Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that 91% of B2B businesses use content marketing to reach their customers. And when it comes to the b2c sector, 86% of those marketers think using content marketing is crucial to their overall digital marketing strategy.
The Content Marketing Institute also shows that 72% of marketers say their content marketing efforts increase engagement and that it has increased the number of leads.
Your content is worth optimizing because 95% of people only look at the first page of search results so if your content appears on the second page or after, the majority of people will not see it.
Most of the content marketing advice out there is general and does not give you actionable tips you can use to see a return on your investment. This list gives you a solid place to start.
Overview
1. A New Spin on Gated Content
Gated content requires a subscription or an email address to access. You can grow your email list with these kinds of posts by creating a small selection of normal blog posts that only your email subscribers can get access to. When someone clicks on one of these posts, a pop-up should appear that asks for their email.
This approach can help you grow your email list while playing up the “exclusivity” part of some of your content, without having to charge people to read it.
2. Attack Content Decay
If you’ve produced content for a while, chances are you’re losing traffic as a result of content decay. Simply updating and relaunching your old post can dramatically improve your traffic. If you’ve been blogging for some time though, it may be hard to tell where to begin with updating your old posts. That’s where the Animalz Revive tool comes in. It’s a completely free tool that will analyze your Google Analytics data and provide a list of posts that you should refresh.
It’s up to you whether to relaunch the post like it’s brand new or if you want to quietly update the content. Either way, you should see an increase in traffic to the post. The more posts you revamp, the more traffic you can capture.
3. Use Templates to Mimic Past Successes
Templates are helpful when it comes to scaling up your content marketing. Whenever you start a new post, avoid opening up a blank Google Doc. Instead, work from one of your proven blog post templates. When you sit down to write a blog post, use the template to help you get all of the important parts down on paper.
After you’ve done that, transfer it to a Google Doc and start writing. Working from a set of templates Makes it easier to scale up your publishing schedule. Where you used to publish a new post once a month, with this approach, you can publish a post every two weeks.
You’re not sure where to start with creating templates, take a look at the most popular posts you have and determine if they are of the same type. For example, if you noticed that your most popular posts are case studies, you’ll definitely want to create a case study template to use in the future.
4. Create Stats Pages
Creating a stats page is a wonderful way to build backlinks without needing to do a lot of outreach. Those pages are optimized around your “topic + stats” keywords and the people who tend to search for those kinds of keywords are journalists and bloggers.
Typically speaking, when they use one of your stats in their article, they’ll link back to your stats page.
5. Reverse Engineer the Competition
When it comes to digital marketing, there is certainly a place for originality and creative thinking. But, it’s okay to copy what your competitors are doing and you don’t need the Google analytics password to do it. There are a number of tools that show you what is already working for someone else.
For example, if your main focus is link building, Detailed.com provides you with a list of where the top blogs in nearly every niche get their links from. Knowing this, you can craft a strategy that helps you earn links from those places to making it easier for you to compete.
Not sure what to write about? You can use BuzzSumo to see a specific site’s most shared content, to give you an idea of what resonates with their audience so that you can develop your topics accordingly.
6. Use the PBC Formula
Backlinko says the PBC formula is when you quickly preview what your post is all about. Then, follow it with a list of benefits that someone gets from reading your post. And finally, you finish the introduction with a brief call to action. Why does this approach work? your blog post introductions are important because they are the first thing people see when they land on your post. However, the majority of blogpost intros are way too long. Using the PBC approach keeps your intros lean and gives the user exactly what they want or need to keep reading the post.
7. Focus on Trending Topics
Trending topics are those that are popular, yet haven’t reached a super competitive point. If you’re tired of using tools like Google Trends, there’s a free tool, Exploding Topics, that’s helpful. In the last six months, covering the business and marketing categories, the “exploding” topics include local SEO, regenerative agriculture, YouTube hashtags, customer persona, and UX writing.
What’s cool about this tool is that you can set it for a wide variety of time frames – starting with one month and going all the way to 15 years. You’ll find that some topics are brand names, but if they are your competition, you can do an X vs. Y post to make use of the branded keyword and topic while still reaching your goals.
Let’s talk about other things you can do to improve your content marketing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
