How Content Marketing Helps You to Work With Other Bloggers
Content marketing generally tends to refer to the process of publishing content on your own website so that you create ways to people to find your brand (through Google) and so that you can build trust and authority.
But content marketing is really any kind of marketing that involves content and that includes ‘guest posting’.
Guest posting works the exact same way as content marketing on your own site, the only difference is that you’re gaining exposure via another creator’s channel rather than your own. The aim is still to show that you have knowledge and can provide value however and it is still to build trust with your audience via a ‘free sample’.
The advantage here is that guest posting allows you to start afresh with a new audience and you also get a quick ‘boost’ in your authority because you are getting the seal of approval from a blogger that that audience trusts.
The Power of Content Marketing + Guest Posting
Anyone can guest post, but if you have already been investing energy into content marketing, then you will likely find that you are much more effective at this. That’s because guest blogging works best when you have fantastic content to share with the other blog. Not only will this increase your chances of actually getting published on the blog you’re targeting, but it will also help you to make the best first impression on that audience.
At the same time, having great content on your own site is very important. Remember, when someone publishes your content on their site, this is essentially their seal of approval. If your website is low quality, then this association is going to hurt their reputation and their brand. If you want to get onto the top blogs, then you need to ensure that the content on your own site is every bit as good as that found on those top blogs.
How to Get Other Blogs to Work With You
Even if you are the best content marketer in the world though, you might still find it is a struggle to get new creators to work with you.
There are many ways you can get around this obstacle but one of the most important is to build a relationship with the blogger before you contact them. People don’t like being contacted out of the blue with no prior interaction, so how can you get them to sit up and listen?
One option is to try mentioning that blogger for free in one of your posts. If they see this, then it will help to demonstrate that you have similar audiences and similar approaches.
Another method is to try and strike up a conversation about something else. Try sending a message to say ‘hi’ or just to ask them questions. If they sell a service, you could even try hiring them for that service.
Either way, you are now creating an interaction so that when your name shows up in their inbox, they know who you are!
How to Create a Successful Fitness Blog With Content Marketing
Content marketing is all the rage right now and we’ve all heard about how blogs and businesses are investing more in this aspect of internet marketing than any other.
But what does that look like in practice? What does content marketing really involve?
Let’s imagine a fitness website. The site belongs to a ‘personal brand’ (a guy or gal who want to promote themselves as the head of their brand) and makes money from both advertising and selling an ebook. How does this page go about using content marketing to reach prominence and start selling to a ravenous audience?
The Posts
The first type of content this site could benefit from is blog posting. The more regular here the better and ideally you’d want to see posts every day or at least several times per week. This will provide regular value and it will incentivize visitors to keep coming back.
These posts should be well written of course and the personal brand will allow the owner to make use of a narrative structure. In other words: by structuring blog posts as stories rather than factual reports, you can make them much more interesting and engaging and create more of an emotional hook. If you describe how something worked for you then your audience can imagine how it might work for them.
You need to make sure all your posts have a USP. That means they should offer something that can’t easily be found elsewhere online. They also need to have a consistent ethos and tone. In other words, people need to know what they can expect when they read a blog post on your site so that they know that they tend to agree with your point of view. It’s this that will earn you the trust to sell to them.
Other Content
But content marketing is more than just blog posts.
Social media posts are also important here and again you can ride that ‘personal brand’ by making sure that you are seen to be living the lifestyle you are promoting. You should be the living proof that your methods work, so that means posting images to Instagram that show you training and looking healthy, or eating great meals.
Likewise, you should consider having a YouTube channel. YouTube is a surprisingly effective tool for engaging with your audience and for really getting them on-board with your message. If you can create videos with good production values and sheen, then this will instantly demonstrate your skill and professionalism. And if you can portray your personality in a way that is engaging and likeable then you can build a lot more trust to sell your products. People who have seen you speak will feel like they know you and like they understand what you’re about and what you represent. You can use this to your advantage to sell your products but that’s the final tip – you only sell when you have something you genuinely believe in and feel passionate about.
