This sounds simple, but sometimes it’s too easy to forget that market research should be the foundation for creating a high quality content marketing strategy. Duh.

Seriously though, investing time and energy into product research, market research, and connecting with people working and living in the area of concern is overlooked time and time again.

Rand Fishkin of Moz SEO, recently posted a great video blog  about the importance of research and analysis periods before starting a content marketing project. In his post, he says, “[People often] put something together that they hope will achieve their goal of reaching a new audience, of getting promoted, but it falls flat mostly because they had the idea before they talked to anyone else. Before they realized whether anyone else was interested, they went and built it…That’s actually kind of a terrible idea.”

Here is 5 ways to create better – more strategy driven content based off of some of the ideas Rand outlines in his recent post.

1. Learn about the industry you plan to work in.

Rand says, “This is going to be dozens of hours of research to understand the niche before you can effectively create content for it. That’s something where it isn’t just an on demand kind of thing.”

2. Learn about the community you plan to work with.

This is going to consist of many hours browsing through topic forums, YouTube channels, blogs, and magazines getting to know the people using and buying certain products or services. The one not so exhausting characteristic about this step is all of the aforementioned resources are easy to find and free or cheap.

3. Before you create any content, know that it would be unique and others would actually share it.

This is where having connections and being able to reach out and shake a hand come into play. Simply asking for an insider’s opinion sounds to easy, but it’s commonly overlooked. Also, if you’ve been doing your research, you should have an idea of what your audience is needing and wanting.

4. Visual and/or interactive content is going to perform a lot better than text.

Images are memorable.

5. Cater to an audience that will help you reach your business goals.

Creating content for the purpose of driving leads and closing deals involves a completely different strategy than creating content that drives traffic and builds brand recognition. The easiest way to explain this is: content that go viral usually don’t end with “sign up today.” Viral content is usually short, simple, universally understood, and instills strong emotions. Content that that drives leads is mostly analytical and logical.

In conclusion, if you’re going to do it, do it right the first time. Investing in research periods may be costly, but a content strategy that falls flat is always a waste.

If you need help developing and implementing a high quality content strategy, contact Clix. We’d be happy to help!

The post Simple Sharable Content Is Hard to Make appeared first on Clix.

Content becomes the link connecting businesses to customers. Storytelling sets the tone for their engagement. Blogs, social networks and video-sharing sites inform, entertain and empower your best prospects and clients. – Trond Lyngbø

Content Marketing can address every stage of the sale funnel.

Well planned Content Strategies should have a piece of content for everyone at every stage of the sales cycle. This includes everyone from the general public all the way to yesterdays customers.

First, by creating easily shareable content for the general public or even people just beyond the upper limits of your sales funnel, you can actually help your entire site gain domain authority by attracting more monthly visits, acquiring more backlinks, and increasing activity on social media channels.

Secondly, by raising awareness, answering questions, and addressing concerns Content Marketing can aid prospects through each and every phase of the sales cycle.

Lastly, just because a person has already purchased your product or service doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be addressed in your marketing plans. Content can be produced to keep people coming back again and again. Pieces centered around continuing education, product updates, or even company updates, can help ensure customers will recommend your business to their friends and family.

Content Marketing not only informs people, it can convert prospects.

In reference to my previous point, Content Marketing can help prospects build so much trust and confidence in your business’ product or service, they will be ready to purchase by the time they call in or visit a location.

The idea behind this concept is that your high quality content will qualify a prospect by clearly explaining every reason someone should buy your product or service. The content you’ve produced will in turn, nurture the prospect by addressing all of their concerns and answering their questions. Lastly, prospects will be ready to purchase because they will be well informed, know what they want, know why they want it, and now trust your brand.

Content Marketing helps you find out what is important to your market.

I know it’s a passive approach, but it still has value. Pieces of content can be used to gauge market interest. The more activity an article generates – the more your audience is concerned with that topic.

Be sure to remember, content can always be repurposed. Meaning, if you write an article that sparks a large amount of activity, host a webinar on that topic, create an infographic, or create a video blog. The main goal is to keep the ball rolling, generate even more exposure, and dig deeper into the market.

Content Marketing lets you tell your story.

This is something that Joe Corporate needs to understand. The internet has made finding and sharing sensitive information with the world incredibly easy. Using Content Marketing to inform people about your business, its morals, its agendas, and even its hiring practices can help everyone – including the general public – build trust, create understanding, and develop confidence in your company.

The post Why You Should Be Using Content Marketing appeared first on Clix.

