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Since our first reader in August of 2014, we’ve steadily increased our traffic, and we're now consistently drawing 5,000 plus readers per month to our blog. Our traffic is increasing at a growing rate, and we're optimistic about doubling or tripling our traffic in the upcoming year. If you're a small company like ours — under 20 employees — you're probably wondering how we can consistently publish over 100 quality blog posts annually in addition to getting our “day jobs” done. The answer is in our process. There are five important steps that make up our process, and each is critical in helping us accomplish our goal of publishing 100 high quality new blog posts annually. These steps use the HubSpot blogging and social tools....
I moved five times in the last year. And every single time I moved, I forgot to sign up to have my mail forwarded to my new address.
Mail forwarding is an important step in any moving process, as it ensures you don't lose any valuable information that's sent to you. And the same can be said for your website: If you're moving a website from one URL to another, you need to take the necessary steps to ensure your visitors get sent to the right place. In the world of tech, this is called a 301 redirect.
A 301 redirect is key to maintaining a website's domain authority and search rankings when the site's URL is changed for any reason. It easily sends visitors and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally requested -- without having to actually type in a different URL....
Which of these sums up your view on content production?
“Content is about quality, not quantity. We should be producing high value, authoritative content regularly, not publishing lots of short posts. Less is more.”
“Winning in digital media now boils down to a simple equation: figure out a way to produce the most content at as low a cost as possible.” (Digiday 2013)
Do you agree with first statement? Me too, until recently. But now I think we could be wrong.
The Washington Post now publishes around 1,200 posts a day. That is an incredible amount of content. My initial reaction when I read the statistic was ‘surely that is too much, the quality will suffer, why produce so much content?’ The answer seems to be that it works. The Post’s web visitors have grown 28% over the last year and they passed the New York Times for a few months at the end of 2015....
It’s a rainy and cool weekend here in Melbourne, and I’m looking forward to reading something inspirational with several (ok many several) cups of tea. These have been an excellent start! How Facebook Decides Who Sees Your Updates | Edgar Oh. Wow. This was interesting and confusing and a complete rollercoaster of emotion. Now, if you’re like most bloggers, you’ll have set up your Facebook page to share your stuff. One of the tips shared in this article from the people at Facebook is… “avoid promotion”. Yay. Ah but all hope is not lost – they have other pretty solid tips to help you lift your Facebook algorithm game. I wrote them down in all caps. 5 Secrets of Selling to a Small Blog Audience | Be a Better Blogger Not all of us are rolling in millions of unique pageviews a month, but we still have an audience. I think these are pretty solid ideas to help you make the most of what youdo have – and I loved her take on small blogs and advertising. How to Make Money When Your Blog is Brand New | Blog Tyrant A fantastic and very practical guide to earning an income right from the start. Couldn’t agree more!...
Some people give me a hard time about how long my blog posts are (you know who you are). They tell me I should break my posts into smaller posts, or suggest I consider a 500-word post for a change. I deserve the razzing, particularly when I publish a couple of 3,000-word posts back-to-back.
In the absence of column inch or word limit restrictions, I’ll use as many words as I need to get my point across. It’s not that I don’t know how to write short posts, it’s just not my preferred style. If I’m limited to 140 characters (for now at least), I’ll use 140 characters. If I decide to write a 500-word post about how to write shorter blog posts, I can do it.
To prove my point, you’re actually reading that 500-word post I mentioned. Here are six of the most-helpful tips I’ve come across for writing shorter blog posts...
You have just written the blog post of a lifetime. The one that you know has the potential to go viral on social media. The one that you know will drive a lot of qualified traffic to your website generating leads and ultimately sales. You’ve optimized it for search, checked it twice for grammatical errors, and you’re ready to schedule it to go live.
Then you stop.
Why?
Because it’s at this point, you ask yourself the ultimate question—when. When is the best time to publish an amazing blog post? What day of the week? What time? What timezone?...
Here’s my summary view of the current state of “blogging:” - Written content is an important pillar of “rich content” and will remain so although people will diversify the way they consume content. - Our written content will look less like traditional blogs as we publish on increasingly diverse platforms. - The Content Shock of information density will prevent some businesses from succeeding with any kind of content marketing strategy as the competition increases and the cost of success goes up. - Content is becoming less effective as an inbound “magnet” as platforms become the publishers and move eyeballs away from our home base. - To win the battle for attention, focus must be placed on distribution as an “ignition” strategy.
