How To Build Your Content Marketing Blog
Get your Company Blog Started
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a great way to improve the reach of your company — because building an audience requires an exchange of value.
Your content should deliver this value. Does it?
First off, why should you read this article? Content can make or break your brand, and if you invest in it, then a good Content Marketing strategy can repay you big.
Content Marketing contains more than blog posts. Your Facebook and Twitter channels, your Youtube channel, your Instagram account and any other place where you give your audience something in return for their attention is part of your Content Marketing.
But a word of warning before you waste your time: This post is mostly about blog entries and articles.
However, most sections can be valuable to you if you apply the strategy to your other content channels that are not based on writing.
Let’s get into it.
Define Your Goals
Now, handling this the best way can be a daunting challenge — about 90% of all businesses use some form of Content Marketing. If you’re reading this, then your business is likely amongst them.
But it doesn’t work for many!
One-third of companies that do Content Marketing feel that it’s effective. If you’re like so many others then you’re making at least a few mistakes and are not completely sure what’s actually in it for you — are you really getting the extra reach, bigger audience and more sales like you want?
Or are you talking and talking into an empty space, but nobody is listening?
Let’s restructure your approach right now and make your business kick ass in Content Marketing.
Why Your Content Marketing isn’t Working
Ask yourself one question: What is your content’s mission?
With that, I don’t mean that you want to make money and sales… we all want that. No, what I’m asking you is what does the content do for your reader?
If you have more than one answer, then something is not optimal. If you have no answer, then we already have found the reason why you are failing.
More questions:
Who is your target market? What’s your “sweet spot”? Are you measuring success? Are your expectations realistic? Is your content interesting to anyone who isn’t you? Are you actively putting the content in front of your readers’ eyes?
If you haven’t asked yourself these questions, then how do you think you will be able to succeed?
Your Mission
To succeed, the first step is defining your mission. What value are you giving your reader?
As an example, for this post here it would be: “I want to help small and medium businesses kick ass with their Marketing and sell more.”
Every blog post you do has to fit this mission. If it doesn’t, scrap it.
Now that we know our goal, it’s time to do research. I know that sounds boring, but it is the most important part.
Do the Research
1. What’s your target market?
To create an effective marketing campaign you need to have a good grasp of your target market. This is especially important for Content Marketing since you should focus on one persona only, at least in the beginning.
You should know who your target market consists of, where they are located on the internet(social media, forums, youtube, …) and real life, how they are spending their day, …
Finding out as much as possible is crucial to success.
2. What is your “sweet spot”?
The sweet spot is the overlap between the passion/pain points of your customer and your skills/knowledge.
How can you use what you have to best help your target market?
Identifying your sweet spot is crucial. Use it to determine the content you’re going to produce.
3. What are good niches/low competition keywords?
Your goal is to be the expert in the area you are focused on.
That’s not easy.
The solution to this problem is decreasing the area! Take your time to do research on this and it will pay off greatly. Your goal is becoming the leading expert in a niche with low competition and high traffic.
The tool I personally recommend for this is Moz Toolbar, a Google Chrome addon. With this tool, you can check the Domain Authority of posts in your niche.
The lower DA the highest ranking websites have, the better! You want to aim for competition under 40 Domain Authority.
Keyword/Niche research is not always 100% accurate and you should use your intuition to judge what makes sense.
4. What’s your competition doing?
Next, you should have a look at your competition and reverse engineer what they do. This means having a look at other websites/articles in your niche and taking them apart to see what makes them work.
Find out which pages got the most traffic, find good keywords they are targeting and evaluate these as you did in step 3.
Tools that work are Alexa.com, Ahrefs, and SEMrush.
5.. Do you have a chance to become the Go-To Expert in your Niche?
Now after completing the last few steps, evaluate the results you have gotten. Can you become the Go-To Expert in your Niche?
If your content is good enough, can you beat the competition? And should you go for this niche or is the traffic not high enough?
The Target Persona
A persona is a constructed person that you’re going to write to. It’s a simple way to identify exactly who you will write to. Personas can really help with “getting into the head” of your target audience.
Like when we defined your Mission, you have to be laser-focused with the personas you are targeting.
Take the research you have and “build” a person that you will write to from now on. You want to have demographic info, personal background, his/her goals, pain points, … give the persona a name and a picture when you’re done.
You can find more info here.
Quality over Quantity
Do you spend a lot of time reading about things that do not interest you and are not useful to you? Me neither.
You have to focus on providing value, utility and positive emotion.
Stand out by providing valuable content and make it shareable by conveying positive emotions and producing content that helps your reader. These two factors are the biggest contributor to social shares. We will have a look at another way to get shared later in this article, so stay tuned!
Focus on Evergreen/Pillar Content
Your marketing strategy needs strong foundations before you can add everything else. This means writing a few, well researched and extremely strong articles on key topics. You will later expand these with additional blog posts, but your focus should be on pillar content.
