “types” among all respondents
Top executives prefer video as a content medium
44 percent of respondents say that lack of domain expertise is the top barrier for creating quality content
99 percent of respondents use third parties to create at least 25 percent of their content
83 percent of respondents report that third party generated content is at least above average
80 percent leverage basic tools (Google Analytics) to track and measure content impact; followed by 60 percent using marketing automation systems

“The marketplace is constantly changing,” said David Gehringer, principal of Dimensional Research. “Based on the results of our research for 10Fold, there is no doubt that there is an insatiable demand among technology companies for content that has technical relevancy and that is delivered in a form, such as video and blogs, that is appealing to their buyers.”

It seems that the saying “content is king” still rings true, for now.

In News

5 Simple Ways To Shape Your Content Through Your Culture

July 24, 2017 No Comments

By Josh Ritchie.

Many content marketers think they’re doing content right. They brainstorm. They monitor upcoming events. They plan their editorial calendar based on things like:

New product releases and updates
Holidays
Company news
Current events
Trends
Conferences

They stick to their calendar and publish regularly. Yet their content fails.

It’s not surprising. When you’re too focused on just filling the content pipeline, becoming a slave to your editorial calendar, it’s easy to lose sight of what you should be creating.

What Is Good Content?

Good, effective content connects. It speaks directly to your audience and provides something that they want or need. Yet so much content meets readers at a superficial level; most of it lacks heart and emotional connection. It’s the equivalent of talking about the weather.

If you want to form relationships with your audience and convince them to invest in your brand, which you do, you need to connect through truly meaningful content that tells a worthwhile story.

How do you know what’s worthwhile? The strongest stories include two key traits:

They’re interesting: Most industries are becoming commoditized and more competitive, which makes it harder for brands to stand out. To break through, you need a strong, distinct voice. Telling unusual, unique, or intriguing stories helps you do this. That means diving past the surface, identifying interesting topics, teasing out unique angles, and turning them into compelling stories to capture your audience’s attention.
They’re useful: The quickest way to make your audience fall in love with your brand is to provide content that applies to their lives. (This type of content is also innately interesting to them.) To do this, you can focus on content that helps them solve a problem, learn something new, or do something better. Think education (blog posts, webinars, ebooks, etc.) or inspiration (customer or employee stories, etc.).

So you know what makes a compelling story, but where do you find those stories in your own operation? This is where things can get murky for marketers, but don’t get overwhelmed. You have the single greatest source of inspiration right in front of you, all around you, even in your instant messages.

It’s your company culture.

Why Culture Makes for Good Content

Content marketing is a long-term process to turn strangers into supporters of your brand. The first step of this process is introducing yourself—showing your audience who you are, how you see the world, and why anyone should care about any of this. Conveniently, these are the very same elements that comprise your company culture.

When you approach content from this angle, your stories inherently capture your unique and authentic perspective. This hits both marks for generating great stories:

They’re interesting because they’re unique; no other company has your mission, vision, values, people, origin story, failures, and successes.
They’re useful because they stem from your personal experiences. If you’ve experienced something or solved a problem firsthand, your audience is more likely to trust your advice.

When you peel back the curtain, you’re more vulnerable—and that’s the key to developing a deep, emotional connection with your audience.

But what does that look like in action? Here are 5 ways to turn your culture into incredible content:

1. Share Your Vision, Mission, and Values

If you don’t have these principles articulated for your company, you absolutely should. Sharing your company’s purpose through your vision, mission, and values helps your internal team understand why they’re working, what they’re doing, and how they’re supposed to be doing it. (This also helps create a cohesive culture.)

Additionally, showcasing your principles externally shows your audience who you are and what you stand for. Audiences crave connections with brands that share their same values. For some prospects, your principles could be the key factor in their decision-making.

Creating content around your principles doesn’t mean you publish your mission statement. It means you mine those values for inspiration. What do you care about? What inspires you? What’s been on your mind? How might you create content to move the needle on those issues?

This type of thinking has helped my company come up with many content ideas. For example, one of our values is “be good to each other.” This value also inspired us to create our People for Periods project, an interactive microsite to educate and help destigmatize menstruation in honor of Women’s Health Week.

On another occasion, after we read the story of how Ben Franklin once refused a loan repayment and directed the debtor to “pay it forward,” we became so inspired by the “pay it forward” philosophy that we turned the entire tale into a high-quality print, which ultimately became our holiday gift to our partners. (It was a much more meaningful gift than a branded coffee mug.)

This type of content is a simple way to put your beliefs out into the world and into your audience’s hands.

2. Highlight Your People

Your company is (or should be) full of great people. Celebrate them—and give them a platform. Your audience wants to put a face to your brand, and this is a great way to do it.

