“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
Mr. Franklin was a smart man.
In the world of content marketing, attempting to move forward without a plan is a recipe for disaster.
There are tens of thousands of stories about businesses that have heard content marketing works and decided to give it a try.
They create 1 or 2 500-word blog posts a week, post them to their blog and social media pages for a few months, and hope for the best.
And then, after a little while, nothing happens. So they give up. They stop creating. They stop posting.
Why didn’t it work?
They were shooting at a forest, instead of a target.
To avoid falling into this trap, you need to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.
But how do you do this? By creating a bulletproof content marketing plan.
And this guide is going to help you do just that.
Let’s get started.
[bctt tweet=”In the world of content marketing, attempting to move forward without a plan is a recipe for disaster. Learn more about building your best #contentplan yet for #contentmarketing results” username=”ExpWriters”]
Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Plan?
[bctt tweet=”Marketers that have a documented #contentmarketing plan have more success. @JuliaEMcCoy ” username=”ExpWriters”]
Take a look at this infographic from the team at Impact:
As you can see, 89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing.
But only 37% of B2B marketers and 40% of B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
Not surprisingly, the percentage of B2B and B2C marketers that have documented strategies is almost identical to the percentage of marketers that say their strategy is extremely or very effective.
This isn’t a coincidence.
Having a documented plan is crucial to content marketing success.
The 6 Steps to Developing a Rock Solid Content Marketing Plan
You know you need a plan.
Now we’re going to show you how to develop one.
1. Know Your Goals and How to Measure Them
One of the most important aspects of developing a content marketing plan is to determine the actual goals that you’re trying to achieve through your efforts.
You also need to know if what you’re doing is helping you get closer to reaching them.
My three-bucket goal strategy can help with that. In this strategy, I teach the usage of three main content marketing goals that lead to profits, and what types of content you can put in each bucket to get there. Learn more here.
Measuring content marketing success, as one would imagine, can be difficult.
In most cases, it will require a fair amount of tools to cover the measurement of all of your identified goals. For example, measuring website and blog metrics requires the use of Google Analytics. Keyword research means using tools like Mangools or SEMrush.
2. Identify Your One Reader and Where You’ll Find Them
As you probably already know, marketing doesn’t work very well if you attempt to target several different audiences.
Instead, you need to identify exactly who you’re targeting and then find out the best place to target them with your content.
Once you’ve deconstructed your persona, psychographics helps give you an understanding of how to talk to your target market.
Personality, attitudes, values, interests, hobbies, lifestyle, and behavior are all important things to identify here.
The easiest way to do this is by taking a look at the social behavior of people that fit your basic demographics.
What do they share, tweet, pin, and like?
As you generate this information, you can begin to shape your content messaging in a way that resonates with the audience that you’ve identified.
Once you know the demographics and psychographics of your target audience, simply find out where those people are spending their time. And then publish your content there.
Gathering additional metrics. In addition to URL and on-page metrics, you’ll want to gather info on things like internal and external links, traffic, content uniqueness, etc.
Putting your information into an easily digestible dashboard. The optimal option for this step is Excel.
Understand your dashboard. Sizemore mentions that, “a good place to start would be to look for any content-related issues that might cause an algorithmic filter or manual penalty to be applied.”
Write up a report. This report should summarize the findings, provide recommendations, and examine next steps for improving the site’s search rankings.
While this process may seem a bit intensive, it’s necessary to ensure that your new content marketing plan is put together in a way that it can be successful.
What If You Don’t Already Have Content on Your Site?
If you don’t already have content to audit, you can perform a content audit of your competitors.
And while doing this is important, you don’t want to get caught up spending hours and hours mulling over every single detail of a competitor’s website and content.
BuzzSumo. This tool will give you information about your competitor’s main content and how they’re performing on social platforms.
Rival IQ. This tool allows you to view the top engaging content of multiple competitors at one time.
The goal of completing a content audit for your own website and those of your competitors is to be able to answer three main questions. They include:
When you’re able to answer these questions, you’ll be much better prepared to determine the type of content to include in your content marketing plan moving forward.
4. Generate Content Ideas
Coming up with content ideas is a major source of frustration for many marketers.
If you’re looking for tools to aid you in the process, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, and BloomBerry are all great resources.
Moz’s Keyword Explorer
The Keyword Explorer from Moz is an amazing tool as it gives you up to 1,000 keyword suggestions based around a specific term or phrase.
Here’s a sneak peek of how it works if I was to type in the term ‘content marketing plan’:
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a fun tool to use and can be an amazing resource for generating targeted topics for your content.
Here’s a look at the massive amount of topics generated from typing in a simple term like ‘baseball’:
Bloomberry
Bloomberry is a tool developed by BuzzSumo that generates questions based on the keywords you type in.
