When a B2B marketer maintains a business blog, they get 67% more leads than marketers who don’t. What’s more, companies with blogs earn 97% more website links than those without.
Convinced you need to blog?
Maybe the only problem is this question. How do you become a business blogger? How do you find blogging success in boosting your company, rep, and rankings online as a brand?
The process isn’t as hard as you might think. We’ve outlined 15 key steps to get you going this 2016. Ring in the New Year the right way – with great business blog foundations!
15 Foundational Steps to A Successful Business Blog
There are 15 key things you should be focusing on for blogging success—here they are.
1) Determine your niche
With so many businesses online right now, it can be tough to stand out from the crowd. For this reason, it’s important to decide what it is that you can do better from anyone else. Determining your niche is the foundation of everything from your target audience to your style of content, and it can help you go far in terms of deciding exactly what and how you will write.
2) Determine your goal
If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to have a difficult time getting there! That’s why it’s important to make a decision about the purpose of your blog at the outset. Are you trying to drive conversions? Make sales? Increase engagement? No matter what your goal is, defining it will help you reach it.
3) Decide on topics
Now that you know what your blog’s goal is, which topics are you going to cover? The universe is a big place and it’s impossible to write about everything well. For this reason, it’s important to decide on which topics within your niche you’ll write about. For example, if you’re a business that specializes in inbound marketing, some of your main topics could be inbound lead generation and social media marketing.
4) Hone your point of view
Nowadays, honing your business’s point of view (POV) can go a long way toward earning you readers. Today’s consumers are much more willing to connect with a person than they are a company, and when you hone your POV you personalize your company, thus gaining a direct line into the minds of consumers.
5) Learn from your peers
Once you’ve decided what you want to write about and how, you’ll want to look around at what others in your industry are doing. Writing is a learned skill and if it doesn’t come naturally to you, you can learn a great deal from watching other people. Even if you are a strong writer, watching industry leaders can give you ideas for content and help you stay up to date on the hottest happenings in your industry.
Tip: Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find leaders and track the most-shared content in your niche.
6) Be consistent
One of the most important aspects of business blogging is remaining consistent. I almost put this as #1.
Just how consistent?
I’ve put out 600 blogs now between 2013 – today. 600. And 50+ website pages. Over 100 of my content pages (blogs, web pages) rank in the top 10 positions of Google. I gained that by writing and posting content at least 3x a week for over three years.
Business blogs that publish content on a regular schedule gain more leads than those who don’t. Additionally, every blog you write is one more page indexed in Google, which means that blogging on a regular basis can help produce an SEO boost that can make your company more visible online.
7) Interact with readers
Imagine if a band went out onstage and sang their songs but never signed autographs, gave high-fives, or took photos with their fans. Do you think they’d have fans for very long? Probably not! The same goes for your business blog. Once you’ve started to gain readers, it’s incredibly important to interact with those readers.
Tip: You can do this by reading and responding to your comments and polling readers about topic ideas and what they’d like to see more of. This creates an environment in which your readers are engaged and interested, which is the perfect platform for your business blog to thrive.
8) Be ethical
Your business blog isn’t going to get far if you don’t insist on ethics from the beginning. Blogging ethics can be a little complex and they go far beyond not copying other people’s work. Ethical blogging also includes things like ensuring your links are legitimate and not spamming readers or other bloggers. While building blog traffic doesn’t happen overnight, maintaining an ethical blogging practice is one of the best ways to ensure that your blog has a healthy, long lifespan.
9) Diversify your content
While 44% of B2B marketers have a content strategy, only 42% feel that the strategy is effective. Many experts believe that part of the reason for this perception this is true is that business bloggers aren’t diversifying their content enough. When you use your blog to share a variety of content types, you diversify the experience for users. This can lead to more readers, more leads, and more sales.
10) Use video & good visuals in your content
While it may not seem like videos have a place in a business blog, videos are some of the most popular content on the web right now. In case you needed proof, YouTube is uploading 72 new hours of video content each minute and, as a general rule, visitors spend approximately 88% more time on sites that include video. What’s more, video earns a site 3 times as much traffic as other types of content and consumers are a whopping 46% more willing to seek out additional information about a product, good, or service after being exposed to an online video.
Along with that, infographics and interactive gifographics do very well to spice up the content you deliver and publish and add visual flavor on your website. Attract more readers and viewers with content that’s visual as well as typed.
11) Include social sharing buttons on everything
We live in the social age and one of the best ways to ensure that your blog gets all of the traffic and shares it deserves is to include social sharing buttons on everything you write. In order to make your buttons effective rather than overwhelming, include no more than 2-3 buttons. For example, Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. While it may sound counterintuitive, whittling down your social sharing buttons actually increases shares by making the decision-making process more simple.
12) Categorize posts
One of the most important factors for both SEO ranking and user experience is a site’s organization. If your blog is cluttered and difficult to navigate, it’s going to drive readers away, which will harm your SEO ranking and reflect badly in the SERPs.
For this reason, it’s important to categorize your posts to make them easy to find. Using categories, tags, and labels helps ensure that your readers can find the information they’re looking for every time, which in turn makes your blog a more enjoyable place to spend some time.