This can be as easy as creating a page that spotlights them or showcasing their work. It can be more involved, too. You might encourage your employees to write blog posts (even if they aren’t on the content team) about their experience or create content around a volunteer event that your company sponsors.

For instance, our Director of Strategy recently wrote a well-received article about battling—and beating—creative struggles called “The 15 Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned in Creative Work.” When one of our designers began to take calligraphy classes after work, we tapped her to hand-letter inspirational quotes for our Instagram account. And when our New York team helped YMCA kids create a chalk mural, we created a video recap.

If employees aren’t comfortable writing or producing content themselves, they can still brainstorm ideas, offer their perspectives, and help you identify angles your audience would find valuable.

Here are some other ways to highlight your employees:

Showcase their innovations, awards, etc.
Interview them (perhaps film them in their work environment)
Give them shout-outs on social media

3. Tell Your Origin Story

Find creative ways to showcase how your company started and how it’s evolved over time.

I find myself telling my company’s origin story most frequently during sales meetings, and I’m still pleasantly surprised by how interested people are in knowing this stuff. Why do people care? Because this is the stuff that is specific to each company, and stories of humble beginnings are always interesting, inspiring, and endearing.

Recently, my team has even started to help our partners tell their stories, too. We publish interviews with clients about how they built their companies, what they learned, and what advice they’d give to those facing similar issues.

Any time you share your experience—including your struggles, failures, and growth—you cultivate stronger relationships.

4. Publish Your Failures

Everyone fumbles and fails their way through at least the early days of launching a brand. Even if you’re a 10-year business veteran, you will face challenges.

Sharing stories about how you’ve failed and what you learned humanizes your brand, makes you more relatable, and demonstrates that you are invested in learning and trying to improve—for yourself and your customers.

Most importantly, it provides your readers with something of value—the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.

At our agency, I’ve written about the toughest lessons I’ve learned about building a content strategy. And we had our entire team share the best content marketing lessons they’ve learned.

You may feel shy or strange at first talking about how you’ve absolutely botched something, but as long as you frame it in terms of what you’ve learned, you have nothing to lose.

5. Publish Your Successes

Hopefully, you don’t just have failures in your brand’s story. Just as you share your losses, you should share your wins—not in an arrogant way, but in a confident way. (Your audience appreciates your advice from failures, but they definitely want to know how to win.)

To ensure you stay humble, when you share your wins, think of ways to frame it in terms of why you won or succeeded. Doing so enables people to “stand on your shoulders.”

For example, when our agency created a viral video for Microsoft, we let our audience know about the success. But we presented it as a behind-the-scenes blog where we shared the strategic thinking that went into the project, how we vetted the idea, and why we think it worked.

If you help others around you succeed, you succeed.

Remember: Go Deeper

When you use your content as a conduit to express your culture, you can market your company as a unique entity versus a transactional, lowest-cost provider, which is the best advantage available. This alone should inspire you to grab your team and a pizza to start hashing out your ideas.

Using this tactic doesn’t mean you have to abandon your entire content strategy. You can build your editorial mix around high-value, high-interest ideas first, then plug in company news, new product updates and releases, etc. to maintain your publishing schedule.

No matter what you create, always focus on leading with value for your audience first.

This article originally appeared on Marketo.

By Josh Ritchie

Sourced from VISUAL NEWS

In News

SEO Copywriting: How To Write Content That Both Google And Your Visitors Will Love

July 14, 2017 No Comments

Sourced from Inbound Rocket.

Building an audience for your company can be achieved in a couple of different ways. In the old days, you would buy ads in your (local) newspaper; you did radio ads, tv ads or any other ad you could afford with your marketing budget.

Then came the internet and the same old advertising model moved along to the web.

But people are getting blinder every day for these types of companies trying to scream for attention. In a recent piece on Medium Jeremy Ettinghausen even called it “Why Does Digital Advertising Suck?”

He states:

The reason most digital advertising isn’t very good is because most people in advertising don’t really get the internet.

So unless you’re creative and have the potential budget to act upon it, how can you and your small business still generate business online?

That’s where Content Marketing came in over the last couple of years. After all, you know your market in which you’re operating best, right? So why can’t you help your potential customer solve their problems in the same way your product helps them only through media you are creating and promoting?

One of the biggest challenges faced by people doing Content Marketing though is how can you build an audience when your content is not being indexed properly by search engines. And if you do try to optimise your content too much for search engine indexation will it still appeal to your readers?

As we wrote in an earlier topic, SEO content isn’t that complicated, once you understand that with whatever you write the readers comes first, the user is more important than any search engine robot, you’ve already won the first battle.