How to Create Awesome Video Content for Your Content Marketing
Content marketing does not just mean writing lots of blog posts. It can mean that sure, but what is just as powerful is video content.
In fact, video has a number of advantages over written content. Sure, it is less SEO-friendly and it does require a greater commitment from the viewer (they need to be able to have their sound on for starters). But at the same time, video allows you to portray your personality, principles and expertise much more efficiently and quickly. Video is also inherently more engaging and a great way to show your professionalism. If your video has high production values, then this suggests a certain level of authority for you to have been able to create that video in the first place.
With all that in mind, just how do you go about adding great video content to your site? Here are some important tips…
The Quality
To start with, you need to make sure you have the right equipment. It is possible to film with a phone but this will often have difficulties with autofocus. Better is to choose a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and ideally one with a flip screen so that you can see yourself talking and check you’re in shot.
Just as important as the camera is the brightness. Make sure that your image is bright and clear and consider investing in studio lighting equipment such as a softbox. Positioning yourself by a window can also work well.
This will make your footage much clearer which is crucial to ensure that your audience doesn’t need to squint and lean in too close to the screen!
Also important is sound quality. If your sound is muffled, then this will seriously hurt the professionalism of your videos. Solve this issue by speaking into a lapel mic or maybe a free-standing microphone such as the Blue Yeti Snowball.
Think as well about the other hallmarks of a high quality production. For instance, you should make sure to speak slowly and clearly yourself and to be well-presented. You should also think about your backdrop. If you’re in front of your chest of drawers with your boxes hanging out then that won’t look good!
Editing
Once you’ve done this, you can then synchronize your video and your audio in a piece of editing software like Adobe Premiere. You should then try introducing a few cuts and edits to keep the flow going and to keep the audience entertaining. Try switching to still images and footage from other things when you can in order to prevent the video from being unstimulating.
This is also where you can add a subtle backing track and importantly a logo in the top or bottom corner. You can also add an introduction (look for someone who can make you one on Fiverr) and maybe ‘bottom thirds’ to introduce people and concepts as they appear on the screen.
These small touches can all add up to create something that is very professional looking and that should really get the right reaction!
How to Create Stunning Images to Go With Your Content
If you want to get more from your content marketing, then you need to stop thinking of your content as ‘stuff you use to fill your website’. Instead, you need to start thinking of content as though it were a product. This is a product that is just as exciting as anything you might sell and as such, it deserves all the same buzz, marketing and attention.
And this means that you need to adorn your content with the right images and the right layout to make it look beautiful. This makes a huge difference to the tone and impact of what you write: so make sure that you get it right.
The problem? Getting stunning images can be hard. Stock images are expensive and using images from Google Images often means facing copyright issues. At the end of the day, using ready-made images is never as good as creating images yourself any way though, after all: an image you create yourself will perfectly suit the topic of your blog post rather than looking generic and only vaguely relevant.
Fortunately, if you can invest in a good camera – even a decent phone camera – then you can start adding impressive images to your content that will take it to the next level. You just need to learn a few tricks to get elevate your images to a professional standard.
Focus
One of the best tricks for making an image look professional is to use a shallow depth-of-field and to create a macro effect. This basically means you’re going to place the object in the extreme foreground and then focus on that so that everything else blurs into the background.
This is easy to do. On a smartphone, you simply need to double tap on the object in the extreme foreground and subtly change the distance until the camera locks on. If you have a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, you can do the same thing by setting the camera to ‘manual focus’ and then changing the focus until it looks just right.
Composition
When photographing something up close like this, whether it is a keyboard, a phone, a dumbbell or anything else, it can often be fun to get a more dynamic angle. An upward shot will make the object appear larger and more important for example. A downward shot will allow you to give more billing to nearby objects.
Don’t just shoot objects head-on. Think about more interesting angles and positions. How about putting the subject on the left-hand side of the frame? What could you add in for scale?
Storytelling
Understand the objective of your photo is to tell a story. It shouldn’t just decorate the page, it should add to your content.
Telling a story doesn’t mean showing something in action though. Often it means showing the aftermath or set-up to an event and then letting the viewer fill in the blanks. This makes them a more active participant in the image and thereby creates something more artistic and engaging.