The best part about this tool is that it scours the web for questions that people are already asking on social platforms like Quora.
Here’s an example of how it would work if I typed in the keyword ‘content marketing strategy’:
With these tools and the resources that KissMetrics presents at your disposal, you shouldn’t have any problem coming up with plenty of topics for your content.
5. Know What Type of Content You Want to Create
Now that you’ve got a solid base for the topics and keywords you’re going to target, you’ll need to identify the type of content you want to create.
Now it obviously wouldn’t be wise or even possible to create content in each and every format on this list.
Instead, you should utilize the information gathered from your target audience research and content audits to determine what will work best for you.
But what about making sure that the type of content you’re creating is actually accomplishing the goals you’ve laid out for your content marketing plan?
The One Home-Run Per Quarter Strategy
If your goals are built around developing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, generating sales leads, converting leads into customers, and improving customer retention, it goes without saying that you’ll need to create content that allows you to accomplish all of these things.
For Kessler, a home run can mean anything from a 65-page ebook to a 30-page white paper.
So long as it’s extremely useful and relevant to your target audience, and something that they actually want, you’re good to go.
As Kessler goes on to mention, home run content does three things:
Once you’ve created this content, you can gate it by asking interested readers to provide their email address, and potentially other relevant information, in exchange for a free download.
To download the ebook, potential readers had to provide a ton information that was then used to turn them into leads.
And judging by the fact that the ebook has been shared over 3,000 times and downloaded many more, potential readers had no problem making this exchange.
Repurposing Your Home Run Piece
The best part about creating home run content is that it can be repurposed in dozens of different ways and then used to fill out the rest of your content calendar.
Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, uses the turkey slice analogy for this process. As she says,
“I love using the turkey analogy…you start out with the turkey at Thanksgiving and that’s the main event, and then everybody knows that after Thanksgiving you’re eating turkey sandwiches, you have turkey on your salad, and maybe a little turkey hash. Journalists (and content creators) very quickly learn how to treat their stories and their sources like that turkey.”
So you’ve got your home run piece (which is the turkey served on Thanksgiving).
Now you can repurpose that home run piece into smaller pieces of content (using the leftover turkey for sandwiches, salads, and hash).
From the LinkedIn marketer’s guide, for example, Miller and his team were able to generate 50-60 smaller pieces of content that included everything from webinars and infographics to SlideShare decks and blog posts.
6. Create a Content Calendar
Now that you understand your target audience, have performed a content audit, and have plenty of ideas for content, creating an editorial calendar is the easy part.
While there are many different tools, such as CoSchedule, that can help you with this, you can also find plenty of free editorial calendar templates that will do the job just fine.
HubSpot offers a few easy-to-follow templates that look like this:
The only downside is that you’ll have to fill out some information about yourself in order to get the free download.
Go Create Your Content Marketing Plan
You’ve got everything you need at this point.
Make the decision that this is going to be the year that your business dominates with content marketing.
Go.
Take action and get started with your content marketing plan today.
If you’d like some help with your content planning,our awesome team at Express Writers can point you in the right direction. We’re always happy to help businesses just like yours get on the right path to dominating with content.
88% of marketers are now engaging in some form of content marketing.
And why wouldn’t they?
Businesses across the globe have consistently proven just how beneficial a focus on producing content can be to driving revenue.
But while there are plenty of readily available resources and courses on content marketing, 60% of organizations still say that producing engaging content is a major challenge.
Another 57% say that they also have difficulty producing content consistently.
And if you think about it, this all makes sense.
After all, content marketing is hard.
You can’t just throw together a couple keyword stuffed articles a month and expect ROI from your efforts.
If you’re going to win with content marketing, you need to produce engaging content and you need to do it consistently.
But, other than hiring a large and expensive team of in-house marketers, how exactly are you supposed to do that?
The answer…personal, brand-fitted freelance copywriters.
[bctt tweet=”Learn how to win with your #contentmarketing by teaming up with talented writers ” username=”ExpWriters”]
Why Freelance Copywriters for Your Content Marketing?
Well, for one, because they’ll save you tens of thousands of dollars.
While there are a lot of variables that go into the exact cost of hiring a content specialist, the team at InTouch Marketing estimated that it would come out to about $88,123/year.
But what about the cost of a highly skilled freelancer?
At EW, the price of blog content from one of our vetted freelance copywriters comes out to right around .10/word (that includes editing and formatting).
Since we know that companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month generate almost 3.5x more traffic than those that publish 0-4 monthly posts, let’s assume you want to produce 16 posts per month.
And, since long form content generates a higher ranking in search results, let’s also assume that you want your posts to average about 1500 words.
