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If you’re like most bloggers, you’re probably wondering how you can produce huge results, the kind other bloggers retire doing. Or, you’re looking to gain a serious boost for your business via blogging, but not sure how to get rolling. Fortunately, this success isn’t just blind luck – it is the direct result of a series of efforts you can apply to your own blog.
If you’re like most bloggers, you’re probably wondering how you can produce huge results, the kind other bloggers retire doing. Or, you’re looking to gain a serious boost for your business via blogging, but not sure how to get rolling.
Fortunately, this success isn’t just blind luck – it is the direct result of a series of efforts you can apply to your own blog.
If you’re looking to increase your SEO, blogging is the first and most important step. According to HubSpot’s 2015 blogging frequency benchmark data, companies that blog earn 97% more inbound links than companies that do not. Additionally, companies that post more than 16 blog posts each month get roughly 3.5 times more traffic than companies that publish four or fewer posts each month. (We recently gained over 300 keyword positions in a single day—and it was 100% through our content & blogging.)
Read on to learn more about the SEO importance of blogging and how you can triple your SEO efforts through regular, high-quality posts.
When it comes to SEO, there is arguably nothing more important than blogging. In order for content to rank well, there has to be content in the first place and multiple industry leaders have shown that companies that blog regularly do better than companies that don’t.
HubSpot’s aforementioned blogging frequency benchmark data shows that when small companies with 1-10 employees publish more than 11 posts each month, their sites get three times as much traffic as companies of the same size that publish only one post per month. What’s more, sites with 11 posts each month earn twice as much traffic as companies that publish between 2-5 posts each month.
For slightly larger companies, the results are comparable: companies with between 26-200 employees that publish more than 11 posts per month get twice as much traffic than companies who only publish one post each month.
It’s obvious that blogging frequency really does matter and that, in order to boost traffic and improve SEO, you need to produce relevant, useful content on a regular basis.
One of the main reasons for this is that old blog posts stick around long after they’ve been published. In fact, when HubSpot conducted a study of their own blogging traffic, they found that 90% of the leads their blog produced actually came from old posts. That said, it’s possible to generate, in equal parts, traffic from both old and new content, as long as you know how to create content that is genuinely interesting and valuable.
Now that you know how important blogging is for SEO, here are 6 tips to help you blog better and produce better results.
This may seem obvious, but creating content is one of the most important aspects of SEO. This is because each post you write adds a new SEO page that has the potential to be crawled and indexed by Google. Additionally, each new post can be optimized for unique long-tail keywords which allows bloggers to create pages full of new ranking opportunities. Blogs also offer the opportunity for high-quality backlinks and plenty of organic traffic to your site.
If you do it right, every post you write can create high-quality traffic that gets you noticed. Unfortunately, most people don’t do this right. This is because they focus only on getting content written and distributed rather than creating viral content that maintains its value. The first secret to doing the latter is to make sure that your headlines are irresistible.
Eight out of 10 people read headlines while only two out of 10 read body copy, so you can bet that people will click through to your blog if you get your headline right. Need an example? Consider Upworthy for a moment. Upworthy launched two years ago and now boasts viral posts and 88 million visitors, which makes it more popular by visitor numbers than the Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Buzzfeed. The secret to Upworthy’s success? Attention-grabbing headlines first of all, and then minimal sharing buttons and the use of short, intriguing videos to grab users.
Once you’ve mastered killer headlines, you’ll want to ensure that your content is the correct length. At Express Writers, our blogs are generally between 1000-3000 words and Buzzsumo has found that its most popular posts range between 3000-10,000 words.
No matter how quality your content is or how shocking your headlines are, it isn’t going to carry you to SEO and sales success if it doesn’t pertain directly to your readers. This means that, in order for your blogging efforts to work in favor of your SEO standing, you need to understand your audience very well. You should know what they’re interested in and which problems they’re struggling with and you should be able to synthesize new content ideas that will help make their lives easier.
To get a better handle on who your audience is and what they want, use sites like Quora to get involved in niche-specific conversations and then head to BuzzSumo for help in creating and generating new ideas for content. BuzzSumo allows users to plug in keywords and see what other related topics have gone viral on social media. Another great tool for this same purpose is Ubersuggest, which is fantastic for generating ideas for blog posts and advertises itself as “Google suggest on steroids.”
It’s one thing for your posts to be attention-grabbing but it’s entirely another for them to hold their value throughout the months or years. This is where Evergreen topics come in. According to Moz, evergreen content offers “continued and sustained success.” To put it another way, evergreen content doesn’t rely upon passing trend and it doesn’t rely on the re-posting of old content. Rather, it uses foundational industry truths as topics from which to branch out. Examples in the world of blogging include “How to Blog – The Steps to a Successful Blog Start,” “Revealed: 19 Things to Know Before You Start a Blog” and ProBlogger’s own “How to Blog: Blogging Tips for Beginners.” These posts all take one evergreen topic (blogging) and offer helpful tips and tricks on the subject. Because of this, these posts aren’t going to come into and out of fashion. Instead, they will continue to be highly searched-for and will continue to be a major source of traffic for their home sites.
Long tail keywords are and have always been a big traffic factor for bloggers. Take Search Engine Journal, for example, who noted a huge 78% jump in traffic after optimizing their content for long-tail keywords. In order to optimize content for long tail keywords, it’s important to create extensively researched, lengthy, valuable content that utilizes your long-tail keywords in a natural way.
Since long tail keywords show you what your users are looking to do, there’s a high probability that content optimized for them will produce far better conversions than content that is not. Additionally, longtail keywords can help you understand how to better structure content in order to solve a searcher’s problems or provide value for their needs.
6. Use CTAs to collect emails
As of 2013, there were more than 3.6 billion email addresses worldwide with upwards of 247 million emails sent on a daily basis. According to many email marketing experts, for every $1.00 bloggers spend on email marketing tactics, they earn $42.00. If you need an example, you can think about QuickSprout, which created a revenue of $43k from one email blast over a single 24-hour period.
That said, it’s wise to collect emails every time someone visits your site. Do this through a special landing page or embed email popups or subscription forms throughout your blog. Accompany these with powerful CTAs and then use the gathered emails for email marketing down the road. In order to get the most emails possible, ensure that your site is structured properly and easy to use. This means that your site should be compatible for all devices and very readable (in terms of font type and actual writing). The site should also load quickly and be easy to navigate. When your site provides a positive experience for users, people are much more likely to click and subscribe than they would be for a difficult site that wasn’t intuitive.
While increasing SEO can be confusing, it’s obvious that blogging does in fact have a large impact on SEO. Follow these 6 tips to help you blog better, increase SEO rankings, and make more sales. Happy blogging!
Julia is a serial entrepreneur and content marketer, and the founder of Express Writers; she loves to blog and is a soon-to-be published author.
In a world of digital marketing that’s 24/7 with ubiquitous connectivity from anywhere, anytime, marketers’ need for tools is greater than ever. Content Marketing in particular offers a competitive landscape where the effectiveness and efficiency offered by the right mix of tools can make the difference between feast or famine.
There are many categories of content marketing tools since content and consumer pursuit of information is the backbone of the web experience. Here are some of the content marketing tool categories that come to mind (not too different than a high level list of marketing tools actually).
Obvious content marketing tools include the class of enterprise platforms and services that many large brands are using including Contently (content marketplace), Kapost, NewsCred, Skyword and Percolate (content marketing software), UberFlip (content marketing automation), new content marketing platforms like the one from Curata and much anticipated tools like Cintell (customer intelligence).
Wisdom of the Crowd – I’ve published lists of content marketing tools here in the past but these sorts of resources warrant regular updates. In addition to the near-daily pitches I receive and my own research, I reached out to my network on Facebook for new content marketing tool suggestions.
The result? An A to Z list (and then some, 45 tools in all) of new and many not so new but highly useful content marketing tools to help you solve content planning, creation, promotion and measurement challenges. This is by no means a comprehensive list but it is a collection of the content marketing software companies that are top of mind amongst my own social network.
Atomic Ally – Content scoring tool to customize for specific audiences.
Buffer – Content promotion scheduling, analytics and team collaboration.
BuzzSumo – Content social media research, alerts, links and influencer discovery.
Canva – Web based visual content design tool with stock photos.
CoSchedule – Content editorial calendar plug-in for WordPress offering workflow and analytics for blog posts and social shares.
Curata – Content curation and content marketing platform.
DivvyHQ – Web based editorial calendar with content planning and workflow.
Evernote – A multi-platform app that captures text, images and video synchronized to the cloud and across devices.
Flipboard – Create a curated online magazine.
Grammarly – Grammar checker app for the Chrome browser.
HemingwayApp – Web based, dynamic text editing tool.
InboundWriter – Predictive analytics for content creation and marketing.
Jing – Desktop software to create content recorded from your computer screen as images, animation or video.
Kapost – Content marketing platform.
Keywordio – Find topics in demand on search engines.
KISSmetrics – Connects all data to a person. See the entire customer journey —across campaigns, web and mobile.
Leadfeeder – sales lead generation tool for B2B companies that shows you which companies visit your website and what they do there.
Leadin – WordPress CRM & lead tracking plugin with analytics.
MeetEdgar – Social content scheduling (by category that recycles shares).
NewsCred – Content marketing software.
Oktopost – Social media content distribution tool for B2B.
Over – Mobile app for adding artwork and text with creative fonts to images.
Piktochart – Web based infographic creation tool.
Prismatic – Social content recommendation tool.
Qzzr – Create and embed quizzes in your content.
Resonance – Content retargeting tool.
Scripted – Written content marketplace.
Scoop.it – Content curation, blogging and social promotion platform for small businesses.
Scrivener – Mac software for structuring, writing and editing long documents.
SEMRush – Discover what topics and keywords are driving traffic to your competitors’s content.
Share as Image – Microcontent creator and sharing tool for Chrome that turns text into an image.
Shareist – Research, curation, scheduling, and page creation tools for social media channels, blogs, and email newsletters.
ShowHows – Tool for making embeddable content focused on step by step instructions.
SlideBatch – Curate embeddable “batches” of any kind of content or media with customized layouts that display on any device
SlideShare – Content hosting and lead generation.
Sniply – Share other people’s content in a way that drives traffic to your own content.
Stipso – Dynamic user generated infographics with embedded social shares and call to action features.
Trello – Visual organization tool.
Uberflip – Curate content, design an experience and convert with offers using this embeddable content hub.
Videolicious – Easily create videos using a mobile phone with easy social sharing and centralized dashboard for review and publishing.
Viraltag – Pinterest marketing tool and platform.
Word Swag – Mobile app for adding text with creative fonts to images.
X – What? There’s no content marketing tool that starts with the letter “x”? Seems like a nice marketing opportunity!
Youzign – Basic web-based tool for creating marketing graphics: facebook covers, twitter covers, YouTube channel art, infographics.
Zemanata – Content ad platform for amplification.
Other content marketing tool resources:
A big part of compiling this list of tools was a group effort – participation marketing in action! Thank you to these fine folks from my Facebook network for their content marketing tool suggestions!
Andrew Davis, Brian Fanzo, Bhupesh Shah, Kelly de Vooght, Ian Cleary, Marc Meyer, Robyn Tippins, Bas Van Den Beld, Jay Baer, Tamar Weinberg, Teri Ross, David Brown, Kristi Hines, Lisa Picarille, Ashley Combe, Kristie Wells, Cari Bugbee, Shel Holtz, Tom Martin, Susan Emerick, Janette Speyer, Angie Schottmuller, Ann Handley, Martin Jones, Susan Beebe, Kimberly Reynolds, Corey O’Loughlin, Stephanie Losee, Cindy Turrietta, Bernie Borges, and Susan Bratton.
What content marketing tools have you discovered recently that really WOW you?
But there are other advantages to adding closed captions to videos not just for long-haul flights but for video as a whole and its use in the digital world. Some video marketing statistics for 2015 courtesy of Eric Guerin is the founder of Adelie Studios.
Closed captions are the text version of speech being spoken in the video and “closed” means that is it a choice for the viewer to select the option for “closed captions”. Video captions are also useful when in a quiet environment and the sound is required to be muted for example in hospitals or when it is difficult to hear what is being said.
Subtitles, however, are used for translating a foreign language on a video into another language for example English to Spanish or French to English. Closed captions are required for broadcasting on Television while subtitles have more specific constraints on them for their use.
So as video is such a powerful tool in this digital age video captioning can bring more awareness of your video’s existence in Search Engine Results Pages. Just adding an accurate transcript to your video gives so much more information to Search Engine bots it will rank higher over others with just the basic title and possibly a brief description.
In YouTube, you can edit the speech of what is being said by the person or persons in the video. However, this can be quite time consuming if it is a quite a lengthy video and you are not a transcriptionist or typist! Hiring a transcriptionist can be a cost efficient way and of one of the easiest way you can immediately enhance your video’s awareness to search engine bots.
Accurate closed captioning and subtitling will not happen without a conscious effort and a great deal of time. Virtuadmin Transcription can assist and provide you with “error-free” closed captions.
How can you avoid common errors for video closed captioning? Hire Virtuadmin Transcription for your business transcription services for companies of all sizes — we will assist you with any queries you might have about how to add closed captions and subtitles to your videos or a closed captions file for you to upload at your convenience.
What is your opinion of closed captioning? Do you use closed captions or subtitles with your business or marketing videos? Why do you or why do you not? Please let us know by leaving your thought and sharing this article with your colleagues and business connections. Visit our website www.virtuadmin.uk or comment on this post, it would be great to hear your views.
– J. Doughty | Virtu@dmin
6th February 2015