Our favorite channel, by far, is content marketing.
We don’t have to push people to become our customers, all we have to do is release amazing content and great prospects will come to us.
For many us, getting into sales or paid marketing just as appealing as being able to help people while marketing our business. We get the best of both worlds. Not only do we grow our business, we provide a ton of value and solve problems for people along the way.
It’s not all roses though, content marketing does have some downsides. The main one being how long it takes. To build an audience that loves our content, we have to invest a ton of time.
To help you get results sooner rather than later, we’ve put together a huge collection of guides below that detail every step of content marketing.
Content Creation
Creating content is no joke.
The first few pieces are always fun and exciting, then it turns into a grind.
One of the most intelligent decisions you can make is how you approach content creation. Setting the right frequency, not getting burned out, using reliable templates, and getting the most from every piece of content makes it much more manageable over the long term.
Before jumping in and getting burned out, go through these guides and put some thought into your long term content plan.
How to Write 5 or More Articles a Week and Not Burn Out
How to Create a Popular Infographic
Does Infographic Marketing Still Work? A Data Driven Answer
8 Tactics to Increase Sales with Video Content
Engagement
We all want engaging content.
That’s the difference between a successful content marketing program and one that’s dragging along without getting results.
If you spend the time to get really good at making each piece of content highly engaging, your entire program will light on fire. You’ll get endless shares, tons of word-of-mouth, and more links than you know what to do with. Engaging content is the cornerstone of any great content marketing strategy.
The Ultimate Guide to Creating Visually Appealing Content
9 Tips to Create Highly Engaging Content
How to Engage and Persuade People Through Storytelling
4 Ways to Make Your Content Gripping to Readers
30 Tips For Creating Content that Gets Shared and Discussed
Metrics in Google Analytics To Help You Make Better Content
How to Cut Your Bounce Rate in Half with Interactive Content
The 8 Underused Components of Compelling Content
How to Get 247% More People to Read Your Content
Content Creation Tactics That Will Amp Your Content’s Reach
Suck Your Readers In: 4 Types of Openings for Sticky Content
Formatting Tactics That Will Double Average Time on Page
Ideation / Topic Development
Another major sticking point for content marketing is the blank page. What happens when you completely run out of ideas?
And how do we ensure that our ideas will resonate with our audience?
Over the years, we’ve learned that it’s too expensive to simply produce a ton of content and hope for the best. These days, we use a number of processes and step-by-step formulas to quickly generate a ton of ideas that our audience loves.
Feel free to use all of them yourself:
10 Tips To Help You Find Interesting Topics in Minutes
7 Ways to Find Better Content Ideas
The Top 15 Ways to Come up with New Content Ideas
Generate Clickable Ideas For Content Marketing
Infographics
Infographics got really hot around the 2012-2015 period. It seemed like every infographic went crazy viral as soon as it was released.
Granted, they don’t pop quite like they used to but a great infographic can still cut through all the other marketing clutter. Especially since most folks aren’t producing them anymore.
5 Ways to Get Your Infographic to Go Viral
How to Enhance Your Content by Building Infographics
Productivity
Also take the time to dial in your personal productivity. With the volume of content that needs to get produced, any small productivity win pays huge dividends over time.
The Best Time to Think and Write Creatively
18 Tools for Better Content Creation To Improve Writing
Produce More Content in Less Time With These 6 Tactics
Templates for Quick and Easy Content Creation
6 Unconventional Tips to Create Content Faster
How to Double Your Writing Speed Without Lowering Quality
Quality
One strategy has never failed me: when in doubt, improve quality.
If you ever find yourself stuck with a struggling content marketing program, push on quality. Find a way to make it better than anything else that your competitors are doing. If you improve quality enough and maintain it for a long enough period, you will win.
Discover Whether Your Audience Is Bored with Your Content
6 Teaching Techniques You Should Know
7 Tips to Take Your Content From “Meh” to Amazing
Is Your Content Good Enough? 6 Questions to Find the Answer
A Method for Finding Out Whether Your Content Sucks
How to Take and Edit Photos Without Hiring a Professional
Examples of Truly “Epic” Content: How Does Yours Stack Up?
Scaling Content
Once you’ve gotten a content marketing program to work, the next major hurdle is scaling it.
Don’t take this step lightly, lots of folks stumble here.
At this point, you’ve spent countless hours honing your content skills. You’ve gotten pretty darn good.