Winning in Content Marketing, means you need to go further than just producing content for the sake of creating content. It needs to appeal to the reader by helping them solve their problems, AND it needs to appeal to search engines, so you get a good ranking.

But how can you create content that ranks well in Google and other search engines and still appeals to your readers? That is where SEO Copywriting comes in. It helps you to write content for people and at the same time optimising for Google.

What is SEO

But before we can start we first have to get our basics right. What is SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

So in other words, by using SEO, you’re trying to make sure that your website has a higher position in search results. SEO seeks to optimise your website in such a way that the algorithms of Google, Bing and others rate your site in such a way that you get a higher ranking.

Although the actual way this ranking works has always been (and probably will always be) a secret, over the years more and more people started to figure out what kind of things are necessary to get a higher ranking.

These items that can help you rank better can be divided into two categories. On-page SEO factors and Off-page SEO factors.

On-page SEO factors are the things you can change and optimise on your own website. Like technical changes, or the way you write your copy.

Off-page SEO is slightly more complicated because it involves things that are not happening on your domain and have little to no control over. Although the most important off-page factor is probably getting backlinks to your website. The more (relevant) sites link to your site; the higher your ranking will be.

In this article, we will be focusing on on-page SEO, and specifically how to write better copy.

Copywriting?

At its core copywriting is re-arranging words to make your products or services sell better. It is like that salesman who makes all the sales at your company, only then in writing form.

Copywriting is the art and science of creating copy, creating content that prompts the reader to either buy your product, subscribe to your email list, or take any action that you want as a result after reading that copy.

What drives a reader of your copy to take action? A good copywriter does, copywriting is all about:

Getting them to WANT to engage with you….not spamming them with offers.
Generously giving something valuable to the person….not just “greedily asking” for stuff.
Getting them to WANT to buy from you….not out of pressure, but because they enjoy your content and help.

Being a good copywriter first starts by understanding your audience. A good copywriter knows what his or her audience likes and chooses the words that will appeal to them. The headline, words, phrases, quotes used in the content are there to persuade and cause the reader to take action.

Next, to that, an SEO copywriter not only understands his human audience, but he also understands how search engines feel about certain words and phrases.

The beautiful thing is, in theory, everyone can become a good copywriter, just like everyone can be a good storyteller. The only way to become one though is by lots and lots of practice.

How to write copy for SEO?

Writing copy for SEO, just means that you want to create content with the goal of attracting search engine traffic. After all:

As you can see, if you do any business online, it is important that you optimise your content for search engine.

The better optimised it is, the better the ranking of your content. It could bring you to the holy grail, that first page of search results. Or even the first position. You will get more click, shares, likes, engagement and conversions. If nobody can find your website, then even the best-written content is pointless.

Writing SEO friendly content though sounds simpler than it might be seen. There are some steps involved, next to just producing content if you want it to be able to rank well.

At it’s core writing copy for SEO can be done in four steps:

Keyword research – if you want people to be able to find your content, you first need to figure out what it is that you want to get found on. If you do the research for quality keywords at the start, you can start to produce content that you know people are looking for.
Keyword optimisation – Now that you know what words, or combination of words work best for your company, you can start to figure out where and how to use these keywords in your content.
Content organisation – Even though you want to include the keywords into your content, you just don’t want to stuff your entire piece with the same keywords. A good piece of content is organised in a logical way. This will help the robots to better understand what the content is about and next to that it will also help your visitors to consume the content better and as a result stay longer on your site.
Content promotion – Content creation is only half the battle – the rest is gaining notice. After you published your new piece, be sure to promote and share it on different places to build visibility and backlinks.

Keyword research

A keyword is a word (or a phrase) that one might type into a search engine to find what you’re looking for. There could be thousands of words and phrases related to the content that you’re creating, so the challenge is the find the best ones for you that will drive the most traffic to your site.

So what makes a keyword a unique keyword? People tend to think that a good keyword is a popular one automatically. Popularity is not the primary focus you should have though; the main focus should be relevancy, followed by popularity.

Finding relevancy, first starts by thinking what you want to rank about. Write down in one sentence what you want to be find for. The next step will be coming up with questions related to that one sentence. The more questions you can think of the better. And finally you can imagine what it is you would type into a search engine if you want to get an answer to those questions.

Let’s give a concrete example. Say you want to create a page that talks about the best exercises you can do at home, without the need of any gym equipment. The first step is coming of with a statement, a one sentence describing what you want to talk about: “How to build muscle and strength at home without lifting weights”

Potential questions this page might answer are: “How can you become stronger without lifting weights?”, or “How can you use your body for weightlifting?”, or “What exercises can you do without gym equipment?”.