13) Focus on SEO
One of the best ways to ensure that your blog gets the attention it deserves is to focus on SEO. SEO stands for “Search engine optimization” and is the process by which you make your blog more readable to both people and search engines, which allows it to be found more easily by Google users. To optimize your blog for SEO, you’ll want to target the correct keyword phrases, optimize your images, build your linking strategy, promote user engagement, and use social sharing to expand your reach.
14) Measure your results
Once your business blog is up and running and features several quality posts, you’ll want to measure your success according to several important blogging metrics. While there are many success metrics, the most important for a business blog are visits, traffic sources, returning visitors, audience engagement, subscriber conversion, social shares, and visitor activities (bounce rate, etc.).
These metrics can help you gain insight into how well your content is working, or not. If your metrics are lower than you’d like them to be, poll your readers for topic ideas, consider hiring an expert content writer to ensure that you’re publishing high-quality posts on-time, and seek to diversify your content. These simple fixes can often go a long way toward boosting your traffic and producing metrics that make you smile.
15) Have fun!
Business blogging doesn’t have to be a stuffy affair! Take it from us 😉
Example: Want an example? Consider new-to-the game startup MeUndies, whose mission statement is funky, bold, fresh, and inspiring – words that aren’t often used to describe something as utilitarian as underwear. Have fun with your content, tell your story, get creative, and we can promise you – your business blog will go far.
Conclusion: There’s No Time to Business Blog Like the Present
If you’ve ever considered starting a business blog, there’s no time like the present. Blogging has the potential to increase your site’s traffic and help you make more sales while also promoting user engagement and helping you bond with your customers. Plus, blogging has never been simpler than it is right now. You don’t have to be a whiz-kid or an SEO expert to start a killer business blog, simply follow these 15 steps, keep and open mind, and work hard. Chances are, you’ll see results sooner than you can say “Publish.”
We talked to more than 15 content marketing experts (19, to be exact) this month and asked them for 2016-geared content marketing predictions on our industry. Here’s what they shared. Longer insights directly from the experts are shared below the infographic.
The Experts Weigh-In: 19 Content Marketing Predictions For 2016
“Really excited to see where content marketing goes in 2016. I have a sense that we’re nearing some really big changes, perhaps even a bit toward segmentation of sorts. I’m kind of thinking back even to blogs like Daring Fireball and Kottke that have been curators of a sort, while also taking occasion to go longform on a topic if need be. This mix – long plus short, or rich media plus plain text also – is one direction I could see things heading, as it might support the varied tastes of readers who might want different things!”
“The job of content marketers will be challenging in 2016. The volume of content published will continue to grow exponentially and getting your voice heard will be harder. Thus it will be important to research content opportunities before you start creating content.
For example, what content does your audience love, what emotional elements engage them, what formats do they like and what content do they particularly like to share such as quotes, facts, images, tips, research, news, etc.? What is the best content in your space and how can you improve on it? It will also be increasingly important to have an amplification strategy before you create content. Who will share the content and who will link to it? You need a clear outreach strategy for influencers and link building. Building relationships with key influencers will grow in importance. In 2016 the battle for content engagement will be won or lost before any content is even written.”
4. Ted Rubin, Social Marketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, Brand Evangelist, Acting CMO of Brand Innovators, Twitter @tedrubin
“For marketers thinking about approaching content marketing from a networking and community building aspect rather than a marketing and sales aspect can be very difficult. Brands need to attract customers, but breaking through the clutter is challenging. Every day brands and marketers are spending millions trying to get you to use, keep using, and share that you love their brands. But why aren’t they doing everything they can, and using some of those millions to do it (probably way less that they are spending on those marketing campaigns), making experiences with their brand remarkable. Opportunities to do this are given to brands each and every day and they simply, turn their heads, rave about their latest and great “campaign’ as if it were a military conquest, and pass up ways to really create customers for life.
2016 needs to be the year of doing what I call… Looking People in the Eye Digitally. The last few decades of marketing tactics have made us lazy communicators and I’ve had just about enough. Most often we don’t even pay attention to who we are talking to other than via the data we collect (and even that’s a maybe). In order to fix this and really start to benefit from the content we produce (both as individuals and as companies), we need to start looking people in the eye digitally.’
Brands, in 2016, and going forward… Standout by “LIKING” them BEFORE they “LIKE” you. #RonR… #NoLetUp!”
“360 Degree Live Video Experiences: The year 2015 started an era of live casting with the introduction of new technology such as Periscope, Facebook Live and Blab. 2016 will take some of these live broadcasts to an entirely new level with the introduction of live 360 degree broadcasts that will allow people to move their mobile phones and experience the action as if they were actually present and moving their heads. In addition we’ll see the wide scale adoption of cost effective virtual reality devices that will enable fully immersive 3D experiences that are live. Much of this will be enabled by low cost 360 cameras like the Ricoh Theta combined with economical devices like Google Paper that transform the smart phones everyone already owns into a virtual reality device. This represents an entirely new opportunity for marketers to give factory tours and any other form in-person experience the mind can imagine.”