The goal with these pillars of your success is to become the go-to resource for that topic in your chosen niche, as well as establishing you as the expert in the area. When writing your pillars, aim to produce content that’s better than the 40 highest ranked search results for your topic. That’s not easy, but achievable.
A pillar should stay relevant and valuable long-term and has to be useful and interesting to your audience.
After finishing a pillar post, you should add on to it by producing content that is giving further insights into the topic. When doing this (you should do this!), you should refer to your pillar post in the newer piece of content. This way you not only channel your readers to your pillar post, but you also show Google that your pillar post is important. More on that later.
A good practice is continually updating your pillar posts.
Following this tactic will be a great way to establish your company or brand as the Nr.1 expert in your niche.
Own the Key Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
You might be asking yourself where to build the key part of your Content Marketing Strategy. And you’re probably looking at Medium, LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram, …
While those are all great, you are not in charge there. You have to abide by the rules that these platforms set and can be negatively affected by changes to their algorithms or policies.
When you build your own blog, the only thing you will have to keep in mind is SEO and quality content so your articles get ranked in the search results of Google and similar search engines.
Take Care of SEO
When Google decides how you are going to rank in the search results, multiple factors come into play. We are only going to take care of the basics here, but those can absolutely be enough to get you ranked in a top spot if you do them right.
What is SEO? SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and is all about showing search engines like Google that you have what they want… the best experience for their users.
You may think this is easy, and it is if done right, but it is not 2011 anymore and just pushing lots and lots of content… doesn’t work anymore. The focus has to be on quality. Be laser focused on making the best content you can, and the SEO results will follow.
Repeat after me: “Quality over Quantity”.
On-page SEO
1. Write long, sticky Content
This is probably the single most important thing that you can do to improve your Google rankings. The average content of the highest ranking results from Google is 2000+ words long.
By writing long content you make sure that your reader stays longer on your article — if it is good. So do intensive research on the topic you’re going to cover, make sure you write interesting and don’t make it too short.
Length implies strength, and long articles tend to be higher quality than shorter ones because you have to spend more time on them and grow more attached to the little piece of art you create.
If you make your content interactive or include a video, that makes it even more sticky, and results in a longer timespan that your audience spends on your content.
But don’t repeat yourself for more words! If your article is long, that means it should contain more valuable information. Every word has to earn its place.
If ask yourself “How do I write long, good content fast”, then this video might help you:
2. Don’t be boring
Having a long piece of content won’t help if nobody wants to read it!
Make your content interesting by writing as you talk. Break up big blocks of text, alternate the length of your paragraphs, tell interesting stories, and use short, punchy and easy to understand sentences.
You might have heard this before, but this is important: People don’t care about you, they never will. People care about themselves!
So the easiest path to being interesting is talking about their problems, desires, interests, …
Do that and they will read anything, no matter how long.
PS: Don’t forget to spice it up with pictures.
3. HTTPS vs HTTP
If you don’t have HTTPS on your website, then what are you doing? It’s almost 2019, wake up!
Google will punish you for not having an SSL certificate on your site and is committed to eradicating HTTP.
Here’s what they have to say about it:
https://security.googleblog.com/2018/02/a-secure-web-is-here-to-stay.html
4. Cross-links
Cross-linking to other relevant articles on your website is a good practice and you should absolutely do that.
A good way to implement it if you’re unsure how to do it organically in the article: Adding a list of related articles below your blog post.
5. Optimize your URL
You want to have an URL that is short, clean, gives a clear idea of what the content will be, and that is shareable.
Why is this important? Your viewer should be able to trust you from the start and a good URL will help in driving him to your website.
To optimize your URL, simply change the Permalink settings on your site, so that the URL is set up like this:
https://www.[yoursite].com/<<Postname>>
Now that the URL contains the name of your post, a good headline will be visible to people that have not even clicked the link to your website.
6. Use your Keyword as Early as Possible
To get the best chance of ranking for a keyword, you have to include it! Consider it best practice to do so in the title and somewhere at the beginning of your blog post.
Don’t overdo it with one keyword, instead:
7. Use Related Keywords in Your Content
When it comes to keywords, the 1% rule is often touted, saying that you should include your main keyword in 1% of the total word count. As an example, if you write a 1000 word article, you should use your keyword 10 times in that article.
I advise you against that.
Use your main keyword in the title and the first part of the text, but afterward, its use should be organic. Keep in mind that Google wants Quality, not Quantity.
What you can do instead is take a few related keywords and include those in the text, taking the time to talk about them shortly. You have a chance to rank for those keywords and it looks more attractive to Google. You can find related keywords using Google Trends, searching for it and having a look at “related searches”.
8. Optimize Page Load Time!
Do you remember when your internet connection used to be so slow you had to wait… and wait… and wait… and wait… for websites to load?
Did you have a good time?
Page load time is extremely important for your website, not only for SEO but in general. Everything suffers when your site is slow.
To be honest, all I know about this topic is that you shouldn’t use too many plugins, but crazyegg.com has you covered.