Now let’s do some easy math:
16 Blog Posts x 12 Months = 192 Posts Per Year
1500 Words @ .10/word = $150/Post
$150 x 192 Posts = $28,800
versus:
$88,123 (Cost of In-House Content Marketer) – $28,800 (Cost of Freelancers) = $59,323
So, by hiring a team of freelance writers to handle a year’s worth of content, you’re saving approximately $60,000.
That’s a pretty convincing argument in and of itself.
And that’s without taking into consideration the time and resources that you would have to spend training an in-house staff.
But that’s not the only reason that hiring freelance writers is a good idea.
3 Case Studies Showing How Freelance Copywriters Can Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts
The other reason?
Because there are plenty of businesses that have proven that freelancers have the ability to seriously boost your content marketing campaign.
Let’s take a look at three examples.
1. Case Study: How Express Writers Uses Freelancers to Win Through Content
Since launching the company in May 2011, I’ve worked with dozens of freelancers that I’ve personally vetted to help ensure the delivery of high quality work to our clients.
Without them, there’s very little chance that we’d be able to handle anywhere near the type of volume that we do today.
In addition to client work, I’ve also employed freelance copywriters to handle some ghostwriting for both the EW blog and a portion of the guest blogs that I do.
And why would I do that?
Because I know firsthand the type of ROI that can come from one impactful piece of content.
For us, the life cycle of a great piece of content looks like this:
This cycle played itself out after publishing one of my many guest blogs on SiteProNews. Let’s take a look at what went down.
2:25 PM on Jan. 21, 2015: We receive an email from a potential client who mentions that he is interested in our services after reading my guest blog.
Jan. 26, 2015: After several email conversations over a five day period, the client decided to purchase our expert copy and content planning services. The combined price of the projects came out to over $5,000.
$5,000! All in just a five day span and from a single piece of great content.
That type of ROI, about 100x the investment, in that short amount of time is unheard of with almost any other marketing method.
And it’s exactly why I’ll be one of the first to tell you that a freelancer that can deliver great content is worth their weight in gold.
2. Case Study: How Zapier Uses Freelance Writers to Dominate Content Marketing
Zapier is another example of a company that uses freelance writers to win with content marketing.
Duvall also wrote a chapter for Zapier’s massively successful guide to remote work.
Hiring Freelancers to Become In-House Team Members
Zapier’s head of marketing, Danny Schreiber, has said that the freelancers they’ve worked with are one of the first places they look when hiring new people.
Of the first three employees he hired for his marketing team,
“Two started freelancing – one for three months, another for six – before they were encouraged to apply to work at Zapier and then hired.”
And, as would be expected, having these existing relationships with the people Schreiber hired helped lower turnover rates while limiting the risk of bringing on new employees.
3. Case Study: How Neil Patel & Hiten Shah Used Freelancers to Build Two $1 Million+ SaaS Companies
Neil Patel and Hiten Shah are master marketers.
The duo have built Crazy Egg and KissMetrics into monster SaaS companies, as each company generates well over $100,000/month in revenue.
Because, while there are a ton of freelancers out there, finding individuals who are responsible and talented isn’t the easiest task in the world.
Kathryn Aragon, former editor at Crazy Egg, offers four tips for doing so:
Other potential options include:
1. Utilize a copywriting agency, like EW, that vets freelancers for you.
2. Browse UpWork and Freelancer.com, which both offer a huge pool of freelancers looking for work.
Before you decide to reach out to your freelance candidate, successful freelance copywriter Barry Feldman recommends that you ask yourself a few questions:
What type of writer do I need? Know what type of work you’ll want the writer to handle.
Should I hire industry experts? They are generally more expensive but offer higher ROI.
How do I begin to know whom to contact for an interview? Review their portfolio and resume to ensure their experience fits your future expectations.
Hiring Freelancers
When making the hire, Feldman suggests that all agreements should include the following:
Working With Freelancers
I recently put together a business owner’s guide on how to work with blog writers that covers this topic extensively.
Use Freelancers to Take Your Content Marketing to the Next Level
While finding, hiring, and working with freelance writers isn’t always an easy process, the three case studies above show that it’s certainly worth it.
If you’d like to outsource your content but don’t want to spend the time finding and hiring new freelancers, we have a team of vetted writers that can produce quality content for you.
Save time and money by getting in contact with us today.
Many of these changes are subtle and go unnoticed. But that wasn’t the case when they introduced their new web indexing system, Caffeine, in June of 2010.
The goal of the new indexing system was to provide 50% fresher results for web searches.
What that meant for website owners was that, in order for their content to stay relevant and featured in search rankings long-term, they needed to take certain actions to make that happen.
And while this ranking modification happened way back in 2010, Google continues to improve their indexing to value fresh content above all else.
But what exactly is ‘fresh content’? And what can you do to make sure your content remains fresh?
