How is Content Marketing Related to Blogging?

You must have often heard of the familiar term ‘Content Marketing’ on the web. This term has gone viral since the trend of digital marketing and blogging came into focus. It is one of the strategic marketing approaches which is implemented in various online sectors such as, blogging, creating website content, etc. so that it can provide valuable information to the public in order to drive a profitable number of customers. Our today’s post is based on the relation between blogging and content marketing. But before that, let’s learn a little bit about content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is the practice of creating and sharing online content such as, blogs, videos, social media posts, etc. to invite a targeted audience with the objective to stimulate public interest in your products or services. This form of marketing is just like storytelling where you need to provide genuine and complete information on the subject so that readers can obtain firm knowledge of the topic and they might clear their uncertainties. Content marketing is not the strategy to promote your product only, where the authentic idea about your product goes missing, and the key focus stays on the product’s sale. That will not resolve customer’s issues, and hence, you’ll lose driving traffic towards your product. Content Marketing is used by the world’s most leading brands like Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, etc. and is also implemented by the small businesses because of its huge impact. Companies have derived increased sales, reduced costs, and more loyal customers from an effective Content Marketing strategy.

How is Content Marketing useful to Blogging?

Blogging is generally considered as writing and updating new content regularly on a blog to provide or share certain information or knowledge to readers. A few people blog just to share their ideas on a subject and seek no huge attention or have any targets except for a few followers. Whereas, the professional bloggers aim to drive a huge traffic along with monetizing their blog and selling their services/products to people. With Content Marketing, a blogger can transform their blogging approach with the crucial information that they previously missed out.

The serious bloggers focus on being productive by developing their marketing skills. With a wide range of content marketing tools and strategies, they aim to maintain their tasks well and lay the right foundation to improve their blog productivity. For a blogger, it’s highly significant to develop few external skills that a webmaster requires. This includes a good strategist, content creator, marketer, proofreader, copyeditor, website manager, designer, etc. And to implement these content marketing skills, you need to use the right content marketing tools.

Use the right Content Marketing Tools

The web consists of a wide range of programs and tools that can accelerate your blogging power. A program like Trello reduces the complication of planning tasks and making it easier to manage. You can schedule your blog posts and maintain your to-do list easily with this effective program. Another tool is Paper.li that helps you get the right content for your blog. Being a busy blogger and multi-tasking, you might hardly get any time to get content and ideas for your next blog post. So instead of searching for content ideas, subscribing to Paper.li will deliver regular content in your inbox. Paper.li fetches the fresh and new content from multiple resources and deliver them to your email. Similarly, the website Alltop.com collects blog feeds from the topmost blogs in the world that also helps you find the right content. Other comparable places are Feedly, Pulse, Quora, Reddit, and Twitter that would help you finding contents.

Develop the right strategy

Most people get confused in between the terms content strategy, content marketing strategy, and content planning. These terms sound quite similar, but people interchangeably use them pretending to be equivalent. According to Kristina Halvorson, content strategy is the ‘creation, publication, and governance of useful and usable content’. It helps businesses manage the content they have, and this goes beyond the content marketing strategy. Content marketing strategy is your answer to ‘Why?’ Why you are creating the content, whom you are helping, and how it will help the ones for whom you are writing the content. Most organisations build content for self-promotion and build an audience to increase their company revenue, reduce costs, and to drive more traffic. Your content marketing strategy will be the answer to your Why’s, and that will help you plan it better. On the other hand, content planning defines how the content will execute your strategy and who will handle this task. So before building your content plan, you need the right content marketing strategy.

Use the right platforms for announcements

This section especially applies if you are selling any of your products or services through your blog. If you do not use the right platform to promote your skills, then you won’t get your targeted customers who can use your product/service. A number of actionable channels like email marketing, news media channels, sponsored ads, etc. can help you promote your stuff. Besides these, a blog is one of the distinctive places where one arrives to look for new announcements and updates. So if you want to drive some extra traffic to your blog, apart from promoting your product or service on the blog, you’ll need to use the other external channels too. Meanwhile, blogs are considered as an excellent platform due to their promotional character. They can pull customers and make the content shareable and readable so that the readers don’t feel that your product is being advertised. Readers can also put their queries and feedbacks, and that makes it even more interactive and engaging.