Off-page SEO: Showing Google What Others Think About You
1. Backlinks
What are Backlinks? They are links on other websites that direct traffic to your article. If you write an article that mentions this one as a great resource of knowledge in Content Marketing, that will be a Backlink to my article.
You shouldn’t wait for others to link to your content, however.
Instead, be proactive and use a strategy to generate Backlinks. One would be Broken Link Building, where you look for broken links on websites in your niche and contact the website owner, telling him about the broken link while asking him to simply replace it with a link to your article.
Infographics are also a powerful thing to use, as they get shared quite often if they’re good and interesting. Investing in a good infographic can go a long way to drive traffic to your content.
You can also reach out to other sites in your niche and offer to write a guest article, but of course, this means you have to take the time and create another good piece of content to direct traffic to your article.
A tool for analyzing backlinks is monitorbacklinks.com.
2. Social Shares
Having your piece of content shared on social media is great because it does two things for you.
- The followers or friends of the person that’s sharing your content will see it too.
- The social shares act as Backlinks, helping you with SEO.
How do you get your content shared on social media?
Share your content on your company social media channels, ask friends and family to share it as well, promote it in groups that are in your niche, and use Buzzsumo to find people that shared similar content and ask them whether they have seen yours.
When using Buzzsumo, type your keyword in the search bar, have a look at the results, and click “View Shares”. Here’s an example of how it looks for Hiveterminal:
It is important that you don’t cheat with Off-page SEO. It should be as natural as possible and the focus here is, again, on Quality over Quantity.
Don’t Sell
When you produce content please engrave this in your brain: This is not a pitch! You are not selling!
Yes I know, we all want to make sales. But through Content Marketing, you need organic traffic and you want to deliver real value to your reader. The goal of content is to help the reader, position yourself as the expert, expand your brands’ reach, and build an audience. This audience will be made up at least in part by customers, but it is not going to be interested in your product.
If you want to include at least some info about it that’s fine, but keep it 80/20, 80% value for the reader, 20% information for your product.
An example: You have an invoicing software. Your content targets small businesses and educates them about invoicing. A legitimate way to inform them about your product is by giving them advice about good invoicing software and give them an overview of your software, presenting it as an option for doing their invoicing.
Interact With The Reader
Would you rather have a conversation with someone or have that someone just talk at you, trying to push his ideas, never listening to you?
The time of talking only at your reader is over. Nowadays, your audience expects some form of interaction. And you should give it to them because the audience wants to be taken seriously when it stays with you. Consider yourself not only as a business but as the leader of your community.
Responding to comments, having private conversations with your biggest supporters and answering their questions goes a long way. And why would you not use this as a resource for new content ideas?
Try to also build your content itself with some level of interaction.
A quiz, a vote, a poll, an interactive infographic or an interactive video can go a long way in getting your post shared. One BuzzFeed quiz has been viewed over 22 million times, and liked over 2.5 million times!
If you’d like to know more, click here or here.
Collect Emails
I hope you’ve gotten a lot of great information thus far but bear with me until the end because this section is important.
If you follow all of the advice in this post, you have a good probability of success with your content marketing campaign. But you might be wondering how you can make the most out of this audience…
Get their email addresses!
You want to build the most powerful connection you can, and if you do it right you can achieve that with your email list. Use it to publish your email exclusive newsletter, which should be of high quality, share information on sales and time constrained chances and new, exciting products.
To make someone give you his or her email address, you have to give something in return. The newsletter is a good first step, but it may not be attractive to a lot of readers. After all, a lot of company newsletters are only sales pitches or contain no valuable information.
A simple way of giving something in return is making your article downloadable as PDF, give a freebie for the email address, like a small ebook or a guide, a testing period for your product, or a valuable video only available to your email list. Be creative!
If you need help with your email marketing, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Use Only ONE Call To Action
It’s morning, and you go to make breakfast. But oh, you don’t have any jam/marmalade… You go to the store and find yourself standing in front of a HUGE row of jams and marmalades, with at least 100 in front of you. Which do you pick?
Overwhelmed by the amount of choice you go home without jam, taking with you a glass of peanut butter. Because there was only the choice between bigger glass and smaller glass…
Too much choice kills your conversion. Don’t ask your audience to do 5 things at once, just ask them to do one single thing.
One CTA at the end of the article. Avoid asking for more.
Be Patient and Consistent
If you are just getting started with content marketing, don’t expect it by tomorrow, or next week. It can take months to build an audience and start monetizing it. But as long as you continue to take care of the basics, don’t overextend yourself, and keep on delivering consistently, you will succeed.
I wish you the best.
Wrapping it up
If you take one thing away from this post, then it should be this:
Focus on Quality over Quantity.
I hope this post helped you in getting ahead in Content Marketing and maybe you learned a thing or two or maybe you found something you can implement in your strategy. If that’s so, please give this article 50 claps.
In any case, please let me know what you think and how your content marketing situation looks right now.