“Make 2016 your year of quality over quantity. Rather than straining to get out as many content assets as you can, concentrate on producing fewer but truly epic pieces, and then repurpose and re-promote them over and over again.”
“Content Marketing in 2016 will see a new focus on creating great content that embraces real-time input from the community while creating and delivering the content at the right time! “Content is king” inspired marketers to create content just because they knew that content was powerful rather than asking for feedback, leveraging data and creating great content. Thanks to apps like snapchat, periscope and Facebook live streaming brands can now crowd source content ideas in real-time while also surveying their audience to better understand the content they should be creating for their community. Live streaming will also drive a new focus on creating more authentic content and dissolving the notion that customers prefer perfect content.
2016 is an exciting year for content marketing as I believe the content will be more data driven and include the community in the creation like never before ultimately making happy customers, community and marketers!”
8. Shane Barker, #1 Social Media Consultant, Writer, Co-Founder at Modera, Twitter @shane_barker
“2016 will be the year of the Social Media Influencers! Brands large and small will start to research, evaluate and hire influencers through platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. These influencers will become micro-producers of original content that is tailored for their following and spoken in their voice. These unique campaigns will create social proof for the brands while driving traffic and ultimately more sales.”
“I predict that in 2016 content marketers will switch to quality over quantity of content published and devote more time to content promotion and distribution. I’m already starting to see this shift with the leading marketers/companies in Q4 of 2015. I believe so strongly in this that in prediction that I built ContentMarketer.io to help with content promotion.”
“Here are my thoughts on content marketing for 2016 …
During the course of 2016, we will continue to see a deluge of content, with most of it ranging from poor to decent quality content. Leading content marketers, however, will figure out that even good quality content is not good enough. You have to be thinking about elite content (or what Rand Fishkin calls 10x content).
In a recent BuzzSumo Moz study, the data showed that most articles get very few shares or very few links, but even fewer articles get a significant number of shares AND links.
There is a real battle for attention going on out there, and you need to do what it takes to stand out from the crowd.”
Thanks for the connection and the opportunity to submit my prediction. Here is a shorter version and a link to my longer post on the subject. Feel free to quote any or all of this in your article and if you can find a way to link to that post, I would really appreciate it.
“I predict a massive correction in advertising budgets that will drive an increase in content marketing. This will require us to get pretty darn good at showing Content Marketing ROI.
We’ll also see more personalization, visual content and brand-produced entertaining content. Is 2016 the year of more brands finding a personality and sense of humor? Read my longer post with more 2016 insights.”
12. Guillaume Decugis, CEO & Co-Founder at Scoop.it, Twitter @gdecugis
“First, proving Content Marketing ROI will become more and more important in 2016: content marketing is maturing and after a grace period experimenting with it, marketers are now expected to show how it impacts lead and revenue generation.
Second, I’d say that things are getting serious: content marketing is not yet a science but a proven methodology for it has emerged and gone are the days when you could simply rely on pure creativity and… luck. While content generation remains key, successful content marketers invest at least as much time and budget in the other parts of the content marketing cycle: planning, distribution as well as analyzing what works and doesn’t.
Third, we’ll see the rise of Content Marketing Automation as many of the tasks in that cycle and methodology can and should be automated for greater results and time saving. Distribution to social channels, generating content emails from your posts, discovering great content to share or analyzing performance data are all examples of tasks that smart marketers will perform better and faster by using content marketing software.
“In 2016 in terms of content marketing, I’m greatly increasing investment on Social Media Ads and Video content promotion. I’m cutting back (even more) on Google+.”
14. Michael Stricker, Marketing Director at SEMrush, Twitter @RadioMS
“At first, the cessation of Google’s Auto-Suggest API will choke many keyword researchers seeking it’s insights into what gets entered and clicked in search. Tools such as SEMrush that use their own intrinsic methods to arrive at Related Terms will continue to perform.
Eventually, someone may find a way to purchase that autocomplete data from Google and present the results, but this signals the end of an era wherein free tools like Soovle and ÜberSuggest were helpful.
The nosebleeds induced by skyscraper content will sap the strength of many creators. Broad evidence suggests that social sharing of such tomes far exceeds actual reads. Ridiculously encyclopedic collections (One Million Ways to Sew On a Button!) will tarnish the trade and in the end, searchers must be understood, personified and their queries taken in context so that a more concise, useful and usable answer can be served. Fortunately, data about audience interests, affinities and better targeting is becoming commonplace and easier to use! I predict that use of interviews to construct personas will be methodized and rise to practical prominence in 2016.”
“In-house content creators need to understand the customer journey and how properly placed PR with influencer mentions impacts organic search traffic.
Always ask yourself, “Is this content more powerful on our website or as a digital asset on a partner website?”
For example, consumers often search “brand + reviews” right before making a purchase just to confirm they are making a good decision. A positive mention of your brand on a third-party authority website is psychologically more powerful than a list of testimonials on your company website.”
