Content marketing remains the most effective driving force behind every successful blog. Most bloggers fail to grow their blogs because they lack the right content marketing ideas and strategies.
As a matter of fact, content marketing is a game-changer when it comes to growing your blog. However, you need the right content marketing strategies for your efforts to yield the right results and help you grow your blog and beat the competition in 2020. In this post, we will look at 10 seasoned content marketing tips from the pros to help establish your blog as an authority in your niche.
What is Content Marketing?
Many people define content marketing differently. But let’s try to sum it all up here. Content marketing is a process that involves the creation of content to drive traffic to your site or blog, converting more visitors to customers, recording higher sales or simply to increase your brand awareness. Let’s see some content marketing strategies that can help you grow your blog in 2020.
1. Come up With a Unique Content Marketing Plan
No content marketing plan can succeed without a good plan. Before you go about setting up your blog and fine-tuning things here and there, you must conclude your content marketing plans and strategies since that is the sole determinant of how far your blog goes.
Your content marketing plans should include the type of content you wish to publish on your blog, how often you will publish new content, your target audience, the right voice for your content to appeal to your target audience, how to lure your target audience to spend time on your blog, other channels for advertising your blog, and several other vital points. It is important you write down every item on your content marketing plans and make sure you stick to your plans at all times.
2. Publish Content That Will Outlive You
Good content should be relevant even several decades after it was first published. This is the first and most important item in your content marketing plans. You will need to publish evergreen content if you ever hope to succeed with your blog. Evergreen content has certain features that make the reader engrossed from the first line to the last word.
For your content to pass as evergreen content, it must be unique and original in every way, useful, always relevant irrespective of time and season, thorough, very detailed and lavishly informative, and searchable on major search engines.
Publishing evergreen content with all the attributes mentioned above will go a long way to establish your blog as the most respected authority in your niche, increase your search engine rankings and bring the traffic you need to earn good money from your blog.
3. Always Write for Readers While You Optimize for Search Engines
As obvious as this might seem, many still do not understand its importance. When it comes to content marketing for your blog, focus on the readers while writing and optimize the content for search engines. Don’t forget search engines do not read content, people do. So, always write with the readers in mind.
However, these search engines perform the important tasks of ensuring people find relevant content when they rely on these search engines to lead them to authority blogs where they can find the information they seek on a particular topic.
It is important you pay attention to search engine optimization because nobody will find your great content if search engines can’t understand it. It is always a win-win situation to think of the readers while creating your content without downplaying the importance of search engine optimization.
4. Understand and Utilize the Relationship Between Content Marketing, Seo and Social Media
If you can make these three important tools work for your blog, then your chances of winning big with your blog in 202o become extremely high. You need the right content to boost your search engine rankings and the same great content helps you provide your social media network with the right information.
Whatever you publish on your blog is an important part of your SEO strategy and can be used on your social media handles as a part of your content marketing strategy. So, whenever you are thinking of creating new blog content, make sure the content agrees with your SEO and social media efforts.
5. Ensure All Content Are Relevant to Your Audience
Topic relevancy is one thing you can’t play with if you want to grow your blog in 2020. Your audience already knows what your blog is about and expects to get relevant information on that topic whenever they come to your blog. You will be shooting yourself in the leg by going off your niche to talk about things that do not relate to your topic and may have no relevance for your followers.
For instance, if your blog is a fitness blog, it won’t make any sense to deviate from unrelated topics and gossips about fashion icons or popular entertainment figures simply because those are the news trending everywhere online. Always stay on your lane if you want to be wowed at the number of shares your posts get on social media and the number of unique visits you record on your site whenever you publish a new blog.
6. Create Detailed Posts
A good blog post will help you reach more people and create wider awareness for your blog. You can’t create very short posts and expect to cover relevant information on that topic in one post. The best blog posts are lengthy and informative. Make sure your posts are at least 1000 words in length to increase their search engine rankings and shareability on social media platforms.
It is always better to publish one lengthy post with all relevant information about the topic you are talking about than to create several posts on a single topic. You can’t grow your blog with short posts that leave your readers wondering what the post was all about. And don’t always assume they will find the subsequent posts because most times they won’t.
7. Make Sure Every Content You Publish is Shearable
You may need to visit some popular share networks to help you learn more about topics and the type of content people want to see in your niche and share them with their networks. For instance, people searching for topics on health and fitness may be more interested in workout videos than written content. Such vital information will help you make necessary adjustments to your content marketing strategies to satisfy your audience.
Another example is the structure and type of articles and blog posts people would love to read and share. Researches have shown that blog posts with topics like Best 10 tips, Top 10 strategies, 10 ways to, best 10 tips for, how-to topics are shared more than others.
8. Format Your Content Well
Every good content must be well researched, original and unbiased in analyzing topics. Meeting these criteria is not even enough, your content must look good and attractive to the reader. No one would want to read badly formatted content. Always pay attention to factors like neat paragraphing, headings and subheadings, the right font size, etc. Good formatting has also been found to be good for your blog’s SEO rankings and acceptability on social media.
9. Publish Quality Content Consistently
Apart from ensuring all information you provide is accurate and up-to-date, another important tip you must follow is to maintain a consistent publishing timetable. Having a pre-defined publishing schedule will help you manage your time better, and also help you attract the most loyal fans and followers. Such fresh content means more visits to your site by search engines, more visits from your RSS feed, more visits from social media, and ensure your longterm loyal fans are always happy.
10. Keep Your Titles as Catchy as Possible
The title of your post is arguably the most important part of your content. A good title helps search engines understand what your content is about, helps social media understand your content, attracts readers’ attention and more unique clicks on your site. So, before you publish any blog posts, make sure the title is catchy enough and optimized.
As a rule of thumb, the best content incorporates texts, videos, and images for better results and conversion. Pay attention to these tips and watch your blog grow faster than you ever thought possible in 2020.