How to Create Stunning Long-Form Content
There are many different approaches to content marketing but one of the best ways to create content that will get shares and that will get read, is to attempt to build ‘long form’ blog posts and articles. This is any content that is longer than 1,000 words and that will usually include lots of images and links. It’s also perhaps the most powerful type of content there is for growing your site and demonstrating value…
Why Long-Form Content Works
Google has undergone many changes over the years but almost all of these have had a single purpose: to provide its users with better results. Google wants to show its users the most relevant, entertaining and useful search results and as such, it wants to remove as much spam as it can from its results pages.
To do this, Google looks for indicators of a site’s quality. One such indicator is length, and if a blog post or article appears to be longer, then this suggests that it is providing more value to the reader. There’s only so much information you can convey in 500 words, whereas a long post is something that will be able to go in depth and explore many different angles of a subject.
This is why Google has actually gone on record to say that the optimum length for a blog post is 1,800 words. If your content is that long, then it will look like it has real value to the reader. You can enhance this by also adding lots of headers, lots of images and lots of links to high quality external resources.
Another good sign that Google likes long-form content is the fact that longer posts are most likely to get featured as resources in the SERPs!
How to Device Long-Form Content
To make long-form content that works, you need to choose a topic that you can really go in-depth on. This means thinking of every single way that you can offer more value and useful information to the reader, whether that means including links to resources throughout the post (or at the end), whether it means providing different opinions on the same subject or whether it means just being the most in-depth ‘guide’ to the subject currently on the web.
What it absolutely must not mean however is that you stuff your site with words and bulk it up as much as possible. Do not waffle or you will lose the audience that matters.
Another tip is to make sure that your content doesn’t look too dense. If your site is just one massive block of text, then it is going to be highly off-putting for the reader and require too much of an investment of time in order to read.
Good long-form content should be spaced out with lots of headings and perhaps even a table of contents. This way, the reader can skim through to find the parts they’re most interested in or they can opt to sit down with a cup of tea and dig in!
How to Qualify Your Content for Better Engagement
One of the quickest ways to get stressed and burned out in life is to try and please everyone all the time.
And one of the quickest ways to see your website or blog sink into obscurity is to do the same.
It is impossible to please everyone and so you shouldn’t try. This is especially important in marketing though because it is perhaps the very fastest way to create a website that is bland and that no-one cares about. It’s also a surefire way to prevent yourself from building any kind of trust or authority.
Why You Need to Leave People Out
If you were to create a website that appealed to everyone, that would mean that the posts would have to be useful for people who were new to the topic and those that were experts. It would mean that you couldn’t make any very controversial statements and it would ultimately prevent you from gaining any sense of ownership from your visitors.
Conversely, if you have a strong point of view, a mission statement and an ideal customer, then you can create a website that will greatly appeal to the right person.
One of the fastest ways to make your content more interesting is to quickly identify who it isn’t for. This will rule out people who wouldn’t have been the right demographic for you to market to anyway but it will also help you to make your content appear that much more appealing to those that are still present.
Many brands will attempt to qualify their content in a way that is transparently fake. For example ‘If you don’t want to earn mega bucks, then leave right now!’. This doesn’t work because the visitors see through it and it just looks desperate.
However, if you say ‘this course is only for professional lawyers that are already making a lot of money’, then those professional lawyers will be much more interested than if you had said ‘this course is for beginners and experts alike’. You want your target demographic to feel that the content you have on offer is aimed directly at them.
Why You Need an Opinion
Likewise, you need to ‘take a side’ when it comes to your content. For instance, if you have a site about health then you can decide to come down on the ‘highly scientific’ side of things and only promote strategies backed heavily by science. Alternatively, you could decide to promote naturalistic products with no chemicals. It doesn’t matter which – that comes down to your personal beliefs – but you do need to pick.
Why? Because this way, people who agree with you will be able to choose your site over other sites. They will know that your site shares their principles and their beliefs and they will be able to feel confident that the advice you share and products you recommend are in keeping with their belief system.