“I’ll just put it this way. The human species produced 27,000,000 pieces of content every day in 2012, and internet use is increasing daily. How to cut through that noise? That’s your top challenge for 2016.
I’ve developed a set of guidelines to shock and awe readers into paying attention to you. I call it the P.A.V.E. Principle. I developed it through my discussions with some of the best copywriting minds working today. (Who noticed me after my post, “Confessions of a Google Spammer” jumped to #1 on the inbound.org content Hall of Fame.)
The PAVE Principle: Be Personal, Authentic, Vulnerable, and use Emotions.
Here are the people and posts that express these values best.
Personal: Joanna Wiebe is really good at this, and it has a lot to do with her meteoric rise in the copywriting world. Check out her article on Mad Men and copy writing to see what I mean. (Mind blown moment: Check out how often she uses the word “I” in her writing to connect with readers.)
Authentic: Julia McCoy wrote the best piece on this. Go read it. (Mind blown moment: 43% of millennials rank authenticity over content.)
Vulnerable: Brian Lenney wrote a great piece about how persuasive vulnerability can be. (Mind blown moment: The top viewed TED talk of all time is about the power of vulnerability.)
Emotions: Talia Wolf is one of the most well-known masters of emotional persuasion. (Mind blown moment: Steve Jobs also knew these tricks and used one–anchoring–when announcing new product prices.)”
17. Olga Andrienko, Head of Social Media at SEMrush, Speaker, Blogger, Twitter @OlgaSEMrush
“1. The struggle of writing for humans and pleasing search engines will be brought to a whole new level. One just doesn’t go without the other any more. Content should be optimized and never over optimized.
2. I see more and more content marketers talk about metrics, ROI, tools like Google Analytics and how to use them to track success. This is a very optimistic trend, because data always does more good than harm.
3. Another trend will be people realizing they can’t constantly produce new content, and start re-purposing their content. I see it at SEMrush as well. Instead of creating a whole new post, we get a webinar that our audience liked and create post based on the presenter’s insights and slides. We’re reworking all Twitter chats we hosted to get the best quotes and use them.”
“In the early years of social media, we got way too focused on being active and producing content regularly, ignoring the fact that much of the content produced was low quality and really served no purpose. Over the last two years, everyone from search engines, social media sites, to even the users themselves, have really made it clear that quality is way more important than quantity.
in 2016, companies have to focus on quality, and further more, start to really understand what quality means. Does your content answer a question, help someone make a decision, and provide real value. You have to be willing to take yourself out of it being your company and your content and really ask, is this someone I would read or share? 9 times out of 10 it is not.
Spend more time researching topics to add historical relevance to them, reach out to experts to have them comment or add to the article, use real design firms to create quality graphics and Infographics, and use visuals in your content that actually summarize and work with the content, instead of just useless stock photos meant to check off your article requirements.”
“2016 is going to be the Year of Reckoning in content marketing. How so?
1. Business owners will come aboard the content marketing train or find they’re being left behind. It’s time to produce good content (such as starting a blog, produce videos and graphics, engage and create on social media) or join the outdated group of people who aren’t.
2. Content marketing creators will vary their content productions more to step up the game. Podcasting is hot right now; it’s not over-saturated just yet, but will be in late 2016. Now is the time to start yours. Better and more unique forms of video content will happen. Live streaming will be even more popular. Forms of better engagement on social media, like Twitter chats, and tools for engagement, will grow; to rise above a standard level of infographic, gifographics will be created; content will be better researched and more effort put in; we’ll find more answers online as companies grow and produce their own unique content. To rise above the content sea, you have to be a thought leader. Be unique. Add your own insight. Create your own tool. And that will require major investments. Gone is the DIY age of content marketing.
3. Inbound marketing will thoroughly trump outbound. Cold calling, interruptive TV ads, mail flyers will be less in existence, and companies will realize the necessity and significance of inbound marketing investment and production.
Don’t be left out in the Year of Content Reckoning; join the rising revolution of (better) content marketers. Add your voice. Be heard. Stand out, engage your fans, build an audience.”
Have a 2016 marketing prediction? Enjoyed these expert predictions? Share your thoughts in the comments!
We wish you a Merry Christmas, We wish you a Merry Christmas, …And a Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas From Express Writers!
It’s already the end of 2015. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are upon us!
I hope that you’re not spending too much time in front of the work screen, but if you are, you should read this one blog. (Insert brazen-faced winky emoticon.) I hope it’ll inspire you and that you’ll leave with some content marketing tips you can start using right now – and bring into your New Year.
First: Why Christmas Doesn’t Have To (Ever) Be Your “Slow” Season
I’m even more excited to bring you this holiday post and hereby “blog,” or “work,” on the holidays, because, well, December is becoming our hottest month of the entire year!
I couldn’t believe it myself, but we broke records and had over 1,000 pages of content ordered in 48 hours, our first week of December. This is the most we’ve had ordered in 48 hours since I created the company, in 2011.
Our financial graph for the entire year looks like this:
(The lowest point, in January, looks lower than it was because we actually started our online Content Shop then and had all our clients begin placing orders online.)