Potential search queries could include “losing weight”, “building muscle”, “easy steps to become stronger”, “workouts at home”, “workouts for men”, “workouts for women”, “beginner home workouts”, “best home workout”, etc.

While you now have a list of potential keywords. The next step is to identify the most important ones for you. Using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner you can get an estimate, based on real data, of the total number of searches that people are doing for these keywords each month. Next to that as an added bonus you also get a list with up to 800 keywords that are similar to the one you entered.

Other great tools are SEMRush (both paid and free) and KeywordTool.io.

Keyword Overview lead generation on SEMRush

Using SEMRush to do Keyword research

Using this information you can refine your list, deleting the ones that at the end don’t seem that optimal. In an ideal situation, you want to end up with no fewer than two and no more than maximum eight keywords for your piece of content.

Not sure which keywords to delete and which ones to keep? Remove any keywords or phrases that don’t sound natural that sound like some bad copywriter tried to write and advertisement. Or phrases that mention a competing brand by name.

The final step you need to take with the narrowed down list, is identifying your primary keyword (or long tail keyword). Again, this one doesn’t have to be the most popular keyword from the list of remaining items. But it is the one that describes your piece of content, your page the best. When it does that, you know your page will address the unique needs of the person searching for it and ending up on your site.

Now that you’ve chosen your primary keyword, the next task will be to select a handful of secondary or short tail keywords. These keywords should expand the range of people’s search to which your page could still be considered relevant, without losing too much of it’s focus.

After that, it’s time to optimise your content.

Keyword optimisation

The first step is often the hardest, so also in this case. Identifying the correct keywords for which you want to rank is the hardest part, now we need to start tweaking our page, by putting those keywords in the right spots.

The most important places for your keywords to appear in are:

Body copy
Your headings and subheadings
Your page title
Your meta description
Your URL or permalink
Alt texts of your images

Don’t go crazy by putting to much of your keywords (both long and short tail) in your content though. A good ratio is 1-2% of your text maximum should be your keywords. So, that means in a 500-word article, you should include the keywords no more than 5-10 times.

Integrate them naturally in your content, as we stated in an earlier article search engines are becoming better and better in understanding human writing. If the placement of your keywords look to weird, to unnatural Google and other will notice this and may punish you for it.

A great way to check if you did not over optimise is by using a free tool like Keyword Density Checker.

Content organisation

The third step is making sure your content is organised in such a way that it makes it easy for the reader ready to consume your piece of content. How can you optimise it in such a way that it is easy to the eye and easy on the mind to consume?

Let’s first start with the readability of your content. There are some great tools out there that can help you improve your writing.

Hemingway Editor

The Hemingway Editor is available as web app, but also as desktop application

The Hemingway Editor is a great tool for almost all of your writing tasks. You don’t want to bore people with difficult words, with large unreadable sentences. That’s how you scare away your readers! Hemingway Editor analyses your text to find any sentences that are difficult, or even “very difficult”, to read.

It highlights these sentences. Next, to that, it also highlights instances where your copy is too passive. The easier it is to consume a piece of content, the longer people will stay on your site to consume the entire piece of content and the higher the chances of them sharing your content.

More shares, means of course more people getting your content presented to them and the articles that get shared the most get the best SEO rating.

Read-Able

Read-Able Readability Test Tool

Read-Able is quite similar to Hemingway editor. It also analyses your copy based on readability, but instead of highlighting individual sentences that need improving, it gives your text and overall readability score. This score tell you what age group will be able to easily read your content. If you’re article is already online, you can also enter your URL instead op copy pasting the text.

Help.Plagtracker

Plagtracker – Professional Editing Assistance

If you’re writing content of course a lot of people look around on the web nowadays for inspiration. Sometimes you’re inspiration however, might be a bit to literal resulting in content that looks and sounds to much like other content already out there. Although it is perfectly fine to get some inspiration online, it is never okay to plagiarise content. Plagtracker will analyse your piece of content, looks for any instances of plagiarism, and replaces them with new, original content.

Other items to focus on with the organisation of your content, having a clear structure, adding visuals to make it visually more attractive, internal linking, etc.

Content promotion

Even if you produce the best content in the world, so is everyone else. According to research done in 2012 by the Content Marketing Institute (so probably by now these numbers are even higher) 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing.

So when everyone is doing it? How can you stand out above the rest? How can you get your content noticed faster and better than your competitors?

The answer is content promotion.

Creating and optimising your content on your website is only part of the process; once you’ve created it, content promotion helps you get in front of the right audience at the right time.

