If you want to double your chance of success with content marketing, then you’ll love this piece.
Truth is: having the best content marketing strategies for your blog is what separates the good blogs from the awesome ones.
Whether you’re now considering content marketing or you already have a strategy in place, it’ll cause no harm to revisit your content strategy plan – to make sure you’re up in the game.
You see, that thing: “perfect marketing strategy” does not exist. Plans are relative – they might succeed or fail, it all depends on how well you manage them. The success of your blog will depend on how much effort you invest in it.
Remember why you started. Motivation is important so is commitment.
A remarkable content marketing strategy helps you create, publish, and promote content that ultimately attract quality website traffic, lead generation, and as a result, an increase in sales.
Recommended: Blogging for business ~ 6 Content ideas for your business blog!
After all, content is the bait we use to bring in visitors into our blog and convert them into leads, right? Therefore, if you don’t know how to promote your blog effectively, all the efforts you put into creating blog posts will fall off like a stone. Even if you create content like crazy.
Also, a good blog content strategy should be able to answer these three questions:
- Why are you writing content in the first place?
- What type of content should you write?
- How does the content accomplish your goals?
Now:
Are you ready to save time, drive more traffic, and boost your blogging success?
Then consider it done.
Follow these pro tips to create the best content marketing strategy that you’ll be proud of.
Here we go:
1. Set Higher Goals
Just like any business, you must have a goal for your blog. Your plans must have goals so you know where you’re headed to. Clearly, this process can be quite challenging. Because sometimes, our goals are not clear enough, they only become clear as we walk on them. Other times, they’re not challenging enough. More to it, juggling the two can be quite tricky.
Don’t worry!
Here are the tips: set SMART goals. Make objectives:
Specific – what are the definition of your goals? Where will they head you, and why is that it?
Meaningful – why is reaching the set goals important to you? What’s the benefit you want to get from them?
Attainable –be realistic, but don’t see your goals as unattainable. Set goals that you don’t have to travel to the moon to get to.
Relevant –how will your goal benefit society? How is it relevant to other people?
Trackable – what measures will you put in place to track your goals?
2. Research the Market
You’ll do better with your blog fast if you know what the public wants. Research the market trends before starting. See your blog as a product for a specific market.
With that being said, how do you find a market?
Here are some hacks for you:
Create surveys – survey is an effective tool to discover what your friends, relatives, and potential customer needs are.
You can throw a question out this way:
“What would you guys like to read about?”
Or:
“What are you interested in?”
Online interviews – try to set up Skype interviews with people you’re not physically close to. Find out what their needs are.
(You should ask questions related to your product).
Don’t ask “what they expect an ideal project template to look like” except you have one to offer them.
You get it right?
Use all the web resources and online tools you can get your hands on.
3. Make your audience-value paramount beyond the brand value
What this means is your blog should be relevant to the target audience. Create content that solves your audience problem if you want to win them. I bet your big O’l pal, “Google” will also give you a big thumbs for that. Ask any professional blogger or marketer and they’ll tell you I’m right.
4. Think of ideas
Every great business was the product of ideas. Think about the value you want your content to create for your audience.
Know what your chosen niche needs you to do.
Know how many bucks you’ll spend on your idea.
Draw a deadline for your project.
What is the anticipated end date?
Ask yourself what will definitely work? What can be improved?
Keep asking yourself “am I in the right niche?”
It’s never late to reconsider your idea if you find too many handicaps or things that might impede your success.
5. Re-purpose & update your old content
Take it or leave it: evergreen content is a no-brainer content marketing strategy to achieve the best results from your blog.
The truth is this: all content are NOT created equal. Some contents can bring you more results over a long period of time than the others. However, with time, even these so amazing evergreen posts need to be updated to keep them relevant.
Here’s the tip:
Perform content analysis of your blog content every 2-3 months and see which blog posts are getting weaker in Serps. Then revamp these blog posts by improving the quality (oftentimes, adding more words) and enhancing them for possible ranking keywords.
In fact, Ahrefs increased their pageviews by 468% after updating one of their old blog posts.
Did you spot the opportunity there?
You’ll see amazing results too if you repurpose your old content properly.
Also, hitting the update button is not where the work ends – rather where the work begins. You share that same old content on social media and on other sites like Slideshare, Medium or LinkedIn for more traffic.
In fact, there are so many ways you can promote your repurposed content. You can even take it to the moon. I’m just kidding :).
6. Come up with keywords to target
As any experienced blogger or marketer will tell you: in effective blog content strategy, keywords are the next best thing that happened after bread and butter.
Know why?
Without them, you’ll not rank well on search engines. Worse, you’ll find it difficult getting a lot of consistent traffic which might frustrate your effort.
Let me show you the top criteria for selecting the right keywords:
- Dig into keywords that have high search volume and low competition.
- Check the keyword difficulty for that keyword.
- Type that keyword into Google and check the authority of the websites appearing on the first page for the keyword.
- Analyze their contents. They are your competitor. The aim is to do WHAT they are doing – but BETTER.
- Then write a content that is at least 2x better than them. Make sure you include your main keywords in the title, several times in the body, footer, and image alt text (don’t overdo it, though. 0.50-1% keyword density is enough, depending on the content length).
- Work on building quality backlinks to that content with your main keyword as the anchor text (For example, if your main keyword is “email marketing”, you can make your anchor text “email marketing”). I suggest you sometimes use branded anchor text like “your brand name” or generic anchor text like “click here”. Over-optimized anchor text might trigger a red signal to Google. That’s risky you know.
That said, you don’t need to base all concentration on keyword research.
Here’s what Cara Hogan, a content strategist and consultant, said concerning choosing keywords.
She said:
“Keyword research is a great way to come up with new ideas and opportunities for content, but SEO should not drive your entire content strategy. It should factor in, but not fully control, the topics and message of your content. You may find an opportunity for a specific keyword, but you should then combine that information with your knowledge of your target market and personas to write the best possible content.”
The takeaway? Coming up with keywords is one thing. And writing on a great topic is another thing. Both are insanely important to the success of your blog.
7. Create a blog content calendar
A content calendar is your eye-view to ensure your content is always amazing and published on time. Fortunately, most content calendars also have social sharing and email marketing functions in them to make things stay organized and easy.
What’s the importance of a content calendar if you cannot make real-time updates, organize all content assets, when each piece is due and have an eye-view into who is working on what?
Well, here are some blog content calendars you should be using. Some are free. And the paid ones? Very affordable!
Here they are:
8. Focus on what makes your audience happy
Let’s be frank here: most of your consumers are self-centered but you can’t ignore them. Can you?
Then it’s better to focus on what makes them happy; at least they are your customers.
Let your brand take a back seat as you engage them with branded content; tailor-made content that is for them and will engage them, and you’ll earn your loyalty.
Conclusion
As tempting as it may be to write your blog posts as they hit your mind, having a written blog content strategy is very important to your blog success.
Which other content marketing strategies are you using for your business blog? We are eager to hear it.
Don’t be shy to share 🙂