We still have one more half-week in December, and our team is in the office throughout this month still – so we expect the year to end with our busiest month yet!
That’s my reason directly to you why December doesn’t need to be your slowest month. We actually saw it become our best month for 2015 – which means anyone can, too, provided they never let go of the hustle and effort it takes to get a best foot forward and put in some real work and passion.
Copywriting Tips for the Holidays (and Beyond)
Even as the holidays are quickly whizzing past us, there’s still plenty of time to hone your skills for your holiday campaigns and start converting readers into buyers. But before you do, let’s take a look at the top copywriting tips to get your writing into shape.
8 Top Copywriting Hacks
1. 90% Of Your Time Should Be Spent Crafting Killer Headlines
There’s a lot to be said on the topic of headlines. Strong conversion copywriters spend at least 90 percent of their time crafting one, or two… or three for every piece.
It’s important not to stuff your headlines with keywords. And while you’re at it, throw out everything you were taught by those old-school SEO dictators on how to craft those headers. Make them attention-grabbing, borrow from winning formulas, do what you got to, to reel readers in.
Here’s an important tip to remember: great headlines are very often incarnations of the value proposition of the very thing you’re trying to sell.
Here’s another tip: ask yourself this about the prospect you’re writing for: “what was going on in their life that brought them to you today?”
2. Write Amazing Headlines Using “Without”, “Even If” and “Data”
There’s so much to be said about headlines and that’s because they really are THAT important. Here are a few things you could include to help make your headers stand out:
Use an “even if” clause to overcome hesitation
Add a little data about the outcome
Replace “even with” with “without” – what don’t your readers have to do to get the result?
3. Stay Away From Positioning Statements – Use Value Propositions
At its very core, a value proposition needs to express what’s desirable and unique about your offer. Never confuse it with a positioning statement. You should state something about that your product does. You can include an end benefit. But don’t make your value proposition a laundry list of benefits.
4. Get To Know Different Types of Awareness
There are a couple of different kinds of awareness your readers will have during the sales process. Depending on the stage of awareness they’re at, they’re going to need different messaging and content:
Pain Aware – in this stage people respond to seeing solutions to their pain, or even their own pain.
Solution Aware – this is where people respond to high-level benefits, so avoid thinking of the problem and think of the solution.
Problem Aware – during this phase, people realize they actually have a problem but don’t know how to solve it.
Product/Brand Aware – here people want to know what best and biggest benefit your product has to offer before they’re introduced to the benefits. People love the phrase, “but wait! There’s more!”
Completely Unaware – during this phrase, people are completely clueless about their problems.
5. Embracing Similarities Between Taglines and Value Propositions
Sometimes the very best taglines are actually your value propositions (as discussed above), just whittled down smaller while being specific.
6. Keeping Swipe Files for Inspiration
Never heard of a swipe file? It’s a collection of content that you can use for ideas – all that memorable stuff that’s resonated with you. Save everything you love so when the well runs dry, you have a file full of inspiration.
7. To Write Content That Shocks and Generates Shares, Go Ahead and Pick a Fight!
Take a completely accepted way of doing things and go and turn it on its head. Don’t be insulting, though, just provocative.
8. Top X Lists Can Still Work
These lists can work well, provided they add something meaningful to the conversation. Try to be better. Aim to be different.
5 Tips for Effective Holiday Content You Can Do Now
Here are 5 bonus tips for crafting effective holiday content as you leave my blog today (and go eat chocolates, or open gifts, and enjoy your holiday – in short, get away from the computer :D).
1. What Are Your Customer’s Holiday Needs?
One of the best things about the holiday rush is you get to offer your customers great value when you create content that will help them cross something off their to-do list, saves them time or makes the holidays more fun. Consider what your readers are trying to accomplish this holiday season and help them achieve their objectives.
This Christmas, we decided to give back and create the ultimate giveaway of five free days of gifts – for five total gifts. We created landing pages for each of the products after we finished creating the actual product (which ranged from a 10-day email course to eBooks and PDF resources), then wrote a blog and landing page for the entire campaign. We then socialized this like crazy–pinning to our Twitter, posting it on Instagram, highlighting on our Facebook business page, and more. We’ll probably even make a few Twitter ads for it, and we’ve already scheduled an email campaign for it.
2. Target Specific Audiences to Improve Performance
While the bigger brands and media organizations tend to create content that appeals to a wider audience, one of the best ways to drive performance for a holiday campaign is to determine the audience who is most likely to purchase your products and then create content catering to their interests and needs.
Let’s say you are a sports apparel brand, a very general holiday gift guide with products ranging from home décor to high-tech gadgets is far too wide-ranging to capture a particular audience’s attention. Rather create specific posts like “10 Perfect Gifts for The Sports Woman In Your Life.”
3. Make Sure the Subject Matter Fits Your Brand
Here’s another thing to keep in mind: your content needs to address a subject that you and your brand actually have the authority to speak about. Even if someone who purchases a state-of-the-art television set is likely to indulge in a fancy cocktail this holiday season, I highly doubt that customer is going to take much note of a post titled “5 Great Champagnes To Try This New Year’s Eve” that’s been put together by a tech company!