A blog can be a great asset to a company because it can have a huge positive impact on its digital footprint. In general, blogging can be used to help earn traffic, build brand awareness, earn back-links, earn social shares, boost SEO, and grow your addressable audience.

Here are 5 pro tips for the beginning commercial blogger:

1. You get what you give – You can’t just set up shop and expect people to start taking you seriously. Start posting in online forums, comment on blogs and articles, start spreading your name around your industry. If you want to start earning traffic and gaining participation, you have to be a participant yourself. (Note: Be sure to follow the rules and guidelines of online forums and message boards. Spamming is usually not tolerated and you will severely damage your brand’s image by getting banned from online communities and message boards pertaining directly to your brand’s industry.)

2. Give shout outs – Align yourself with others in your industry by mentioning, quoting, referencing, and even challenging industry influencers. Shout outs are usually more effective if you associate yourself with people who are just a bit more influential than yourself. The big dogs may not give you the time of day, but a medium dog may appreciate the acknowledgment and want to continue the conversation.

3. Embrace early adopters – Build personal relationships with as many followers as your can, especially the early adopters. Follow these people’s blogs and interact with them on social media. Earn people’s respect in an effort to establish an advocacy group for yourself.

4. Host it correctly – Never ever use a subdomain or a separate root domain to host your blog. Reason being, you will lose your ability to generate domain authority and you won’t get the rankings boost that comes with that high authority. Keeping your blog in a subfolder of your main site is the best thing that you can do for your SEO.

5. Create everything yourself – Taking your own photos and generating your own images and  graphs adds validity to you blog. Even if your photos aren’t ready for TIME Magazine, going through the effort of creating original content will carry weight with readers.

Want more? Check out some more tips for beginning bloggers.

The post 5 Tips for the Beginning Blogger appeared first on Clix.

Blogging for SEO benefits can seem intimidating at first, but following a few simple guidelines can help you make the most of your posts for both the search engines and your readers. Once you have decided on a post topic that is interesting and relevant to your audience, it is important to increase the odds that visitors will stop to read and share your content.

Titles And Headings:

Titles and headings within your posts serve multiple purposes. They benefit SEO, organize the content, and make the post scannable. Titles and headings tell the readers (and Google) what the post is about.

Headings help organize the content within the post into categories or topics. This makes it easier for the author to stay on topic and easier for the reader to find relevant information.

Titles and heading make it easy for readers to determine whether or not to invest the time to read your post. It gives the reader the highlights without requiring them to delve into a series of paragraphs to find the right information. Think of heading like chapters in a book. Would you rather search through an entire book to find the information you need or skip to specific, relevant chapters?

Length:

The length of the posts will determine whether or not readers will take the time to explore your post. Anything of great length will turn away readers, as will posts with only a few sentences.

The minimum length of content should be no less than 250-300 words. Posts with fewer words will seem unimportant to Google, and decrease the value of the posts.

There is no formula for determining the optimum length, so it is important to write naturally. If you have a post of several thousand words you may want to break it down into a series of smaller posts. On the other hand, if you feel you do not have enough to say regarding a certain topic you can combine it with other relevant information at a later time.

Scannable Content:

One of the most important things for bloggers to understand is that most people will not take the time to read an entire post. In the fast-paced world of the internet, users want content that they can scan quickly. Luckily, there are ways to make posts appeal to these readers.

• Use bullet points. Rather than typing out a long list of points, call them out in a way that is visually appealing to visitors.
• Number your points. Structuring a post around a concept like “Top Three Ways To…” gives you the perfect opportunity to number your points in an easy to read manner.
• Avoid long paragraphs. Forget the five sentence paragraphs you were forced to write in school. Online, 3-4 lines of text, regardless of the number of sentences included, is all that should be in a paragraph.
• Limit lists. Readers are not interested in more than 10 points per post. More facts become too difficult to navigate and remember.
• Dress up the text. Using features like Bold, Italics, and Underlining makes it easier for readers to find keywords and topics while scanning your posts.

Media:

Visitors love media. Videos, images, and infographics can increase the appeal of your posts and help prevent visitors from skipping a post. Make sure you complete the title and alternative text for images and videos so they will be found in Google search.

Images also are the most widely shared content on the internet. A quality photo increases the chances that visitors will share the content and build natural links.

Linking:

Links help Google understand how your blog relates to other content on the web. Linking can be used internally (to other pages on your site) or externally (to pages on other sites). External linking can occur any time you mention information found on another site.

The post Blogging Tips For Beginners appeared first on Clix.