But when you start getting contractors or employees to help, they’re not nearly as good. They’re also not as motivated as you were in the early days. And the folks that are really good? They’re either working on their own business or are too expensive.
When you first start scaling your content team, go slow and perfect every part of your process. These guides will get you up to speed:
6 Skills All Great Writers Have (and How to Learn Them)
The 15 Best Tools for Creating Content as a Team
How to Do Curated Content RIGHT: A Step-by-Step Guide
How to Create Content More Efficiently with Curation
11 Advanced Techniques for Repurposing Old Content
How to Run Contests That Encourage User-Generated Content
How to Leverage Crowdsourced Content to Grow Your Audience
How to Grow Your Business by Doing Less Work with UGC
Video
With every year, video gets bigger and bigger.
The best part is that it’s not nearly as competitive as other types of content for one simple reason: it takes a lot more effort to produce.
Yes, video costs have come down tremendously over the years. All you need is an iPhone for great quality video. But the editing
and production of video still take a ton of time. Since it’s going to be a much larger investment than other content types, make your video is as good as possible:
If a Picture Says 1000 Words, Then Video Is… Priceless
How Text Drives More Traffic Than Video Content
Written Word
Blog posts, articles, PDFs, and emails all form the core of any content marketing strategy.
Get good at these and you’ll always have a way to grow your business.
A Guide to Writing a Compelling Article Introduction
A Guide to Producing a 3,000-Word Article on Any Topic
The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Scannable Content
12 Content-Writing Secrets of Professional Writers
Learn To Write Content like a Pro
Content Marketing
Creating the content is one thing, spreading it is another.
Yes, if your content is unbelievably good, it will spread on its own. But I wouldn’t recommend depending on this. I’d much rather plan for the worst and hope for the best. I do that by marketing my content and helping it spread.
If I can kick start the content sharing process, then the quality of the content can carry it the rest of the way. Here’s all of our tips, ticks, and hacks to give content that little extra push.
8 Content Marketing Tricks Helped Dollar Shave Club Go Viral
How to Use Content Marketing For a “Boring” Industry
Create Content That Will Increase Your Traffic by Tomorrow
10 Tips to Make Content Marketing Work for Small Budgets
A Guide on How To Create a Guide That’ll Drive 360k Visitors
How to Create Content That Drives Sales
35 Content Marketing Lessons Learned
93 Content Marketing Tools You Need to Check Out in 2019
34 Content Marketing Tips Every Marketer Needs To Know
Build Audience Connections with Content Marketing
Distribution
What about the nitty gritty of where to publish and feature your content? Should you repost content? Reshare it? What about sponsored promotions?
We’ve broken down our recommendations on everything:
Should You Repost Your Blog Content on Other Websites?
Distribute Content Effectively Across Multiple Channels
How to Combine Native Advertising with Content Marketing
Leverage Basic Concepts of Sponsored Content to Boost Reach
Amplify the Reach of Your Content Without Spending a Dime
Create a Waterfall of Downloads for Your Ebook
How to Repurpose Your Content Across Multiple Platforms
Which Content Marketing Strategies Have the Biggest Impact
Strategy
The best way to ensure results from your content marketing is by picking the right content strategy to begin with.
There are quite a few strategies for content marketing, many of them work in different situations too. So take the time to research all the options and then pick the best one depending on your exact situation.
How to Easily Add Gamification Techniques to Your Content
7 Ways to Ensure You Maximize Your ROI From Content
Give Away Your Best Content, Your Business Will Grow by 290%
How B2B Audiences Engage with Business Content Online
How to Use Humor to Power up Your Content Marketing
6 Steps to Your First Content Marketing Plan
The Future of Content: What It Will Look Like
Create a Content Marketing System That Runs on Autopilot
7 Required Content Marketing Principles To Master
10 Quick Low Hanging Fruit of Content Marketing
One Insanely Actionable Content Marketing Strategy
How to Make Your Content Marketing Impossible to Copy
How to Use Social Listening to Create Viral Content
A Useful Framework To Produce Great Content, Every Time
Should You Outsource Content Marketing?
Is Your Content Marketing Profitable? Here Are 22 Metrics
3 Content Creation Strategies That Will Help You Prosper
How to Influence Purchasing Decisions
Get Your Boss to Invest More Money in Content Marketing
This is Your Brain on Visualization