Thankfully, most traditional marketers have no idea how to promote their content (next to putting advertisement budget behind it), so it has only a small portion of the reach it could have.

If you want to be better than your competitor start promoting your content on all the channels you can after it is published. This means social media, specialised communities for around your topics, email newsletter. And not just on your company channels, using tools like Social Seeder, you can use the power of your employees and your brand ambassadors to share and amplify your content.

Creating content requires a lot of time, skill and knowledge. If you want to start getting better search traffic to your website, you’re going to put in the work.

The success of your content and its marketing value, however, will first depend on the quality of the content itself. Next to that the “small” details as outlined in this article will help you push your content further.

Don’t start with the optimisation of your content though; you want your content to read and feel natural.

So, first put down all your thoughts in an article, post, page or any other piece of content you want to create and only then start using the above techniques to make those final tweaks to make sure it ranks even better.

What’s your take on SEO copywriting? Do you think it’s a major factor for online content marketing success? How are you optimising your content at your company? Leave a comment below!

Sourced from Inbound Rocket.

In News

6 Underused Content Marketing Strategies That Get Results

May 12, 2017 No Comments

By Sam Thomas Davies

You’re probably aware that content marketing is an integral part of SEO today.

With it, you can improve your brand’s online visibility and generate 3 times as many leads as traditional advertising (and at a fraction of the cost).

But not everyone is profiting from it…

According to a recent survey, only 30% of B2B marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing.

Plus, 55% say they are unclear on what content marketing success or effectiveness looks like.

If you’re part of that statistic or have been struggling with your content marketing efforts, recently, I’ve got your back.

In this article, I’m going to show you six under-utilized content marketing strategies that will help you generate more organic traffic, improve your conversions and introduce your brand to new audiences.

Let’s get started.

1. Perform a content audit

In today’s content-driven world, many business owners are cranking out more content in a bid to outrank their competitors.

But in doing so, they’re overlooking an important fact:

Not all content serves your website.

If it isn’t high-quality or optimized correctly (on-site or otherwise) your content might be hurting your domain authority (or worse, affecting your rankings).

The solution, then, is to perform a content audit.

According to Neil Patel…

A content audit is a careful look at your website’s existing content in order to make sure that it’s doing what you want it to do – driving the right kind of traffic, containing the right kind of keywords, and improving conversions.

While auditing your site’s content might not fill you with enthusiasm, the results that come from it might…

In an interview with Pat Flynn, writer Todd Tresidder revealed deleting a third of his content tripled his traffic.

And he’s not the only one.

When Nick Loper deleted and consolidated 650 articles on his site, he boosted his organic traffic by 65%:

To perform a content audit of your own, login to Google Analytics, go to “Behavior > Site Content > All Pages”, and do an 80/20 analysis of your content.

Ask yourself, “What is the 20% of content that is producing 80% of the traffic?”

Optimize that 20% by adding additional keywords or a content upgrade (more on that in a moment) and improve or remove the 80% that isn’t producing any return.

To learn more about how to conduct your own content audit, read Everett Sizemore’s thorough article on the subject.

2. Relaunch old content

We’ve all been there:

You write an epic blog post, hit ‘Publish’ and…

Crickets.

No comments. No backlinks. And no influx of organic traffic.

If that’s ever happened to you then you might consider doing what Brian Dean calls a “content relaunch.”

Inspired by a HubSpot post, Dean revisited a blog post that dropped in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and improved it by updating its images, restructuring its copy and adding a case study.

The results were remarkable:

He got 260.7% more organic traffic in 14 days.

Experiences like Brian’s reveal an important fact:

It’s not always necessary to create new content; often, you just need to improve what existing content you have.

Here’s how to do that:

Go back into your Google Analytics and view your lowest-performing content.

Ask yourself,

Is any of it re-launchable?
Could I rewrite, update or improve any of it?
If so, how? Could I update its images or stats, or add a case study?

Often, it’s the marginal improvements that yield the maximum results.

3. Repurpose your most-popular content

It’s a common trap many business owners fall into…

They write a blog post, hit ‘Publish’ and then move onto another without considering how they could maximize the reach of their content.

That’s where content repurposing comes in.

As the name suggests, content repurposing involves taking existing content and adapting it for other platforms to reach new audiences and create further link-building opportunities.

As Arnie Kuenn writes,

With so much content being published every day, people are bound to miss a blog post or video once in awhile. However, through repurposing, your audience may come across your content after it has been altered, through a different channel.

A good example of a marketer repurposing content is Eugene Cheng.