Let’s take a look at the four most important factors.
1. The Strength of the Content
In any evaluation of the life expectancy of content, we’d be silly not to mention the importance of the actual strength of the content.
It’s easy to judge the life expectancy of bad content. Maybe, if your headline is good enough and you share it on social media, it’ll last a few hours or even days.
But is that what you’re really going for?
Without great content, there are no backlinks. There is no engagement.
There is nothing but a few hours of curious people clicking the link to your article and promptly leaving your website as they realize that you aren’t delivering what your headline promises.
Like a lot of things with Google’s algorithms and ranking methods, the influence of the inception date is difficult to measure.
What we do know, however, is that there can be two different types of inception scores.
Justin Briggs, of Briggsby SEO, lays it out like this:
Once the search engines have defined an inception date, it becomes a part of the Freshness Score of the content.
Briggs simplified how this works through this graph:
As you can see, search results initially lean towards the content with the most recent inception date. This is especially true when you’re dealing with queries that are date sensitive (ex. sports scores, data, statistics, etc.).
But, after a certain amount of time has passed, the influence of the inception date is no longer as valuable.
And, at this point, the factors that follow begin to take precedent.
3. Updates to Core Content
As would be expected, regularly updated content receives a higher Freshness Score than content that’s never updated.
But the amount and type of change also directly impacts how much the score changes.
“In order to not update every link’s freshness from a minor edit of a tiny unrelated part of a document, each updated document may be tested for significant changes (e.g., changes to a large portion of the document or changes to many different portions of the document) and a link’s freshness may be updated (or not updated) accordingly.”
As an example, let’s say you put together a blog post in 2014 titled ‘The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads’.
If you were to go in today and simply change the link along with the date and time tags, Google would almost certainly ignore the change.
If, however, you were to go in and update the content based on modern day best practices for Facebook Ads, you’d be much more likely to have your Freshness Score positively affected.
And this all makes sense. After all, Google didn’t become the biggest search engine in the world by accident.
They did it by ensuring that user search queries were consistently answered with the best possible results. The only way to do that is to provide updated, relevant results.
At the end of the day, if you want to extend the life of your content, it’s crucial that you update as much as is necessary to ensure that the post reflects what is relevant now.
“Backlinks remain an extremely important ranking factor. We found the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.”
Remember, Google is trying to deliver relevant, updated search results to users.
If they’re finding that your page is continually seeing an increase in its link growth rate, that signals to them that your content is still relevant.
But this goes both ways. As Google’s 2011 patent application for document scoring also states:
“…a downward trend in the number or rate of new links (e.g., based on a comparison or rate of new links in a recent time period versus an older time period) over time could signal to search engine 125 that a document is stale, in which case search engine 125 may decrease the document’s score.”
Once again, this makes sense. More backlinks cause your Freshness Score to increase while receiving less cause it to decrease and become stale over time.
It’s also important to note, however, that the Freshness Score of the site you’re receiving links from plays a major role in how much of an impact backlinks have on ranking.
So going out and utilizing black hat SEO techniques to gain backlinks from any and every site possible isn’t going to extend the life of your content. In fact, it may do more harm than good.
If you want to do it the right way, your first focus should be on updating your content to become more relevant to modern times.
Keep in mind, as Moz contributor Kristina Kledzik points out, that the effect of link building takes time to make a significant impact in rankings.
As you can see from this graph, Kledzik found that it takes about 10 weeks, on average, to see a one rank jump.
What can be gathered from all of this information is that link building is a long term strategy that, when done correctly, can increase the ranking of your content over time.
And by focusing on generating backlinks from sites with a high Domain Authority, you can speed up the process of increasing your search rankings through this strategy.
The Conclusion: What Really is the Life Expectancy of Your Website Content?
As much as you don’t want to hear this, the only real answer to give here is…it depends.
It would be virtually impossible to crawl through the billions, probably even trillions, of blog posts that have been posted on the web and come up with a concrete answer.
And even if it was possible, the range in the life of different pieces of content would be so great that knowing the average would be irrelevant.
What we can do, however, is tell you what you can do to ensure that your content lasts as long as possible.
The 3 Steps to Extending the Life of Your Content
If you want to give your content a shot at lasting for years instead of hours or days, following these three steps will help.
Step #1 – Create Amazing, SEO Content
As we’ve already mentioned, this step is absolutely vital if you want your content to achieve a lengthy life in search rankings.
Search engines like Google have been working diligently for years to continue to ensure that quality, fresh content is the most important factor in their rankings.
And, as SEO specialist Sujan Patel says, you simply can’t outsmart Google. He goes on to mention:
“Google hires some of the top scientists, engineers, and PhDs in the world every year. The odds of some ‘sneaky trick’ you’ve found on an SEO blog outsmarting this brain trust aren’t very good.”