Discussing topics that fall naturally under your brand’s preview means you can give consumers a reason to trust your content and want to read it all the way through to the end.
For a cool example of what does work, take a look at Verizon’s post. In their post they perfectly targeted gift-givers who were in the market for those under-the-radar tech accessories, and the subject matter is perfectly aligned with what the tech company have to offer.
4. A Sense of Urgency Is Key. Your Customers Are Expecting It
One of the main challenges of marketing during holiday time is that you only have a short period of time. If people don’t make their purchase before the end of the year, they’re not likely to return to your brand in January, are they? What’s more, if you fail to be aggressive about converting readers into paying customers, there’s a big chance they will make that purchase from a competitor.
While more blatant sales pitches could turn people off any other time of the year, customers tend to be more receptive to them at holiday time as they’re actively shopping and in fact, they are expecting companies to promote featured product items. So it’s easier to create a sense of urgency with your customers by presenting them with exclusive sales offers that expire within a certain amount of days or hours, enticing them to buy from you before even bothering to see what your competitors are selling.
Even if you don’t wish to use calls to action in your content, you can still create a robust retargeting plan that will resonate with your most engaged audience with a tailored sales pitch later on in the holiday season.
5. Launch Your Content Early and Start Testing It
It’s really never too late to start laying out your holiday content campaigns. Of course you want to get a head start so that you can optimize exactly how you’re going to promote your work in order to reach out to your audience. So let’s say you have five pieces of Cyber Monday content, be sure to give yourself enough time to see which articles perform best in order to allocate more budget towards those winners in the days leading up to your sale.
You can run a range of similar experiments, both on social media and in content recommendations, with your thumbnail images and headlines to see which combinations will drive engagement and therefore conversions.
One of the best things about holiday campaigns is that you know they’re going to come around, so you can give yourself loads of time to create amazing campaigns that will get you the results you want.
Does the idea of creating any kind of content campaign terrify you? Don’t worry, at Express Writers we know how to create and deliver on expert content that says all the right things for your audience, just in time for the holidays!
For one, many people misunderstand the purpose of blogs. Blogs go far beyond the mundane – they’re used for everything from showcasing personal writing to offering actionable tips that can help people solve problems and make their lives better, raise brand awareness, and in many cases (like ours) drive a huge percentage of online leads to their business.
10 Key Reasons to Start Blogging For Business (Now)
To me, blogging is like the surety of an umbrella on a rainy day. As long as we consistently blog (along with a formula of high quality content + promotion of what we create), we keep our SEO rankings up and thriving, and our visitor numbers flourishing. No matter how “rainy” the day gets, these leads will come in. If you’ve ever considered starting a blog for your business, here are the top 10 reasons you should do it right now.
The Power of Content Today (Case Study) – Published back in July 2015, this is still relevant to our post today. I discuss how content is the cornerstone of online marketing.
Seriously, though, how do people typically find your website? If they come to it via paid aids, it’s likely that you’re spending a lot of money that you don’t have to. If this sounds like your situation, it’s probably wise for you to start dividing your time differently.
Instead of spending tons of money on paid ads, you can start blogging, beefing up your social media presence, and optimizing everything you do for SEO.
Here’s why it works: if you don’t blog, your website is a little stagnant. It’s likely that you don’t have a ton of pages and, of the pages you do have, very few of them are updated that often. In a setup like this, you don’t have many pages indexed in Google, which means that you’re only marginally visible to people who may be searching for a company like yours. This, in turn, means that one of the only real ways to grab traffic for your site is to pay for it. When you blog, though, all of this changes.
Every time you write a new blog, you provide a new page to be indexed in Google. By creating content that your readers and customers love, you ensure that people can find your page. Plus, when you share your blogged content on social media, you create an entirely new outlet for traffic and social shares. (And content is HUGE for Google. Their recent 160-page doc, which we analyzed, discusses how their standards rely on the quality and expertise of the written content.)
2) Blogging can help you make conversions
Once you’ve begun to drive traffic to your site via content, you’ll need to find a way to convert that traffic, right? Enter the power of the blog. Because every page you write is a new page that Google gets to index, every page you write is also an opportunity to create new leads and help those leads convert into subscribers, sales, or shares.
Blogs work best for conversions when you focus on including a high-quality CTA at the end of every blog post. By doing this, you tell your viewers exactly what you want them to do and help ensure that nothing is lost in translation. It’s really that simple.
3) Blogging helps establish you as an authority
What’s one of the most important aspects both of ranking well and drawing in new readers, done with blogging for business? If you answered “authority” you’re right on. Page authority is incredibly important and it’s not something you can buy. The only way to create authority on the web is to create content that is genuinely useful, helpful, and interesting to readers.
Nowadays, the majority of people (about 81%) conduct nearly all of their product research before ever speaking to a company or its customer service representatives. One of the primary places that people turn to conduct this research is the web. When you build and maintain a business blog where you publish valuable, educational, helpful content, you can be the person who provides the answers to questions your would-be customers ask during the research process. By doing this, you establish your company as a leader in the industry, as well as helping ensure that when the customer is ready to purchase, they’ll come back to your site.