After repurposing his existing content on Slideshare, Eugene was able to get over 2 million views for his presentations:

And that’s not all…

Cheng was able to rank an additional page for the long-tail keyword, “presentation design Singapore”:

Whether you repurpose your content into a Slideshare presentation, an infographic, a video, or any other medium, content repurposing expands the life cycle of your content even further, making it evergreen for years to come.

4. Syndicate your content

Have you ever read a popular blog post only to later notice it everywhere?

If you have, that’s because of content syndication.

The idea is simple:

When an article performs well on one platform (driving a ton of traffic and backlinks in the process) it’s pitched to other platforms (often major media outlets) in the hopes of achieving similar results.

The thing is…

You don’t have to wait for other outlets to accept your work.

Take Benjamin Hardy, for example.

By copying and pasting all of his blog posts onto Medium, he was able to get 20,000 subscribers in 6-months:

Image Source: Goins Writer

But growing your email list isn’t the only benefit that comes from syndicating your content; it increases your brand’s reach too.

James Clear illustrates this perfectly.

By syndicating his content on multiple outlets, he’s able to increase his reach and expose himself to new audiences he wouldn’t have otherwise:

Guess what I’m going to ask you to do?

Go into Google Analytics and identify your highest-performing content. Then, pitch it to domain authorities in your niche with audiences similar to yours.

If you can provide screenshots of statistics such as social shares, traffic, and more, you’ve got a good chance of getting it syndicated and improving your brand’s visibility in the SERPs.

5. Add content upgrades to your content (Hint: Not how you think)

You’re probably familiar with content upgrades.

And for good reason:

They’re super effective for increasing conversions.

When done right, it’s possible to boost conversions by as much as 785% (no, that’s not a typo).

But there’s a problem…

Everybody’s using them.

In fact, it’s hard not to visit a site now without noticing the yellow call-out box that’s become a standard feature of the content upgrade:

So, how do you get noticed in a busy online marketplace?

You use content upgrades on other mediums.

Check out this recent YouTube upload from Jack Canfield:

Instead of including content upgrades in his blog posts (something everybody’s doing already) he includes them in the meta-descriptions of his videos:

While it’s impossible to know his conversion rate, it’s safe to assume they’re high with the number of subscribers he has, likes his videos receive, and the fact that so few people are following this strategy.

Add content upgrades to your content, of course, but try thinking beyond blog posts.

How could you use them in ways others haven’t considered?

6. Write case studies

When we think of content, we tend to think of epic blog posts.

After all, long-form content ranks higher in Google.

But long-form content isn’t everything.

If you’re looking for content that converts prospects into customers, you can’t go wrong with having case studies.

In its 2014 B2B Technology Content Survey Report, Eccolo Media found that case studies rank as the third most influential content type in the purchase process for both small businesses and large enterprises:

We utilize case studies at Sleeknote for this very reason.

In fact, we have an entire category on our site dedicated to companies we’ve helped improve their conversions:

Be warned:

Crafting a compelling case study requires a little experimentation on your part. No two companies are alike. Different readers respond to different copy.

Take word length, for instance.

When Neil Patel shortened his case study from 2,286 words to 615 words, he increased the number of leads he generated by 39%.

Case studies aren’t just an under-utilized type of content; they’re an integral part of helping your prospects move through the buyer’s journey, too.

If you have case studies at the bottom of your funnel (BoFu), you’re more likely to nudge prospects into becoming customers and produce measurable returns on your content marketing.

Conclusion

Content marketing is – and will continue to be – an essential part of SEO in 2017 and beyond.

And with more business owners competing for the coveted front page every day, getting noticed is more than an advantage – it’s a necessity.

I’ve given you six proven ways to help you cut through the noise and rise above the fray.

The question is…

Which will you choose?

By Sam Thomas Davies

Sam Thomas Davies is the content marketing manager at Sleeknote: a company that helps ecommerce business owners capture and convert more leads without hurting the user experience.

Sourced from jeffbullas.com

In News

Storyful & Weber Shandwick Launch a Content Intelligence Service for Marketers

April 26, 2017 No Comments

The partnership aims to help marketers mitigate risk.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Storyful discovers, validates, and acquires social video for global media organisations. Weber Shandwick is a global communications and engagement agency. They have partnered to develop Cognitive Context, a digital content intelligence service.

As part of the joint effort, Weber Shandwick clients will have the opportunity to gain access to pre-viral social media content that is surfaced by Storyful with the same speed and accuracy that it has been delivering to leading newsrooms, including Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Vice and others.

Storyful’s content-mining technology and insights from its global team of former journalists combined with Weber Shandwick’s expertise in content strategy and communications will provide marketers and communicators with a new solution for fine-tuning social strategy, managing risk and informing content programs. The companies are also co-developing a custom reporting module that will make it easier for marketers to take action after receiving Storyful data and insights, exclusive to Weber Shandwick clients.