 “It is a fantastic strategy to build your brand, get in front of new people, earn some links back to your site, and earn the recognition from other communities that can lead to all sorts of good marketing opportunities in the future.”

While Rand is most certainly correct, there are some things that you need to keep in mind before offering your content to blog owners.  As with anything, you want to make sure you get the most out of your time and effort to ensure maximum productivity.

Do your research:

Before you start creating content for a guest post, it’s essential to do some basic research. Make sure that you choose sites relevant to your niche.  If you’re creating content about kitchen remodeling, then you probably don’t want your content on a site that revolves around dentistry and oral hygiene.  That’s not going to do you any good, and chances are the blog/site owner will decline your guest post.

Finding blogs to guest post on is not too difficult.  Don’t make it harder than it already is.  There are some great tools out there that can help you find relevant, quality blogs to publish your content.  Do yourself a favor and check out sites like My Blog Guest and Guest Blog It.

My Blog Guest Members Forum

Reach out and build relationships:

Creating relationships is half the battle when it comes to guest blogging.  Reach out to blog owners and give them reasons they should be publishing your content on their site/blog.  Let them get to know you first, and be completely honest about your intentions.  People put a lot of time and effort into their websites, and thus they’re not just going to let some stranger come on in and publish content without digging a little deeper.

It’s also good to interact and leave well-thought comments on blogs that you’re wishing to guest post on.  This shows that you’re not just there to get content published and move on.  It shows you have a real interest in what’s being discussed.

Optimize your content:

Make sure you check the site’s guest post requirements.  Some might require author bios, pictures, minimum/maximum word usage, etc.  Once you’ve attained the guest post requirements, you’ll want to optimize your content for search engines.  Make sure to use target keywords/phrases in the title of your content.  As most SEO’s know, the title is one of the most important aspects of on-page optimization.

You’ll also want to make sure you use your keywords sparingly throughout your content.  DO NOT stuff keywords in your content, as Google has reiterated numerous times that you’ll get penalized for doing so.

Be careful when choosing anchor text for your backlinks.  It used to be very beneficial to apply target keywords in anchor text to acquire higher rankings for those specific keywords, and that’s still true to an extent, but don’t overdue it.  Be sure to mix in some “naked” or branded anchor text in your backlinks too.  This will help diversify your in-bound link profile, which Google Penguin loves.

Connect through social media:

Not only should you be sharing your blog posts throughout social media channels, but you should also be connecting with other bloggers on your social networks to build guest blogging relationships.

Find bloggers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc.  Follow them, like them, and add them to your circles.  Most bloggers have links to their social networks right on their blogs and blog posts.  They are there for a reason, and that is to connect.  Use them to build guest blogging relationships.

Thanks for reading and happy blogging!

The post Guest Blogging: 4 Ways to Amplify Your Strategy appeared first on Clix.

You’ve started your new blog, made a couple of posts and made it look all flashy and stuff.  Now what?  How do you get people to interact with you on social media?  The first tip seems rather obvious, but might be overlooked if you’re new to blogging.  Display your social media icons prominently near the top of your blog.  This will make it easy for your readers to connect with you on your social networks.  I say this is a great idea.  Next you will want to create a Facebook page for your blog specifically, this isn’t the first thing I would do, but it makes sense, it might drive your blog readers to be your fan on Facebook, which ultimately creates more interaction.

Some of the other tips included generating traffic with StumbleUpon, which is a recommendation engine; again this should be good for your blog as long as you tag things appropriately for random people to find your niche.  Using the same concept there are a few tips about using things you might already be using to promote yourself, such as sending your RSS feed to your LinkedIn account and using Pinterest.  You can even add a pin it button to your blog, to make it easy for your users to share your content.  If you can get people you already engage with to interact with your new blog, then others might join in.

Other tips were to use link shorteners, even when you don’t need to; this is so you can gain access to metrics.  Metrics are always good; this way you know who is clicking and when they are doing it.  Other things you can do is to use your blog name as your username, this will promote your personal brand.  On top of that you should join many blogger groups on Facebook, this will hopefully lead other bloggers to link to you, if you have good content, which ultimately builds social awareness of your blog.

On that same note, you should show some love to other bloggers as well, retweet them, share their content on Facebook, or repin their stuff, and hopefully they will return the favor.  The last thing you should remember is to stay on Social Media, continue to post and read everything you can.  This will help you make and maintain relationships and get new ideas for your upcoming blog posts.

The post Socially Interacting with your Blog Readers appeared first on Clix.