Category Archives: content ideas

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Why You Should Break Away From Title Conventions In 2016

How many times have you read a lame “5 Ways to Improve Your Bottom Line!” title, clicked through, and the been disappointed to find the same old generic, rehashed information on the other side?

If you roll your eyes whenever these titles come up in your Facebook feed or from some marketer’s Twitter account, you’re not alone. Unfortunately for marketers looking to take the easy way out, millions of other people are feeling the same way and are becoming immune to the type of clickbait titles that have dominated marketing communications for way too long now.

In the near future (actually, now), no one is going to be clicking on cheesy, cringe-worthy headlines that mask lackluster, uninspired content. Instead, you should be working to standout with your titles in other ways to help draw people in without misleading them. Of course, step one is to make sure your content is up to par; no great title or thumbnail image can lead to the conversions you’re after if you don’t have great words waiting for readers on the other side. Be valuable, be useful.

Next, consider tossing out additional hyped up adjectives and adverbs for statistics. Many of the most successful content marketing triumphs to pop up in 2015 were case study types which could boast a specific change in a variable in their title.

For example, the popular Groove blog wrote an article with a title along the lines of “How we raised our traffic by 12,267% with zero advertising.” It’s just about as enticing as a marketing blog post title could possibly be because it gives you an exact statistic that you can hold the author to.

By the way, that blog post really is excellent and outlines a bunch of free traffic generation methods that the company used to, no kidding, give an insane multiple-thousand percent increase to their traffic numbers in an impressive amount of time.

You should consider also making your titles platform specific. For example, WordPress has plugins which allow you to display different title and description tags for certain social networks. For example, if you know that Facebook shows only the first 70 characters of a link title and LinkedIn shows 110, you can create custom titles that fit those exact lengths and make the most of you allotted characters on each platform.

Titles which are native (made for) a platform will without a doubt perform better in terms of clickthrough and reader interest. Futhermore, platform specific titles can help you create clever synergies between the titles and preview images shown on each network, which can go a long way toward making your homegrown marketing efforts look more professional and thought out – and that’s never a bad thing!

Basically, titles still need to deliver clickthroughs and intrigue readers, but the way in which they accomplish these goals is going to need to be more genuine and helpful going forward. Working together to eliminate crappy content and titling is just one way to make audiences less skeptical of content marketing, which makes things easier on the rest of us, doesn’t it?

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The Elements Of A Successful Content Marketing Piece

Content marketing: The creation of written, video, audio, or other content by a brand with the goal of garnering an audience or attention and establishing authority within a market.

Content marketing has proven, over the last couple of years, to be outpacing its more traditional media buy and advertising counterparts in terms of engagement with audiences and, ultimately, conversions. That said, not everyone gets it right, and some people have yet to start actually creating a content marketing plan for their brand.

Today, we’re going to go over a few ways you can audit any content marketing piece before you put it out in order to give it the best chance of success.

Make sure your target audience really, truly cares.

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make with content marketing is that they use their content as an extended ad for their product or service. The content itself delivers little value to the reader and doesn’t actually set them up to be any more knowledgeable on a topic or in a better position to solve their problems than before they read it.

Content marketing is about giving, and as such you should always place yourself in your target market’s shoes while writing. Ask yourself questions like:

– If I was in this market, would this content be useful to me, or does it just sound like someone trying to convince me to buy something?

– Is this genuinely interesting?

– Is this written like it’s honest and coming from someone who is knowledgeable on the topic?

Can it make it big?

Take into considerations the elements that make a piece of content go viral or stand out from the rest in terms of how much it gets shared around with others. In content marketing, learning to leverage your existing audience to spread your work exponentially to their own contacts and followers is key. In general, a few key items will help you achieve this with a piece of content:

– A title that is intriguing and clicky, but stays true to the content that’s on the other side.

– A piece that shows so much work, care, and time that it stands out as a resource above all others. For example, this is why list articles super high counts (i.e. “120 ways to share your content!”) often get shared 1,000’s of times – hard work shows.

– Have you designed imagery for promotion? Posts with images catch attention and perform substantially better, so you’ll want to design thumbnail images for social sharing even if your content itself is not visual (a written piece, etc.).

Can you hustle?

Content marketing is a numbers game, and those numbers are, largely, hours. Not only will you put in hours to create content that resonates and delivers, you’ll need to think about your distribution strategy.

This means manually posting to Facebook groups, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. Develop a distribution plan by starting broad and then narrowing in on the channels that are delivering results after a few releases. Most likely, this is a multiple month long process, but content marketing in general is playing the long game. Good luck!