At first glance, this projection may seem bleak. It’s not. This just means things are changing and the rewards will come to those who can make the transformation....
Today, you’ll learn 9 strategies that’ll help you create highly engaging content that’ll draw your target audience in.
To create a richer experience for your audience, your content needs to impact their lives and answer their questions. It also needs to be strategically planned. Don’t be like the 70% of marketers who lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.
Let’s take a look at the 6 content writing strategies that’ll help you acquire more organic traffic....
According to Demand Metric, 59 percent of B2B marketers consider blogs the most valuable channel.
So, Orbit Media Studios co-founder Andy Crestodina thinks the mega-population of the content creation nation stands to gain interesting insights by examining how their blogging brethren operate.
For the past two years, Crestodina and company have dug deep to uncover data revealing: - How bloggers do what they do - When and where they work on their craft - Who they write for - What they do to enhance their prose and promote their posts.
The 2015 edition of the research examines the answers to 11 questions and juxtaposes the data with the results collected in 2014 to reveal trends taking shape....
What role does an open-ended question play in helping you create the right blog posts? Not much, right? Well actually, open-ended questions will open up new opportunities for you when writing your blog posts.
In this post, you’ll learn how the right questions will trigger the right response in the subconscious mind.
Blogging is a great way to attract a qualified audience and grow your business. According to HubSpot State of Inbound, 2014, content marketers said that blogging produces 13x positive ROI when done properly, and 82% of marketers who blog daily acquire customers from their blogs, as you can see from the image above.
So how do you blog the right way? Trust me, there is no perfect answer to that question. Ultimately, you want to be there for your readers. You’ve got to listen to them attentively and become their friend....
The survey included some of the most common questions asked by marketers beginning new blogs, like how often to blog and how long posts need to be. This is great data to benchmark your progress as you get started. There are a few more questions on the original post, as well as expert analysis on each one of the questions.
How Frequently are Bloggers Publishing?
There are more bloggers that are blogging 2-6 times per week, although that number is down slightly from last year. Both daily and weekly bloggers have increased since last year, and those are good targets to hit. If you are currently blogging a couple of times a month, try to get to weekly and if you are publishing a few days a week, see what it would take to get to daily. Ignore the 15% of bloggers that are blogging irregularly, because from a business perspective, you will see greater results by blogging regularly and more often. This doesn't mean publish just for the sake of publishing, but a regular cadence of solid posts will be more likely to catch on with your readers....
Tumblr and WPP conducted an exclusive survey recently to know what readers are looking for on social media networks. Surprisingly, what they are looking for is content.
Each of the apps that you’ll read about next was designed to take your simple content and boost its perceived value. After all, you can’t say that your content is high quality until the readers say so or benefit from it.
Let these nine content marketing apps reshape your vision, guide you on the right path, and revamp your content into content that drives traffic and leads....
Most businesses view their website as a sales tool, which understandably leads to the idea that all content should reference product value. It’s a common mistake to place products at the forefront of every article or blog post.
The conclusion we’ve come to on this subject: If the sole focus of your corporate blog is to talk about your products, you’re going to find not many people will be interested in what you have to say. But people can be sold on your brand’s value beyond service offerings....
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The first cog is your website. It starts with you designing and building your website for the social web and surround it with tools and technology that search engines and social networks love. The second cog is content. The next piece of the puzzle is the content. Creating and publishing it is just the start. Marketing it to the world is the next step. Ensure your content is easy to share when they show up and is pushed out after the publishing button has been punched. The final cog? Focused digital marketing of your products and services. Making sure that the products that sit at the epicenter of your website are tempting people enough to hand over their name, email and maybe even their phone number. Then taking them on the buyer’s journey. Here is some of the tactics, technology and the tools to make this happen for your startup, blog or business....
When it comes to marketing channels, the newsletter is the dependable workhorse. New and flashier channels come and go, but the trusty newsletter has continued to be the backbone of content marketing distribution strategy – delivering vital traffic on a measurable and predictable basis. Setting up an infrastructure for your newsletter program is as important as the content that fills it and, sadly, many companies are operating blind when it comes to their newsletter success metrics. In this post, I’m going to walk through the five essential steps that you should be taking when you build out your content marketing newsletter optimization strategy....
A surge of traffic may look great in your stats – but it won’t necessarily result in many new long-term readers.