If they can’t know that for sure, then how can they trust you enough to buy from you?
How to Write Content for the Reader That Google Will Still Like
When it comes to writing content for your website or blog, it often seems as though you have two options. Option one is to create content that is written for the reader first. Here, your first priority is to create something that people will enjoy and that they will be excited to read. This is the best strategy for those genuinely interested in true content marketing, where the objective is to create long-term fans.
Option two though is to write content for the search engines. In other words, this means that you are writing content in such a way that Google will be more likely to index it and will be more likely to present it to users. The risk here is that while you might gain exposure, you could risk losing the enjoyment of your readers and thereby building trust and authority.
But the real question you should be asking is not which of these methods you should adopt… but whether or not you can accomplish both things at once.
The New SEO
There was a time when writing for Google and writing for the reader meant two very different things. At this time, SEOs were focussed on trying to hack Google’s algorithms and effectively game the system. Google primarily ranked content based on the repetitious use of keywords and phrases and this meant that a smart SEO could simply insert the same keywords into their content over and over in order to make something that would rank highly on Google.
Of course this did not result in content that was readable or enjoyable for the visitor.
Fortunately, Google has wizened up to those methods and is now much more savvy at spotting blatant attempts at manipulation. If you repeat the same key terms over and over again, your website is likely to get penalized rather than reaching the top.
Instead, Google is now smart enough to look for real language and writing ‘around’ the topic. In fact, you can see this now when you search Google for terms: often it will actually replace the search term with synonyms!
This is something you need to consider and include when you are writing then: try to use related terms and synonyms in a way that comes naturally and a way that you think Google is likely to understand. If you do this, then your content will be more varied and useful for the reader and it will also be more likely to get ranked by Google.
The Message to Remember
The key take-home to remember through all of this is that Google wants to rank the best quality content. The overall aim of Google is to ensure its users find what they are looking for when they search and thus if you offer something genuinely useful, your goals will be aligned with those of Google’s and future updates will be more likely to help you rank. On the other hand, if you are trying to dupe Google, then your site will get hurt with each future improvement!
Why a High Quality and Quantity of Content Ensures That Your Website Cannot Fail
Content marketing is getting a lot of praise from internet marketers and from experts in SEO. This is a form of marketing that focusses on creating and sharing high quality blog posts, articles and videos. The general idea is that you’ll provide a way for people to discover your site but at the same time, you’ll also demonstrate quality and authority so that people decide to start visiting your site of their own accord.
Content marketing doesn’t just mean writing the content though, it also means sharing it with others on social media. You need to create the content and then market the content as though it were a product in its own right.
But what if you’ve been doing all that and your site still isn’t the huge sensation you were promised? Why aren’t you seeing the returns you’ve been led to expect from content marketing?
The simple answer is that you either lack quality or you lack quantity.
Lots of Content = Lots of $$$
If you are producing large amounts of content – if you are posting a new blog post twice or three times a day – then it becomes very difficult to fail. On the other hand, if you are only posting once or twice a week, then it is very hard to become as successful as the biggest players.
You can see this for yourself if you just take a look at some of your favorite big blogs on the net. Most of these will probably post several times a day.
This should make common sense. If you hope that you will make a full-time wage from your website, then that means you need to start treating it like a full time job. You need to be writing content and promoting it full time. Doing this for just a couple of hours a day is really not enough!
At the same time, creating lots of content also creates a huge amount of opportunity for people to discover and interact with your brand. If you create a blog post on your site, then even if it isn’t optimized for SEO, Google will likely identify a couple of ‘long tail keywords’. These are exact matches for long, random phrases that people search but that no one is bothering to compete for.
Now let’s say that every article you post has 1 long-tail keyword and each of those gets searched for once a week. If you have 3 new articles a day, then that’s 21 new hits that week immediately. That becomes 42 new hits in week two and 63 new hits on week three.
And chances are that some of those articles will do much better than that. The more you publish, the greater the odds of a runaway hit happening soon.