4) Blogging for business is a long-term plan
There are many marketing tactics that produce short-term results. While those things can be effective to drive huge bursts of traffic, they’re seldom cut out to be a long-term solution. Blogging, on the other hand, is designed for the long-term.
When you sit down to create a blog, you create a valuable piece of content that long outlives your efforts and your investment in it. By generating shares, drawing views, and producing conversions, each blog you write has the potential to draw traffic long beyond the day it is published. In fact, HubSpot reports that upwards of 70% of its monthly traffic and 90% of its overall leads come from blogs that were published in previous months, some even as long as a year ago.
5) Blogging is low-cost, high-return
Have we mentioned that blogging only costs what you want to invest for writing and imagery? The ROI is way, way worth the small investments. Blogging is both one of the cheapest and one of the most effective ways to drive traffic, views, and attention to your business website and, while it has the potential to produce a huge return investment, it doesn’t cost anything to get started.
6) You don’t have to be a tech expert
Blogging isn’t a pastime reserved only for the uber-techy. Instead, it’s a simple, accessible move that virtually everyone can make. Platforms like HubSpot and WordPress are designed to be hugely people-friendly and not require outstanding design skills. While it’s all well and good to know HTML and CSS, you certainly don’t need to have these things mastered when you start your blog.
Just remember to get a good writer who knows what he or she is talking about in your industry, and you’re set.
7) Your blog provides you with a source of content gold
Content creation is tough, isn’t it? When you have a blog, though, you supply yourself with fodder for all of your other social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all of your marketing copy like emails, newsletters and eBooks.
A blog provides an important source of original content and helps you stay on schedule in terms of content creation and distribution. This is especially true when you hire a team of writers to handle your content creation for you.
8) Blogging keeps you on your toes
If you’re not creating content, there’s an argument to be made that you’re not keeping up with the times. Because blogging requires content, it makes you perk up and pay attention to what’s going on in your industry, including where new developments are coming from, who’s winning at the game, and what’s helping other marketers succeed.
Keeping an ear to the ground in these topics will help ensure that you’re on the cutting edge of your industry and will help you provide your users with awesome content that they find illuminating and helpful.
9) Blogging is a great place to tell your brand’s story
Nowadays, consumers want brands they can relate to and support fully. There’s no better way to produce this for your company than to tell your brand’s story. But how do you tell your brand’s story? There are many ways, of course, but ta blog is one of the best.
When you have a blog, you can dedicate time to developing a unique POV that helps you further your brand’s mission, stand out from the crowd, and provide important insight for your users. This, in turn, promotes bonding with your customers and keeps your brand fresh in their minds.
10) Blogs provide insight into your customers
Once you start posting blog content and people begin to interact with it, you’ve gained yourself a valuable look into your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and sharing habits. By analyzing your blog analytics, you can learn more about what your readers read, click, and share, which allows you to plan your marketing efforts better and to better cater to your unique users. All of these things are important to attaining business success and, when done well, can help you ace your marketing and produce better conversions and more sales.
Conclusion
When it comes to blogging for business, if you’re not doing it, you should be. Creating a blog for your business is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to boost your SEO, gain more leads, make more sales, drive more traffic, and stay on the cutting edge of your industry. Plus, blogging is a fantastic way to gain inspiration and have fun in your industry.
By seeking to create great content on a daily basis, you put yourself in the ideal position to learn, expand your horizons, and make new connections, which is great for your company and for you as an individual!
Imagery in blogs and web content: they vary from the sublime to the ridiculous (crash test dummies in love, anyone?) but they’re vitally important to your content.
Research has shown that articles that feature images earn 94% more views than those that don’t. This makes sense given the fact that we live in what some have dubbed “The Visual Age.” There are currently more than 2.5 billion camera phones in existence (whoa!) and image-sharing sites like Instagram are exploding in popularity.
With all of this in mind, it’s clear that images should be playing a large part in your content strategy.
The Power of Visual Content
According to an infographic created by Wyzowl, only 10% of people remember things that they have heard and only 20% of people remember the things they read. In contrast, though, 80% of people remember the things they do and see. This is why so many of us, myself included, categorize ourselves as “visual learners.”
The human brain is wired for visuals. We process visual information 60,0000 times faster than we process textual information and 93% of all human communication is not verbal. For this reason, the addition of visual content into blogs and other content marketing materials has the power to boost views and strengthen your content.
In fact, Jeff Bullas states that the COO of Shuttlerock, Paul Bingham, has noted these changes firsthand. According to Bullas, when customers optimize visual content using Shuttlerock, their email lists grew by upwards of 44,000 subscribers and they earned 23 million new impressions via Facebook timelines. One user even experienced a 57% growth in sales and another gained over 33,000-page visits after running a photo competition.
How’s that for proof?