Do not forget SEO

For a good content strategy, you need to apply the right SEO strategies in your content. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the heart of a content that takes it to the top of search engine rankings.Good contents need the right SEO to be implemented in it otherwise writing it would be totally useless, and you won’t get the audience reach as your content deserves. In that case, you can hire a good SEO service or agent who will optimise your content or you can learn SEO yourself by going through a number of resources on the web. Platforms like Moz, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, etc. can deliver the right SEO knowledge to you. It’s much better to learn it yourself rather than hiring an SEO expert and paying high charges. Be a webmaster and blogger, it’s good to be multi-talented, and this would be beneficial for the future of your blog too.

Follow a routine

A blogger performs multiple tasks which might lead to a stressful day and make you go beyond control. A successful blog should have a right schedule and proper routine. Creating a routine will help you boost your creativity and time management, allotting more energy to your brain. It helps you decide things and help you do things which are more creative in nature. By maintaining a routine, you are enabled to perform the extraordinary tasks and get active mental responses. So it’s better to make a habitual routine and get productively rewarded. Please note, whatever routine you create, should be aloof from any other activities. Avoid associating it with any other tasks and keep it simple and with limited tasks. Follow your routine consistently to make your habit stronger every day.

Follow a schedule

A systematic schedule is necessary to maintain your regular tasks and save time. Most bloggers carry a calendar to schedule their regular tasks or a to-do list that helps them manage the tasks and list them on a priority basis. Making a schedule helps you avoid the unexpected things, panic attacks, surprises, and makes your job done on time. It helps you give a vivid look at your future, and you learn how to prioritise your works and meet deadlines. For example, in the next two days, the first day you structure and complete a blog post and the second day, you promote and publicise the posts to various networks. This also indicates that a good schedule also helps in content marketing and growing your blog productively.

Listen to audience feedbacks and respond

Blogging is a kind of interaction, a conversation with your readers. It’s one of the techniques to learn what your readers are seeking, understand their queries, and respond accordingly. Most bloggers make a blunder of considering blogging a monologue, which isn’t right. Blogging is a form of social media where you should also listen to the media and provide them feedback. Besides promoting and marketing your blog, it’s necessary to form a community and discuss ideas, take others suggestions, and implement it accordingly. This will influence readers to share, comment, and like your posts and they would recommend others to read it.

Use Social Media Monitoring Tools (SMM)

The SMM or Social Media Monitoring tools are used to analyse, optimise, and track the growth rate of your blog content. This is one of the measures of content marketing because the social media has a huge role in crawling blogs and promoting brands. The web consists of a large number of social media software that contains hundreds of options and features helping bloggers tracking their blog’s social media presence. But not all of them offer the right services because a large number of bloggers have invested their money in those and ended up in confusions. According to an analysis by Kissmetrics, 42.9% of the users of SMM tools are Social Media Managers, and only the 10% are the Marketing Executives. Only a few percentage of people are concerned about social media integrations with SMM tools and about the metrics it offers. Further, 60.1% of the public are satisfied with the SMM tools and only 5.8% plans to switch from it. What frustrates a person with SMM tools are the time lag and inaccurate data it provides and the excessive bugs and confusion it creates at an expensive cost. Most bloggers use Twitter to avoid this confusion, and a maximum has derived accurate data out of it. So being a serious blogger, you can consider using a few of the best SMM tools such as Wildfire’s Social Media Monitor, AllTop, SocialMention, Twitter, Twitterverse Web Apps, etc.

Analyse your blogging objectives

Most newbie bloggers lack the strategy and objective of blogging. I have met many such bloggers who leap into this field just to make some money and quit when they find a negative outcome. So it’s significant to focus why you are blogging and what you want to derive from it. A blog should contain a number of crucial information that most readers crave for from it. You need to understand what readers look for, and this information can be obtained from interacting with your readers and keyword searching. Along with, you need to grow certain skills so that readers can trust your content. Many bloggers offer free ebooks, toolkit, and consultancy through their blog and they derive great results from it. This is because the readers are benefitted with the content bloggers provide, and they seek for more to come up. These bloggers know their blogging objectives, and hence, they can drive their blog to a greater position with this marketing technique.

Verdict

Great bloggers do not only just write content, but their key focus also lies on good marketing, interacting, and analysing. They gaze at their job with broad eyes and learn the key techniques to develop their blog with content marketing skills. They know how to be productive, accept your help, follow a motivational routine, identify the regions of the top productivity in blogging, listen to their audience, and know their objectives. In short, they know the best practices that make blogging influential. So if you want to enhance your blogging skills, then you should also follow these content marketing gems because, without attaining these, your blogging would be worthless.

Image Courtesy: Pixabay

Refs: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/developing-a-strategy/

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/03/bloggers-improve-content-marketing/

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/social-media-monitoring-tools/?wide=1

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