If you want to give yourself a chance in the long-term game, focus on creating epic content above all else.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Extend the life expectancy of your online content in three simple tips from @ExpWriters!” quote=”Extend the life expectancy of your online content in three simple tips from @ExpWriters!”]
Step #2 – Update Core Content as Often as Necessary
We’ve already touched on the necessity of updating core content to ensure that you maximize its Freshness Score.
But spending your time updating every single post isn’t very efficient. Instead, as Joe Fylan of Elegant Themes suggests, you should:
“Prioritize posts that receive a lot of traffic, are seasonally-relevant, or that have received a lot of shares in the past.”
As far as what to update, Fylan mentions that you should:
“Bring the information up to date, add more content, add nicer images, improve your SEO, and include internal links to newer content.”
Step #3 – Work to Continually Build Quality Backlinks
When you’ve identified the posts that you plan on updating, be sure that you also focus your efforts on continually building quality backlinks to that content.
As we’ve mentioned, content that receives several backlinks early on but starts to taper off as time goes on can, in the eyes of Google, be seen as stale content.
The Final Word on Decoding the Life Expectancy of Your Website Content
As much as I’d love to give you an exact answer about the life expectancy of your website content and how long you can expect your content to last, it just isn’t possible.
If you’re able to follow the steps outlined above, however, you’ll give your content the best shot at achieving a lifespan that’s several years long.
For help with creating epic content that readers and search engines will love, give our experienced team a shout. We look forward to hearing from you!
Creating great content that gets results can seem like an insurmountable challenge.
As Moz shows, most people follow similar principles when they use a search engine.
First and foremost, they’re there to find an answer, solution, or piece of information. They then formulate that need into a string of words (keywords) and type it into the search engine.
As he reads through the article, he begins to see that he isn’t alone in his lack of motivation and that there are solutions to his problem.
So he’s now in the solution aware stage.
The author understands this and, once the reader has finished the article, offers up an email opt-in that promises to help the unmotivated user even more.
The man enters his email, receives the ebooks, and is now in the product aware stage as he knows that the author has also published books that he can purchase to help him even further.
Since the initial content, and the ebooks, provided the solution he was looking for, he doesn’t return to Google to check out other potential solutions.
The author begins sending content through emails that slowly works him into the most aware stage where he is ready to make a purchase.
This example shows the power of understanding how users interact with search engines based on their stage of awareness.
Use it to your advantage and optimize your content to work users to the most aware stage.
3. Your Users Want Landing Pages
We know that users search based on their stage of awareness.
But, if this is the case, why isn’t all of the content we create based on walking visitors through to the next stage of awareness?
This is a great question, and one that many content marketers can’t answer.
To solve this problem, Search Engine Land puts it in the most simple terms possible: businesses need to look at every page as a landing page.
They advise that you ask yourself three questions when creating content. These are:
As you answer these questions, you arm yourself with the necessary information to create content that gets visitors to say, “This is exactly what I need right now!”
By doing this, your content doubles as a landing page and can directly contribute to conversions for your business.
And isn’t the goal of content marketing to serve as an avenue to generate revenue?
[clickToTweet tweet=”Wondering what attracts readers to your content? @ExpWriters is sharing seven facts on user intent you should know!” quote=”Wondering what attracts readers to your content? @ExpWriters is sharing seven facts on user intent you should know!”]
4. Long-Tail Keywords are Used in Searches More Often
The data shows that about 70% of search traffic is through long-tail keywords.
And, if you’ve been following along so far, this makes sense.
After all, if a user is typically looking for an answer, solution, or information when they use a search engine, they’re generally not going to find what they’re looking for by using a single word.
Let’s go back to the example of the unmotivated 40-year-old man. His search was “how to get motivated.”
Had he just typed in “motivation,” he would have seen this:
I’m guessing he already has a pretty firm grasp of the definition of motivation.
And, because this isn’t what he was looking for, the principles of user search interaction tell us that his next step would be to go back and reframe his search to something more specific.
But not only is the utilization of long-tail keywords important because of how users search, they also make a huge difference when it comes to search rankings and conversion.
As you can see, attempting to rank for a one-word phrase comes with a whole lot of competition and high costs. Not to mention the low probability of conversion.
Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are low cost, have little competition, and have a much higher probability of conversion because the user is almost always in the problem aware stage when they’re searching for them.
If your goal is to satisfy the needs of your users (which it should be), then utilizing long-tail keywords is clearly the way to go.
5. User Search Queries Are Becoming More Conversational
Another important reason that long tail keywords work so well with user search intent is because searches are becoming more conversational.
In mid 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned that voice searches now account for about 20% of all mobile searches.