5 Benefits of Visual Content
Visual content, which includes images, videos, infographics, memes, and many others, has many benefits. These include the following:
Visual content can promote sales
Visual content can increase brand awareness and help consumers remember your company
Visual content can promote sharing on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter
Visual content can provide an SEO boost
Visual content can increase reader engagement
While many marketers steer away from visual content because they believe that the only option is cheesy stock photos or that they’re not qualified to create other types of visual content, like infographics, that provide marked traffic boosts, including visual content in your marketing is actually much simpler than it sounds.
The 5 Main Types of Visual Content You Should Be Using
There are many types of visual content, but some perform better than others. According to KISSmetrics, there are several types of visual content every marketer should be using.
1) Images
You know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. But when you augment your high-quality blog posts with equally high-quality images, they can be worth a thousand views instead.
Now more than ever, people don’t want to wade through dense, impenetrable content that offers no relief. For this reason, images are an important addition.
There are many different types of images, varying from personal photos to high-quality stock photos and each has its own unique set of benefits. On one hand, images taken by you add a personal touch to your content and can help add value to deeply personal topics (it would be strange, for example, to purchase a stock photo for an article about your family). On the other hand, unless you’re a professional photographer it may be difficult for you to produce images that are as high-quality as they need to be in order to feature prominently in your content. In these cases, it may be a better idea to purchase images from a reputable stock photo company.
You can even do something really cool and get a custom artist to illustrate for you. Like we did in the How to Tell Your Best Story post above. You can find decent $5 artists on Fiverr.
To give your stock photos an extra boost, you can use a service like Canva to create unique photos via a drag-and-drop design interface. We’ve added a link in this post to a free resource we created giving you 20 awesome free stock photo resources.
Just remember that if you are going to use images, you must be conscious to always purchase them from a reputable source rather than simply copying and pasting them from the web, as this can easily result in a lawsuit.
2) Videos
According to Moz, posts that feature videos earn 300% more inbound links than their video-less counterparts. Videos are one of the most useful ways for marketers to present solutions, relay information, and introduce products.
When done correctly, a high-quality video can boost a content campaign by providing a personal touch, giving readers an insider view of the company, or clearly showcasing a product.
Videos can also be used to drive conversions. In fact, one study demonstrated that featuring a video on a landing page increases conversions by an average of 86%.
There are many different types of videos, from how-to videos to interviews, to customer service and tutorial videos. What’s more, live-streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat have ballooned recently and many marketers are using these platforms to offer behind-the-scenes footage or to promote secret sales and giveaways.
3) Infographics
Infographics are the prom queen of images. By combining visual and textual content into an information-dense powerhouse, a great infographic can easily go miles in your content marketing strategy. In order for an infographic to be as effective as possible, though, there are some important things to remember.
Here’s an infographic we did on the Ultimate State of Content Marketing.
First of all, the layout of an infographic needs to be simple and impactful. This means using the right colors, images, and formats to convey data in a simple and easily digestible way. Additionally, the information included in an infographic must be accurate, authoritative, and relevant. Because infographics are boiled down to nothing but facts, this is especially important.
When done correctly, infographics are one of the most popular forms of content. Keep in mind that 40% of people respond better to visual information than they do to textual information, which means that infographics can be a very effective part of your content strategy.
4) Memes
With all of the silly memes floating around the web, it may be hard to see how they would have any place in content marketing.
Fortunately, they do, and they can be very effective. Unlike infographics or videos, memes are seldom used to convey deep or information-dense topics. Instead, they’re an important form of fun, easy-to-create content that is ideal for sharing and driving traffic.
To create your own meme, you can choose to use one of any of the dozens of meme creation services on the web. When creating memes, think about where you’d like to distribute them. Memes are ideal for social media and places where younger readers hang out, like Facebook and Twitter. One way that marketers often use memes is to share in-jokes about a specific industry or occupation. This expands the reach of a meme and makes them highly shareable on sites like LinkedIn and, of course, your personal blog.
When creating your memes, you’ll have the best luck if you keep them relevant, witty, sharp, and funny. This ensures that they’ll appeal to a wide variety of audiences and that they’ll have a lifespan far beyond their publishing date. While memes aren’t ideal for heavy topics, they can be a fantastic way to make your readers laugh and get your content shared around the web.
5) Screenshots
Screenshots are a valuable way to underline a concept.
Here’s a screenshot inside SEMrush we recently took to illustrate a post about content auditing.
When you grab a screenshot and include it in a blog post or tutorial, you allow your readers to see what you’re doing rather than simply read about it. This is important because people respond better to directions when they include images than they do when they are text-only. That said, the next time you’re trying to illustrate a complicated point, grab a screenshot and give your readers a hand.
Conclusion
While there are many benefits to including visual content in your blogs and social media, the most prominent benefit is user engagement. By including high-quality images, infographics, videos, memes, or screenshots, you add bulk to your content, break up text-heavy pieces, provide additional information, and essentially make your content more compelling and attractive.
Keep in mind, though, that any visual content you add to your blog will need to be high-quality, attractive, and relevant. Visual content is just like anything else – the more time you spend making it great, the more likely it is to attract viewers and produce positive conversion rates. So get creative with your content and beef it up with beautiful visuals of your choice.
Order blogs with custom-made images from us today.