Instead of thinking just about traffic, you want to focus on getting subscribers: people who keep reading your posts day after day, week after week, and month after month.
A great first goal is to get 1000 subscribers to your blog, either through email or RSS subscriptions. (Unless you’re writing about techy things, you’ll probably find most readers prefer to subscribe through email.)
When you’re just starting out, though, with just a handful of subscribers, or none at all, 1000 can look a long way off. Here’s how to get there, step by step....
Have you ever wanted to go a bit crazy with your blog strategy? You know, try something a little left of center to see if it will get better results? Every now and then it pays to go off the beaten path. While conventional wisdom certainly has its place, there are many instances where defying it can prove just as valuable. For these 11 bloggers, going against the grain was exactly what they needed to drive results. If you’re thinking about ruffling a few feathers in your next blog post, take a look at how these men and women did so in a way that protected, rather than compromised, the success of their blogs:...
Inspired by my recent reflection and subsequent thinking about where I want to go from here with Journalistics, I’ve written a two-part post on how to create an editorial strategy for your blog. My hope is these posts will help you clarify the strategy for your blog, as well as provide me with a timely excuse to do the same for Journalistics.
In this age of content marketing we’re living in, it seems like every organization is blogging in hopes of capturing some inbound marketing magic (you can thank HubSpot for that). Whether you’re publishing on behalf of an organization or for personal reasons, I suspect many of you don’t have a written strategy for your blog. In survey after survey about content marketing, it’s pretty consistent that 40-60% of organizations don’t have a written content strategy....
Wondering what the future is for blogs?
Is blogging dead?
To discover what the future holds for blogging, Michael Stelzner interviews Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer....
You may call yourself a successful blogger only if the comment section under your posts is busy and you get tons of shares and likes on social media websites. So, how can you engage your readers and make your content more exciting?
Fortunately, the Internet and technology are developing fast and today you may find many tips and tools on content marketing.
The 12 online tools listed in this article will help you make content more engaging and save your time. In case you’ve decided to boost your blogging success and try new approaches, you need to start exploring these websites without any delays!...
I’ve had the privilege of my writing being published on Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch, Time, Fast Company, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur, and several other publications, and if you aspire to see your writing in mainstream publications like these, perhaps there is something in my story that will help you get there.
The writing I’ve had published has brought me speaking opportunities, a book deal, and more than 1000% growth for my business. I’ve been able to interview and network with my marketing and business heroes, all in the last two and a half years. Prior to that, my writing had never appeared in a mainstream publication. I was just a guy nobody had heard of, posting here and there on my blog, with a small handful of readers. This is the story of how everything changed. ...
Many influencers talk about the 80/20 rule: you should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it. Although I think this ratio really depends on your job, needs and company, it does capture one thing: if you write amazing content but don’t shout out your did so, no one will hear you.
And as far as promoting your blog goes, you can pick and choose on the list above the items that make most sense to your company. If for instance you work for a very technical B2B company and your target audience is above 50 years old, you might want to consider investing in LinkedIn rather than Facebook, leverage influencers and invest time in guest blogging. It all really depends on your audience, where they are and what they care about.
There is one very important point I’d like to add to this infographic: it’s not content repurposing (which I thing is one of the leanest way to do content marketing, it saves an incredible amount of time), it’s content recycling....
You get the idea. These bad boys are everywhere. List posts are a fixture of content marketing.But rather than merely accept them as being, we should understand them. More importantly, we need to know if they’re effective or simply a tacky way to push content online.
So, here’s a list post that will give you everything you need to know about list posts....
There are thousands of articles that have been written about ways to grow your social media following (some of which by myself), but one of the things that most articles fail to cater for is actually growing them from nothing.
We all know how Coca Cola, Pepsi and Oreo have built enormous social media followings, but what if you’re not a huge brand? How about if you’ve just set up a blog and had no real online presence beforehand?
This is what I’m going to focus on – the first 3-4 months of your social media campaign.
One of the implicit values in our Buffer marketing is to challenge assumptions. And one of the biggest assumptions I have about our content is that we should be publishing original articles to the blog multiple times each week.
Well … what might happen if we didn’t?
To find out, we stopped publishing new content for 30 days, focusing instead onrepurposing and refreshing our content from the archives. I’d love to share with you every single thing we tried and all that we learned, both what worked and what didn’t....
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The story of how one HubSpot user built a strategy of publishing high-quality articles to increase their website traffic by 300%.