Think about what you say when you use voice search. If you own an iPhone and want to find out how to cook boiled eggs, you’d likely say, “Siri, how do I boil eggs?”
You see the digital assistant as someone you can have a conversation with, and therefore ask them the same way you would ask an expert on the topic.
And with the continued improvement of digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Voice, Amazon Alexa, and others, the number of people using digital assistants is expected to continue to rise.
The shift to conversational search queries is also causing a change in how people are creating content.
Content creators are beginning to avoid the journalistic approach and are instead using their content as a way to have a conversation with readers.
Think about mega influencers like Neil Patel and Seth Godin.
They emphasize the need to speak directly to their readers within their blogs. And, judging by their success, their readers appreciate and trust them for it.
6. Users Make the Decision to Click Based on the Headline
But just how important are they when a user is performing a search?
According to UpWorthy co-founder Peter Koechley, “The difference between a good headline and a bad headline can be just massive…When we test headlines, we see a 20%, 50%, or even 500% difference.”
500% difference?!? That’s huge.
Let’s take a look at an example of the impact of intriguing headlines.
If you were to search for “how to make money blogging,” your search results would look like this:
As you look at these four results, How to Make Money Blogging: How This Blog Makes $100K per Month clearly sticks out.
Why? Well, for one, because it’s specific. The user is searching for how to make money blogging, so they obviously want to generate income.
Smart Blogger’s headline is telling the user that, if they click on the link, they’ll learn how to make $100K per month. The other three headlines, on the other hand, fail to be specific enough to intrigue users.
While this is a simple example, it shows that taking the time to create great headlines is absolutely crucial if you want to stand out.
7. Users Process Visuals Faster
By now, you’ve probably read and heard plenty about how important it is to include visuals in your content.
But as search engines are getting more sophisticated, images are providing a way for websites to stand out there as well.
Because of this, having an image alongside your headline, URL, and meta description sets you up to be the first thing a user sees when they browse search results.
Take a look at this example when we search for “how to boil eggs”:
If you’re like most people, your eyes were immediately guided to the two pictures of the boiled eggs.
And, because of this, you’ve become more likely to click on one of those links.
Now unfortunately, Google doesn’t actually let you upload an image directly into search results.
Instead, you have to first put yourself in a position to have your image picked up by Google’s images index.
Here’s how you can do that:
While it’s a bit annoying that this is a “wait and hope” scenario, the power of having an image featured makes the process well worth it.
Using These Facts to Inspire Better Content
Armed with these facts, you now have the ammunition you need to start creating content that is made for users.
Focus on your audience, understand what stage of awareness they are in, and hone in on long-tail keywords.
And, if you want to skyrocket your conversion rates from search results, optimize that headline.
Do these things and you’ll be well on your way to creating content that ranks at the top of search engines and generates clicks from intrigued users.
We’ve all heard the saying: a picture is worth a thousand words.
But how does this impact blogging?
Today, it’s virtually impossible to create a great blog without also creating strong visual content. In other words, your words matter less when they stand on their own. Modern readers want to be engaged on all fronts, and they look to visual materials to facilitate this.
It’s proven: blogs with high-quality, original images rank better, get more attention, and earn more shares than those without. And with over 70 million blogs going out on WordPress each month, you can’t afford to stop and invest in real methods to stand out.
One great method to use to stand out in your blogging is to invest in custom, high-quality graphics created to match your brand and blog topic.
An eye-tracking statistic by Springer International Publishing has said that people following a set of directions (which is common to long-form blogs) respond 323% better with illustrations included along the way!
This leaves one big question, though…
How, exactly, do you go about creating “high-quality, shareable, original images?” What does that even mean?
Here’s your complete guide.
[bctt tweet=”Learn all about how to create themed, share-worthy, on-point blog images in our guide ?#blogging” username=”ExpWriters”]
The Ultimate Guide on How to Create Your Best Blog Images Ever: First, The Importance of Visuals in Your Blogs
37% of marketers report that visual marketing is the single most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging.
With this in mind, consider what happens when you combine the two!
Visuals have always been a critical form of marketing. In addition to the fact that people are more likely to remember what they see than they are what they read or hear, content with images has a long history of performing better in search results and with shares on social media platforms.
And, BuzzSumo once reported that blog posts with images every 75-100 words earned twice as many shareson social media as posts with few or no images!
Adding images to your blogs is more important today than ever before.
But, here’s where our guide comes in. It is not enough, folks, to simply slap a stock photo into your WordPress blog and call it a day. Stop right there. You’ve got to go the extra mile and create high-quality, custom images that provide relevance for your users, and context for your content. And if you use stock photos in the process, use them well.
That’s what we’re here to talk about.