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How to Promote Your Blog Posts as an Online Marketer: Part 2

So you’ve churn out a stellar blog post. I mean a real whopper, something that will make people say, “wow, I’ve never thought of it like that!” Packed with data, case studies, and references, written with the eloquence of a modern day Shakespeare, your article is going to take the internet by storm, if only it finds a few interested eyeballs.

Hold on there, cowboy or cowgirl, it’s a long road ahead. Not that that’s anything to be afraid of. Once your blog post goes live, here are a few ways you can kickstart its ability to gain some attention.

Email sources. The advantages of citing actual sources and other authorities in a niche are twofold. First, they give your own writing extra authority because anyone can just say something, but once it’s backed up with facts and figures you can show that you’ve done your homework.

The second advantage is that you can actually try and leverage the people and sites you’ve used as sources to help share your article.

If you wrote in an article on top resources for bloggers (please, don’t actually write this article unless you can do something better than the 40,327,811 out there that already exist), you might have mentioned someone’s software that you use on a daily basis.

Once your article goes live, send the company an email and/or tweet at them, letting them know you’re a fan and saying you mentioned them in your latest post. At the end, politely ask that they consider sharing the article with their own audience if they enjoyed it.

Make friends with the big dogs, even when they seem out of reach. Every big content marketer whose blog posts now get 1,000+ shares each week started out where you are. They were grinding when no one paid attention and they recognize the struggle.

If you can offer them some sort of help in their business, if you can consistently network and show them that you ask smart questions in their comment sections, or that the posts of yours that you’re tweeting show that you’re putting in the time and effort and aren’t going anywhere, they’ll notice.

When the time comes, it might just not be too much of a stretch for you to reach out and ask if they might give some super cool thing you’ve written a nudge. That’s pretty cool (so make it happen!).

Of course, you should also be making sure that you give your own channels a mega nudge on your own.

Post to Facebook, schedule several tweets to go out over a few days using tweetdeck, post images to tumblr that link back to your content, take advantage of Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn groups, as these can be deceptively good places to get your content seen by those who would find them relevant.

More sensitive communities, like Reddit and Inbound, can also be great places to share, but will require some more finesse.

Whatever your promotional tactics, keep them constantly evolving, and don’t be afraid of trying something that might not work, because it just might be a gold mine for you.

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4 Of The Best Entrepreneurial Blogs You Can Start Reading Right Now

One of the best ways to learn anything in the internet marketing world is to get out there and take action. There is absolutely no substitute for finding out what works for your exact business model and personality than by experimenting and tweaking what you focus on based upon your results.

Having said that, the second best way to learn has to be from other companies and individuals who have been through the phase you’re at already, and have been kind enough to package their own lessons into easily consumed content for you.

Often, this comes in the form of a blog, where you can regularly get updated on whatever the topic that person or company has expertise in. For entrepreneurs, here are 4 that are especially awesome and go out of their way to deliver constant value to readers.

1. The Groove Blog

Honestly, this is one of the best transparency blogs around for entrepreneurs. Run by Groove CEO Alex Turnbull, the blog follows this customer support startup every step of the way as they journey to $500k per month in recurring revenue.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of insights to be learned from a company well on their way to hitting those ambitious numbers. The nice thing is that they share a lot of things that didn’t work as well, and provide the data to back up anything they say or recommend.

2. The Daily Egg

Crazy Egg is a product all about data, so it’s not surprising that the research that goes into posts on the Daily Egg (CE’s blog) are packed with awesome research. Plus, they have a great track record of securing some awesome guest posters, which help to flesh out the blog as an authority on a wider range of subjects.

As if all of that weren’t enough, the blog is one of Neil Patel’s projects. If you don’t know Neil, he’s one of the most prolific writers and content marketers around, and just about everything he touches is gold.

3. Swift Branding

A new player on the scene, Swift Branding is run by George Karboulonis over in Greece, and it’s got a good thing going for it right now. The blog does a great job of committing to providing as any useful resources, freebies, and guides for IM’ers as possible.

While some of the content is more general or entry level, there are some real gems as well, and George seems to have a knack for getting people to share their interesting stories with him in the form of revealing case studies.

4. Copyblogger

Finally, Copyblogger. Copyblogger has been around for a long time, and even has a now-rebranded media branch you can find at rainmaker.fm

While CB’s original focus was, no surprises here, copywriting, the team have really branched out over the last few years and broadened their topic reach without any falloff in quality.