“Social media has fundamentally redefined how news, marketing and communications professional do their job and how audiences consume content. For the last seven years, Storyful has built the technology and expertise that modern storytellers have come to rely on to report the news, create innovative advertising solutions and mitigate risk in real-time. Our global team of journalists process billions of data points a day to find the insights and content that drive strategy and content creation for our partners. Weber Shandwick’s global scale and innovative approach to communications makes them an ideal partner to harness our capabilities and expand our best-in-class solutions to organizations and brands around the world,” said Rahul Chopra, CEO of Storyful.

“The rules of marketing and PR today favour those willing to continually understand how trending content surfaces, who is behind it and how that impacts news and social media conversations – it’s all interconnected,” said Chris Perry, Chief Digital Officer, Weber Shandwick. “This unique partnership with Storyful will arm us with the insights that make our planning, content creation and integrated media programs even stronger.”

Storyful’s access to and insights behind billions of social posts complement Weber Shandwick’s planning and data/analytics capabilities, expanding the data pool to derive intelligence for clients. In addition to informing campaigns and communications programs, this partnership will help organisations more rapidly adapt to the evolution of consumer interaction with news and branded content.

In News

How to Write Data-Driven Content: A Step-by-Step Guide

April 21, 2017 No Comments

Sourced from Neil Patel.

Honest question: Why do you read this blog?

I’m not usually a betting man, but I’d wager that you read it because of the amount of research, advice, and step-by-step explanations that I provide.

And that’s pretty much my entire blogging strategy. That’s my “big secret.” Now, it’s out there.

I learned a long time ago that I had to work hard to set myself apart from my competitors. That was especially true in my early blogging days.

I thought about it for a long time, and I finally realized that my readers wanted value and lots of it.

It was up to me to give that value to them.

That changed the way I viewed blogging. That’s why I write long-form articles that are packed to the gills with thorough research and actionable steps for you to take.

I also learned that longer articles aren’t necessarily better than shorter articles.

It’s more common nowadays for blogs to have tons of content, but not all of them have tons of value. Unfortunately, there are some well-known blogs that just don’t deliver.

That’s why I put 110% into these articles for you. I want to bring you super long and super informative articles that help you not bore you.

Your time is valuable. I want you to get value from this blog if you spend any time reading it!

I’ve had lots of people ask me about my personal process for creating data-driven content, so I thought I’d break it down into steps so you can replicate it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an expert copywriter or a writing newbie. You can follow the formula I’m about to share with you to create content that will set you up as an authority in your niche.

Learn how I used data driven content to generate over 100,000 visitors a month from Google.

Step 1: Find your topic, angle, and slant

You might think coming up with a topic is one of the easiest parts of writing content. In some ways, it is, but there’s more work to it than it seems.

It’s not as simple as choosing an in-demand topic and running with it.

That is the first step, but it’s not the last.

To find your initial topic, there’s nothing better than conducting research in your niche to see what’s trending.

I find it’s usually best if a topic is rather narrow. So something like “Content Marketing 101” would be a bit too general.

I like browsing sites in my niche and seeing what’s not being talked about. In other words, where is the knowledge gap?

I use Buzzsumo to see what others are (and aren’t) talking about.

For example, if I want to see what people are posting about content marketing, I can enter that keyword into Buzzsumo:

Click “Go!” and you’ll see a bunch of new and trending articles:

Buzzsumo shouldn’t be the only tool you use, but it’s a great start.

But you can’t stop once you’ve found that knowledge gap. You have to optimize your topics and make them the best they can be.

For instance, take a look at the titles of some of my latest articles:

So what’s special about these?

To see the difference, let’s change the titles. Let’s say I had used these titles:

How to Leverage 301 Redirects
Ecommerce Marketing 101
How to Create a Popular LinkedIn Post

Those aren’t as snazzy, right? But why?

Notice how specific my titles are. I’m not just talking about 301 redirects––I’m showing you how to get more traffic with 301 redirects.

Likewise, I’m showing you how to market your ecommerce store in just an hour a day and how to write a LinkedIn post that 78% of your network will engage with.

See a common thread here?

This is one of the big secrets of content creation: finding a topic, angle, and slant for each piece of content you write.

Here’s a handy chart from Chapter 5 of Quick Sprout’s Advanced Guide to Content Marketing that explains each term:

The topic is the broadest category. Your angle and slant are narrower and more specific to what you want to say with the content.

Let’s apply these to the articles I mentioned.