How to Create Your Best Blog Images (7 Steps to Follow)
Learning how to create or delegate the creation of blog images that are highly effective is a process. We’ve got a few key tips to help you get off to a great start.
1. Focus on Themed Images
Here at Express Writers, we believe deeply in creating authentic, beautiful, and themed images for our blog. We invest hundreds of dollars monthly with an in-house designer that’s been on staff for years to create these custom graphic assets.
We create custom themed blog images in our posts on The Write Blog that follow this set of criteria:
We have 5 image assets created per blog: a feature header, an ‘inset’ that is easy to share on social media, a matching CTA that references our services, and then specific sized images for Pinterest and Instagram)
We follow three bucket areas of approved styles for our designer to create, and specify which one when sending her the request:
Custom designs are always preferred, like the one of the artist painting a photo on this blog you’re reading. Our designer hand-draws these and then creates them in Adobe Illustrator.
If a stock photo is used, it’s created with an ‘overlay’ of colors in our brand palette. See this blog for an example.
If we’re referencing events or talks that I gave, we provide images that our designer uses in blog headers. See this example. Here’s another one from CMWorld. I use my iPhone to take these photos.
Clear Express Writers’ palette colors (sometimes we go off-grid from the main colors, but it’s always complementary)
Check out some of our examples from the blog roll:
See how engaging this is, vs. a typical stock photo structure? We won’t name names, but this is from a leading content marketer’s blog.
Another good brand that follows a ‘themed’ blog image look has twelveskip.com. While most people imagine some hokey holiday thing when they think of “themed images,” the reality is much different.
Themed images are actually a series of images that fall into a specific design structure. Of course, this design structure varies from company to company, but it’s always predictable, reliable, and recognizable.
This serves a critical purpose. By making your blog content more recognizable to your consumers, themed images help promote brand recognition and develop a consistent branding presence.
If you’re going to create themed images, keep things like your company’s color scheme, typeface, and voice in mind as you work through the process.
2. Hire a Designer
While platforms like Canva have made it easy to create your own graphic content, it remains a difficult and time-consuming task for people who don’t do it frequently. If you, like so many marketers, have your hands full with other responsibilities, consider hiring a professional designer to create your images for you.
Not only will you get a large batch of high-quality images all at once, but you’ll save the time you would have otherwise spent struggling to create them. This time can then be applied to more productive business pursuits that help grow your company and your social presence.
Not sure where to find a designer? You can go through a content agency (Express Writers offers custom image design for social media and blogs!) or work on finding a freelancer on your own.
3. Develop a Format
Regardless of whether you choose to design the images on your own or hire a professional to do it for you, one big time-saving tip is to create a standard image format that you can work off of and customize down the road. Our agency calls this an “image set.” Put simply, it’s your best featured image size with minimal text, then a formula for an inset image that can be shared on Instagram or other social platforms like Pinterest.
While each of the images you create should be unique, saving these presets in your system will streamline the creation process and ensure you wind up with high-quality images every time. To give you a head start, here’s the best image sizes for all major social platforms, according to Louisem.com:
Instagram: Instagram posts look best when they’re 1080PX x 1080PX.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn images should be 1200 x 628PX.
Facebook: The ideal image size for Facebook is 170PX x 170PX, although experts recommend uploading images of at least twice that size to ensure quality.
Pinterest: Pinterest Pins should be about 736PX x 1104PX, while board covers are 736PX x 736PX.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Want to create blog images that stand out? @ExpWriters is sharing how to size and optimize every online image!” quote=”Want to create blog images that stand out? @ExpWriters is sharing how to size and optimize every online image!”]
4. Pay Attention to Alt Text
While frequently overlooked, alt text on featured images matters hugely to SEO. Alt text is the string of text input “behind” an image, which makes it readable for search engines and people with visual disabilities.
According to Yoast, they look like this:
But, you probably won’t have to deal with the “code” if you’re in WordPress.
Here’s what alt text looks like on the featured image upload section in your WordPress (arrow on the right):
If you have a target keyword for the blog post you’re writing, it should always be in your alt text.
This helps search engines make sense of your image and rank your content accordingly.
Unlike meta descriptions or tags, alt text doesn’t have a hard-and-fast maximum length. The better rule to consider is to always include your focus keyword here.It is important, however, that you add alt text to every image in your blog (especially the featured image) and that you’re including relevant information, like full product names and product IDs, as well as head or long-tail keywords.
So…
To end tip #4:
ALWAYS include your keyword in your ALT text on images uploaded to your blog.
This is extremely important to focus on in the Featured Image section, where Google usually indexes key images from to show with your blog in knowledge graph search results.
5. Upload the Right File Format
While most people don’t realize it, the type of files you upload for your images has an impact on their quality! While many people upload JPEGs to the web, there may be another option. First, here’s a quick breakdown of the three main file types for visual content, and their strong suits:
JPEG. JPEG files are common in photographs and images where places, things, and people are featured.
