Welcome to Part 2 of taking the HubSpot Content Marketing Course. If you haven’t read part 1 you can read it here. Remember, this isn’t everything that was taught in the course but things that I found interesting and relevant, especially when starting with a blog and trying to build an audience.
Extending the Value of Your Content through Repurposing
It was interesting to hear that you don’t have to constantly create new content daily. While That is helpful, it’s also effective to repurpose your content. That could range from changing the message of your past blog posts for a different purpose to turning your blog into an educational video series. By repurposing a blog, it gives you a better chance of a better search engine ranking and developing a new audience. For example, if you had created a how-to blog on a certain subject in the past, you could repurpose that content into a video, giving it new life and making more people aware of your content/blog. Thus helping you and your team combat the chances of writer’s block.
Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages
A topic cluster is multiple pieces of content that are grouped by a shared topic and related subtopic. A pillar page, on the other hand, is a website page that covers a topic in-depth and is linked to a cluster of related content. Together they help organize your site’s content page. It sounds like a lot of jargon, but here is an example that breaks it down a little easier. Imagine you go onto webpage such as Target if you go into electronics on Target’s site and you are now on its pillar page, the cluster content would be everything in the electronics pillar page such as TVs, phones, and other electronic devices. By organizing your cluster content it gives your website more authority when it goes through Google’s search engine. This was interesting because, for me, my blog is still brand new, I’m still working out the kinks on how to organize and structure everything, so it would be best for me to keep this in mind when trying to organize my blogs into clusters.
How to Create a Successful Video Marketing Strategy
Because of the rise in technology, video is used more widely as a business strategy. Video content today helps companies build trust with their audience. It’s much more affordable than it was in the past but that also means that there are a plethora of videos out there, so your video content needs to have a purpose and capture your audience. Videos help with bounce rates of an audience, the percentage of people who come to your website and leave. Personally, the idea of making videos on a blog is interesting because more often then not, people prefer to watch a video rather than having to read something online.
Building a Guest Blogging Strategy Powered by SEO
When I first saw the title of this chapter I thought it meant that I should find a guest to create a blog for me. I was close but wrong. Guest blogging is when YOU are the one who Guest Blogs on another person’s site and it can be very beneficial for a few reasons. Guest blogging would help expand your audience, increase referral traffic, and help your SEO, search engine optimization. When trying to find a website to guest blog on you should search based on the Domain Authority Range by tiers. This domain authority ranges from 0–20 is relatively new, 21–70 as websites with a healthy dedicated audience, and 71+, the top-industry blogs. Ideally, you want to partner with a website that is tiered at 21–70. Finding a Guest Blog opportunity, however, requires a little bit of research. You’re going to have to find your niche and find relevant websites that allow guest authors. These sites can be found through twitter or websites that your buyer personas would visit. For example, the blog that I created has a niche that focuses on and relates to film. So for me, I should find a relevant website that also has a base for my niche based on websites I think my audience would visit and occupy. From there you need to be persistent and try to build a relationship with said company.
How to Effectively Promote Content
When promoting content, don’t just simply post your blog or video on every social channel you have available. You have to find the best source based on that content to get it to the right people. You should create a content audit and planning sheet to keep track of your content creation. From there you should experiment and find for yourself when is the best time to share your content with your audience. This all hinges on what you believe is your buyer persona. Which social media app does that persona frequent the most? Youtube? Google? Twitter? Your content could be promoted organically such as SEO or word of mouth. Or it could be through paid promotion, which would allow you farther reach to audiences that you probably would not have found through organic promotion.
Measuring and Analyzing Your Content
To be successful you need to build out a strategy to measure and analyze your performance. There is a way by setting SMART goals, goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. These goals can be set by either historical data, such as looking at previous data benchmarks, analyzing what works or doesn’t work. If you don’t have historical data such as your business is relatively new, you can use industry benchmarks.
And there you have it. Part 2 of the Content Marketing course at HubSpot Academy. It helps set a guideline of sorts for me and many others on how to not only build and grow an audience but to maintain and connect with them as well.