But that’s the other thing you see: your content must be high quality to stand a fairer-than-average chance of getting shared and going viral. Spam is not going to get you anywhere, so if quantity isn’t problem, then quality is. But it’s definitely one of those things!
Why Content Marketing Works Best With Your Own Content
If you want to make a successful website or blog then you should definitely look into content marketing. This is the form of marketing that website owners and business owners are investing the most time and money into at the moment and for good reason. Not only is content marketing ideal for building a big audience, it is also a great way to build a relationship with that audience, to earn their trust and to position yourself as a ‘thought leader’ in your niche.
The problem is that writing content takes time and effort and it also requires that you have a basic level of writing skill. It is for these reasons that many site owners will not write their own pages but will instead turn to freelancing sites like UpWork and Freelancer in order to acquire writers. Not only that, but they will often rely on other techniques like content submitted by users and content that has been curated from the web.
These options have their place but none is as effective or powerful as writing the content yourself. Here is why…
Being on Brand
First and foremost, writing content yourself ensures that it stays precisely on-message and on-brand. Your content doesn’t just need to be well-written to be effective, it also needs to convey a consistent message.
People want to know that you are on their wavelength. They need to know that if you are recommending a product, it is because you believe it is scientifically tested. Or that you believe it is natural and wholesome. Either way, they want to know that your opinions align with theirs.
If you hire writers to handle your work, then you are going to lose some of that. The best writers will try to stay neutral to avoid putting words in your mouth, while the worst ones might actually contradict the point of view you are trying to adhere to.
Excitement and Passion
The other problem is that hiring a writer creates more distance between you and the reader and it removes the excitement and passion that should be present in everything you discuss. The best blogs by far are those that are written by people who know the subject inside out and are passionate about it. Why? Because they have the knowledge and understanding to bring something new to the table. They know the topic well enough to make suggestions that are exciting and to go beyond just beginner introductions.
A hired writer may know the subject well but they won’t want to be too adventurous with their content because they won’t know what youwould be willing to say. Very often though, they’ll be learning as they write and that means the content is likely to be entry-level at best.
Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. The best option is to find someone who is as passionate about the topic as you. Whatever you do though, don’t settle for outsourced, generic content. Even if it is well-written.
Why You Need a Great Brand for Your Content Marketing to Work
Want to use content marketing in order to build trust and authority while also gaining more exposure for your website? Then you need to ensure that you first have a great brand in place. One does not work without the other and in this post, you’re going to learn why!
The Objective of Content Marketing
To understand why your brand is so important, it can be useful to first consider the role of content marketing. The aim with any content marketing campaign is not only to gain more exposure by climbing the ranks of Google and by providing content that can be shared on social media: it’s also to try and help you build authority and trust with your audience.
The hope is that after stumbling on your content a few times and being blown away, your audience will then start to seek out your site because they see it as an authority. Eventually they might bookmark it and begin to check it daily, at which point your high quality information and entertainment has done its job.
But in order for this to happen, your audience first needs to recognize that the posts they enjoyed were from the same creator and that they are going to continue being as high quality and as well geared for their particular hobbies and interests.
How does this happen? Usually it happens because those visitors notice the background or the logo at the top of the page and realize it’s the same site they enjoyed last time.
At the same time, your logo also needs to convey a certain purpose, mission statement and style. People are only going to follow your blog if they think that this is a place where they will continue to get information and entertainment they enjoy and find useful.
Your logo is going to play a big part in establishing that fact. Your logo should be strong enough that when a visitor looks at it, they have a good idea of the kind of thing your site is all about. If this appears to be in accord with the post they just read, then they might start to explore further.
Your Brand is What Ties it All Together
A brand is not just a logo and a site design though, it is an ethos and a promise. You buy Apple products because you know what to expect. From your previous experience with Apple, you know that their hardware will be well-made and their software will be slick and easy to use.
When you return to a site you like, you do so for the same reason. You are here because you know what the site is all about and in your experience, it delivers the kind of thing you are interested in reading about.
If your blog is going to be successful, then it needs to have its own tone, its own style and its own particular subject area. All this should be encapsulated and symbolized by your branding.
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