PNG. PNG files are the best for logos, text-heavy designs, and graphics. They’re also ideal for screenshots and images that have a transparent background, such as a logo designed for website use.
GIFs. GIFs are animated files and typically feature in memes.
When it comes to creating visuals for your blogs, you basically have to remember two rules: JPEGs for standard photos, and PNGs for any custom graphics you create.
In addition to the file format you choose, you’ll want to pay attention to your image dimensions, as well. Huge files take forever to download, and can affect the final quality of your image.
While many web publishing platforms (like WordPress) have functionalities built-in that automatically re-size images, it’s still wise to use an editor like Lightroom or Photoshop to resize your images (according to the above guidelines) before you upload them to the web.
6. Be Cautious With Stock Photos
Like we explained in #1, while stock photos can be a valuable tool in blog image creation, they’re best used carefully. Too many stock photos in your visual strategy will make your blog look, well, boring. While it’s best to use original photos whenever possible (take a look at how LMS platform Wisetail does this on their site), this isn’t an option for companies that don’t have the photography power or the personnel to do it.
In these cases, using stock photos is fine. If you’re going to use stock photos, just be sure to follow these tips:
Add a Branding Overlay Color or Use Part of the Photo. Don’t just slap in a stock photo. Get creative with it! There are many ways you can add or even remove elements of a stock photo and make it more fun and engaging.
Look For High-Quality Options. Stock photos come from professional platforms, yes, but that doesn’t always mean they’re nicely done. As you search for images to use in your visual strategy, look for ones that are clear, crisp, and on-brand. Make sure the people in the photo (if there are any) reflect your target audience and that the topic of the photo is relevant to your post.
Focus on White Space. For a stock photo to perform well in your visual strategy, it needs to have enough white or empty space to take to text. While you can enhance the visibility of text overlay with filters, layers, and font colors and sizes, it’s always difficult to get text to show up well on top of a complex and colorful stock image.
Understand Attribution. Most stock photos don’t require any attribution when you use them. The operative word there, though, is most. By understanding the topics of attribution and copyright, you can avoid legal issues arising from your stock photo use, and keep your blog images thoroughly between the lines.
7. Focus on 10x Content
While they’re intensely important, most people regard blog images as an afterthought in the larger scheme of their blogging strategy. Unfortunately, this is exactly the wrong approach. Instead, you need to apply the principals of 10x content to your blog images. Coined by Rand Fishkin at Moz, “10x content” refers to content that breaks the mold and does something truly astounding.
It’s essential for good blogs and social media posts, and no less important for blog images.
Instead of just scraping by with your blog images, you’ll want to invest the time and energy required to grow a true visual strategy, and to ensure that every image you publish is the best one yet. While it’s true that this takes extra effort, it’s well worth it.
Think of it this way: your blog image features right next to your headline when you post new content.
While the headline has long been considered one of the most essential pieces of any blog, it’s arguable now that the featured image is up there, too.
When your featured image is high-quality, unique, attractive, and interesting, it draws people in. When paired with a great headline and a strong hook and body content, it makes for irresistible written material that is far too powerful to underestimate.
With this in mind, never stop striving for better blog images. When your visuals move up the content quality scale, the rest of your material will, as well. For more research on this, learn about the Skyscraper Technique and figure out unique ways to apply it to your blog strategy.
For example, can you evaluate your old blog images and come up with ways to make them better? Maybe you can partner with other companies or professionals to create images that the web has never seen before!
How about a hand-drawn image to accompany a fun blog post? We did this for a typically “boring” SEO blog post on a numbered list of SEO tips, by adding “to rule your content castle” at the end of the topic, then giving the title to our creative designer! Here’s the result:
The possibilities are endless, and it’s up to you to get creative.
Learn How to Create Blog Images that Win & Become a Better Visual Blogger
Today, there’s no room on the web for low-quality content – not even in your visuals. Of all the digital resources your company has, your blog is one of the most essential.
After all, 70% of customers prefer to get to know a company through content rather than ads, and 61% of consumers make purchases based on information from blogs!
With this in mind, it’s clear that you can’t afford to overlook your blog, or the images that accompany your text.
By getting proactive about your image creation strategy and actively looking for ways to improve your visual content, it’s easy to develop a high-quality approach to images that will benefit your blog for years to come. Don’t waste any more time on sub-par blog images. Check out our custom image design services today!
Measuring content marketing success, as one would imagine, can be difficult.
3. Perform a Content Audit
3. Perform a Content Audit
2:25 PM on Jan. 21, 2015: We receive an email from a potential client who mentions that he is interested in our services after reading my guest blog.