Topic: 301 redirects

Angle: Using 301 redirects in an unconventional way

Slant: Using 301 redirects to get more traffic

Topic: Ecommerce marketing

Angle: Marketing an ecommerce store in less time

Slant: Spending just 1 hour a day on ecommerce marketing

Topic: Writing a LinkedIn post

Angle: Engaging with your network with a LinkedIn post

Slant: Creating a post that 78% of your network will engage with

It’s best to be as specific as possible when creating your angle and slant. (Typically, slants are more specific.)

I know this all seems like a lot just to come up with a topic, but this is one of those pro techniques that will set you apart from everyone else.

After all, how many times have you seen generic content titles and passed them over?

The more targeted your topic is, the better your article will be. So don’t be afraid to put in some extra time on this step.

Step 2: Research, research, research

Here’s where the “data-driven” part of “data-driven content” comes into play.

But you might find it surprising that you don’t need to spend hours researching.

As Tim Ferriss points out, being productive and being busy aren’t the same thing:

Source: Pinterest.com

If you know how to productively research, you can cut down on time while finding the best supporting data for your topic.

You’ll still need to research a lot, but it won’t be as time-consuming as it might seem.

Here’s how to create new researching habits so you can use your time more wisely and get a lot out of it.

First, research without researching. This sounds funny, but it’s one of the most helpful types of research.

The idea is that research should be an ongoing process. You shouldn’t stop researching once you leave your desk.

If you have an idea that pops into your head, jot it down on paper or in your phone.

I do this all the time. For some reason, I get some of my best ideas when I’m exercising, flying on airplanes, and riding in Ubers.

If you’re reading an article that would be great to use as an authority link, bookmark it or email it to yourself.

A lot of times, I’ll just open a Google document on my phone, paste in a few links, and maybe even jot a few lines down.

This doesn’t feel like research, but you’re actively finding new material to use for your content.

Second, find authority sites in your niche and follow them.

This step comes with a bit of a caveat.

Say you wanted to write about SEO. If you search Google for “SEO blog,” you’ll see the big names like Moz and Search Engine Land.

But some of these blogs may not be right for your unique needs.

Let’s take Moz, for instance. I think Moz is great, but they post about topics other than SEO.

You might find it tiresome to sort through the posts. So you might want to look at another blog that’s purely about SEO.

I recommend taking a look at “top blog” lists like this one from Inc.

You should find anywhere from 5 to 15 authority blogs to follow.

These will be your sources for credible links and information.

Third, spend the time to ensure your information is legitimate and credible.

If you link to an article that ends up containing false information, don’t be surprised if your readers call you out on it.

Even if they just notice that you linked to a bad source, your readers will most likely think less of your site.

On the other hand, making sure your sources are credible ensures your reputation and authority.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a detective to do this!

One option is to simply use credible sites to find research. Sites like ChicagoBooth.edu post trustworthy research in different industries.

By extension, most .edu and .gov sites are universally accepted as credible sources.

You can also search case studies and academic research by using Google Scholar.

Let’s say you’re writing about sales psychology. Enter that term into the search box:

Click the search button or hit enter, and you’ll see a nice list of results:

These results aren’t quite what we want, so we’ll use an advanced search trick and put quotation marks around the search query.

This ensures that Google will only return results that have the exact search query. So pages with just one of the words (“sales” or “psychology”) won’t show up.

That’s more like it! You now have access to countless pages of academic study.

Google Scholar is great if you need any form of case study, focus group report, or official statistics from respectable institutions.

Pro tip: If a source has a “PDF” link on the side, you’ll be able to see the entire study or paper.

This is great because you can see the source in context instead of only being able to read a short overview.

If you’re drawing from other sources that aren’t as obviously credible, you can do some basic fact checking by tracing the information back as far as you can.

Let’s see that in action. Here’s an article from Backlinko:

In one of the tips, Brian makes a claim and hyperlinks it to the source he used:

Even though Brian includes a screenshot, you can double-check the validity by clicking on the hyperlinked text and arriving at the official statement from Google:

Therefore, Brian’s statement is valid, and his source is trustworthy.

(Another pro tip: Including screenshots (when applicable) and linking to the source is one of the best ways to show your readers that you’ve done your homework.)

You can follow this same process to check the validity and authority of information you find. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

If you want to go the whole nine yards with fact checking, take a look at the “Research” section of Chapter 4 of Quick Sprout’s Advanced Guide to Content Marketing:

But wait––we’re not done yet with researching. There’s one more step that involves research: using your research well.

Step 3: Include the right stuff

Once you have your research, you can’t just include whatever facts you have compiled.

You need to include information that helps you prove your point, and you also need to include visual information.

To see how I do this, take a look at this article of mine: