In actuality, content marketing and social media marketing are two very different disciplines. But they do overlap, support, and complement one another in some fascinating ways. They’re also both essential parts of any thorough digital marketing strategy.

In this comprehensive guide to content marketing vs. social media marketing, we’ll touch on everything you need to know to knock your marketing goals out of the park. We’ll cover the differences between the two and let you in on some best practices for knowing when and how to apply each.

What is the Difference Between Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing?

Content marketing and social media marketing each play unique roles in reaching audiences. Content marketing is about crafting and sharing informative materials like blog posts, videos, and ebooks, usually on your own website. It aims to educate and engage specific groups over time. The goal is to build authority and trust by providing valuable content that appeals to potential customers’ interests and needs.  

On the other hand, social media marketing focuses on creating content tailored for platforms like Facebook and Instagram to interact directly and instantly with users, sparking conversations and building community. While both strategies aim to boost brand awareness and engagement, they target audiences and achieve their goals in different ways.

Both content and social media marketing serve your business goals by raising brand awareness, contributing to conversions, and putting your brand in front of target audiences. However, each does this in its own unique way:

• Marketing content most often lives on your website (or possibly someone else’s), while social content is created specifically for individual platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), or Instagram.
• Content marketing is about educating and influencing an audience, while social media marketing is about engaging audiences and starting conversations.
• Social content is typically ephemeral and short-term, while marketing content is usually long-form, in-depth, and crafted to be useful over the long term.
• Content marketing builds authority and trust, while social media marketing humanizes brands and makes them more relatable.

In other words, content marketing is more about long-term engagement and building trust through valuable information, while social media marketing focuses on immediate interaction and community building. The two concepts complement one another greatly, and you need both to make your marketing strategy work in today’s ever-changing digital landscape. However, this doesn’t change the fact that content and social media marketing are distinctly different.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic discipline that involves planning, crafting, publishing, and distributing targeted content to serve an audience, drive sales, and attract new customers while retaining existing ones. This marketing discipline involves a detailed process of planning, developing, and sharing content through various formats including blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, infographics, and long-form articles. This is done to engage potential and existing customers by offering useful content that meets their needs and interests.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of planning, creating, and posting content across one or more social media platforms to connect with target audiences in a personable, accessible way. Specific posts may aim to promote products, drive traffic, initiate conversations, build community, and make the brand appear more relatable and human.

Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing Have Different Objectives

All marketing strategies and tactics have clear, actionable goals, and this is just as true for social and content marketing.

Again, there’s some overlap between the two. Many marketers may even track and analyze the same key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the success of both. However, the primary underlying objectives are different.

Content marketing emphasizes the funnel and lead generation

The primary focus of content marketing is to draw potential customers into  the sales funnel and guide them through buyer’s journey. By providing valuable, relevant content at each stage of the funnel, content marketing helps nurture leads, builds trust and strengthens budding brand-client relationships.

Here are a few examples of some of the many ways this can look:

• Well-crafted blog posts, videos, or infographics—especially those with viral potential—attract and educate potential customers.
• Top-tier gated content like ebooks and whitepapers can generate high-quality leads at the top of your sales funnel.
• Robust email marketing content and ongoing blog content answer consumer questions and influence decisions as they navigate the middle of your funnel.
• Advanced content like webinars, how-to guides, online courses, and similar resources help establish the brand’s authority in the field and deepen trust with the audience.

This strategy requires high-quality copy to succeed, and services like Crowd Content provide robust copywriting solutions tailored to meet diverse goals across different niches and industries.  From crafting detailed blog posts for content marketing or engaging tweets for social media, professional copywriting services can truly elevate your brand’s marketing efforts.

Social media marketing emphasizes direct engagement with audiences

These days, social media is more than just a way to stay in touch with friends or kill a few minutes while waiting in line for coffee. It’s an important part of how consumers research purchase decisions and become aware of new product options. For that reason, a solid social media strategy is a key way for today’s brands to engage with existing and potential customers.

Here are some examples of how brands like yours leverage social platforms to satisfy this objective:

• Eye-catching social media posts draw attention as people scroll through their feeds, stopping them in their tracks and introducing them to new products or brands. This can make a memorable impact in a brief interaction.
• Successful posts start conversations, encourage sharing, and boost engagement rates. They broaden brand reach through compelling questions, call-to-action prompts, and interactive content like polls and quizzes.
• Becoming a regular presence on consumers’ social media feeds boosts brand awareness and raises the chance of a potential future purchase. This consistent visibility keeps the brand top-of-mind.
• Social media and regular engagement help humanize your brand and make it relatable.
• Many brands use social media to field customer service issues and address concerns directly. This helps in resolving issues efficiently and improves customer satisfaction and loyalty by showing that the brand is attentive and responsive. 

Which is Better: Social Media Marketing or Content Marketing?

Neither social media nor content marketing is definitively better than the other across the board. However, content marketing is better suited to long-term business strategies, while social media is ideal for more immediate results. A complete digital marketing strategy includes both and uses them in a way that complements one another.

Targeting audiences with content marketing vs. social media marketing

Both social media and content marketing require marketers to truly know their audiences. Market research, customer feedback, and tools like buyer personas can really help you here. However, how you apply these to your targeting efforts will vary.

• SEO is an audience-targeting staple with both types of marketing. Both leverage well-researched keywords to boost visibility in relevant search results. However, content marketing SEO revolves heavily around long-tail keywords and natural language processing, while social media SEO involves elements like hashtags for content discoverability and engagement.
• Content variety matters with both content marketing and social media marketing. However, while content marketing spans a wide array of formats, from written content to videos to podcasts, social media marketing will likely use a variety of content types suited for quick consumption (e.g., short videos, images and concise text posts).
• Techniques like audience segmentation are significant in personalizing marketing content and delivering the right options to the right people. With social media marketing, knowing how to create effective social media posts to suit individual platforms and playing the algorithm helps serve your posts to the right folks.
• Paid advertising can be helpful in both types of marketing to support ongoing organic efforts and drive quick bursts of traffic as needed.

Content marketing and social media marketing engagement models

Although driving engagement is one of the primary objectives behind social media marketing, it’s still essential in content marketing. Engagement can be any interaction an audience member has with a piece of your content. Examples include likes, comments, social media shares, link click-throughs, subscription sign-ups, and long dwell times.

Methods for driving engagement across both types of marketing include examples like the following:

• Investing in dynamic content that stops people in their tracks and demands attention, including unique social media posts, in-depth blog content, and exciting videos
• Inviting audiences to participate in top-tier interactive experiences to boost information retention and brand recognition
• Leveraging social proof like user-generated content, testimonials, and case studies to enhance credibility and trustworthiness
• Actively inviting readers and followers to offer their feedback, occasionally offering incentives in exchange for doing so
• Outsourcing portions of the content production process to streamline workflows while keeping quality high

Techniques and approaches like these work, and numerous case studies prove it. Here’s a brief overview of a couple to consider as you plan your next marketing move.

INK’s traffic success story

INK was looking for a way to show rather than tell their customers that their content optimization tool can move mountains in SEO, so they turned to Crowd Content for help.

We worked with them to craft a strategy that involved creating a series of fully optimized blog articles and measuring the results to create impressive proof that INK’s tools perform as advertised. As a result, INK saw an incredible 1700 percent increase in blog traffic in just over a month.

GLOBO’s success with content variety

Variety is more than just the spice of life. It also lends flavor and interest to your collective digital marketing campaign. The language-support company GLOBO needed help with its messaging and encouraged more readers to become service subscribers.

Creating a strategy that tailored content to cater to customers at various stages of the sales funnel worked. GLOBO’s website views jumped by 200 percent, and brand messaging improved accordingly.

Craftjack’s smart use of outsourcing

When keeping up with your ongoing marketing demands is more than your team can handle on its own, outsourcing content can be a fantastic option to consider. Lead-generation company Craftjack needed a go-to way to keep their marketing content flowing smoothly but couldn’t handle the job alone.

Partnering with Crowd Content gave Craftjack instant access to experienced niche writers, skilled project managers, and eagle-eyed editors who banded together to boost production. Craftjack was even able to connect with skilled Spanish-language writers to better reach another sector of their client base. The result was a 70 percent increase in organic traffic over a year.

When to use content marketing

Brands can lean into content marketing at any stage of the sales journey to help accelerate progress toward goals, connect with new customers, and keep existing audiences engaged. Some objectives that would make that an excellent choice include:

• Establishing industry expertise and authority
• Raising overall brand visibility, primarily via Google and other search engines
• Elevating SEO rankings and staying competitive on key search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Drawing new users and readers into the top of your sales funnel by showing how your brand can solve their problems
• Strengthening existing relationships by delivering valuable ongoing solutions

You can brainstorm and create better, more effective marketing content by implementing strategies and best practices like the following:

• Deliver value that goes above and beyond what your competitors are doing. Demonstrate how your products and services can uniquely solve problems and improve your customers’ lives.
• Use tools like surveys and buyer personas to develop a deeper understanding of your audience’s preferences, challenges, and behaviors. This will allow you to tailor your content more effectively to meet their needs.
• Create a detailed content calendar and follow it to the letter to keep your content efforts focused and the quality consistent.
• Offer lots of variety to keep your content flow fresh. Think videos, infographics, webinars, podcasts, and ebooks in addition to standard fare like blogs.
• Extend the reach and lifespan of your most successful content by updating it with the latest information and repurposing it into different formats. For example, a popular blog post can be turned into a video tutorial or an infographic that allows you to reach a broader audience.

When to use social media marketing

Social media marketing is a solid way to stay perpetually connected with your customers and create exciting ongoing conversations about your brand that attract plenty of fresh leads. Business objectives that call for a greater focus on social media marketing include:

• Identifying demographics and markets that could be a solid fit for your products
• Embracing cost-effective ways to get more eyes on your marketing content and drive traffic to your website
• Generating useful analytics that can help you optimize your entire marketing strategy
• Engaging directly with your audience on a one-to-one basis
• Providing better, faster, more robust customer care options
• Building overall brand awareness and recognition

Make the most of your social media marketing efforts by considering best practices like the following and looking for ways to integrate them into your strategy:

• Meet your audience where they live by building a presence on the platforms they frequent most.
• Fine-tune your approach to social media marketing to suit each platform. What works like gangbusters for Facebook posts may not resonate the same way with your TikTok audience or your Instagram strategy.
• Explore influencer marketing to tap into readymade audiences that fit your products and services perfectly.
• Encourage and share user-generated content to show social proof that people already love what your brand is doing.
• Chime in on hot topics and trends related to your industry or niche. ​​This keeps your content fresh and relatable, and can help attract new followers who are interested in those topics.

Examples of Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing

Remember that neither content nor social media marketing is about just one thing. Creative, novel approaches that combine multiple approaches often yield the best results. Here are some popular examples of approaches to content marketing:

• Blog posts
• Email marketing
• Ebooks
• Infographics
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Whitepapers
• Case studies
• Interactive content experiences

Popular approaches to social media marketing to mix, match, and try include:

• Influencer marketing
• Community creation
• Contests and giveaways
• User-generated content
• Sponsored social media posts

How Can Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing Work Together?

Content marketing and social media marketing work hand in hand to boost your digital strategy. Sharing your blog posts, videos, and other content on social platforms not only increases visibility but also engages your audience effectively. Social media offers a direct way to gather quick feedback and encourages your followers to share their own content, increasing engagement further. By combining these strategies, you can leverage each to maximize your reach and interaction, making your marketing efforts more dynamic and effective. 

Here are a few key examples of how content marketing and social media marketing go together as beautifully as peanut butter and jelly:

Promoting marketing content

Leveraging your reach on social media is an effective way to amplify the reach of your content, make audiences aware of new product drops, etc. Share articles, your latest blog posts, etc. Content like infographics and videos translate exceptionally well to engaging social media shares and extending your visibility beyond your immediate followers.

Zeroing in on an audience’s wants and needs

Social media is a fantastic way to acquire valuable feedback on what your audience really thinks. You can ask them directly for feedback on specific products, ideas, or content. You can also utilize solutions like social listening tools to follow conversations about your brand across multiple platforms.

Getting audiences involved

Your audience is likely one of your arsenal’s most powerful untapped marketing resources. Mobilize them by encouraging them to create and share user-generated content like photos or videos on social media, asking them to share your content to their feeds, etc.

Effective Strategies for Leveraging Both Content and Social Media Marketing

Investing in your content marketing and social media marketing campaigns separately is a solid start to making the most of both. Combining these two strategies can result in a more cohesive and powerful marketing approach. Here are some expert strategies to try.

Keep your tone cohesive across both

Brands are just like people in that each has its unique personality, voice, values, and approach to connecting with others. It’s crucial that those characteristics are consistent across all platforms. This consistency ensures that your audience receives a unified brand experience, regardless of where they interact with your content..

For example, a customer should be able to visit your Facebook page or X profile and consume content there that “feels” the same as what they’re already reading on your blog or in your email newsletter. If that’s not the case for your brand, now is the time to tighten things up. Check out how brands like Wendy’s, Go Pro, or Nike handle this and get inspired.

Integrate both into your content calendar

Thorough planning as far in advance as possible is the key to an ongoing content strategy that really cooks. Content calendars take the guesswork out of managing, planning, and creating content, especially as your business grows and you take on additional team members to help with various tasks.

Include both your marketing content and your social media posts. Identify opportunities to combine the two in creative ways that serve your audience. As always, ensure that everything you plan fully aligns with your brand voice and company values.

Cross-promote content where it makes sense

Social media posts and standard content work better together than you might think, and there are plenty of opportunities for cross-promotion.

For example, you can promote your latest blog posts and product launches across your social media channels using engaging visuals like screenshots, infographics, or custom imagery to grab attention and add value. You can also embed tweets and YouTube videos or add screen grabs of various social media posts to add visual interest to your blog posts and written content.

Find creative ways to repurpose content

Keeping multiple content channels and social media profiles perpetually filled with terrific content is no easy feat, so it pays to do what you can to make your best ideas go as far as possible. Content repurposing is one highly effective way to do that.

Here are some examples of how creative content repurposing can work:

• Break down YouTube videos and how-to guides into graphic sequences you can post to Instagram.
• Sum up key points and important takeaways from popular informative blogs in an infographic you can share on Facebook, Pinterest, X, or Threads.
• Expand your best long-form blogs into ebooks and use social media to promote them.
• Repurpose long-form content into social media-friendly short-form videos.
• Translate a popular webinar or e-course into a series of Instagram reels or TikTok videos.

Hire experts to help you

As your business grows and the demands on your content strategy increase, considering outsourcing to maintain quality and innovation can be beneficial.  Some people purchase pre-written articles to help fill in crucial content gaps.

You can also hire a trusted full-service content creation service like Crowd Content to help you with the entire process. We’ll help you manage the workload and inject fresh ideas into your strategy.  We’ll also provide assistance that cover  everything from dynamic web content to engaging social media posts to expert content management.

Benefits of Integrating Social Media Insights into Content Strategies

Insights gained from your experiences engaging with audiences on social media can be priceless assets when it comes to fortifying your content marketing strategies. You can get a read on what your audience truly likes and dislikes, as well as how they feel about various content approaches. You can then apply what you learn to reap benefits like the following.

Higher engagement rates

When you know for sure what your audience is genuinely into, you can apply what you know to create more of the kind of content your customers like best and find most useful. Applying these insights allows you to tailor your content more precisely, producing material that not only attracts attention but also encourages interaction. 

Stronger brand loyalty

Think of someone you know who’s always there for you—who always has the right answer to your questions and the best advice on a particular topic. You trust them, and you’re loyal to them, too. That’s how consumer relationships with brands develop through similar dynamics, and using social media insights wisely can help that happen for your business.

Improved SEO

Forms of social media-related engagement like shares are powerful signals to search engines that a brand is putting exceptional content out there. Using what you learn about your customers on social media to boost engagement drives traffic to your website and enhances your greater SEO efforts.

Higher overall ROI

Both content marketing and social media marketing represent investments in your business. It’s not just about money or budgets, either. Time, labor, and mental energy are resources, too, so facilitating a high return on that investment is crucial. Integrating social media insights into your strategy can help you hit the right notes more often, sending your ROI through the roof.

Budgeting for Each Approach

No two brands are exactly alike, and neither are any two approaches to digital marketing, so costs can vary for individual campaigns. However, average costs range between $6,000 and $60,000 a month for a content marketing campaign and between $500 and $5,000 per month for a basic social media management campaign.

Opting for a scalable approach via a company like Crowd Content can ensure you get the most bang for your buck right out of the gate and on an ongoing basis.

Ultimately, neither content nor social media marketing fits your company’s digital marketing strategy better. You need both to stay competitive and keep your finger on the pulse of what modern audiences are looking for. Exploring opportunities to leverage how they complement one another can eliminate the confusion of both processes.

Ready to dive into your future success and get more out of your marketing strategies? Let Crowd Content help you fill in the gaps and create something truly dynamic with quality content services on demand.

The post Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: Key Differences and Which to Use When appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Integrating well-crafted content briefs into your ongoing process helps important elements, such as brand voice, quality, and format, remain consistent from one piece to another. But there’s an art to writing truly efficient briefs and setting your content production team up for lasting success. Content brief examples, templates, and similar tools can help.

We cover everything you need to know to create amazing content briefs and use them to elevate your brand. This includes a look at today’s best practices and some effective content brief templates to inspire and guide you.

What Is a Content Brief?

A content brief is a set of guidelines or instructions for producing a specific piece of marketing content. The objective of the brief is to ensure content writers fully understand how to approach the piece so the final product meets requirements and expectations.

A brief can be long or short, simple or detailed. In cases where a content manager wants a writer to put their own spin on the piece, a brief may read more like a set of guidelines than anything else. However, when content needs to meet specific SEO objectives or branding requirements, the brief may outline every detail of the expected results.

How Do Detailed Content Briefs Improve Content Quality?

Detailed content briefs enhance content quality by providing a structured outline and examples, which are essential for scaling and strategic planning. The benefits of a well-crafted content brief include:

Higher content quality

Content briefs are an effective way to ensure a team of copywriters or other content producers fully understand what’s expected of them when it comes to their assignments. These briefs clarify important requirements and factors, including keyword usage, target audience, point of view, delivery time frame, and structure so nothing’s left up to chance.

Faster production times

Well-crafted content briefs minimize the amount of clarification your writers need before they can get to work. They also reduce the likelihood of multiple revisions before the content is ready to be published, leading to a smoother production process for everyone.

Better brand consistency

Every writer naturally showcases their unique voice in their work, but brand consistency is important. Your content should read as one connected source, not as singular pieces with individual styles. You want users to have a cohesive experience when consuming multiple pieces of content or touching base with your brand across different marketing channels. Briefs help facilitate that.

Search engine optimization

A comprehensive content brief helps ensure maximum search engine visibility. Briefs take the guesswork out of proper keyword usage, search intent, formatting, readability, and user experience, leaving writers free to focus on fantastic writing. 

An edge over your competition

The world of content marketing is incredibly competitive, and amazing content is one key to standing head and shoulders above your competition. Thorough content briefs shed light on what competing content may be missing and offer tips for how the writer can differentiate their piece.

What Makes a Good Content Brief?

Fantastic content briefs don’t just happen. They’re the direct result of an organized approach to brief drafting that puts SEO and user intent front and center. The following are some of the qualities the best briefs have in common.

Clarity

Even the best content creators aren’t mind readers, so it’s important to be clear about what you want and expect from a particular piece. A concise content brief never leaves a writer guessing. It covers all the bases, so everyone’s on the same page.

Conciseness

There’s a fine line between being thorough and long-winded when writing content briefs, and good brief-makers never lose sight of that middle ground. Include everything the writer needs to do a good job without overcomplicating things.

ClearVoice perfectly demonstrates how to craft an effective ebook brief. It tells the writer everything they need to know without bloating the brief with unnecessary elements.

Honesty

Effective briefs don’t dance around issues. They get to the heart of the matter by bringing the writer up to speed about any potential challenges. Whether you’re looking to beat a particular competitor, win back lost customers, or something else entirely, a good brief is direct about the company’s goals.

Content Marketing Institute’s brief example excellently sets expectations and is candid about desired outcomes.

Key Components of an Effective Content Brief

The fine details of what makes a content brief effective vary depending on your company, niche, and content production strategy. But are there essential elements all briefs should have, and what are the most important parts of a content brief?

Well-crafted content briefs should include the following, regardless of industry or topic.

SEO keywords

SEO will always be a concern when crafting effective web content, so always include a complete list of keywords. Differentiate primary keywords from secondary keywords, and be sure to include any density requirements you want the writer to aim for.

Expectations for visual elements can also be defined in this section, including: 

• Image sourcing
• Inclusion of videos or other supporting media

Narrato’s content template example covers a variety of different SEO elements to ensure the resulting content achieves maximum visibility. Examples include primary and secondary keywords, internal and external links, meta assets, and more.

Marketing objective

Add information about the purpose of the content. Are you looking to drive traffic, raise awareness, close sales, or something else entirely? How should the audience feel when they walk away from the content, and what ideal action should they take next?

With a well-crafted brief, the writer knows exactly where you want to go with a piece and is better equipped to help you get there.

Target audience

Always include information on who the content is for. If it’s geared toward potential buyers, add details about where they are in your sales funnel or their unique buyer’s journey. If you mention the target persona in your brief, fine-tune your process by including specific buyer personas.

PayPal’s creative brief does an excellent job of defining many key factors a good brief should cover, including the target audience, with descriptive, clear explanations.

Style notes

Specify the approach you want the content creator to take toward tone, style, and point of view. Should the content be conversational or formal, light-hearted or no-nonsense? General notes on brand voice and style are useful, especially for new writers on the project.

Content structure

Include plenty of information on how the writer should structure their content via a content outline. Many content managers take a detailed approach to this, listing specific H2 and H3 headings and supporting elements for each section. Suggested anchor text and desired placement for internal or external links are also common additions.

Thruuu’s example brief shows a simple but effective method for outlining. It’s complete enough to give the writer plenty of guidance but leaves room for creative freedom.

Word count

Content length determines many things about a piece, including how in-depth the content will be, so always include a target word count. Some content managers look for specific lengths and tight word count ranges, but others prefer to give writers lots of leeway.

Call to action

Ending content with a clear call to action tells your audience what the next step is after finishing your content. Ensure the content creator understands your intentions by adding the goals of your content marketing to the content brief.

6 Content Brief Examples to Inspire Your Strategy

Naturally, you can approach a content brief in various ways. Some content brief types yield consistently solid results, but it’s important to compare successful examples to understand what works.

A good brief can be used again and again or adapted to fit any industry or content niche. Here are a few solid content examples to consider and draw inspiration from.

1. Content Folks

Content Folks’ brief is for a detailed content piece about content calendars that covers everything from their use to how to create your own. It covers everything a writer needs to write well on the topic, including brand goals and key takeaways.

The outline is also thorough, detailing recommended H2s and H3 and what points the writer should cover under each.

2. Brafton

The content brief template from Brafton covers a range of elements a writer should consider when crafting an informative piece for a target audience. Key examples include related keywords, internal links, and questions the audience should be able to answer by the time they’re finished reading.

This brief also gets specific about details important in certain marketing contexts — details like keyword density and specific key performance indicators to consider.

3. Zenbrief

Zenbrief’s brief for a food-focused blog is a terrific example of a brief that includes just about everything a writer needs to do a five-star job. And it manages to do so without appearing overstuffed.

It also helps that this brief is laid out in a way that’s easy for writers to peruse for the first time and refer back to as they work. Many writers return to content briefs repeatedly throughout the writing process to ensure nothing has been missed.

4. The Meta Blog

This simple but effective template from The Meta Blog is another example of how impactful a detailed brief can be when it’s well-organized. Organization is the key to making large amounts of detail and information easy to digest.

The table format makes the elements flow nicely from one to the other, closing with the outline and resource links. This brief is also commendable for including elements such as inspiration sources, target audience, and content goal. By showing writers what you aspire your content to look like, writers are given a foundation before they begin.

5. Wrike

Wrike’s template is everything a content brief should be—comprehensive, concise, honest, and easy to absorb. It’s also noteworthy for including fields that aren’t necessarily standard for all briefs but effective for industries such as healthcare or law, where specificity is essential.

The inclusion of “inflexible H2s and H3s” is also a solid addition, as this lets the writer know right away which headings need to be part of the content for it to hit the mark. Adding research link suggestions to a brief also helps ensure writers start on the right track.

6. Content Harmony

Content Harmony’s example brief presents the necessary information in a legible, logical order. It starts with the most important information a writer needs to begin forming the bones of the article in their head. It progresses through additional helpful elements, including key questions to answer and additional resources that may help.

This structure makes it easy to scale up or down from one brief to another. It even includes information about visuals that will be implemented later so the writer can craft their content around them.

How to Tailor Content Brief Examples for Different Objectives

Although it’s certainly possible to meet your content goals by using an out-of-the-box content brief example like the ones above, it’s possible to get better results if you customize them first and make them your own. Customized briefs:

• Help writers create content that better meets your unique brand expectations and business goals
• Improve communication between content managers and writers
• Save time and lower the likelihood of multiple revisions
• Facilitate mutually beneficial collaboration between team members
• Leave nothing significant up to chance

How Can I Create a Content Brief That Aligns With My Content Strategy?

Your content brief is your golden opportunity to tell your writers what you want them to know about your target audience, brand voice, or specific objectives related to that piece. Customizing your templates and examples is the best way to take advantage of that. Here are some tips to get you started:

Start with goals and keywords

All the best content starts with an understanding of the larger goals and intent behind the writing, so start by defining who the content is for and what it’s meant to accomplish. After that, focus on your choice of primary keywords.

Create a structured outline

Think about what format would best serve the specific piece of content and its purpose. For example, a how-to guide may lend itself well to bulleted lists or numbered headings, while a comprehensive guide might be a better fit for multiple H2 headings with supporting H3s and H4s.

When in doubt about what to include and how to approach the outline structure, look at content that’s already ranking well for your keyword. What formats are working for your competitors? How might you improve upon what they’re already doing while differentiating your brand?

The “People Also Ask” section of a Google SERP can also offer valuable insight into what to add to your brief.

Specify audience persona

When visualizing a piece of content, you may have a crystal-clear picture of your ideal reader in mind, but your writer won’t unless you tell them who they should be writing for. Including relevant audience personas in your brief helps your writer understand who will be on the receiving end of their content.

Provide a target word count

Although certain target lengths work better for some types of content than others, each piece should ultimately be as long as needed to cover the topic without dragging on. When building content briefs, you should never leave word count entirely out of the equation.

Be sure to include whether the writer has permission to exceed the recommended word count. Sometimes, a complex topic with a lengthy outline may lend itself to unpredictably long word counts, but that length may not be appropriate in every situation.

Include links to references and competing content

When writing SEO content, it’s helpful to have examples to refer to before getting down to business. For that reason, consider adding the following links to your briefs:

• High-ranking content competing for the same keywords
• Examples of similar content that’s well-written and hits the mark
• Specific links to references, data, or studies your writer should use

For best results, include additional information about what competing articles (or other examples) are doing well vs. where they need to improve. This technique helps the writer craft something that fills those content gaps left by your competitors.

Specify other requirements

Although many professional copywriters and content producers understand a thing or two about SEO, you shouldn’t leave things up to chance when it comes to elements like on-page SEO requirements, especially if you have specifics you need your writers to adhere to.

Do you need the writer to include one keyword at least four times but another with low search volume only once or twice? Put it in the brief — and don’t forget to specify the placement for the keywords, such as in a certain number of headers or specific sections within the content.

Tools and Resources for Creating Content Briefs

Here’s a closer look at some tools you can integrate into your repertoire for a more productive content creation routine.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT has drawbacks and weaknesses. However, one of its strengths is the ability to help create content outlines and briefs. Start with a target keyword, a working title, or both to prompt a starter brief. Then, tweak the results to fit your requirements.

Narrato

Narrato is an AI-powered platform that helps facilitate various aspects of your content creation workflow, including brief creation. It allows you to quickly generate SEO-focused content briefs, create content drafts, collaborate with team members, easily assign or manage tasks, and more.

Google Trends

Do you need help selecting your next round of keywords or zeroing in on a trending topic to post about? Google Trends is one of the more accessible tools out there for keeping your finger on the pulse of what Google users are searching for at any given time.

InLinks 

InLinks is another terrific tool for taking some of the headache out of your SEO strategy. Deploy a variety of different key SEO elements at scalable levels and build topic clusters with ease. You can even brainstorm, create, and implement a content schedule that includes all your marketing channels.

Crowd Content 

At Crowd Content, we offer a wide variety of resources to take the confusion out of drafting content briefs and facilitating an airtight content marketing strategy. We offer valuable e-books, checklists, content calendar templates, content services, and more to help you fill in the gaps.

Take your content creation strategy to the next level with our proven strategies and free content brief template, plus check out our comprehensive guide on the topic. With our assistance, you can watch your content strategy transform before your eyes.

Sample Content Briefs

Whether you’re new to drafting killer content briefs or simply want something to get you started in the right direction, a good content brief template is a reliable starting point. When you’re ready, elevate your results by developing your own custom templates based on the effective examples we’ve covered.

In the meantime, here are a few free and paid brief templates to try:

Free Content Brief Templates

The following brief templates are free to download and try.

Portent

This is a solid brief template that works well for various content types. It’s simple, user-friendly, and well-organized. However, the fact that it only gets into key SEO details further down may not be the best fit for optimization-focused content.

Avo

This Avo template is highly comprehensive and has multiple pages, so it’s a great option if you need something more technical. Some elements, such as link targets and CTAs, are still missing, so you may want to add them yourself.

Crowd Content

Our free content brief template covers everything needed to get the results you want from your content. You can use it to easily set crucial SEO parameters, create clear directives for your content, ensure maximum readability, and more. We make sure your briefs never miss a beat. Just tell us a bit about yourself first.

Paid Content Brief Templates

Ready to kick things up a notch and try a paid template? Try one of the following resources on for size.

Content Harmony

Content Harmony offers a solid template system that simplifies the process of creating briefs for a wide range of needs. Best of all, the briefs are fully customizable — a must if you’re serious about results.

Newcomers can get their first 10 briefs for $10 but need to sign up for the platform’s content management service after that.

Notion

Notion features an entire database of free and paid content brief templates to try. Some are available thanks to Notion itself, while others are the beautiful work of independent creators.

Many include additional assets for assigning tasks, tracking progress, and more. Pricing varies from template to template, averaging between $10 and $50. However, some options require a Notion account to access.

Now that you’ve mastered the art of the content brief, it’s time to take the next step toward content excellence.Crowd Content can help you take your next content creation strategy further with our top-tier content strategy service. Take full advantage of our dynamic content brief examples, leverage proven industry expertise, and learn how to better integrate briefs into your content strategy today!

The post 6 Content Brief Examples to Inspire Your Strategy appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Distribution is a powerful step of a well-constructed content strategy. After developing a solid plan and a clear understanding of your audience, distribution is the final touch that amplifies your reach and fuels success. 

As you continue reading, you will find valuable information in this guide that will help transform your content into a powerful business asset.

What Is Content Distribution and Why Is It Important? 

Content distribution is the process of sharing content across relevant online channels to maximize its reach. It’s the final step in your content’s journey, connecting your brand with your audience at the perfect time. 

Benefits of an effective content distribution strategy

Content creation is a labor of love. We get it. And a well-executed distribution strategy makes certain your efforts deliver results.

Meaningful engagement: Quality content sparks conversations. Getting people to talk about your content fosters brand loyalty and establishes thought leadership.

• Content distribution example: Say a marketing agency publishes an article on the evolving landscape of influencer marketing. Sharing it on LinkedIn starts discussions and debates in the comments section. This engagement establishes the agency as a thought leader and provides readers and potential customers with useful information about the industry.
  

Increase website traffic: Effective distribution strategies drive qualified traffic back to your website, ultimately bringing in more leads and sales.

• Content distribution example: An e-commerce company creates a comprehensive guide on “Essential Winter Hiking Gear.” Distributing it on outdoor enthusiast forums, with a clear call-to-action prompting users to visit the website for the full product range, can significantly increase website traffic. 
  

Enhance brand visibility: A well-curated and consistent distribution strategy across various channels keeps your brand top-of-mind with your target audience.

• Content distribution example: A bakery creates recipe videos showcasing its signature desserts. Distributing these videos on the brand’s YouTube channel as well as relevant food blogs and subreddits builds brand awareness and recognition. The engaging format and targeted distribution channels ensure the content resonates with specific customers who are actively searching for baking inspiration.
  

Better SEO: Distributing your content across authoritative websites can improve your website’s search engine ranking and drive organic traffic.

• Content distribution example: A legal firm publishes an informative blog post on “Understanding Common Clauses in Employment Contracts.” Uploading this content to legal resource websites and sites such as Quora and Reddit can generate backlinks. These backlinks act as signals to search engines that the content is valuable and trustworthy, potentially boosting ranking for relevant search terms.
  

Establish thought leadership: Consistently sharing valuable and insightful content across relevant platforms establishes your brand as an authority in its industry.

• Content distribution example: A financial advisor creates a series of educational videos on personal finance tips for young adults. Posting them on YouTube and Reddit positions the advisor as a credible source of information. As a bonus, it attracts potential clients who are actively seeking financial guidance.

Content distribution transforms content into a powerful tool for growth. It ensures your content reaches the right audience, sparks meaningful engagement, and drives real business results.

What Are the Three Types of Content Distribution Strategies?

Your content’s reach hinges on three distribution channels: owned, earned, and paid.

Owned channels: These are your digital properties, such as your website, social media pages, and email newsletters. They’re your content’s home base, where you have full control over the messaging.

Earned channels: You gain visibility organically on these channels. Picture your content being shared across social media, mentioned in industry publications, or linked to from other websites. This buzz of engagement builds credibility, boosts reach, and helps you establish a community.

Paid channels: Propel content using strategic investments such as paid ads on search engines, social media platforms, and sponsored articles. These channels guarantee visibility to a highly specific target audience.

Understanding the three distribution channels is essential for designing a content strategy that maximizes your content’s impact.

Maximize your content’s impact by refining your approach with Crowd Content’s Strategy Services. We highlight the crucial role of planning and creation before distribution, ensuring your content strategy is as effective as possible. Let us help you widen your reach, meet business goals, and engage your audience more deeply.

Click to review and enhance your content strategy now.

Let’s expclore the major distribution channels in depth.

Owned channels

Owned channels are your digital properties. You have complete control over the content, messaging, and distribution. They include your website, blog, social media accounts, email lists, and any other platforms you manage directly.

Here are some examples of how businesses use owned channels:

• Digital marketing agency: Blogs packed with industry insights and case studies solidify a digital marketing brand’s expertise. 
• Chain of retirement homes: Websites and blogs feature heartwarming resident stories, advice for families, and details on amenities.
• Freelance SEO specialist: An optimized website with compelling blog content is vital to demonstrating a freelance SEO expert’s prowess. 

How owned channels differ from earned and paid:

• Control: You decide what gets published, when, and how it’s presented. This allows for consistent brand messaging and targeted content.
• Audience: Owned channels tap into your existing audience of followers, website visitors, and subscribers, strengthening relationships.
• Sustainability: While requiring ongoing effort, owned channels often provide the best long-term return on investment compared to reliance on paid tactics.

Who benefits the most from owned channels? 

• Businesses of all sizes: Owned channels form the backbone of any digital marketing strategy.
• Brands building trust: Consistent, valuable content nurtures a loyal audience that views you as reliable and credible.
• Audience engagement: Direct two-way communication through comments, social media interactions, and email fosters a sense of community.

Pros of using owned channels:

• Shape your brand voice and tailor your message without leaning heavily on external platforms or algorithms.
• Build direct relationships with your audience, fostering trust and brand advocacy.
• The initial investment in content creation pays dividends over time compared to continuously buying paid advertising.
• Owned channels have rich analytics on audience preferences and content performance, enabling you to refine your future strategy.

Cons of using owned channels:

• Success requires an ongoing passion for content creation, community management, and audience growth strategies.
• Building reach on owned channels usually takes significantly longer compared to the immediate reach of paid advertising.
• Understanding SEO principles, effective content creation, and social media engagement is essential for maximizing results.

Owned channels are the foundation of a well-rounded content distribution strategy. Investing time and resources in these platforms establishes a firm brand presence and generates insights for long-term growth.

Earned channels

Earned channels come from others organically promoting your content through shares, mentions, and backlinks. This type of distribution hinges on building relationships, establishing credibility, and creating genuinely valuable content that resonates.

Here are some examples of how businesses use earned channels:

• Addiction recovery center: A blog post about overcoming addiction could gain traction on social media and get shared by influencers in the recovery community.
• SEO agency: Active participation on relevant subreddits, providing insightful advice, builds trust and attracts clients. 
• HVAC company: Helpful videos on furnace maintenance from YouTube get shared in home improvement Facebook groups, leading to a spike in calls.

How earned channels differ from owned and paid:

• Trust and credibility: Earned distribution often carries a greater sense of trust, as it comes from an impartial source, serving as social proof. Over the past couple of decades, social proof — as demonstrated in online reviews and testimonials — has emerged as a leading factor in purchase decision-making. Think of it like digital word-of-mouth. 
• Amplified organic reach: Content can gain exposure to new audiences beyond your existing network.
• Cost effective: While it requires time and effort, earned distribution is cost effective, with the potential for long-term impact.

Who benefits the most from earned channels:

• Brands seeking credibility: Endorsements from external sources strengthen your reputation.
• Companies targeting new audiences: Earned channels open up opportunities to reach beyond your existing followers.
• Organizations with a limited budget: Earned channels work well for creative brands with budget constraints for paid advertising.

Pros of earned channels:

• Opens your content up to a wider audience, maximizing reach.
• Third-party validation strengthens trust and positions your brand as an authority.
• Quality backlinks from authoritative websites attract new audiences and boost search engine rankings.
• Exceptionally shareable content has the potential to “go viral” and spread rapidly, reaching a massive audience.

Cons of earned channels:

• You can’t dictate if or when others share your content, so earned channels require a focus on quality and relationship building.
  
• Cultivating relationships and creating share-worthy content takes time and persistent effort.
• While tools offer insights, tracking the direct impact of earned distribution can be more complex compared to owned or paid channels.

Earned distribution is a testament to the value of your content. While less predictable than other channels, it offers the potential for significant gains in reach, reputation, and authority.

Paid channels

Paid channels are paid investments that guarantee visibility. There are a vast array of options to choose from, allowing you to target your ideal audience with laser focus. From pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to sponsored content partnerships, paid channels deliver shockingly precise targeting.

Here are some examples of how businesses use paid channels:

• Pest control company: Targeted Google Ads ensure services appear at the top of local search results for keywords such as “pest extermination near me.” Social media ads showcase positive customer testimonials and promotions to a geographically focused audience.
• E-commerce brand: Retargeting ads on social media remind users of products they viewed, encouraging them to return and complete a purchase. At the same time, sponsored search results drive traffic to specific product pages. 
• Content writer: Paid guest posts on niche industry blogs offer valuable insights and backlinks to their portfolio. Meanwhile, targeted Google Ads appear for searches such as “freelance copywriter for [industry] in [location].”

How paid ads differ from owned and earned:

• Guaranteed visibility: Paid channels offer immediate exposure, unlike owned and earned, which largely rely on organic growth.
• Hyper-targeted reach: Advanced targeting options let you pinpoint your ideal audience by demographics, interests, location, and behaviors.
• Faster results: Paid distribution can drive traffic and conversions more quickly compared to strategies focused solely on organic growth.

Who benefits the most from paid channels?

• Businesses seeking rapid growth: Paid channels accelerate reach and boost conversions, especially when entering new markets.
• Anyone targeting a niche audience: Precise targeting options are ideal for reaching specific demographics or segments.
• Those looking to measure results: Paid ads usually come with analytics that allow you to track ROI and optimize future campaigns for maximum performance.

Pros of using paid channels:

• Reach your target audience instantly and bypass the slow build of organic methods.
• Detailed analytics allow for continuous refinement and improvement of your campaigns.
• Easily increase or decrease your investment based on your goals and budget.
• Track conversions and leads to determine the exact return on your advertising spend.

Cons of paid channels:

• Depending on your industry and keywords, paid advertising can become expensive.
• Successful paid campaigns require planning, targeting, and optimization.
• Users can become desensitized to ads, potentially resulting in lower click-through rates over time.

Paid channels are a major boost, helping you reach your ideal audience and achieve desired outcomes. Using strategic execution and exploring advanced options such as native advertising and programmatic buying can propel your content toward widespread success.

How Do I Create a Content Distribution Strategy? 

This section will guide you through the essential steps of creating a content distribution strategy that propels your message to the right people, at the right time.

1. Understand your audience and their expectations

A deep understanding of your target audience is the cornerstone of any successful content distribution strategy. Moving beyond basic demographics, craft detailed audience personas outlining pain points, goals, preferred content formats, and the online platforms your visitors frequent. 

Next, map out how your audience interacts with content. Where do they go for information? What type of content influences their decision-making? Social media is a gold mine for these insights. Extensive research is nonnegotiable for this step. 

2. Identify the ideal content types for your brand and audience

With your target audience firmly in mind, identify the ideal content types that align with your specific marketing goals. Are you aiming for brand awareness, lead generation, or boosting website traffic? Different content types excel in different areas.

For instance, informative blog posts nurture leads and establish brand expertise, while visually engaging videos capture attention and drive social media shares. A successful content mix caters to various learning styles and keeps your audience engaged.

Important note: Don’t get stuck in a single format. Explore the diverse landscape of content options, including blog posts, infographics, videos, social media updates, podcasts, ebooks, and webinars. Allowing your audience to engage with your brand in various formats helps them connect deeply with it, while catering to a variety of tastes.  

3. Plan

A content calendar acts as your roadmap, outlining the content you’ll produce, the distribution channels you’ll use, and your publication dates. This structured approach ensures consistency and aligns content marketing efforts with your broader marketing goals. 

Be sure to map out a purposeful distribution strategy, whether you use a content calendar or not. Carefully considering which channels best suit each piece of content is vital. Not every format is ideal for every platform. Customize and tailor your distribution approach accordingly.  

Finally, keep in mind that timing is everything in the world of digital marketing. Knowing when your audience is most active online and thoughtfully scheduling your content distribution helps maximize engagement and reach.

4. Ensure uniform branding and brand voice across channels

Developing clear brand guidelines is foundational for online success. Your brand’s ingredients include voice, tone, and visual style. They’re the secret sauce for maintaining consistency across all platforms.  

Customize your content for each platform while remaining true to your brand identity. Ultimately, a cohesive brand image across channels builds immediate recognition and solidifies your brand’s reputation in the minds of your audience.

5. Test

A willingness to experiment is vital. Test different content formats, distribution channels, and messaging to analyze what yields the best results for your specific audience and goals.

Pay close attention to analytics. They’re your north star. Monitor insights such as time on page, bounce rates, and click-through rate. Use these insights to refine your strategy, making data-driven decisions to optimize your content distribution efforts. Finally — and very importantly — don’t be afraid to pivot. If something isn’t achieving the desired results, be agile.

6. Execute

Sticking to your content calendar is vital for maintaining steady momentum and a reliable presence in your audience’s eyes. Why? Because consistent publishing signals dedication to potential customers and helps you ride that elusive algorithmic wave. 

Just keep in mind that you must always prioritize quality over quantity. Two high-quality content pieces per week will always outweigh 20 pieces of low-value content. Each asset you publish should provide true value to your audience. 

7. Measure

Focus on the metrics that directly align with your established goals. And whatever you do, be sure to utilize the wealth of analytics tools at your fingertip. These insights tell you exactly what your audience likes and dislikes.

Platforms such as Google Analytics, social media ad tools, and email marketing reports provide detailed data. Creating regular reports helps you analyze performance patterns and highlight areas for improvement.

8. Optimize and iterate

Optimize your strategy by making data-driven decisions and avoiding guesswork and assumptions at all costs. Continuously tweak your content formats, distribution channels, and messaging based on the insights derived from your analytics. 

Poise yourself to experiment with trends and adapt your approach as technologies and audience behaviors shift.

Best Practices to Enhance Your Distribution Strategy

What are the key elements of content distribution? Let’s look at the most critical best practices.

Tool 1: Multiple Formats

Go beyond a blog post. Transform your content into various formats to cater to diverse learning styles and preferences. 

Tool 2: Brand Assets

Create high-quality on-brand visuals such as infographics, images, and videos to elevate content, connect deeply with your audience, and strengthen brand recognition.

Tool 3: Smart Repurposing

Extend your content’s lifespan by adapting it for different platforms. Repurpose infographics into social media posts and video clips into Reels or TikTok content.

Tool 4: Thoughtful Interlinking

Connect your content with internal links to improve user experience and boost SEO, while encouraging exploration of your website.

Tool 5: Guest Posting and Interviews

Tap into new audiences by contributing content to relevant websites and interviewing industry leaders.

Tool 6: Search Engine Optimization

Optimize content with relevant keywords, language that’s relatable to your audience, and meta descriptions to improve search ranking and organic traffic.

Tool 7: Social Media Mastery

Cater content to each social media platform, leveraging features like Stories, Reels, and live streams to maximize engagement.

Tool 8: Email Marketing

Nurture leads and drive conversions with targeted email campaigns featuring your best content.

Top Content Distribution Platforms

Now that you understand the “why” and “how,” all that’s left is “where?” Here’s a breakdown of the four best content distribution channels. 

1. Social media distribution

Social media platforms are where your audience spends time online. Strategize for each platform to meet your audience where they are. Let’s take a closer look:

Overview: Social media is unparalleled for building community, amplifying brand voice, and targeting content to specific audiences through organic posts and paid ads.

Best for: Each platform has its strengths.

• Facebook: Wide reach, versatile for B2C and B2B
• Instagram: Visually focused for lifestyle brands, strong with younger demographics
• X: Live updates, trending news, and niche conversations
• LinkedIn: Excellent for B2B, networking, and thought leadership
• YouTube: Great for video tutorials, product demos, and in-depth content

Time to see results: It can yield a quick engagement boost, but long-term success requires consistency and audience understanding.

Why it works: Social media fuels discovery and taps into the power of social sharing for extended reach.

2. Email marketing

Your email list is a direct line to a highly engaged audience. Nurture your audience with compelling content, and they’ll become your biggest advocates and most loyal customers.

Overview: Email marketing is ideal for nurturing leads and driving conversions. Directly reach your most engaged audience: those who opt in to receiving your content. 

Best for: Businesses with an established email list, regardless of industry.

Time to see results: Immediate delivery, open rates, and click-throughs are trackable right off the bat. Nurturing campaigns show results over time. Just be sure to factor in the time and effort it takes to build an engaged email list.  

Why it works: It allows for audience segmentation and provides valuable analytics on content preferences.

3. Content syndication networks

Supercharge your content’s visibility by republishing it on high-traffic websites. Content syndication expands your reach and builds brand awareness.

Overview: Publish content on third-party websites and platforms to expand reach and build brand awareness among new audiences.

Best for: Businesses aiming for high visibility across various reputable sites.

Time to see results: Quickly boosts traffic and reach when done right.

Why it works: Leverages the established audience of external platforms and may boost domain authority for SEO benefits.

4. Online forums and communities 

Become part of the conversation on Quora and Reddit to subtly build your brand’s reputation. Offer genuine advice and insights to establish yourself as a go-to source of information.

Overview: Actively participate in discussions related to your industry, offering helpful answers and subtly referencing your own content where relevant.

Best for: Businesses aiming to build a positive brand reputation by demonstrating expertise and engaging directly with potential customers.

Time to see results: It’s a slow burn, but consistent participation yields trust and brand loyalty, directing interested users to your resources.

Why it works: Leverages the power of conversation and social proof, organically highlighting your brand as a problem solver.

Additional Content Distribution Services 

Digital content distribution services are more far-reaching and targeted than DIY efforts because they lean on broad databases packed with insights. They provide expert support in crafting and implementing a comprehensive distribution strategy. 

Crowd Content can deliver custom content distribution solutions that align with your unique goals. Our team of marketing experts can leverage data-driven insights to optimize your content’s visibility and engagement across various channels.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Content Distribution appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But what exactly are content marketing KPIs, and what do you use to measure content success when you’re serious about staying competitive? Here, we’ll discuss some of the most critical content marketing KPIs to keep in mind as you map out your next strategy.

What Is a KPI in Content Marketing?

KPI, or “key performance indicator,” refers to quantifiable values that content marketers use to assess the health and progress of a long-term strategy or a particular campaign. Engagement, audience reach, and conversion rate are a few examples that can help a marketer better measure progress toward a specific objective.

Data is the key to tracking the success of any endeavor. It offers clear evidence of whether your goals have been met, surpassed, or not reached. Analyzing data can also help savvy marketers identify golden opportunities for cost savings, brand expansion, or engagement with new demographic groups.

Today’s content marketing landscape is ever-changing, and successful marketers evolve accordingly. Proactively leveraging your data and tracking carefully selected content marketing KPIs keeps you ahead of the curve in all the right ways. The following examples are 30 critical content marketing KPI examples to watch moving forward.

Website Content Marketing KPIs

A website’s ability to attract and engage visitors is critical to the success of your content marketing efforts. Here are some essential KPIs for measuring content success related to website performance.

1. Impressions

If impressions are lower than expected, try tweaking your keyword strategy or reassessing your targeting goals to ensure you’re going after the right demographics. In the case of paid advertising, consider whether it might be worthwhile to kick your budget up a notch.

Impressions count the total number of times content is displayed to unique users on various platforms. 

It’s also important to note that as search engines evolve, the number one search result on Google isn’t necessarily the most desirable SERP position anymore. Features like knowledge panels and featured snippets are much more visible, and SEO strategies are evolving to include them. However, such features often fulfill user queries directly on the search page, potentially reducing traffic to websites.

2. Website traffic

When it comes to primary digital marketing analytics, website traffic is one of the first KPIs that most marketers think of, and with good reason. Website traffic numbers help you better understand your site’s overall reach and user interaction.

Gain additional insights into this metric by delving into individual traffic sources to learn more about how people find your sites. Reinvest in successful entry points (social media, Google ads, etc.) and content types. Analyze the paths visitors follow as they explore your site for additional insights into user behavior.

3. SEO rankings

Visibility is important; even the most well-written content won’t help a brand if no one can find it. Keeping tabs on your SEO rankings allows you to measure the effectiveness of your ongoing efforts.

Ensure your rankings keep moving in the right direction by making keyword research an ongoing part of your approach, taking care to include plenty of trending terms. Focus on building your backlink catalog, crafting uniquely useful content, and updating your high-performing content articles to keep them relevant.

4. Time spent on page

Attracting visitors to your content is only part of the battle when it comes to winning the content marketing game. You also need to hold their attention once you’ve got it, and tracking content marketing metrics like time spent on a page can help you determine how well you’re doing this.

Longer page dwell times generally correlate to higher engagement rates, so explore different ways to drive those numbers up. Add graphics and videos to lend visual interest. Ensure content is readable and easy to consume by organizing it well, using clear headings, and a narrative flow that guides readers smoothly from section to section.

5. Repeat visitor ratio

How do new visitors behave once they’ve discovered your content? Is that the last you see of them, or do they keep returning for more? Your repeat visitor ratio clues you into how well you’re cultivating user loyalty and fostering ongoing interest in what you’re doing content-wise.

Content marketers can improve this metric by giving audiences more of what they want, personalizing the user experience, updating popular content, and consistently publishing new articles. Additionally, promote engagement through social media and email subscriptions so your audiences never miss a content drop.

6. Lead generation

While content marketing is certainly about delivering standalone value to audiences, it’s important to remember it’s also about turning curious consumers into paying customers. Content manager KPIs like lead generation help lend valuable insight into this process.

Before you can begin nurturing leads, you need to generate qualified ones via ethical but effective tactics. Examples to consider include:

• Using powerful calls-to-action (CTAs).
• Implementing gated content to capture data.
• Offering incentives like freemium content to encourage visitors to opt into mailing lists or follow on social media.

7. Quality of leads

Beyond quantity, quality of leads is also important, especially for brands in the SaaS sector and other highly specific niches. However, all brands can benefit from targeting consumers who are not only likely to convert but also ready to.

Personalized content is key, as relevance is essential for capturing and retaining user interest. So can targeting individuals across all stages of a typical buyer’s journey. Utilize tools like buyer personas to help your content production team better target and personalize key content efforts.

8. Voice search optimization success

With the rising popularity of voice-operated options like Alexa and Google Assistant, voice search optimization is ever more important. Keep track of metrics that help assess how voice search-friendly your content is.

Make your content easier to discover via voice search by using long-tail keywords and conversational tone that reflects natural speech patterns. Leverage schema markup to structure your data to help search engines understand it better. If your business is location-specific, pay attention to local SEO, as well.

Content-Focused Marketing KPIs

Naturally, your content (both written and visual) is the heartbeat of any digital marketing strategy, so KPIs related to its structure and performance are crucial concerns. Here are a few content performance metrics to watch closely.

9. Content production speed

Quality may be king in content production, but consistency is queen. Content marketing success in 2024 calls for more than just informative, high-quality content. Marketers aiming to keep their brands top of mind must also generate content regularly, making content production speed an important KPI to know.

Developing a comprehensive content calendar that includes everything from updates to your company blog to your social media channels and newsletter can help you stay ahead of content production. Consider repurposing existing content and delegating creation tasks to expert writers and creators to streamline the process.

10. Content accessibility score

Inclusion and accessibility are the orders of the day in 2024, including when it comes to content marketing. Tracking your content accessibility score helps ensure your output adheres to all current quality standards and is as helpful as possible to all users, including those with disabilities.

You can keep your content accessibility score high by making your content as easy to consume as possible. Use large fonts that are easy to read, pay attention to strong contrast between text and background colors, and use headings to lend structure and readability to written content. Look into additional options like video captions, text transcripts, and accessible visual elements.

11. Content innovation index

In a digital landscape where every brand competes online with eye-catching content, genuine uniqueness is priceless. The more innovative and original your content is, the better it will perform in capturing the attention of your target audience.

You can boost your content innovation index by developing a deep understanding of your target audience and their needs. Pay attention to what’s already working for you, and use what you know to strike a solid balance between familiar and novel moving forward. Also, be sure to add your unique voice to your content – your most distinct asset that cannot be replicated by others. 

12. Content update frequency

While producing plenty of fresh, original content is crucial, you don’t want to leave your existing content out in the cold when it comes to your ongoing strategy. Updating existing web content frequently – especially any that consistently draws traffic your way – keeps it visible to search engines and relevant for your audience.

To optimize this KPI, plan for quarterly updates for topics that change often.  Annual updates are sufficient for key evergreen topics that are more stable.Integrate content updates into your ongoing content calendar to keep efforts consistent and timely.

13. User-generated content volume

Saying user-generated content (UGC) is a game-changer for brands in 2024 is a real understatement. UGC boosts engagement rates, drives interest in key products or services, and builds trust through compelling social proof. For that reason, tracking UGC volume can lend marketers powerful insight into how well they’re engaging their audience.

Encourage more UGC by actively requesting your to share their experiences or give feedback. Hold contests, giveaways, and similar events to incentivize incredible UGC, and be sure to engage with those who follow through by commenting and sharing.

14. Multimedia content engagement

Successful content marketing involves more than just written content like blogs, ebooks, and social media status updates. Today’s audiences crave and seek out variety in their content, and different demographics may have specific preferences to keep in mind.

Include multiple forms of media in your own content strategy – for example, videos, infographics, interactive graphics, etc. – alongside your standard written content. Add multimedia content engagement to your running list of trackable content marketing KPIs to gauge which content formats are most popular with your audience. Pay special attention to universally popular options like short-form videos as they tend to attract broad interest.

15. Content sentiment analysis

As important as facts and information are when it comes to getting a consumer to finalize a purchase decision, emotions are a lot more powerful. Create content that makes people feel things, and you’re well on your way to crafting an established, popular brand. Tracking content marketing KPIs like content sentiment ensures you stay aligned with these goals.

Sentiment analysis evaluates your content by comparing the frequency of positive versus negative expressions. Mood-associated words that invoke feelings of confidence, encouragement, professionalism, etc., also factor into the mix. Utilize AI tools – like Grammarly, to name just one – to help in this analysis. Apply what you learn to fine-tune the emotional appeal of your content and invoke desired responses.

16. Content experimentation rate

Constant experimentation and innovation are crucial to maintain a vibrant and successful content marketing strategy. But it’s equally important to track the success of all your attempts, so you know what’s working and what’s not. Monitoring content experimentation rate and related content marketing KPIs can help you here.

A/B testing is a proven method for comparing two or more versions of a campaign or content approach. Monitor specific metrics like test velocity, quality, win rate, and percentage uplift to gain additional insights into what’s really working and why.

Branding and Marketing-Focused Content Marketing KPIs

Effective KPI tracking in marketing means staying on top of metrics that reveal how you’re doing with your branding efforts, content performance, and overall return on your marketing investment. Here are some KPIs to help you do that.

17. Return on investment (ROI)

At the end of the day, content marketing is a business investment, so tracking the ROI of content marketing efforts is imperative. ROI is expressed as a percentage that compares the gains from your investment against the initial costs. To calculate ROI, use the formula: (return – investment ÷ investment) x 100 = ROI.

However, ROI also has a qualitative aspect. In addition to the financial numbers, consider factors like lead generation, customer loyalty rates, and overall brand awareness when determining ROI.

18. Brand awareness lift

In a nutshell, brand awareness speaks to how likely consumers are to instinctively recognize your brand or any of its products, services, slogans, or visual assets. The better your brand awareness, the more likely people are to actually choose your brand in competitive markets.

And what do you measure in content marketing when you want to gauge your ongoing brand awareness lift rate? Be on the lookout for metrics like share of voice, referral traffic, branded search volume, and earned media coverage. Enhance visibility by creating relevant content, distributing it across multiple channels, and supporting it with consistent promotion efforts.

19. Share of voice

Don’t underestimate the importance of share of voice (SOV) when assessing potentially useful content marketing KPIs. SOV measures how well your audience is vibing with your brand overall and how well it’s doing compared to your competition. You can leverage SOV to help you analyze social media performance, PPC advertising strategy, organic traffic, etc.

Ensure a healthy share of voice metrics by researching your audience and staying on top of their evolving needs and expectations. Develop shareable content to match and infuse it with your unique brand voice. Collaborating with influencers, thought leaders, and other brands can also help with SOV.

20. Content cost vs. performance

Just as it’s important to keep track of your overall content marketing ROI, you’ll also want to track your content cost vs. performance to ensure your efforts are as productive as possible. Useful metrics to consider include views, engagement rate, user behavior, number of new users, traffic numbers, etc.

Maximize your content’s efficiency by fully optimizing and repurposing it across multiple platforms in ways that make sense for your brand. Form strategic partnerships to expand your reach and help your content find new audiences. Invest in content types and approaches that resonate well with your audience.

21. Influencer collaboration effectiveness

Influencer marketing can be a powerful way to expand your reach for several reasons. Influencers come attached to highly engaged audiences who take recommendations to heart. Partnering with the right candidates in your niche can really take your brand awareness to the next level. However, keeping track of metrics related to influencer collaboration effectiveness is important.

Specify clear goals for your collaborations, communicate them to your partners, and track KPIs that align accordingly. Analyze ongoing collaborations and make adjustments as needed to optimize results. Learning from past campaigns can strengthen future efforts.

Audience and Customer Content Marketing KPIs

No comprehensive list of the best KPIs for content marketing would be complete without metrics that help you fully gauge how your content is landing with existing and potential customers. Here are some examples of essentials to keep in mind.

22. Engagement rate

Tracking engagement rates is a key part of gauging the overall success of your content. People engage with content that resonates with them. They comment on it, share it on their social media feeds, and reference it when producing their own content. Algorithms take note of all those little interactions and show engaging content to even more people.

To elevate engagement, consider incorporating calls for audience interaction or developing dynamic, interactive content. Such types of content not only captivates but also improves memory retention and overall brand recall due to its immersive nature.

23. Conversion rate

In content marketing, your conversion rate (CVR) reflects the overall percentage of web visitors who successfully complete a desired action. That action could be to finalize a sale, but it could also be to download freemium content, sign up for a mailing list, follow on social media, etc.

Higher conversion rates imply effective content that successfully educates, persuades, and leads audiences to act. You can fortify your content conversion rates by improving your overall user experience, crafting compelling calls to action, and highlighting key value propositions in your copy. Implement A/B testing to refine your messaging and improve content strategies across different formats.

24. Email open rates

If you’re like most people, you’re on multiple branded mailing lists but don’t necessarily have time to open every email you receive. Chances are you open the ones that seem most relevant to you or otherwise pique your curiosity and forego the rest. Your customers are the same.

The likelihood of an email being opened increases with its relevance and personalization. Segment your recipient lists according to criteria like past behavior, demographics, or location, and personalize email blasts accordingly. Craft irresistible subject lines, and be sure to send messages at optimal times to boost the chances of engagement.

25. Social shares

In a digital world where almost everyone has a social media presence and spends time on their favorite platforms daily, your social share metric is one of the most critical content marketing KPIs to monitor. People share content that resonates with them and that they’re proud to endorse to their friends and followers.

Determine where your target audience spends their social media time and build a strong, active presence on those platforms. Tailor your content for maximum shareability on each platform, incorporating visuals, strong headlines, and social sharing buttons into website content to boost your content’s shareability.

26. Customer retention rate

Well-crafted content is more than an effective way to attract new potential customers in your direction. When used wisely and approached skillfully, it can encourage loyalty and repeat business.

After defining your goals, do a deep dive into your audience’s pool of interest. Serve up content that meets their needs as repeat customers and brand-loyal consumers. You could include options that help clients get more out of existing purchases or take better care of the products they already own. Serialized content can also be effective in making sure your customers are engaged over time.

27. Audience growth rate

Tracking and analyzing your audience’s growth rate can give you valuable marketing insight into how well your overall content strategy is going. Examining details like traffic sources and comparing the strength of your presence on different platforms can tell you a thing or two about your current market reach.

You can supercharge your audience growth rate metric by prioritizing innovation in your content approach. Focus on informing, entertaining, and genuinely delighting your customers with your content offerings. Form partnerships with influencers and other thought leaders in your niche to expand your reach even further.

28. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) post-content interaction

Monitoring how satisfied your customers are after interacting with your branded content is a solid way to assess how well your content offerings meet their needs. Content that is interacted with, shared, or endorsed typically meets or exceeds expectations.

Examining engagement KPIs (like conversion rate, churn rate, retention rate, and bounce rate) helps you get a more detailed read on how you’re doing here.

Customer feedback loops also lend valuable insight. Pay attention to what customers say in their comments and share captions. (Social listening interfaces may help catch everything.) Utilize  feedback via polls, surveys, and social media posts to enhance your content strategies

29. Net Promoter Score (NPS) related to content

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple but informative metric that measures overall customer satisfaction, loyalty, and enthusiasm about a brand. To obtain one, you ask customers one simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

A high NPS often correlates with customers who enjoy their experience enough to recommend it to others. Apply NPS to gain insight into how your customers feel about your content. Focus your content strategy on delivering helpful, entertaining content throughout every stage of the customer life cycle to maintain high NPS levels.

30. Content reach by geographic location

Understanding where your customers are from can help you more effectively tailor content to their needs. Examine your content and traffic metrics to assess where your reach is the strongest. Are most of your customers local or global? Are there specific cities or regions where your reach is particularly strong?

Explore unique behaviors, preferences, and purchasing patterns  of these areas to create tailored content. Ensure you’re paying enough attention to local SEO related to those locations to enhance your reach further.

Elevating Your Content Strategy with KPIs

Although commonly tracked KPIs like web traffic, customer engagement, and customer retention rate should always make your list of go-to content marketing KPIs, they’re not all there is to the picture. Monitoring and analyzing a well-rounded list that includes gems like the examples listed above gives you a much fuller understanding of how you’re really doing and helps you stay competitive in an increasingly crowded digital space.

Ready to take your content marketing game to the next level? Let the seasoned content experts at Crowd Content help you revolutionize your strategy and fully leverage key content marketing KPIs to maximize your brand success. Get in touch today, and tell us more about your content goals.

The post 30 Essential Content Marketing KPIs You Can’t Ignore appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As audience and Google standards increase, so does the need for relevant, quality, high-volume content production. Outsourcing your content can help you meet your targets, exponentially expanding your revenue and your foothold in the industry.

Understanding White Label Content Writing

White label content is created by a third party but sold by the primary entity — your agency, for example — as a firsthand product. For example, you tell your end clients you can produce 1,000 product descriptions a week, but really, you’re outsourcing those batches to another agency perhaps, and then passing them on as your own product.

The concept of white labeling isn’t limited to the content world, and it might be easier to understand how it all works if we look at a noncontent example. A handful of manufacturers produce much of the essential oil products currently on the market. All those bottles of patchouli, peppermint, and “immune-boosting blend” come off the same assembly lines and boast the same contents, but they get different labels and marketing campaigns based on which brand is buying the primary product from wholesalers.

It’s a brilliant way for small businesses to expand their catalog with products they can’t produce on their own, and bigger brands can test new niches without switching up their assembly lines or investing in ground-up R&D.

White labeled content works the same way; you’re just swapping out tinctures of sage and chamomile for bespoke articles and blog posts.

Benefits of white label content for agencies

You’re known for having fingers in every pie in your agency’s service buffet, but you can’t be everywhere at once. If you’re looking to build a better, smarter business, investing in white label content can help you:

• Save time: Partnering with a content creation team plugs you into a talent pool that’s pre-vetted, talented, and ready to write. Skip time-consuming recruitment, onboarding, and writer testing and head straight to steady, reliable output.
• Maintain quality: Those pre-vetted writers you tap into with a white label content partner have already showcased their skill sets. You get the quality content you need without training anyone yourself. And if you already have an in-house team, white labeling allows you to scale up without stretching your resources and sacrificing quality.
• Offer more of your product: White label content helps you increase your service offerings to include not only strategy but also execution of that strategy. Already have your own writers? You can white label niche content by taking advantage of contracted subject matter experts who specialize in fields such as fintech, health care, travel, real estate, and law — many of whom have the lettered credentials beside their name to go with a proven track record.  

Common Uses of White Label Content

Some of the most common use cases for outsourced writing include:

Digital marketing agencies

Digital marketing agencies are first in line to help clients understand the value of email campaigns, social media posts and thought leadership bylined by the client’s highest-profile personas. But what happens when you recommend a strategy but can’t help execute it?

Agencies can use white label content services to offer packages encompassing everything from a basic consultation to a turnkey strategy, all but guaranteed to generate long-term success. No more sending clients to spend their money elsewhere when you can serve up quality content on a silver platter.

Ecommerce platforms

Ecommerce platforms that serve makers, retailers, and resellers have a prime opportunity to upsell members by offering add-on services, such as copywriting. While a basic package might include web hosting, payment services, and on-site promotional opportunities, platforms can generate multiple revenue streams by white labeling product descriptions, how-to blogs, and other content. Every asset added could help appeal to the end customer and increase conversion rates.

Software as a Service providers

SaaS companies can help shave a few degrees off a learning curve that might otherwise make products seem insurmountable. When backed by white label content services, you can offer educational resources for clients, such as tutorials and explainer video scripts, customizing each offering and infusing assets with authority and value.

Small and medium-sized businesses

SMBs are the most likely candidates to have plenty of vision but not enough resources to turn everything on their entrepreneurial wish lists into reality. The ability to execute on your content strategy without having to hire and train a full writing and editing staff can be invaluable.

Types of Content for White Label Agencies

White label copywriting and content services cover a huge breadth of collateral. You’re not limited to About Us web blurbs and the occasional blog — although both of those are on the table. You have access to all types of content that can help you achieve those KPI milestones essential to success. Some of the content provided by white label agencies includes:

• Blog content: Sell blog content to your end clients and help them improve both search rankings and conversion rates in one fell swoop. Blogs written by research-savvy writers or reviewed by subject matter experts can also help brands establish authority and position company heads as thought leaders.
• Social media content: Hand over responsibility for a thriving X and Facebook feed to an army of writers. Maintaining a steady flow of content on social media can boost visibility and keep consumers engaged, generating much-needed likes and clicks.
• SEO and web content: A copywriter versed in the latest SEO tactics can cater to Google’s standards. Let white label writing squads populate your site with content and landing pages with the long-tail keywords and metadata necessary to hit the top of the SERPs. 
• Case studies: Partner with a white label writing service to produce case studies of your best success stories to show prospects that what you have to offer is more than just a proposal.
• White papers and ebooks: You can offer these assets to end clients or use them yourself as gated content, generating leads and establishing authority at the same time.
• Article writing: Hire writers to craft articles for industry publications, showcase company achievements, highlight events to promote a new product, or underscore company values.

Selecting a White Label Content Writing Service

Like so many services, a white label content writing service partnership is only as effective as the partner you choose. Before you sign on the dotted line, consider what you’re looking for in a writing platform and what you need to scale your offerings.

Build the right team

One of the biggest challenges when dealing with white label content writing is figuring out how you’ll maintain content quality without having direct involvement with every member of the team. One of the easiest ways to do that is to have a project or content manager act in your stead. They serve as a single point of contact and intermediary between you and the team creating your content. They gather and train the best-suited writers, answer basic questions, review content for quality, and handle revisions as needed.

Create content guidelines

Your brand voice is extremely important and you want to maintain it regardless of who is writing your content. This is where your content brief comes in handy. The more information and guidelines you give your writers, the easier it is for them to give you exactly what you need the first time around. Remember, freelancers are experienced in words, not mind reading — provide detailed instructions once, and you’ll save yourself a lot of effort down the road.

Assess content quality

The term “good writer” has so many meanings. Most writing services will lob terms such as “quality writing team” and “experienced talent” in your direction without a second thought. But the proof really is in the pudding, and that means you need to see samples before you consider a contract.

You can also ask for case studies. Crowd Content is thrilled to show off past work, including how we helped one client increase their page views to a staggering 6 minutes. Or how we helped an agency get their client to page one of Google for 57 of their target keywords.

Consider customization options

Your agency isn’t a dime a dozen, and your content shouldn’t be generic or bland either. Ask potential white label partners how in-depth their customization options go. Can you use your own style guide? Can they match brand voice and specific requirements, such as comma and bullet point usage? How often can you change parameters to meet a particular client or project’s needs?

Understand pricing models

Content marketing partners differ in how they charge clients for content production. Some require a membership or subscription fee, with content available on a discounted basis thereafter. Crowd Content’s Managed Services extend a helping hand from content managers who post tasks and manage writers on your behalf in exchange for meeting a monthly minimum, or with our Marketplace, you can pay for content as you go and control the job posts, reviews, and final approval. 

Consider how much content you’ll need and how involved you want to be as you evaluate pricing. The best platforms can talk you through the process and recommend the right approach so you get the most bang for your buck and have room to scale your account alongside your business.

Integrating White Label Content Into Your Business Strategy

The right partner should be able to deliver content that’s ready to be integrated into your existing strategy — a strategy you’ve had time to prep and roll out, since you haven’t been spending time recruiting writers and going over first drafts with a fine-tooth comb.

To make the most of the product you’re paying for, it’s important to go in with a clear game plan:

• Know what you’re asking for. Give your white label service partner a list of expectations, including information on your preferred style, brand voice, and target audience. Using a content brief template removes questions and helps ensure consistency.
• Provide samples. Include content that demonstrates what you like — and what you don’t like — so writers know what’s a hit and what’s considered a major miss.
• Calibrate each project. If you’re ordering big blocks of content that include hundreds or even thousands of pieces that all fit a similar brief, use a calibration round to test the writing team and dial-in requirements before you go into full production.
• Have a plan for promotion and distribution. The last thing you want is to order a ton of content and then realize you have no idea what to do with it all. Part of your prewriting strategy should be putting together a content calendar that illustrates the when, where (which channels), how (content types), and who (the person in charge of pushing the content live).

View analytics and feedback. After content is live, check analytics to see which content assets are getting traction and which aren’t quite on target. Use that information to fine-tune your brief and work with the writing team to bring the next batch of content even closer to perfection.

White Label Content Writing: The Next Step in Scaling Your Business

White label content creation is the perfect storm of productivity and efficiency.. It’s like bringing on a second string of talented employees, but without the overhead and long hiring processes that goes along with investing in a  full-time team. Whether you’re looking to augment the writers already churning out quality content or you want to add content to your growing slate of services, white labeling could be your ticket to growing your business.

To see how Crowd Content’s talented pool of writers can help you stay competitive and scale on demand, check out our managed services, and create quality content without the in-house hassle.

The post White Label Content Writing for Agencies appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The thing is, blogs aren’t a novelty anymore. Readers can spot mediocre content as fast as they can close the tab on their browsers. They crave unique insight and experience, leaving plenty of room for authoritative blogs that offer value.

So, how do you leverage technology and build a blog that appeals to audiences today?

• Our journey starts with the basics: identifying a profitable niche, evaluating competitors, choosing a blogging platform, and designing a user-friendly site. 
• After you set up your site, we’ll cover how to grow your blog with content creation, audience building, and monetization tips.
• Finally, we’ll go over legal and ethical considerations to position you for long-term success.

What Is a Blog? 

A blog is an online information hub sharing knowledge about a specific niche. Blogs are created for several reasons, including personal interest, for generating income, or for serving as a content marketing tool to attract a target audience.

Blogs started out as “weblogs” in the mid-1990s as people began testing the internet waters. Early blogs acted as an online diary, connecting with people with similar journeys or interests. Soon, platforms such as Blogger and Live Journal made it easy for anyone to start a blog without technical expertise. In the early 2000s, Google AdSense enabled blogs to display ads so bloggers could turn a pastime into an income-generating activity. Brands also began partnering with bloggers who had built loyal audiences to promote their products.  

Today, blogs are more dynamic than ever, leveraging technology and multimedia to engage users. In 2024, you can find an array of tools — including AI — powering content creation. SEO, social media, and a variety of marketing channels are helping blog writers find new ways to monetize their online presence.  

Reasons for Creating a Blog

With so many blogs out there, why create a new one? Well, a blog can help you:

• Explore your creativity and interests. A blog offers a rewarding platform to share your knowledge and skills. You can use your blog as a portfolio to document a journey or help inspire others. 
• Build a personal brand. Create a blog to position yourself as an authority and develop a reputation as a credible resource. Matt Kepnes built Nomadic Matt, for example, to share his tips and expertise for traveling the world on a budget.  

• Build a business brand. Blogs are often the centerpiece of a company’s content marketing strategy. Posts are distributed through channels such as social media and email, building brand awareness and driving traffic to support business goals. Hostelling International uses a travel blog to draw readers to its website. 
• Support financial goals. Blogs can be monetized through advertising, affiliate marketing, and brand partnerships. They can also be used for selling products and services such as online courses.

How to Start a Blog: Identifying Your Niche 

To build an audience, you need to strike a balance between a subject you’re passionate about and what others are interested in learning.

Use SEO tools

Semrush and Ahrefs offer SEO tools to help you analyze keywords for various topics. In addition to comparing search volumes, you can uncover related terms to focus your blog’s content.

Google Trends can tell you if active searches for a particular topic are trending. For example, if you plug “baby food recipes,” “keto recipes,” and “vegan recipes” into the tool for the past 5 years, you can see how interest in these topics is changing over time. 

Explore online communities

Reddit, Quora, Instagram, X, and other social media platforms give insight into topics people are curious about. Analyze conversations to see how audiences talk about a topic and the language they use. This can help optimize your blog for voice, tone, and niche interests, as users tend to be more conversational in online communities than with traditional search engines.

Talk to your audience

If you already have a customer base, survey them to understand their pain points. Ask about the content types they prefer and where they spend time online to help align your blog with their interests.

Listen in on social media

Social media listening tools help gauge what your target audience is talking about online. Create a list of keywords related to your industry, brand, and competitors then monitor reach and engagement. You can also zero in on emerging trends.

Conduct Competitive Analysis 

Once you’ve established demand for the topic, get a sense of where you fit in the blogging landscape. Understanding your competitors can help you differentiate your blog.

Tools such as SpyFu can give you the scoop on competitors. For example, if you’re starting a financial tips blog, enter a competing site, such as “nerdwallet.com,” into the tool. SpyFu will identify competitors, such as Business Insider, Investopedia, and Forbes. The provided data shows keywords these sites rank for and performance gains or losses. You can leverage this information to learn what your competitors are doing well and where you might be better at meeting audience needs. 

Take this a step further and evaluate how your competitors position themselves:  

• What type of content do they publish?
• What kind of user experience do they offer?
• What social platforms are they active on, and how do they interact with audiences?
• What advertisers and partners do they work with?

It’s a lot of information to sift through, but it’s critical for developing a blog strategy. For example, you might find a competitor’s blog to be text-heavy and differentiate yours with podcasts and video content. Or, you might see an opportunity to distinguish your travel blog by incorporating accessibility tips.

Establish your authority

Website authority emphasizes to Google that you’re an expert on a subject, which is easier to demonstrate if you specialize in a niche. You can build a comprehensive content inventory and cultivate a targeted audience to attract ads, partners, and brands that want to reach this customer segment.

Choosing the Right Platform and Hosting 

When you’re ready to build your website, choose a blogging platform that satisfies your immediate needs and offers opportunities to expand in the future. You might not need ecommerce capabilities now, but once your site gains traction, you may want to sell courses, ebooks, or merchandise. Leave yourself room to grow without switching platforms.

You’ll also need to consider your technical expertise. Platforms such as Wix and Squarespace offer easy drag-and-drop editors, so there’s no coding involved. 

WordPress provides full customization with plenty of plug-ins and integrations.

When evaluating blogging platforms, consider whether they offer:

• Simple, easy-to-use interface
• Variety of templates
• Integrations for customizing user experience and workflow
• Built-in SEO tools, such as keyword research, image-alt text, customizable meta descriptions, and suggested optimizations
• Ecommerce capabilities, including product pages, shopping carts, and payment processing
• Sign-up forms for mailing lists
• Analytics for monitoring site traffic and growth
• 24/7 support, including live chat or telephone service
• SSL security

AI website builders

AI website builders, such as Hostinger and Wix ADI, use artificial intelligence to create blogs. Simply enter your blog name, a description of your site, and relevant keywords. The platform chooses the layout, colors, font, and images. You can adjust and customize the site to your preferences. For those with coding experience, platforms such as CodeWP use AI to help develop advanced features for WordPress sites.

Hosting

Depending on the server that hosts your blog, your site speed and security may differ. A shared hosting service, like HostGator or Bluehost, where multiple sites share one server, is cost-effective but may run slowly if other sites are consuming significant resources. However, you pay more for a dedicated server. Cloud hosting platforms, such as AWS and Google, use a network of servers to increase resources and enable you to scale when needed. 

Blog Design and User Experience

A clean, attractive website is like a welcome mat, inviting readers to step into your site and explore. Make sure your blog is easy to navigate, as any friction in clicking links or filling out forms may cause visitors to abandon the site. Use the following as a checklist for optimizing your blog’s visual appeal and functionality. v

Aesthetic appeal

Consider the look and feel you want to achieve with your blog, and pick colors that set the right tone. Choose a layout that balances text and visuals — pages should be attractive but not cluttered. White space helps distinguish different site elements so users can find what they need. 

Readability

Use a legible font size and line spacing so it’s easy for the eye to move smoothly from one line to another. Be consistent in applying the font throughout the site and choose contrasting colors for the text and background.

Intuitive navigation

Create a logical site architecture and group content so it makes sense to the user. Use standard navigation cues, such as a menu bar, across the top of the page.

Page speed

Things happen quickly online, so your site should load pages and process requests quickly. Test your site’s Core Web Vitals regularly, as they affect user experience and search rankings. 

Mobile responsiveness

About 58% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so your readers are likely browsing on a smartphone or tablet. To accommodate these users, Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of most sites first. Ensure your content resizes to fit neatly on smaller screens, and links and buttons are large enough to select. Fonts should be legible without users zooming in, and mobile pages should load quickly. 

Dynamic content

Make your blog a dynamic experience to spark curiosity and engage audiences. Where appropriate, consider using:

• Images, charts, graphs, and infographics to break up copy and make points easier to understand
• Video content to bring concepts to life
• Interactive quizzes and slideshows
• Augmented or virtual reality for creative storytelling
• Virtual tours for immersive experiences, such as the ones offered by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Content Creation and Strategy 

To help your blog gain traction, you’ll need a sound strategy and process. It all starts with research, then you’ll need to create a system to publish exceptional content regularly, like a content calendar.

Perform keyword research

With your target audience in mind, use keyword research to guide your topic selection. Identify a mix of broad keywords for core content and long-tail keywords to answer precise questions. Consider the buyer’s journey and create content for audiences both at the beginning of their discovery and further along in the decision-making stages.

Organize themes

With keywords in hand, organize your content into themes so you can take a strategic approach to writing. Let’s say you’re building a financial tips blog. Start with a few topic clusters, such as loans, savings, and mortgages. 

Break these down further. Within the loans category, you might focus on car loans, student loans, and lines of credit. Research long-tail keywords related to these subtopics, such as tips for paying off loans and student loan repayment calculators. This method ensures that your content doesn’t overlap and ideas don’t fall through the cracks.

Manage content creation

Once you’ve identified individual blog topics, consider the format types your audience prefers, and plan your content.

• Use an editorial calendar. Schedule blog posts with deadlines to keep you on track. If you’re struggling to maintain your schedule, consider outsourcing to a blog writing service.
• Create content in batches. Instead of writing in bits and pieces, set aside time to create related content all at once. This ensures a consistent approach, and you won’t have to duplicate research. 
• Write detailed content briefs. A content brief summarizes article details, such as keywords, word count, intended audience, purpose, and topic outline. This document keeps you and your content team on the same page. 
• Repurpose content. Consider presenting content in different formats to satisfy audience preferences and quickly grow your content inventory. Take key points from an article and translate them into an infographic, or turn a webinar into an ebook. As you publish more content, you’ll cement your topical authority.

Balancing content quality and quantity

It might be tempting to push out as much content as possible when starting your blog, but search engines and audiences are increasingly discerning about quality. Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines and the more recent helpful content system update emphasize content with experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. In other words, your content must deliver exceptional value before it can surface in search engines. Incorporate unique insight, such as examples based on your experiences, case studies, or statistics from your research. 

A note of caution: Many bloggers are dabbling in AI to speed up content creation. While AI can help with ideation, OpenAI’s terms of use state you can’t represent its output as human-generated. In other words, you can’t ask ChatGPT to write an article and publish it as your own — but this is a good thing. While AI content could rank in Google in theory, it still requires human assistance to address the first-person experience and perspective that satisfies E-E-A-T principles.

Building an Audience

You’ve built your blog and put together a brilliant content strategy. The next step is to create awareness and cultivate an audience, because quality alone won’t attract traffic to your blog. Here are some tactics to raise your online visibility:

• Search engine optimization: Follow industry standard best practices for getting your site to rank well in search engine results.
• Social media marketing: Identify the platforms and online communities where your audience is most active. Begin building an online presence and engaging audiences using hashtags.
• Social networking conversations: Share your expertise by commenting on posts or answering questions. For example, LinkedIn’s collaborative articles are making an impressive splash in search results.
• Cross-promotion: Partner with websites that have a similar target audience so you can reach new readers. 
• Guest posts: Offer a guest post to authoritative sites in exchange for a link that drives traffic to your site.
• Email marketing: Build your email subscriber list to market directly to your audience. 
• Analytics: Regularly analyze your blog’s performance. See which pages are most popular or where most of your readers are coming from to build on your success.

Once you drive traffic to your site, keep your readers engaged. Link strategically between posts to encourage audiences to explore other pages on your site, and ensure your content remains fresh and interesting. 

Monetization Strategies

When your blog gains momentum, you can generate income. You have to demonstrate a minimum level of traffic to attract advertisers and partners, but as your blog grows, more opportunities to earn become available.

Balance your need to create revenue with the needs of your audience. Littering your site with ads can get in the way of the user experience and impact your credibility. Similarly, your audience depends on you for your opinions, so don’t recommend products simply to earn money through sponsorship or affiliate links. 

Advertising

Ad networks, such as Google AdSense, Mediavine, and SHE Media, place ads from brands interested in reaching your audience and get paid by the view or click. You can also sell space directly to advertisers if you find a business interested in sponsoring your site.

Courses and workshops

Many bloggers generate revenue through courses, workshops, or coaching. There are a few different models for this. The website Simply + Fiercely supplements its home organization tips with courses at various price points. 

Meanwhile, cooking blogs such as the Canto Cooking Club offer a monthly subscription for on-demand cooking classes. 

Affiliate marketing

With affiliate marketing, you earn a commission each time someone from your site clicks a link to purchase on another website. These links are usually included in blog posts as product recommendations. Amazon is the most well-known affiliate partner, but The Home Depot, Walmart, and Lowe’s also offer affiliate programs. The Penny Hoarder, for example, uses affiliate links and discloses them at the start of articles.

Product or services

Offer personalized coaching or consulting services to your audience so they can benefit first-hand from your expertise. The courses we mentioned on Simply + Fiercely include live coaching calls with the blog founder. 

You can also set up an ecommerce shop to sell items your audience might be interested in, whether it’s an ebook you’ve written or products you’ve developed. Yoga with Adriene, for example, has a shop featuring branded clothing. 

Brand sponsorships

Some bloggers secure sponsorships with brands that have a similar target audience. With these arrangements, you receive compensation for mentioning or promoting products in posts — through financial payment or products to review. You may also receive giveaways to run contests or promo codes for your readers.

Legal and Ethical Considerations for Your Blog

When you’re publishing in a public space, you’re obligated to do so responsibly. Taking an ethical approach to your blog helps establish professionalism and credibility and sets the foundation for your site’s longevity.

• Trademarks: Perform due diligence when branding your blog by ensuring the name isn’t already in use. Consider trademarking your final choice for protection. 
• Copyright: Don’t use images, text, video, or other content without permission or attribution. It’s best to create your own content and use royalty-free or stock photography. 
• Disclosure: Disclose whether you’re paid to write about something, receive a commission, or have a stake in something you write about. 
• Libel and defamation: Take care not to make false statements on your blog that can negatively impact someone’s reputation, as this can lead to legal action.
• Be respectful: Be careful about sharing personal stories, photographs, or information without permission.
• Inclusive language: Use gender-neutral terms and watch for language that marginalizes or excludes certain groups. Consider that a diverse audience may be reading your content.
• Headlines: Be respectful of your audience and deliver what you promise in your content — misleading headlines can diminish your audience’s trust.
• Accuracy: Verify facts with credible sources. If you make a mistake, correct it as soon as possible.
• Accessibility: Make your content accessible to users of all abilities. This includes alternative text for images and ensuring your website is compatible with assistive devices.
• Privacy policies and disclaimers: Explain how and why you collect information and any terms and conditions for using your site. Disclaimers can protect you if you’re writing about health-related, legal, or financial topics — suggest that readers consult with a professional before taking action.
  

Additional Resources

While starting a blog can be daunting, you don’t have to go it alone. Plenty of tools can help you get your work done efficiently, as well as lead you to communities where you can ask questions and interact with other bloggers. Some of these tools and communities include:

• Grammarly: Use this popular writing assistant to polish your copy and improve grammar, spelling, and writing style.
• Canva: This graphic design tool makes it easy to create images for blog posts and social media content. Both free and paid versions are available.
• Looka: Need a logo? This tool uses AI to create one for you.  
• Pexels: Find free stock photos and images for your blog.
• Lumen5: Make your blog more dynamic with AI-generated videos.
• Yoast SEO: This WordPress plug-in helps you optimize your content to rank better in search engines.
• Google Analytics: Monitor key metrics and find ways to improve your blog’s performance.
• Trello: Organize your workflow and keep track of deadlines with this project management tool.
• Google AdSense: Display ads on your blog to earn revenue.
• Reddit: Connect with fellow bloggers on the r/Blogging subreddit. You might also pick up some search engine optimization tips on r/SEO.

Your Roadmap to Blogging Success

Building a sustainable blog begins with researching topics your audience is interested in, ensuring a demand, and differentiating your blog from competitors. But to shine online, you need to plan and create outstanding blog posts that demonstrate expertise and offer more value than other sites in the SERPs.

Helpful, thought-provoking, and original content connects you to your audience. Learn how Crowd Content’s blog writing services can help you scale your content creation, from keyword research to quality assurance, and take the day-to-day details of writing and editing off your plate.

The post How to Start a Blog in 2024: An All-in-One Guide appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Using a comma before “which” can drastically change the meaning of your sentence.

• Comma usage in relation to “which” hinges on understanding restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.
• Misusing commas with “which” can lead to real-world errors and misunderstandings.
• Style guides generally agree on these rules, but some minor differences exist.
• Mastering this aspect of grammar is crucial for clear and effective writing.

Welcome, dear friend, to the labyrinth of English grammar, where the comma—that tiny little punctuation mark—can turn meanings topsy-turvy. Misplacing a comma can ignite confusion in your sentences. But fear not! I’m here to guide you through the fiery pits of punctuation, precisely when to use a comma before “which.”

Understanding Relative Clauses: Grammar’s Secret Sauce

Meet the Relatives

Relative clauses are used to infuse your sentences with depth. They’re akin to caramelized onions in a burger—not essential, but undeniably enhancing the flavor. For example, “A koala is a bear that likes to eat eucalyptus.” In this example, the bear’s cuisine preference is a relative clause—not essential but helpful context. Relative clauses are preceded by a relative pronoun, such as the word “that,” “whose,” or “which.” In that sense, relative pronouns are versatile tools used that introduce relative clauses to elevate your writing.

Restrictive vs. Nonrestrictive: A Tale of Two Clauses

There are two types of relative clauses: restrictive and nonrestrictive. A restrictive clause is essential to the meaning of your sentence (like cheese in a cheeseburger). For example, “The person who wrote this article is a renowned author.” A nonrestrictive clause is extra information that is not essential to the meaning (like the pickles—excellent, but the burger’s still a burger without them). For example, “The author of this article, Jane Smith, is a renowned author.”

When to Use a Comma Before “Which”: The Cheeseburger Rule

Now that we’ve had a delicious bite of the flavorful ingredients in our grammatical cheeseburger, let’s take a moment to delve deeper into the art of punctuation using commas. Understanding when to use a comma before “which” is a skill that revolves around comprehending the nuances between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. So, grab your metaphorical spatula, and let’s continue our exploration of the grammar rules.

A Nonrestrictive Nibble

Nonrestrictive clauses, where “which” often hangs out, are always introduced by a comma. For example, “My bike, which is red, has a flat tire.” The fact the bike is red isn’t essential—it’s just a bonus detail.

When Not to Use a Comma Before “Which”: Hold the Pickles!

Before we delve into the cases where you should not use a comma before “which”, let’s take a quick breather to soak in what we’ve learned so far. We’ve covered the fundamentals of restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses and understood why a comma accompanies “which” in the latter. But, just like every rule has an exception, sometimes “which” doesn’t need to be accompanied by a comma. Let’s unravel the cases where a comma before “which” is a no-go.

The Restrictive Rule

When “which” introduces a restrictive clause, you drop the comma. For instance, “I need a book which can help me learn Spanish.” Here, specifying the type of book is essential—it’s not just any book you need, but a Spanish learning one.

Common Misconceptions and Mistakes: The Punctuation Pitfalls

Just like confusing salt with sugar can ruin your coffee, mixing up your commas can mess up your sentence. For example, “I enjoyed the book which was full of suspense” means that of all the books, you enjoyed the suspenseful one. But if you write, “I enjoyed the book, which was full of suspense,” means you enjoyed it, and oh, by the way, it was suspenseful.

Contrasting “Which” with “That”: The Grammarian’s Showdown

In the American English showdown, “that” typically takes the crown as the restrictive relative pronoun, while “which” often introduces nonrestrictive clauses. In American English, people often say, “I’m looking for a book that can help me learn Spanish.”

The Importance of Audibility and Rhythm: The Grammar Symphony

Grammar isn’t just visual; it’s also auditory. Reading your sentences aloud can help you feel the rhythm and detect where natural pauses (and, thus, commas) should be. It’s like tapping your foot to a catchy tune—if it feels offbeat, something might be amiss.

Style Guides and Their Recommendations: The Rulebooks of Writing

Style guides like APA, Chicago, and MLA mostly agree on these comma rules. However, they differ slightly on “which” vs. “that” usage, which can be a point of contention among writers. It’s like preferring cheddar over Swiss on your burger—both options are acceptable, but people often have their preferences based on factors like taste, texture, and overall flavor profile. 

Similarly, writers may have their own reasons for favoring one usage over the other, such as clarity, emphasis, or personal style. Despite these nuanced differences, it’s important to remember adherence to these style guides can help ensure consistency and professionalism in your writing.

The Broader Implications for Clear Writing: The Big Picture

Why does this seemingly insignificant comma hold importance? It’s because precision in writing is the catalyst for clarity in communication. And when communication is clear, writing becomes truly effective. Mastering when to use a comma before “which” is not just about grammar—it’s about ensuring your reader understands exactly what you mean.

Wrapping Up the Comma Conundrum

So there you have it, my friend—the ins and outs of when to use a comma before “which.” Remember, grammar isn’t a scary monster under the bed; it’s just a tool to help us communicate clearly. And now that you’ve got this tool in your writer’s toolkit, you’re well on your way to crafting more precise and compelling prose.

The post Using a Comma Before “Which”: The Grammarian’s DilemmaUsing a Comma Before “Which” appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

• Understanding when to use a comma before “and” is crucial for clear and effective communication.
• The comma’s use with “and” revolves around the concepts of conjunctions, compound sentences, and the Oxford comma.
• Using a comma before “and” can prevent ambiguity and misinterpretation in lists and complex sentences.
• Some situations don’t require a comma before “and,” such as simple lists or contexts where clarity isn’t compromised.
• Different style guides have varying recommendations on this topic, reflecting the ongoing debate among writers and readers.

Hello, dear friend! Today, we’re going to delve into one of the most hotly debated issues in the realm of punctuation: when to use a comma before “and.” It’s like deciding whether pineapple belongs on pizza—everyone has an opinion. But fear not! We’ll break it down, slice by slice, to help you navigate this grammar goulash.

The ABCs of Conjunctions: More than Just a Fancy Word

Before we dive into commas, let’s have a quick refresher on conjunctions. Picture them as the glue that connects your sentence—they connect words, phrases, and clauses. And our star today, “and,” is one of these helpful little linkers.

The Oxford Comma: The Controversial Celebrity of Punctuation

Known as the Oxford comma (or serial comma), this little squiggle comes before “and” in a list of three or more items. For example, “I bought apples, oranges, and bananas.” That last comma is our famous Oxford comma. It’s like the third wheel on a date—it might feel unnecessary, but sometimes, it’s crucial for avoiding awkward misunderstandings.

The Advantages of the Comma Before “And”: The Clarity Champion

Using a comma before “and” can be like putting on glasses—you suddenly see everything. It helps distinguish individual items in a complex list and prevents readers from linking the last two things. For instance, compare “I dedicate this book to my parents, Oprah Winfrey and Nelson Mandela” with “I dedicate this book to my parents, Oprah Winfrey, and Nelson Mandela.” See the difference? That comma just saved you from erroneously claiming some very famous parents!

Situations Sans Comma: Sometimes, Less is More

Just like you wouldn’t wear sunglasses at night, there are situations where you don’t need a comma before “and.” Simple lists or conjunctions that don’t risk ambiguity can go comma-free. For example, “I bought apples and oranges” doesn’t need an Oxford comma as there’s no chance of confusion.

Compound Sentences and the Comma: The Dynamic Duo

When “and” joins two independent clauses (think of them as mini sentences), a comma usually precedes it. For instance, “I wanted to go for a walk, and I took my dog with me.” The comma is like a traffic cop, indicating a pause between the two separate but connected thoughts.

Common Pitfalls and Exceptions: Navigating the Grammar Minefield

Not every “and” needs a comma. Sometimes, adding or omitting the comma can change the meaning. For instance, “She likes cooking her family and her pets” paints a very different picture than “She likes cooking, her family, and her pets.” Be aware of potential ambiguities and tread carefully!

Style Guides and Their Stances: The Rulebooks of Writing

Different style guides, like APA, Chicago, MLA, and AP, have varied recommendations about our friend, the comma. Some advocate for its consistent use, while others prefer a more conservative approach. It’s like choosing between tea and coffee—each has its merits, and the choice often depends on personal or professional preference.

Public Perception and Trends: The Grammar Zeitgeist

Just as fashion trends change, so do punctuation norms. Some writers and readers passionately defend the Oxford comma, while others consider it superfluous. As language evolves, so does our usage and perception of punctuation. So, keep an open mind and a flexible pen (or keyboard)!

Wrapping Up the Comma Saga

Understanding when to use a comma before “and” isn’t just about following rules—it’s about ensuring your writing communicates precisely what you intend. Whether you’re team “comma always” or “comma sometimes,” remember that context is king. Stay adaptable, be mindful of your audience, and don’t be afraid to make informed choices based on your writing needs.

The post Using a Comma Before “And”: Navigating the Comma Conundrum appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Created Helpful, Relevant Content

You know the old saying: content is king.

We’d like to propose a slight alteration — quality content is king.

The content-marketing sphere is crowded, and competition is steep. If you want to rank on the first page of the search results, you’ll need to meet higher standards.

In 2022, the most successful content writing agencies rose to the occasion by producing helpful, relevant content. They focused on fulfilling search intent and ensuring that each piece was the best possible resource on the topic.

The focus on quality will intensify in 2023 as Google rolls out an update to its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. The traditional E-A-T framework is now E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. That’s good news for both brands and content writers; it means that for many topics, Google will consider personal experience when assessing the quality and trustworthiness of a page.

To improve quality and relevance, content writers are:

• Producing original content. It’s no longer enough to regurgitate the ideas in the highest-ranking pages; your content must add substantial value.
• Choosing helpful formats. Select the format that’s most useful for your audience, whether that’s written content, video, audio or a combination.
• Write for people. Create comprehensive content that’s geared toward people rather than the Google algorithm.

As programs such as ChatGPT flood the internet with AI-generated content, originality is more important than ever. Search engines are developing algorithms to detect and penalize AI content, so publishers can thrive in the long run by bringing human-centered value to the online space.

Doubled Down on Written Content

Short-form video has been the star of the content world over the past few years, but 2022 saw a shift toward a more balanced approach. As brands recognized the longevity and power of written content — and the value of owning a platform rather than relying on the whims of a third-party service — content writing services began producing more long-form pieces.

In this latest iteration of lengthy web articles, the “more is more” ideology is a thing of the past. The best content writers aren’t aiming for the longest possible word count; they’re covering a topic in-depth and creating comprehensive, evergreen resources that maximize time on page, minimize bounce rate and send positive signals to Google.

Written content will expand in 2023 as companies look for ways to increase content and audience ownership. Expect to see an increase in ebooks, white papers and other lead magnets that provide value and build engaged mailing lists.

Found New Ways To Personalize Content

Personalization was one of the biggest website content trends in 2022. Writers took steps to connect with readers on a personal level. Driven by extensive keyword and audience research, they created:

• Content that resonates deeply with the ideal customer’s emotions and state of mind
• Topics that correspond to each part of the sales funnel or customer journey
• Calls to action that speak directly to the reader’s immediate needs and pain points

Content intelligence programs are poised to revolutionize the personalization process in 2023 and beyond. Brands and content writing agencies are already using these data-intensive programs to predict the type, topic and format of content that will work best for specific audience segments. AI-driven systems also deploy custom calls to action in real time and trigger specific communication sequences in response to customer signals.

As intelligence platforms become more accessible, SEO content writing services will help brands take full advantage of the technology. This year, expect to see more writers using AI-generated insights and optimization suggestions to create precisely targeted content for specific buyer personas.

Embraced a Broader Content Strategy

The focus on personalization gave way to another content-writing success of 2022: diversification. The best writing services realized that when building lasting connections with a broad range of readers, it’s not enough to rely on a single type of content. They encouraged clients to branch out to a variety of formats, including:

• Informative articles
• How-to guides
• Marketing emails
• Infographics
• Ebooks
• Product reviews
• Case studies
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Social media posts

The most successful content strategies in 2023 will use a mix of formats and topics, particularly for brands marketing to a diverse demographic. The goal is to provide value for audience members at every stage of the journey, whether they need a quick infographic overview or a detailed troubleshooting guide.

Encouraged Niche Topic Selection

Every SEO content writer is familiar with the idea of “niched down” content — media that addresses the needs of a specific audience segment. This type of highly focused content was key in 2022 as brands sought ways to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Niche content is here to stay, especially as more players enter the content-marketing game. Customers are overwhelmed with choices, both for the content they consume and the brands they patronize. Writing services that provide precise keyword selection and target specific queries can help you attract engaged, loyal customers.

Looking back at 2022, it’s clear that content is evolving. Gone are the days of general, broad-focus writing; in 2023, top website content writing services will embrace topics that are tailored to specific profiles and scenarios to help clients succeed.

The post What Content Writing Services Did Right in 2022 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Expert SEO content writers can help you build a steady output of articles, blog posts and other content to boost your online visibility. In this guide, we’ll look at how optimized content helps achieve your business goals and the role SEO content writing services can play.

What Is SEO Content Writing?

SEO content writing is the creation of high-quality content that gives your site prominence in search engines. The content should use search engine optimization best practices for optimum ranking and be insightful and compelling for readers.

What Does SEO Content Look Like?

To land one of the top spots in the SERPs, your content needs to clearly satisfy a search query, cover a topic comprehensively and demonstrate that you’re a trusted, expert source. You can read more in our previous post about optimizing content for SEO, but here are some best practices to follow.

Incorporate Relevant Keywords

Each piece of content should focus on a different primary keyword. Most SEOs recommend placing the primary keyword in the title, the introduction, one H2, the meta title and the meta description. Primary and secondary keywords should also be used at least once naturally in the body.

Understand User Intent

Make sure your content answers a user’s query. For example, determine if someone who searches for “nutritious baby food”  is interested in ideas of what to feed a baby or actual products they can purchase. You can research user intent by entering the keyword into Google to see what kind of content is currently ranking. 

Write for the Reader

While you should optimize your site for search engines, don’t get caught up in the algorithms. Your SEO content marketing strategy is most effective when you write naturally for the reader and aim to deliver comprehensive, useful information. Readers should find value in your content and leave your site feeling their questions have been answered.

Make Content Easy to Consume

Readers should effortlessly understand your content, so be sure to edit for logic, flow and grammar. Write clearly, use multiple headings to organize content and make use of bullet points or lists. 

Guide Readers With Internal Links

Improve user engagement and experience by adding internal links to other sections of your site, such as service pages or blog posts. These links help direct readers to additional information they might be interested in to keep them on your site longer.

Build Backlinks

Inbound links from other sources demonstrate your site is trusted and contains useful content. You can earn backlinks through guest posts or reach out to other sites and ask for links from resource pages or business mentions.

Why SEO Content is Important

Every piece of content on your site is an opportunity for your business to rank in search results and be discovered by audiences. In this way, SEO content writing is an investment. As long as content is evergreen and optimized, it can remain on your site and continue working for you long after it’s published. Here are a few ways SEO content can help you achieve your goals.

Improving Search Visibility

When users plug a query into the search box, they may not know your business exists. If you can create content that readers find valuable and that Google determines is trustworthy, you can reach a whole new audience and increase brand awareness. 

Driving Organic Traffic

It’s worth it to aim high in search rankings. According to Backlinko, the top three search results generate half of the clicks on the page. On average, moving up a position improves click-through rates by almost 3%.

To help turn your high ranking into leads, use compelling meta titles and descriptions or add schema markup to your pages to create rich, visually appealing results. 

Establishing Topical Authority

To rank well, your site must be authoritative. One way to signal your credibility to Google is to demonstrate expertise, or topical authority, in your field. The more thoroughly you cover a topic, the more authority you have.

Expand your digital footprint for a topic by using SEO content services to publish regularly and create clusters of expert articles.

Improving Customer Engagement

Once customers arrive on your site, engage them with stellar content. Publish blog posts on interesting topics and create eye-catching infographics, free downloadable templates and other helpful content.

This is also an opportunity to gently lead visitors through your marketing funnel. You might link from a service page to a case study, for example, to demonstrate how impactful your business is. Or you can end a blog post with a compelling CTA and a sign-up form for a free consultation.

Building an Effective SEO Content Strategy

A good SEO content strategy begins with keyword research. You need to know what your customers are interested in and searching for so that you can tailor content to answer their queries. Once you have a list of keywords, begin planning the content and create an editorial calendar to roll out new posts. An SEO content service can help manage output. Here are some types of content you can outsource.

Blog Posts

Blog posts are an opportunity to incorporate keywords into your website and create compelling content. When you regularly publish blog posts, you give readers a reason to return to your site and build trust and engagement.  

Service Pages

Create a separate service page for each of your offerings. This gives you an opportunity to rank for different queries. A photographer, for example, could create individual pages for wedding, newborn and portrait photography. You can delve deeper into what each service provides, improving user experience and, of course, ranking for more keywords.

Local SEO Content

When your business relies on local customers, it’s essential to appear in searches that specify “in” or “near” your community. Local SEO starts with your Google Business Profile, which can be optimized to highlight products and services and provide mini-updates. But you should also create website content with a local angle. A fitness studio might publish a blog post on local running trails, and a landscaping company can provide tips on plants that grow well in the climate. 

Ebooks and White Papers

Long-form SEO content marketing, such as white papers and ebooks, helps you showcase your expertise in your field and drives interested customers to your site. Typically used by B2B companies, these assets provide readers with in-depth information about a problem or challenge. Ebooks and white papers should be based on solid research, provide actionable advice and focus on educating rather than selling.

According to a 2022 survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 67% of the most successful B2B content marketers incorporated ebooks and white papers into their marketing mix, compared to 56% of all respondents.

Product Descriptions

Customers looking for a specific product may not always know where they want to purchase from, so ecommerce companies need compelling product descriptions for every item in their stores. Product descriptions should incorporate a keyword and be as descriptive as possible to stand out in search results.

Category Pages

Include SEO content on category pages to help rank for other keywords. You can add a few paragraphs with an overview of products or tips on choosing the right one. A store selling rugs, for example, could create content for their outdoor rug category with information about different materials and how to care for the rugs. 

Leverage Experts and Influencers

Another way to drive traffic to your site is by focusing content on experts or influencers in your niche. You could interview them for a profile or mention their work in an article. This provides an opportunity for them to create a backlink to your page or share it on social media. Your page might also appear in Google searches for the person or company.

Guest Posts

A guest post is content that you create but is published on another site. Guest posts help raise brand awareness and expose your business to new audiences. These are often used as part of a link-building strategy, as sites usually permit you to add a link back to your site. 

Accomplish More With SEO Content Writing Services

It can be time-consuming to produce well-written, high-quality content. Streamline your efforts with Crowd Content’s SEO content writing services. Our qualified writers can create keyword-rich blog posts, landing pages and product descriptions to help engage your audiences and grow your traffic.

The post Improve Your Search Visibility With SEO Content Writing Services appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Have you ever felt like you were stuck in a content rut? Delivering enough leads to create brand awareness and conversions regularly is your main priority. But you’re at wit’s end trying to maintain consistent blog output or keeping up with the Joneses in ranking for certain keywords.

Sound familiar?

If you’re devoted to content marketing and SEO, you’ve experienced this conundrum. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 64% of marketers say their biggest knowledge gap is understanding the process of developing a scalable content strategy.

Okay, let’s be honest. You can never create enough content to stay 100% ahead of the never-ending buying stages of personas and their iterations or to keep up with the real-time changes in search-engine algorithms.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to create great content to help you achieve your business goals—you have to get strategic about it. You can successfully scale content for SEO with a little elbow grease and the right approach while avoiding haphazard strategies or sacrificing quality.

First, understand why SEO should be a priority and how to make it work for your business. Second, you need a content strategy to scale as your business grows—without breaking the bank. Lastly, focus on creating quality content that attracts and engages your target audience.

We’ve got some answers to help you start making all that happen.

Before we jump in, let’s understand why scaling your content for SEO is crucial and how Google’s changing algorithms will impact your content strategy.

Why Is Scaling SEO Content Important?

Like most marketers, you probably create content for two reasons: to create awareness and generate quality leads. If you’re looking to scale your content for SEO, developing content that attracts more organic traffic from search engines should always be on your radar.

Why?

Because organic traffic is the lifeblood of any business; 51% of all visitors to B2B and B2C sites come from search engines and SEO-driven traffic SEO-driven traffic converts at 14.6% versus 1.7% for outbound advertising.

But Google’s algorithm updates in 2022 show that search engines are getting smarter. SEO is no longer about cramming in as many keywords as possible and hoping for the best. For instance, Google E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust) assesses the quality of your site’s content in how well it demonstrates expertise, is written authoritatively and gains its audience’s trust. This means that marketers need to be more strategic in their approach to SEO to rank high on SERPs (search-engine results pages). 

Now that we’re up to speed, let’s explore some actionable SEO content scaling strategies you can use to make this happen.

The 6 Tips to Scale SEO Content to Crush Growth Goals

These six tips to help you scale content for your website will skyrocket organic traffic and help you hit your SEO goals.

1. Keyword Research
2. Create a Content Calendar
3. Cluster Strategy With Content Pillars
4. Set SEO-Content Goals
5. Seek Out Subject-Matter Experts
6. Outsource Your Content Production

1. Keyword Research

Before building a 12-month content calendar, take a step back and do your due diligence with keyword research. This is the first step in creating audience-centric and search-friendly content for the best topics to focus on.

Scaling scale content for SEO by aligning it with keyword research increases your SERP rankings, drives more traffic to your website and highlights your brand as authoritative in your industry.

Remember, search engines have evolved over the years to deliver the best results to searchers (search intent). And searchers are savvier and more articulate about what they’re looking for than ever before.

As a content marketer, focusing on context and search intents is essential to overall success. When growing your niche authority and scaling your SEO content, you’ll want to start by targeting longtail keywords. 

According to HubSpot research, 50% of search queries use longtail keywords. These are more specific keywords (usually lower search volume) than your main target keywords. For example, if you’re a travel website targeting the keyword “travel,” you might also want to target the following longtail keywords:

• Travel tips
• How to plan a trip
• Best places to travel

In the long run, go after competitive keywords and phrases you can realistically rank for. Once you have a concrete list of target keywords, it’s time to start creating a content calendar.

2. Content Calendar

A content calendar is a roadmap for your content marketing strategy. It helps you plan, track and publish your content regularly, ensuring your content aligns with your business goals and objectives.

Let’s take a quick overview of how to create a content calendar for your SEO content scaling efforts.

The first step is to convert keywords into content topics. For each keyword on your list, come up with a few different content ideas that you could realistically rank for.

Next, create monthly topic segments or content campaigns around these ideas. These could be blog post series, ebooks, webinars, etc.

Once you have your topics and campaigns mapped out, start creating individual pieces of content. This is where you’ll need to get specific and fill in the details of your content calendar, like post titles, descriptions, target keywords and publish dates.

Delegate responsibilities to editors, writers and designers to help with the creation process. And don’t forget to include an SEO team member in the mix to ensure each piece of content is optimized for search.

When starting to scale content for SEO, having a schedule and process can avert content production bottlenecks and ensure each piece is of the highest quality.

3. Cluster Strategy With Content Pillars

To scale content for SEO, start by identifying your content pillars. These are the broad topics that you want to cover in depth. Once you have your pillars, creating a cluster strategy around each is doable.

A cluster strategy can be defined as creating a main piece of content (often called a pillar page) and then surrounding it with several supporting pieces of content (called cluster pages).  A cluster page on your website contains a wealth of information on a specific topic. It includes an overview of the topic, many blog posts and other resources that dive deeper into the subject.

Say you have a blog about travel. Your main content pillar might be “how to plan a trip.” The cluster strategy around this topic would be to create a pillar page on the same topic. You’ll then surround it with several blog posts covering specific aspects of trip planning, like budgeting, packing and choosing a destination.

Here’s a rundown of how to create a cluster strategy for your content:

• Brainstorm a list of potential content pillars. You’ll want to cover these broad topics in-depth on your website.
• For each content pillar, create a main piece of content (often called a pillar page). This could be an in-depth blog post, an e-book, or even a video series.
• Create supporting content (called cluster pages) around each pillar page. These could be blog posts or social media posts that link to the pillar page.
• Optimize each piece of content for your target keywords. This will help you rank higher in search results and get more traffic to your website. It’s always best to carry due diligence if you want to learn how to optimize content for SEO.
• Increase exposure for your content by promoting it on your social media channels and other online platforms. This step drives even more traffic to your website.

The advantage of using a cluster strategy is that it allows you to cover many keywords with less content.  And because you’re linking between the different pieces of content, Google can easily understand the relationship between the topics. This can ultimately help improve your search engine ranking.

4. Set SEO-Content Goals

Your SEO content strategy is the backbone of your scaling efforts and will help determine what types of content to create, how to optimize it for search, and where to publish it. But SEO is an arduous and ever-changing process, and if you don’t have specific goals, it may not be easy to measure your success. 

Here are steps to set SEO content goals:

• Define your target audience. Who are you reaching out to with your content? What are their needs and wants? What type of content do they prefer?
• Research your target keywords. What terms and phrases are your target audience searching for? What are your competitors ranking for?
• Set realistic goals. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small and gradually increase your content output over time.
• Track your progress. Use tools like Google Analytics to keep tabs on your traffic, conversions, and key metrics over time. 
• Promote your content. Once you’ve published your content, promote it through social media, email marketing, and other channels.

The beauty of SEO is that it’s an ongoing process. As you continue to produce and promote high-quality content, you’ll see your traffic and conversions increase.

5. Seek Out Subject-Matter Experts

It’s crucial to ensure that each piece of content is of the highest quality if you’re looking to scale your content for SEO. That’s why it’s important to seek out subject-matter experts (SMEs) who can provide insights and perspectives that will add value to your content.

These topic-based specialists are well versed in their respective fields, such as marketing, design, or development.  When you involve them in your quest to scale content for SEO, you can achieve new levels of depth and insight that would otherwise be unattainable.

How Do You Find SMEs?

Start by looking within your organization. You might have a wealth of experts at your fingertips. You can also reach out to your network of contacts and see if they know anyone who would be a good fit.

Once you’ve found a few potential SMEs, reach out and ask if they’re interested in contributing to your content. If they are, work with them to develop a plan for their involvement. You could work with them to:

• Write a guest post
• Record a podcast episode
• Give an interview
• Create a video tutorial

Their depth of knowledge can make your brand more credible, authentic and trustworthy—all of which are essential for scaling your content for SEO and developing trust with your audience.

6. Outsource Your Content Production

As much as you’d like to keep the whole content marketing in-house, it’s not practical to do everything yourself. At some point, you’ll need to outsource certain aspects of your content production.

This could include hiring freelance writers and a full-fledged marketing agency. Finding partners you can trust to produce high-quality content that aligns with your brand voice and messaging is important.

While it all depends on your needs and marketing budget, here are factors to consider when outsourcing your content:

• Quality: Can they produce content aligned with your current standards? Do they have a good understanding of your brand voice and messaging?
• Quantity: Can they handle the volume of content you need to produce? Do they have the necessary resources in place?
• Cost: What’s their price point? If you’re working with an agency, are they transparent about their pricing?
• Communication: Do they respond to your emails and calls promptly? Communication can make or break an otherwise great working relationship, so it’s important to ensure that you’re on the same page.

Outsourcing can be a significant boon to your content marketing efforts, allowing you to scale your production without sacrificing quality.

Scaling SEO-Content With the Experts

Quality content may not be the easiest route to successful marketing, but it’s surefire. As more brands vie for attention online, the importance of quality content will only grow.

Scaling content for SEO is a chance to set your brand ahead of the pack by establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

If you’re looking to take your business to new heights, consider outsourcing SEO content writing services that can help you produce high-quality, keyword-rich content assets you need to drive traffic and conversions.

The post 6 Tips to Scale Content for SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Or maybe you’ve hit a wall with your online ads. Or you’re pumping out content but it feels rudderless (“is anybody actually reading these?”).

You know you have to diversify your different marketing channels and dive more into inbound marketing, but where to start?

How can I leverage my content marketing to hit all the right notes and start turning my marketing operations into a lead-generating machine?

Let’s dive into inbound lead generation and the best ways to optimize content for inbound marketing so you can hit your metrics out of the park—without overburdening your sales team.

How Inbound Leads and Content Marketing Work Together

First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what we mean by inbound leads.

An inbound lead is any lead who finds your business via your marketing collateral and then they come to you. An outbound lead, by contrast, is someone whom you approached.

Inbound leads typically show an interest in your business and want to learn more about your products or services.

Whether they fill out a contact form on your website or sign up for a free trial, they are extremely valuable—because they form the base of your prospective customers.

Therefore, if you want to grow your sales, generating more inbound leads is essential. But how does content marketing fit in?

Simply put, people must find you in the first place to reach out. And then you need to motivate them to reach out once they do find you by piquing their interest.

To make your business discoverable and your selling propositions intriguing, you need content.

Potential inbound leads want information—information about how you can resolve their pain points or provide them with a benefit.

And information is what content provides. Content is info that people can find and consume. This is how you turn visitors into leads, leads into prospects and prospects into customers.

If you sell software to other companies, for example, you’ll see results by investing in B2B content creation that will enable you to promote your value propositions to leads.

Maybe you want an ebook to explain the nuances of productivity software to demonstrate your expertise in using tools for saving time.

Or a blog post that shows off benefits of your sales software to better manage pipelines when potential inbound leads search “how to better manage my pipeline.”

When you leverage content marketing, you set yourself up to transform your operations into a lead-generating machine.

What Is Inbound Lead Generation?

Inbound lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to a business and nurturing their interest. It’s how you turn a lead into a paying customer.

Although every company uses unique lead-generation strategies, the process usually follows the same basic steps:

1. Someone finds a business via its website, social media accounts or other marketing channels.
2. They take a desired action, such as clicking a link to download a free ebook.
3. The link leads to a landing page on the company’s website.
4. The visitor provides their contact information in exchange for the ebook or some type of offer to turn into a lead.

To ensure people find you and to nurture them down this path, optimizing your content so that it provides value for their needs is invaluable.

Optimizing Your Content for Inbound Lead Generation

What is content optimization? Optimizing content means to write, format and update content to make it both as accessible and as valuable to your target audience as possible.

There are lots of content-optimization tools to make your content as strong as it can be, but you should also deploy your content as part of a holistic website strategy for lead generation. 

Rather than sticking a few links on a page and calling it a day, you need to be strategic about your content-optimization efforts.

With content optimization, you have more opportunities to attract inbound leads. Let’s look at the different aspects of content to pay attention to for more inbound leads.

Website Forms

You can tweak website forms to generate more leads. For example, place forms “above the fold” so website visitors see them before they scroll down.

Remember that potential customers have screens of all sizes, from smartphones to large monitors, so not everyone can see the same amount of content before they scroll.

And pay attention to messaging for best results.

Research keywords for the content on pages where forms live to attract search engines and use language that captures the attention of your target audience, especially in calls-to-action.

And some visitors hesitate to turn over their names and email addresses. Make it easy for them to part with their information by adding a statement like “Unsubscribe at any time” at the bottom.

Finally, leave plenty of white space around each form. If a form is surrounded by text and graphics, it can be difficult for a visitor to focus on the content and the offer.

White space makes it much easier to understand the text and decide about taking the desired action.

You could also add a signup form as an overlay that appears when users first arrive at your site. Just make sure it has a simple, hard-to-resist call to action and a visible way to exit.

Wherever you use forms, make sure they’re easy to find again if someone who previously opted out changes their mind later.

A/B-Testing

A/B-testing is a type of performance testing that presents two versions of a page to different visitors so you can gather data to see what version works better.

And improving content is a great benefit of A/B-testing. This will allow you to leverage content to generate more inbound leads as you split-test which page elements are more effective.

Titles, images and page layouts are examples of variables you can test.

The key is to focus on one variable each time you conduct this type of test. Testing multiple variables makes it difficult to isolate what increased conversion rates.

Most testing softwares allows you to run small tests. For example, if Option A gets better results than Option B, iterate on A to create a new variation, Option C.

When you test Option C against Option A, you’ll probably only show it to a small percentage of your potential leads, so you won’t lose the progress you’ve made.

The goal is to create small incremental changes to boost performance over time.

Website Metrics

Pay attention to website metrics that show how visitors interact with your site to identify areas of opportunity with your content for improved lead generation.

Here are a few metrics to check:

• Bounce rate: If someone visits your website and leaves without looking at other pages, then they “bounced” away. Typically, people bounce when they look at the page and think it isn’t interesting or relevant. If you have a high bounce rate, tweak your content to make it more engaging and relevant to your target audience.
• Average time on page: The average time visitors spend on your website pages helps determine the type of content they find most valuable. It can also signal potential  inadequacies in your site structure or page-naming conventions—people who quickly move from page to page are likely searching your site for something specific.
• Traffic sources: To optimize your content for lead generation, it’s essential to understand where most of your traffic is coming from. Suppose you see hundreds of visitors coming to one of your pages from an educational resource. In that case, you can tweak your content to make it more educational or update it to answer questions that weren’t addressed on the referring page.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are standalone pages where people “land” when clicking on a link to your website.

For example, if you offer home-repair services in Florida, you might have landing pages known as location pages with content unique to home services in Florida cities.

You can optimize these landing pages for inbound lead generation with the following tips:

• Improve the headline on each page. Make it more exciting or relevant to your target audience.
• Edit landing pages to match the expectations of people looking for your products or services. Provide value by answering their queries, such as questions they would ask to solve their pain points. And where did they come from? Design landing-page content to tailor the stage of the buyer’s journey your website visitors are in.
• Make sure your form length is appropriate for the size of your landing page and strikes a balance between the amount of information you need to collect and your potential leads not feeling overwhelmed or demotivated to fill out too many fields.
• A/B-test to determine which version of each landing page is the most effective.
• Overcome objections immediately with your content.

Calls-to-Action

A call-to-action is a request for a visitor to take a desired action. “Click to subscribe” and “Sign up for updates” are generic example CTAs.

You can optimize your CTAs for lead generation in the following ways:

• Make the copy as straightforward as possible. Don’t make visitors wonder what you want them to do or what they’ll get if they do it. Spell out the offer and tell people precisely what action to take, whether it’s clicking, calling or downloading a free trial.
• Don’t rely too much on overly descriptive text. “Start Your Free Trial” can work sometimes but isn’t particularly compelling. “Get More Sales Today” speaks to a benefit if, for example, you sell sales-enablement software.
• Use design best practices to make it clear visitors are supposed to click the CTA. For example, you may want to have the text change color when the visitor hovers over it.
• Don’t let your CTA get lost in the background. Put some white space around it to draw the visitor’s eye and make it clear you want them to take action.

Generating Leads with Content Marketing

Quality content is a critical aspect of your marketing strategy. Content attracts people to your website and convinces them to become leads.

You can produce content in house with the proper resources or optimize efficiency & scalability by outsourcing content marketing.

But whatever path you choose, know that turning your operations into a lead-generating machine to attract more inbound leads to grow your revenue is impossible without content.

These are some of the most common ways to generate leads with content marketing.

Case Studies

If you’re trying to generate leads for a B2B business, publishing a case study is a great way to get more people to visit your website.

A case study typically describes a business problem and explains how one of your customers used your company’s products or services to solve the problem.

One of the main benefits of a case study is that it subtly suggests to the reader that your company has the expertise needed to meet their needs.

You can also include a strong CTA at the end of the case study to encourage readers to set up a discovery call or get in touch with your sales team.

Ebooks

Ebooks work well for both B2B and B2C businesses. If you work with B2B customers, they help the reader solve a problem or learn a new skill related to your service.

For example, an accounting firm would benefit from publishing an ebook on how manufacturing firms can reduce labor costs.

Or if you target consumers—perhaps you sell jewelry—you might want to publish a guide to caring for precious metals and gemstones.

Templates

Offering free templates can convince visitors to give you their contact information, making it easier to turn them into leads.

If you’re targeting designers, for instance, you may want to provide a basic infographic template or give visitors access to a set of color palettes that can help them with their design projects.

Free Courses

Free courses are ideal for sharing your expertise with other people and making them more confident in your ability to solve their pain points.

For example, if you sell math tutoring, you could offer a free course on using specific methods for math problems.

People who sign up for your course would then be exposed to your other offerings, such as tutoring for the math portion of the SAT or video courses on passing core math exams.

Surveys

If you sell to B2B customers, offering access to survey data is a great way to convince website visitors to give you their contact information, turning them into leads.

The Society for Human Resource Management and other industry organizations do this regularly, positioning themselves as a helpful resource for potential customers.

Checklists

Checklists are easy to create and many visitors find them valuable. This type of content benefits those who can provide step-by-step instructions for completing tasks.

For example, a professional organizer could offer a checklist to clean out a pantry or organize a bedroom closet.

Start Getting More Inbound Leads With Better Content Marketing

Successful inbound-lead generation starts with high-quality content. If you don’t have the time or expertise to create articles, landing pages, blog posts and more, Crowd Content can help.Expert, vetted writers from content creation services develop content uniquely for your audience so you never have to write again while your inbound-lead metrics blast through the roof!

The post How to Create an Inbound Lead-Gen Machine With Content Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But producing content at scale takes time. According to data, it takes over four hours on average for businesses to write a blog post—an increase of 67% over a seven-year span! Ebooks can take twice as long as they are usually more custom and in-depth.

And many business leaders publish books to establish authority in their field and boost their company brand. If a blog post takes four hours, imagine how long a whole book would take!

That’s why finding a business ghostwriter is key to scaling content marketing. Outsourcing content to a ghostwriter frees up time to focus on strategy, and business ghostwriting services enable marketing departments & executives to increase output.

You first need to figure out how much it costs to hire a business ghostwriter. With so many factors impacting ghostwriting costs for businesses, how do you sort all this out?

And what are the benefits of business ghostwriting to weigh against costs? Without understanding both sides of the equation, you can’t calculate investment returns.

In this post, we’ll overview what business ghostwriting is all about, what criteria influence costs and how to optimize the efficiency of ghostwriting.

Once you master the ins & outs of the costs of ghostwriting on your business and how to turn those costs into an investment, you can improve your content marketing to increase traffic and convert more leads.

Or maybe publish that industry book to (finally!).

What Is a Business Ghostwriter?

Business ghostwriting is when you hire an external writer to write blog posts, ebooks or business books while you retain writing credit.

Simply put, you’re paying an expert writer to write your content marketing for you. This helps you save time and create content at scale.

Ghostwriters create content of all types, from 300-page business books to short blog posts designed to promote a product or service.

Business ghostwriting services are ideal when determining how to grow your business using content marketing because content development is a core principle of content marketing.

Successful ghostwriters come from a variety of professional backgrounds, from software developers who write technical manuals to creative writers who can connect with customers.

In other words, with the right team of business ghostwriters, you can solidify content production processes to improve your overall content marketing, get more leads and increase sales.

How Much Does a Ghostwriter Cost on Average?

The cost for a ghostwriter depends on many factors, such as what type of content you need, how long each piece needs to be, and how much research the project requires. A ghostwriter may also charge more if you ask them to include images, hyperlinks, and other content elements.

For example, business ghostwriting starts at $5,000 per book, according to wWriting coach Lisa Tener. If a ghostwriter charges hourly, the cost of a book could be between $30 to $200 per hour, depending on the project’s scope. Per-word rates for this type of work typically range from $1 to $3.

Book ghostwriting can be costly because of the prestige associated with publishing a book people can buy at a bookstore and hold in their hands. Other types of projects cost much less.

According to the American Writers & Artists Institute, professional writers typically charge at least $450 to create the home page for a website and $250 to $750 for an information page, which may include how-to guides, buying guides, and product reviews. 

Case studies typically cost $1,200 to $2,000, according to the Professional Writers’ Alliance, while white papers cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000.

Of course, these are just averages. Ghostwriter costs across all types of projects fall into a few pricing structures:

• Per-word pricing
• Flat-rate pricing
• Hourly rates
• Per-project rates

Per-word pricing

Ghostwriting rates per word vary dramatically — from 1 cent to several dollars. These prices factor in both the writer’s experience and the specific project.

For example, it’s common for writers to charge more per word for projects that require a lot of research. You’ll also incur additional costs if you need your ghostwriter to interview people or watch lots of video content to get a feel for your brand.

While there’s no set rate across the board, you can expect to pay 5-10 cents per word for simple blogs and general web content written by entry-level ghostwriters. A writer with a few years of experience may charge upwards of 20 cents per word, and subject matter experts or technical writers command an even higher premium.

You’ll also pay more if you need an ebook or white paper. Creating an ebook can cost businesses at least 50 cents per word, depending on quality and research requirements, while a white paper requires a budget of up to $1 per word. Both types of content can easily cost you thousands of dollars, but they also showcase clear authority to cement your position within a niche.

Flat-rate pricing

Some ghostwriters use a flat-rate scale, where you’ll pay a specific amount for content up to a certain number of words or per page. This payment structure usually gets cheaper as the word requirement increases, so it’s better than straight per-word pricing for businesses needing long-form content.

While ghostwriting rates depend on the writer’s skill level, you should expect to pay about $50 to $75 for a 1,000-word blog post written by an entry-level professional. In comparison, expect to pay up to $250 for a blog of this length if you engage the services of more experienced ghostwriters.

Hourly rates

Like per-word rates, hourly ghostwriting prices vary considerably, depending on the type of content and the experience of the individual writer. For example, the median hourly rate of a copywriter is $28, but this rate ranges from $25 to $31. 

Copywriters handle various types of marketing writing and related content, which is often an ideal match for businesses. However, general content writers typically charge a few dollars less per hour and can handle blogs and the most basic forms of website copy. Again, expertise plays a significant role in these prices.

Unless you’re looking to hire an in-house ghostwriter, you generally won’t encounter hourly rates as often as per-word and per-project fees. 

However, accepting an hourly rate may be advantageous if you’ll need your ghostwriter to attend several meetings during the planning and publishing process. This way, you can cover the extra work without negotiating it into the project as a separate payment.

Per-project rates

Per-project ghostwriter fees make the most sense for anything that isn’t a simple blog post or web page because they allow your ghostwriter to factor in all the additional work required, such as SEO, image sourcing, and research.

This pricing structure is also ideal for social media posts and emails, since these types of content require extra planning and creativity that a per-word rate won’t cover. Social media content costs up to $10 per post, while emails may cost up to $50, jumping much higher for long lead-generation pieces.

Expect to pay about $400 for a 2,000-word blog post, $50 to $100 or more for product descriptions (depending on the length and complexity), and around $1,000 for a landing page. Additional requirements will add to these costs, but the benefit of a per-project rate is that you know how much you’ll need to pay upfront before you accept the contract.

How Successful Businesses Use Ghostwriting Services

You may be wondering how to use a ghostwriter.

Leveraging ghostwriters enables you to optimize cost-efficiency while scaling output and maintaining quality all at the same time.

And with bylines and writing credit, you retain your brand’s authority over your area of expertise. It’s a win-win!

While there are four main types of ghostwriting content: website copy, ebooks & business books, fiction and memoirs, businesses focus mostly on web content like landing pages, blog posts, ebooks, and business books.

Content for business ghostwriting services

• Landing pages: Business ghostwriters can write keyword-rich landing pages with compelling calls to action, helping you generate leads or convert your existing leads into paying customers.
• Blog posts: When you want to educate your target audience and demonstrate SEO authority, blog posts are a go-to. Ghostwriters deliver well-researched posts to engage audiences and increase your traffic and conversions.
• Ebooks: Think of ebooks as middle-of-funnel collateral for your content marketing. Users can download these mini-books as part of the lead nurturing process to move through your sales funnel. Ebooks are usually longer than blog posts, so it’s vital for the writing to flow well. Professional ghostwriters can write ebooks from scratch or take existing blog content and repurpose it for you.
• Business books: If you’re a growing business and want to establish a professional reputation in your industry, authoring a book is an excellent way to accomplish this goal. But writing a book can be incredibly time-consuming. A ghostwriter can alleviate the burden of researching and writing your book, giving you time to focus on the business.

Leveraging business ghostwriters where possible in your content marketing strategy can save you a lot of time.

Advantages of Hiring a Business Ghostwriter

Ghostwriters can help you achieve flexibility and reduce the cost of your content marketing efforts. They can also bring third-party knowledge and experience to the table to increase the quality of your content.

Time savings

As a business owner, you have to juggle everything from marketing and customer service to bookkeeping and inventory management. You may not have enough time to research and write the content necessary to help grow your business.

On the other hand, large companies may want their employees to focus on product development, customer service, and other roles, leaving little time available to create a content marketing plan and consistent production schedule. Outsourcing content production to ghostwriters can help you publish consistently without dedicating much time to content creation.

Cost savings

When you hire a full-time writer, their salary or hourly wage is only one of your costs. You may also need to offer benefits, pay extra taxes, and cover the cost of a new computer or other equipment the writer needs to do their job. These costs add up quickly, especially for small businesses. When you have a writer on your payroll, you have to cover these costs regardless of whether you need content.

Ghostwriter services are less expensive, since you only pay for the content you receive. You don’t have to cover the cost of their computer equipment or internet access, pay any extra taxes (since they’re responsible for their own taxes), or worry about finding space for them in your office. As a result, working with a ghostwriter can save you a significant amount of money.

Of course, you can also leverage both types of writers. Hiring a ghostwriter can maximize your in-house writing team’s performance by allowing them to focus on time-sensitive tasks and your most important pillar content.

Increased flexibility

If you hire a full-time writer, they may not have experience writing every type of content you need. You could get around this problem by employing part-time writers with different skill sets, but then you’d have to find space and purchase equipment for both of them.

A better alternative may be to hire different ghostwriters for each type of project. For example, you’d work with a business book ghostwriter if you wanted to publish a book. Then, you’d work with a second ghostwriter if you needed a case study or white paper. This gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility.

How to Hire a Ghostwriter

If you’re ready to take advantage of all the benefits of business ghostwriting, you have two options.

The first is advertising online, screening applications, reviewing work samples, and conducting interviews until you find the right ghostwriter for the job. If you go this route, set aside plenty of time for reviewing samples — you’ll want to find someone who can write in your preferred tone and keep your target audience engaged.

The second option is to seek an agency with many business ghostwriters available for immediate work. Working with an agency eliminates the need to advertise, screen applications, and conduct interviews, freeing up a lot of your time.

If you work with an agency, you can also request a business ghostwriter with experience writing about your industry. Writers with niche expertise will communicate the value of what you offer and match Google’s desire for topical authority.

Start Growing Your Business with Ghostwriting Services

If you’re ready to learn how to grow your business with content marketing, contact a business ghostwriter today. To make hiring a writer even easier, partner with a company that works with qualified ghostwriters who are ready to take on projects of any size. 

At Crowd Content, we make it simple to find freelance ghostwriters for hire. We also have a team of SMEs who can review your content to ensure it demonstrates the expertise and authority Google loves.

The post How Much Does a Ghostwriter Cost for Business Writing? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Your company’s lead volume is stagnant but your sales reps are capped. What do you mean simply call more leads? Are you hiring another SDR?

Alas, a tale as old as time.

This is where marketing comes in. If you run mark-ops or are a content marketer tasked with feeding leads to sales, how’s it going?

Is inbound lead generation working for you or are you experiencing lots of sleepless nights?

If you want to expand your efforts or just focus on a core strategy without scatterbrain, you need to know inbound marketing, what are inbound marketing channels and how to leverage them.

So what is inbound marketing, how does it differ from outbound marketing and how can you refine tactics to make inbound marketing channels generate leads so you can hit your goals?

Outbound marketing reaches out to new leads by coming to them, whether it be through traditional advertising, outreach at tradeshows or even telemarketing.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, attracts customers who’ve already started the buyer’s journey (even if they don’t know it yet) by drawing them in to you.

By creating different kinds of content with solutions potential leads are already looking for, you can attract and empower more people to give you more revenue.

Why is this important? Simply put, inbound marketing creates a dialogue with prospective leads. Providing valuable info via inbound marketing channels enables leads to find and evaluate you.

But how exactly does inbound marketing work? And how can you harness this powerful marketing strategy yourself?

We’ll dive into the benefits of inbound marketing, the returns you can expect and investigate the various channels of inbound marketing to take advantage of.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

At its most basic definition, inbound marketing is a strategy to help prospective customers or clients find your business.

Inbound marketing meets customers where they are and guides them towards your products or services, attracting and engaging buyers before they’re even considering making a purchase.

Customers generally start their journey by researching a query online to learn more about their given interest.

For instance, they may be researching new meal recipes, gardening tips or software solutions for their jobs but not necessarily shopping yet.

If you sell a product that aligns with their interest—say, gardening accessories or a productivity software—you can guide them towards your solution.

That’s where inbound marketing, SEO content come in. By providing meaningful and informative content to customers, you can build trust and educate leads.

With an inbound marketing strategy, you’re building visibility and rapport, bringing customers to you rather than seeking them out and selling to them directly, which is outbound marketing.

Through inbound marketing channels, including organic traffic, social media and events, businesses can create brand awareness and generate leads.

Therefore inbound marketing can be a great complement to outbound marketing to increase your revenue. So how exactly are inbound and outbound marketing channels different?

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

While outbound marketing also creates leads and builds revenue, it aligns with more conventional marketing practices like ads, bulk-email marketing or even cold-calling.

The goal for both inbound and outbound marketing is to convert leads, but the approach between the two differs.

Outbound marketing almost acts as an interruption by proactively presenting products or services to people, regardless of whether they’re likely to make a purchase or not.

Inbound marketing instead aims to attract customers with tailored and valuable content.

Inbound lead generation answers questions or provides solutions to problems potential customers want to solve, while outbound marketing pushes out messages to create interest.

In simplest terms, outbound marketing brings your business to customers while inbound marketing brings customers to your business.

While outbound marketing still has its place in a marketing strategy, inbound marketing benefits compared to outbound marketing include cost-efficiency and the opportunity to nurture leads.

Let’s review the benefits of inbound marketing so you know when and how to leverage it to grow your customer base.

What Are the Benefits of Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a long-term strategy. Instead of going right for a sale, it’s designed to attract a lead’s attention, pique their interest and nurture them on their journey to a conversion.

While the benefits are subtle in the short term, a good inbound marketing strategy creates more brand awareness, increased revenue, reduced expenses and better customer engagement.

3 Inbound Marketing Benefits

1. More Brand Awareness
2. Higher Quality Leads and Increased Engagement
3. Efficient Marketing Budget

1. More Brand Awareness

Most consumers start their buyer’s journey by researching online.

With an effective SEO strategy and content that satisfies the queries of prospective customers, you can rank near the top of a search engine for instance and answer their question.

Or you attract their attention by educating them on something they didn’t know that would benefit them or solve a pain point.

This is an example of how inbound marketing generates online sales leads. When customers start their journey, your brand can show up and answer their questions first.

2. Higher Quality Leads and Increased Engagement

Customers expect tailored and individualized experiences. But only 60% of customers think companies provide good marketing personalization.

Inbound marketing can help connect to more potential customers in a personalized way.

When you understand where customers are in their journey and strategize your inbound marketing to their needs, leads are more likely to engage with your brand in meaningful ways.

Writing content with emotional messaging to exhibit empathy with your audience’s pain points is an example of how to grow your business using content marketing.

It connects with your audience on that personal level and translates to better inbound lead generation and higher customer conversion rates.

3. Efficient Marketing Budget

Since inbound marketing focuses on bringing qualified leads to your business, it’s less costly than outbound marketing.

With an effective inbound marketing effort, you can use a relatively small marketing team to make the most of your budget.

By pushing great content through various channels, the results of your efforts will compound rather than diminish over time.

With SEO practices and engaging content, your content will continue to grow and generate more leads, which means more revenue to feed back into your business and marketing budget.

How to Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Creating an inbound marketing strategy takes more than throwing money into various channels.

Pro marketing teams consider what channels they should prioritize and how to best facilitate lead generation according to their business needs.

Here are six tactics to create an inbound marketing strategy:

1. Define Buyer Personas
2. Identify Marketing Triggers
3. Determine Keywords and SEO Strategy
4. Establish Marketing Goals
5. Outline Content Strategy and Structure
6. Analyze, Revisit and Optimize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

1. Define Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your brand’s ideal customers. A single brand might have numerous buyer personas, each with different interests, priorities and goals.

Some elements to include in a buyer persona to ensure your inbound marketing strategy is effective include interests, challenges, goals and frustrations.

Importantly—and this is key for your marketing collateral to hit the mark—map your solution’s benefits to your personas’ anxieties and pain points to attract more leads.

Understanding and defining your brand’s buyer personas helps you better understand whom you’re marketing to. The better you understand your buyer personas, the better equipped you are to create content that resonates with customers.

2. Identify Marketing Triggers

Events, circumstances or pain points that cause customers to search for information about your product or industry are known formally as marketing triggers.

An example would be an anxiety we referred to above when talking about defining buyer personas.

For instance, maybe you sell marketing software to business owners who’re anxious about their busy calendars. That’s a classic trigger for the selling point of “saving time.”

Trigger-based marketing also meets customers at their point in the buyer’s journey, responding to certain actions with specific solutions rather than broad and arbitrary advertising.

Other triggers could include website or email activity, letting you know if your lead is still learning about your solution or is further along, looking at product features.

3. Determine Keywords and SEO Strategy

Once you understand your buyer personas and what causes potential customers to engage with your content, you’ll need to know how you’ll get that content in front of them.

Keyword research is an integral part of an inbound marketing strategy because it enables you to identify the questions and pain points your target audience has when researching online.

Leverage this information to optimize your SEO strategy and design your content calendars to make your content discoverable so more leads can find you.

A good example of improving your inbound marketing with SEO is to investigate common topics your audience researches from keyword research and to create topic clusters.

By focusing on and linking between a few core, common topics, you demonstrate authority and expertise to people and search engines alike on info your target audience will find valuable.

4. Establish Marketing Goals

Set inbound marketing goals by identifying what you want to accomplish by a certain time. Consider traffic metrics, conversion rates and lead sources to start planning marketing goals.

Once you know what to focus on, you can scale up from there. For example, maybe it’s better to start driving brand awareness and improving SEO before tackling goals about customer loyalty.

But whether you’re creating short-term or building towards more long-term inbound marketing goals, you’ll need strong content. 

5. Outline Content Strategy and Structure

Impactful content in various formats enables you to accomplish your marketing goals because content is how leads find you and it’s what they engage with when you’re nurturing them.

So content marketing goals are a necessary subset of inbound marketing goals, but how do you create great content goals for inbound marketing?

Basic keyword research will help you design content topics that align with your audience’s interests to grab their attention and provide value.

You also need to understand your audience’s pain points, emotional triggers, needs and wants to compel them, nurture them properly and generate inbound conversions.

If you’re a B2B content marketer, for instance, a great tip for creating B2B content marketing goals is to map your content to the buyer’s journey.

That means optimizing different types of content for each of the stages your leads are in and distributing that content accordingly.

Inbound marketing leads typically fall into three stages:

• Awareness. Leads look for general information about a topic and you’ll want them to discover your brand with content that they find valuable
• Evaluation. Leads discover more about your brand & services and gradually engage with more content about benefits or features so you can move them closer to a sale.
• Buying. Leads more strongly consider what your company can offer and interact with bottom-of-funnel content specifically about your product, services or buying process.

By creating content that responds to the separate lead stages, you can meet customers where they’re at in the buying journey and better personalize each experience.

ROI of Inbound Marketing

When designing a strategy to kickstart your inbound lead generation, you also need to focus on achieving and measuring a return-on-investment (ROI).

Not every inbound marketing channel is conducive to precise measurements and specific quantifiable metrics.

But creating a baseline, even if it’s based on estimates, is a great start to help with forecasting and finetuning your strategy decisions.

How Cost-Effective is Inbound Marketing?

Compared to outbound marketing, inbound marketing is cost-effective: small businesses see an average cost-per-lead savings of 64% and medium-sized companies enjoy a 68% reduction.

That’s partly because you’re not exhausting extra expenditure to deliver your message to potential customers, using content to instead let them find and evaluate you.

Therefore, it’s worth it to build an infrastructure to measure your inbound marketing ROI.

When you can bring tangible profitability estimates to your decision-makers that demonstrate this cost-effectiveness, you can access more resources you need to hit your goals.

What Is the ROI of Inbound Marketing?

It’ll take time to see how your content connects customers to your brand and generates leads.

Search engines gradually crawl and index content, rewarding high rankings to content that’s regularly optimized to  answer users’ questions.

Keep in mind that content can have a lasting impact. Performance often compounds over time as you build an authoritative domain through more strong content properly interlinked.

The bottom line for inbound marketing ROI comes down to how much you’re spending to convert leads into sales.

For example, say you spend $3,000 on content that results in six sales at $3,500 each. That’s $21,000 in revenue at an average cost of $500 per sale.

But this breakdown is often too simplistic. The formula is looking at total investments; content is one piece of a puzzle that leads to a sale.

So how do you build a system to take a properly holistic view at measuring inbound marketing ROI?

How to Measure Inbound Marketing ROI

Instead, build a system on an attribution model that weighs channels and content collateral by various touchpoints.

Strong inbound marketing measurement maps content to revenue-related conversion events.

For example, an analytics tool can connect a touchpoint on a blog post or an email campaign to an event like a demo signup, a trial request, a newsletter subscription and more.

Manual solutions could involve UTM parameters for inbound marketing ROI on conversion links and then tying the data in a spreadsheet to revenue metrics from a sales software.

With a comprehensive approach, you can cross-reference revenue with other metrics like social media engagement or email signups to get a full picture of your inbound marketing strategy.

So how does this all add up to generating more inbound marketing leads? We know what goes into a successful strategy and measuring ROI, but what are the channels of inbound marketing?

We’re going to shift into looking at the most common inbound marketing channels and how to use them so you can level up your content game and scale lead generation for your business.

What Are Inbound Marketing Channels?

An inbound marketing channel is a scoped set of resources and tools to deliver content from a company to your audience. In other words, how content goes from production to consumption.

Inbound marketing channels comprise the various ways businesses connect with their audience via content, from discoverability online to nurturing leads through emails or social media.

Knowing which inbound marketing channels to focus on and how to leverage them helps leverage ways to generate online sales leads with inbound marketing, so let’s dive in!

7 Important Inbound Marketing Channels

1. Organic Traffic
2. Social Media
3. Paid Advertising
4. Events
5. Podcasts
6. Referral Marketing
7. Website Resources

1. Organic Traffic

Organic inbound marketing is the most common and generally the most important channel available. It refers to website traffic of users who find you “organically” via a search engine.

Your company’s website is the main hub connecting your services to customers. Blog posts and services pages can generate organic traffic with the right content marketing and SEO strategy.

When potential leads look for info, your brand can educate them about the topic to build trust or provide value by highlighting benefits related to their query.

This is what makes your website discoverable on search engines to generate organic traffic and more prospective customers to your website.

Tailor your website’s content to your buyer personas and study the keywords and phrases that can guide people to your website.

Generate content for all stages of the funnel too. For example, top-of-funnel pages specifically target leads in the awareness stage by discussing content similar to your business categories.

If you sell workout equipment online, for instance, building content topics around workout routines and bodybuilding advice is a great way to target top-of-funnel leads.

It’s also important to know how to optimize content for SEO. Common tactics include keyword research, focusing on quality and ensuring you demonstrate expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T).

If you don’t pay attention to keywords and an SEO strategy, it might not matter how much high-quality content you produce.

If content doesn’t match users’ search intentions, search engines won’t rank your content and your website might not get the traffic it deserves.

2. Social Media

Why is social media an important part of inbound marketing?

Social media is a fast-growing channel for inbound marketing, and for good reason. A unique benefit to social media for inbound marketing is the ability to foster relationships with customers.

Social media content establishes a meaningful relationship between customers and businesses and facilitates two-way conversations.

With platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more, you can engage directly with customers, gaining insights into what they need from products and services.

What are ways to use social media as an inbound marketing channel?

Provide valuable threads on LinkedIn and Twitter to show your expertise or create a Facebook community for customers to demonstrate your commitment to customer experience.

There are also ways for how social media helps SEO.

For example, you can gain backlinks through viral posts when you amplify your content to people who can share your links on their websites.

Search algorithms will view such shares as a sign of credibility, enhancing your search rankings. Your social profile pages themselves can also rank for relevant keywords.

3. Paid Advertising

Advertising is often considered an outbound tactic, but it can be useful for inbound marketing strategies too.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on platforms like Google Ads allows you to target specific buyer personas by criteria like demographics, location and previous touchpoints on your website.

You can further customize your targeting by controlling when and where your content or ads appear.

This level of personalization enables you to hone in on potential leads already looking for info that you can provide. And ads are a proven tool to nurture inbound leads already in your funnel.

It’s also easy to attribute PPC inbound marketing to conversion events and revenue metrics. These analytics are handy for measuring and optimizing the success of your content strategy.

Although PPC can be costly, you only pay for each click you get.

Costs also differ per platform. LinkedIn tends to have higher click costs than Facebook or Google, but the lead quality tends to be stronger too since it targets business professionals.

And if you’re a local business that provides a home service, you can qualify for Google Local Services Ads.

One reason why this type of advertising is great for small business owners is that Local Services Ads charge per lead instead of per click, so you only pay for qualified leads, no junk. 

4. Events

Events are another example of a marketing channel that appear outbound, but they overlap with inbound techniques to a large degree.

Popup events associated with experiential marketing closely resemble outbound marketing, but participating in conferences and sponsoring events is all about attracting leads to your brand.

Why is event marketing an integral channel for inbound marketing? Because event marketing involves multiple touchpoints to educate and nurture leads like other inbound channels.

Setting up a booth at an event to entice passersby with a solution to their problem isn’t much different from blogging about that solution to entice search-engine users with the same problem.

And when booth attendees sign up for a demo or request more info, this should place them in a sequence with collateral like emails and ads, with unique landing pages about the event.

Once you get more digital assets involved, like QR codes, you can also initiate attribution tracking to measure event ROI too!

The key is how you are leveraging events to enable potential leads to find you and intrigue them with your hook. From there, educate them with materials also used for other inbound channels.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are increasingly prevalent among even small- and medium-sized businesses as an inbound marketing channel.

Podcast inbound marketing is effective because it helps you cement your brand by giving your company an opportunity to develop and show off your personality.

Another positive for podcasts is that podcast listeners actively engage with brands. Podcasts compel people to listen attentively, so they’ll likely become a fan of your brand personality.

Also, podcasts are an additional avenue for you to establish your expertise.

For example, if you’re an SEO agency that sells digital marketing services, starting a podcast to share SEO tips would build trust with prospective customers, showing them you know your stuff.

And podcasts are hugely popular with consumers.

The most recent year-over-year data shows the percentage of adults who regularly listen to podcasts jumped from 37% to 41%.

If that increase looks unimpressive, consider it was at 32% the previous year and is expected to hit 47% within the next year. That’s a consistent annual growth rate of over 10%.

But starting a podcast can be intimidating and time-consuming for first-timers. Plus, with more podcasts constantly popping up, it can be difficult to stand out in a saturated market.

Make sure to research podcasting tips for beginners so you feel comfortable getting started.

For instance, find the right equipment and figure out how to plan the scope of your podcast episodes.

Returning to the SEO-agency example, the SEO-podcast space is a competitive market. Maybe you mostly cater to local businesses, so you can establish a niche around tips for “local SEO.”

6. Referral Marketing

Referral marketing can produce a high volume of quality leads for lower costs than other inbound marketing channels.

That’s because you’re leveraging the reputation of other brands potential customers already know and trust.

By tapping into businesses and social circles around you, you can broaden your reach, get leads recommended from partner companies and find influential people to vouch for you.

Broadly speaking, this is what referral marketing is: it encapsulates anything that involves other people or companies bringing prospective customers to you.

Examples include customer referrals, influencer marketing with social media heavyweights or partnership marketing with companies that aren’t competitors but target the same audience.

One of the easiest ways to begin a referral program is to harness your existing customer base.

Provide your existing customers with a unique coupon code to share with a friend. They’ll likely spread the word if there’s a benefit for them, like a discount for each new referral.

The beauty here is that you only need to pay out rewards once the new customer actually makes a purchase, so you’ll still see revenue growth that’s profitable.

Influencer marketing uses endorsements and mentions from social media users with large followings, otherwise known as influencers.

With established trust from their followers, influencers can generate traffic to your business by recommending your products and services to their followers.

While influencer marketing is a lucrative inbound marketing channel, managing the shifting trends and demographics can be challenging.

Different demographics have their own aesthetic preferences, meaning you might not reach your ideal buyer persona if you don’t partner with the right influencer.

It doesn’t need to be as complex as paying a celebrity a lot of money to publish an ingenuine tweet about your product.

Find people your target audience respect, perhaps experts in their field, and engage them in a dialogue to see how you could help each other out.

If you sell products online, for instance, a great way to work with influencers is with ecommerce influencer marketing.

Find influencers who are right for your brand. If you sell makeup online, why not partner with popular YouTubers who give makeup tutorials?

When you partner with another business to refer customers between each other, that’s called partnership marketing.

For example, Apple and Mastercard came together to integrate Mastercard into Apple Pay when it was first introduced.

This made the Apple Pay app viable but also boosted Mastercard’s image as a forward-thinking leader in the payments space.

You don’t even need to create an integrated product line with another company.

If you sell accounting software, you can simply build an interdependent referral program with another company that targets accountants with a different type of software.

If you choose to partner with another company, make sure you’ll be reaching new customers and the relationship is truly a win-win.

7. Website Resources

In addition to blog posts and social media content, for instance, it’s important to create other pieces of inbound marketing content to nurture leads at all stages of the funnel.

For instance, once leads find you, they’ll want to learn more about your specific product category. This is known as middle-of-funnel marketing.

Content optimized for the top of the funnel answers users’ queries about their pain points and needs before they even know about what your product is or does.

But then after they find your brand, they’ll then want to learn more about how a solution like yours works.

As we mentioned previously, blog posts can represent “top of the funnel” marketing, drawing users to your site from search engines.

Informational resources like podcasts and webinars target customers in the evaluation stage—the middle of the sales funnel.

Ebooks and white papers provide in-depth educational content beyond that of the average blog post. You should reserve these resources for your most sophisticated content.

They take more time and funds to produce, but they’re necessary to win sales when you have a more complex buying cycle.

And for leads who already know what they’re looking for at a high level, these resources can be perfect as an initial touchpoint.

Since potential customers often find them more valuable than top-of-funnel content, they’ll more likely give their contact information so you can follow up with—and close them—later on.

Harness Inbound Marketing Channels for More Leads

Inbound marketing is an impactful tool that strategically connects businesses and customers.

By using channels like blogs, social media and referral marketing, you can target customers at their individual stages in the buyer’s journey.

This results in improved brand awareness and preference, ultimately leading to greater lead generation and conversion rates over time.

To create an effective inbound marketing strategy, you’ll need more than a few blog posts. At the heart of every inbound marketing strategy is quality content.

With content writing services, you can cost-effectively generate the content needed to leverage inbound marketing at scale and attract more leads to your brand to grow your business.

The post 7 Inbound Marketing Channels to Generate More Leads appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Developing B2B content marketing goals is critical to attract new customers and grow your revenue.

But strategizing a content plan can seem daunting for a B2B content marketer. Content yields high returns, but without a roadmap, your efforts will be for naught.

Say your boss wants to scale your company’s content and see more results. But your blog does nothing, nobody downloads your ebooks and your conversion rates are underwhelming.

So how can you achieve results for your B2B brand? You can’t exactly assume that doing much of the same will improve the situation.

You need to set content marketing objectives with direction and purpose.

This is why it’s important to define content marketing goals. You connect content marketing to company growth goals to build revenue.

B2B content marketing goals clarify business goals focused on lead generation to help you produce that extra revenue and hit targets.

And content marketing is a perfect fit! Content marketing delivers 3x more leads than outbound sales and B2B companies increase lead volume by 67% when they blog regularly.

When you define content marketing goals, you generate brand awareness, improve SEO, educate leads, foster customer retention and drive revenue.

This guide outlines B2B content marketing goals, explains what makes great content and lists example goals to help you win at content.

Now you can create a content marketing plan that actually works, so let’s dive in!

Developing a Strategy for Your Content Marketing Goals

What makes great content marketing strategy goals? A strong content marketing strategy relies upon quality content designed with purpose.

Defining content goals for quality and relevance is the best way to align content marketing with company revenue goals.

But let’s be honest. It’s almost impossible to determine revenue produced by content marketing with precision.

Bottom-of-funnel content about buyer concerns or product fit might work for last-touch attribution.

Though most content delivers organic traffic and introduces your brand to potential leads. At this stage, people are still learning.

Your content needs to educate and nurture. Along with a strong brand story and a great user experience, your content functions as part of a holistic whole to move leads down the funnel.

An optimal B2B content strategy thus emphasizes quality and relevance.

About 47% of potential B2B buyers engage with 3–5 pieces of your content before purchasing—and a sizable chunk with more than five!.

Focusing on quality, value-driven content makes your content discoverable and engaging for leads. This is how to align content goals with revenue goals (and make your bosses happy!).

So, how to define, produce and leverage high-quality content?

What Makes Great B2B Content?

Great B2B content provides relevant value to your audience, answers questions, and forms part of a strategy that scales your business.

There are four steps for how to grow your business using content marketing and make B2B content work for you:

1. Planning content. The days of designing blog posts one at a time based on generic keywords are gone. Cluster content around relevant topics for your audience to signal your expertise in certain fields.
2. Developing content. Set brand standards to ensure content is well-researched, succinct yet still comprehensive, simple to digest and connects with your target audience. Play around with different formats to see what moves the needle.
3. Distributing and amplifying content. Never “set it and forget it” after publishing. B2B content is only great with an audience, and a relevant one too. Create a marketing flywheel for content around a distribution and amplification plan.
4. Restrategize content. Customer expectations will develop over time and your competitors will adapt. Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit content clusters, guidelines and influencers to keep things fresh.

With a holistic strategy in place, you can then hone in on crafting content quality itself during the production stage.

How to Create Quality B2B Content

The goals of content marketing rely on relevant blog posts and touchpoints for leads to find you, gain interest and become customers.

Focus on Storytelling

Just because you sell to businesses doesn’t mean your content should be boring and esoteric.

Guide readers through a journey connected to the heart of your company; narratives humanize brands and are key for conversions.

Develop Smart Buyer Personas

Create content that speaks to your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents part of your audience.

But avoid defining personas around generic characteristics. A common trap is that buyer personas are often based on stereotypes, thus deflating their value.

Instead, focus on needs, not useless demographic information. Two people with similar backgrounds, equal amounts of wealth and of the same age could differ a lot.

For example, Kazoo designs content around buyer types and needs. They focus on categories like challenges, industries and solutions.

Format Content Like a Pro

Giant walls of text put off most readers.

Before you publish a piece of B2B content, make sure it’s easy to read. Bolded headings, bulleted lists and other formatting elements make it easy to digest content.

For example, concentrate on brevity. Short headers generate 36% more organic traffic than longer ones.

Map the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is the path a potential customer follows when evaluating your products or services.

If you publish content only relevant to leads in one stage of the journey, you can’t connect with them as their intents change at different stages.

Map out the journey stages to different pieces of content, inclusive of destination pages with targeted conversion points.

Goals of Content Marketing

We’ve overviewed the importance of devising a content strategy aligned with revenue goals that focuses on quality and relevance to target leads based on their needs.

Part of this process involves understanding the steps needed to develop great content that actually works and what goes into creating & leveraging quality content.

Content marketing goals guide these principles that enable you to succeed and provide a roadmap towards that success.

If this seems overwhelming, start with the end in mind. Once you know where you’re going, you can determine the best way to get there.

Let’s take a look at content marketing goals to consider—and why.

5 Example B2B Content Marketing Goals

1. Drive Brand Awareness
2. Improve SEO
3. Educate Prospective Buyers
4. Impact Revenue Metrics
5. Foster Customer Loyalty & Revenue Retention

1. Drive Brand Awareness

Before your content can help qualify leads or convert qualified leads into customers, it has to generate leads.

Content is especially valuable in driving brand awareness. Since increasing brand awareness is the top priority of half of all B2B marketers, it should be a go-to content marketing goal.

Design top-of-funnel content that speaks to buyers’ aspirations and pain points. This will make you discoverable as they look for ideas before they even know what solutions they need.

Gong executes a great example of this content marketing goal.

They created the content category “Revenue Intelligence” for information about improving company revenue and to establish themselves as experts in their field.

And as an added bonus, they doubled-down on this brand-awareness campaign by highlighting the category in their metadata!

2. Improve SEO

One of the most vital content marketing goals is to improve SEO and deliver more organic traffic to your website.

This goal should drive your content marketing because of how effectively content contributes to SEO.

Engage in best practices for article writing SEO by targeting keywords and search queries your audience might find interesting with researched and well-written posts.

And go after interactive elements on SERPs (search-engine results pages) to augment this approach.

For example, HubSpot are masters at capturing featured snippets with their content marketing.

They execute a structured system within their content to answer queries their target audience would search on Google.

HubSpot leverages typical questions their potential customers might ask for more organic traffic.

Then they implement SEO tactics, such as in the below HTML, to signal to search engines that this type of content is worthy for exposure. Genius!

3. Educate Prospective Buyers

Leveraging content to educate people about the possibilities of how they can improve at their jobs and hit their metrics is one of the most impactful content marketing goals to strive for.

When possible buyers have pain points, they’ll seek out information to fix their problems.

By educating them on solutions, you’ll build trust and cement your expertise to encourage them to buy.

Let’s say you struggle to optimize your productivity because of an insufficient tech stack. None of your tools integrate with each other and it eats up hours each week.

Enter Zapier. They produce B2B content about “productivity tips” complemented on their blog with a dedicated CTA for a newsletter signup.

Makes sense. Increased productivity for B2B buyers is at the heart of their messaging since it’s a core benefit of their offerings.

In the above example, they don’t merely point out the integration they offer with Google Calendar; they lead with the educational message about how to better manage your day.

This content reinforces their reputation as leaders in the productivity space as they educate potential buyers about solutions they didn’t even know existed.

4. Impact Revenue Metrics

Earlier we mentioned how it’s almost impossible to attribute revenue to your content marketing. This is especially true with top-of-funnel content like blog posts.

But it’s simpler with middle- or bottom-funnel marketing content for specific, short-tail queries that address immediate pains.

Besides, the overarching purpose of B2B content marketing goals is to align with wider revenue goals. Well-executed content serves this purpose.

If you’re doing well and ready to start scaling, hone in on content that leads to shorter turnaround times for converting leads to paying customers.

Again, Zapier provides an exemplary case study here.

Their “insane SEO strategy” involves content pieces spread out across many webpages and elements targeting prospective leads looking for specific solutions.

Think about it. You’re a prospective lead who encounters a gap in one of your daily workflows. Your stack is insufficient and your tech team feels capped—they can’t help you.

So you search for potential ways to solve the problem yourself. You need to send emails as Slack messages.

Behold Zapier, with three webpages, one about Gmail, one about Slack and one about the solution.

It’s dedicated content designed to spur direct revenue—and it works!

5. Foster Customer Loyalty and Revenue Retention

Nurturing customer loyalty for better retention rates is an underrated goal of content marketing.

How can you achieve this goal?

Create content marketing campaigns around information that helps both new and existing customers.

When you provide curated and expert content for your base, they’ll value your services more and stick around.

One B2B organization that does well at this goal with their content marketing is the accounting company Bench.

They produce content every tax season on a dedicated website hub about advice and resources for filing business tax returns.

They reinforce their expertise and reward clients with content full of tangible benefits. This tactic also provides upsell opportunities and delights website visitors with great content.

This is a winning formula for B2B content marketing. It inspires loyalty and spurs business growth!

Get Amazing Content to Hit Your B2B Content Goals

Setting B2B content marketing goals provides a roadmap to develop and put your content strategy in place.

When you know what to achieve with content goals, you’ll attract & educate leads, create brand awareness, drive organic traffic and increase retention rates.

But none of this matters without quality and relevance for your target audience. To achieve results, you need quality content you can produce at scale.

Crowd Content’s content writing services save you time and deliver expertly written B2B content so you never have to write again.

No matter what stage of the buyer journey you’re targeting, you can tackle your B2B content marketing goals with confidence.

The post How to Create B2B Content Marketing Goals With 5 Examples appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Maybe you want to create something valuable to offer your existing audience. Maybe you want to use an eBook as a lead magnet that you promote via social media, paid promotions or SEO.

No matter why you want to create an eBook, there’s a question you have to ask yourself: will it generate a high enough return on your investment to make it worth the investment involved in creating it?

You can’t answer that question without having a full understanding of all the labor (and associated costs) that goes into conceptualizing, producing, and distributing an eBook.

ALSO – Check out our eBook writing services

Here’s a breakdown of all these elements, and how they affect total cost of creating an eBook.

First, What IS an eBook?

Technically, “eBook” is a term used to describe any document (typically a non-editable one) that you can read from an electronic device, like a computer, smartphone, or tablet. The more practical definition of an eBook is that it’s a long-form composition leveraged in a digital format in exchange for money, a lead submission, or something else that serves an objective of the creator.

Note – Most content marketers use eBooks as lead magnets to capture contact info from potential buyers. Most buyers are towards the middle of the funnel around the Interest stage of their journey.

Before we start breaking down the costs of creating an eBook, let’s make something clear. Yes, anyone can create an eBook — if you write two pages in a word document and export it into a PDF, technically, you’ve done it. But, what we’re talking about here is creating something of value — an eBook that delivers.

Typically, that means that your eBook that:

1. Is at least 5,000 words
2. Comprehensively covers the topic at hand
3. Features an attractive, on-brand design
4. Use hyperlinks in a table of contents for easy navigation
5. Includes graphics, charts, illustrations and other visual cues

As we’ll describe below, this is a larger ask, and one that may involve costs that you aren’t thinking about right now.

Do it Yourself or Outsource?

Many digital marketers see eBooks as a worthwhile effort because they are a valuable piece of content that you can use to support multiple business goals. The main challenge often comes down to the time it takes to do it right.

You can spend hours working on the concept and the message of your eBook, and still not have anything that resembles the outline of a fully fleshed-out composition. And that doesn’t include researching, writing, editing, and designing your eBook which can take dozens of hours.

This is why many marketers choose to outsource their eBooks. They either outsource the smaller parts that they would struggle to handle on their own, or sometimes larger portions, serving to streamline the entire process. As we go step-by-step, we’ll talk about the cost of creating an eBook using outsourced talent.

Step 1: Developing the Concept

Before you start crafting your masterpiece, you have to build the framework for the entire exercise. What’s the topic? How will it be used to meet your goals? What audience does it speak to? Where are they at in the funnel when they read this?

This step doesn’t cost anything — there’s no charge for your own creativity.

Once you have a concept and loose outline, it’s time to start the creation of your eBook.

Step 2: Writing the Content

Step 2 comprises two parts: research and writing. They’re part of the same step because you’re probably going to want the person doing the research to also write the content that their research covers. And, you want that writing to be at a quality level that doesn’t need much editing after it’s written.

Alex Azoury, Founder and CEO of Home Grounds says the cost of creating an eBook depends on the writers you have access to.

“If you don’t have a writer on staff, then you’ll probably hire a freelance content writer or agency,” says Azoury. “Freelance writers differ in their experience, subject preferences, and costs. Think about whether you need a native English speaker or a competent writer whose English is at near-native level.”

If you’re hiring an “intermediate” writer, according to Azoury, they’ll typically charge between 5 and 20 cents per word. The average eBook is 2,500 to 5,000 words. That means that costs range between $125 to $250 on the lower end and $500 to $1000 on the high end.

When your topic is research-intensive, or you want to hire a writer with an expert knowledge of the subject, you’ll end up paying more. Budget as much 50 cents to 1 dollar per word, which will run you between $1250 to $2500 for a 2,500 word product.

Note – At Crowd Content, we always recommend clients use at least our 4-star writers which are priced at 12 cents per word. At that rate, you’ll need to provide a good amount of research and data to your writer. For more complex or research intensive projects we can set up a custom project.

A Cost Effective Alternative Method

If you want to save costs on content creation, you can use content you’ve already written and published in your eBook. If you’re writing a long form piece about a topic, chances are it’s a topic you’ve already explored before. During your planning steps, look for previously produced content that can be used to reduce the burden of researching, writing, and editing brand-new content.

Many marketers actually create a series of blog posts that could be considered episodic content, meaning that collectively they make up one larger story. Collecting these resources into an eBook is a very cost effective way of finding content for an eBook.

The reverse is also true – consider carving up sections of your completed eBooks into blog posts you publish (content repurposing). You can even include a link to the full eBook in the post which can generate a lot of leads.

Step 3 – Editing Your Content

The cost of editing, according to the Editorial Freelancers Association, varies based on the type of work you need. Basic copy editing is usually billed at around $30-$40 per hour, and if the copy needs a more intensive editor, that will increase to around $40-$60. If the average copy editor can get through an average of 5 manuscript pages per hour, a 2,500 word eBook (10 pages) will run you between $60 to $120 and a 5,000 word composition could cost an average of $240 at the high end.

Note – At crowd Content you can hire freelance editors for 3 cents per word. For more substantial editing requirements we can also set up a custom project.

Again, keep in mind that these numbers are for basic editing. If you want a copy editor to make multiple rounds of revisions and look deeply at changes that could improve the content, you may need to budget more.

If you decide you just need a proofread you might also be able to budget less, but we wouldn’t advise that.

Step 4: Designing the Assets

The design cost depends on the level of commitment you want to put into the aesthetics of your eBook. Do you want every page to be expertly laid out with full-color graphics, or will an eye-catching cover page suffice?

Alex Azoury again: “Your design includes your eBook cover, various elements within the book, and the final page. Someone will need to decide on the fonts and color used. All the headlines, paragraphs and text need to be formatted so that your book appears professionally produced.”

Azoury estimates that a complete design takes about five hours. If a freelance designer charges $30.00 per hour, that comes out to $150.00 for the project.

Keep in mind, that is a bare bone estimate and would likely result in a very basic looking eBook.

According to James Pollard, Founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, “Some people will recommend going to a cheap site like Fiverr, but I’ve found that you get what you pay for. I suggest hiring a professional designer either directly or through a freelancing site.”

This level of premium design may cost you a lot more. Pollard estimates that for a fully produced, graphically rich cover design, it may cost as much as $500 for a final product that makes your eBook stand out.

That’s just for the basics, though. If you want to take time to create graphics, tables, charts and other visual elements, that will require more design time. An eBook with robust visuals can cost significantly more and may even creep into the thousands.

Whatever level of design quality and depth you choose, you’ll want to ensure the final package follows your brand guidelines and is appealing to readers.

Do It Yourself?

This all assumes that you opt to have a designer create your eBook. While usually that’s quicker and can produce a better result, there are a number of tools that can help you create your own eBook design for free.

1. Microsoft Word – there are great templates available to pop your content into. While it can be tricky at times, it does let you add important elements like table of contents, cover pages, graphics and charts fairly easily.
2. Online tools – Canva, LucidPress and FlipMaker all offer easy to use tools to create visually appealing eBooks. While there can be a small cost to using these tools, they might be a good fit for you.

Keep in mind that you should have a good eye for design if you go the DIY route.

Step 5: Repurposing and Distributing Your eBook

The most common eBook format is the PDF. And, that may be all you need to do.

But, you might also choose to put it in different formats and distribute it additional channels to increase its reach. Here are a few ideas:

1. Create an audiobook version and make it available on services that offer listening like Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Scribd, and others.
2. Format it for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and make it available on Amazon. You can make it available for free here, but many published authors earn significant revenue by charging for their eBooks
3. Format your eBook in the ePub format for wider accessibility. This is the standard format used by eBook readers such as Kindle, Kobo, iBook, etc. There are many free and paid tools that can help you do this. This will also allow you to sell your eBook on marketplaces like Google Play and iBook.
4. Break it up into several blog posts and post it on your blog

These are all relatively low cost ways to get your content to more of your audience, and you can even generate sales if you choose.

Step 6: Calculating Your Final Cost of Creating an Ebook and ROI

So, what’s the final cost of creating an eBook? As mentioned, the total investment depends on what you have available to as well as the level of depth and quality you’re aiming for.

A good ballpark for an average eBook would be around $3,000 dollars if you hire freelancers for everything. But, if you have access to some resources needed like existing content, design support, editing support, etc, the total cost can be a lot lower. Similarly, if you need an exceptional level of quality, tons of research, and need to hire an expert to write it, you could be looking at significantly more.

The amount you actually budget creating your finished product should depend on what you expect to gain from it when you leverage it to your selected market. According to James Pollard, “I tie it directly to a revenue metric in my business because I view it as an investment. I have no problem spending $3,000 to create an eBook that will generate $30,000 in sales over the next year.”

To understand and track the ROI of your eBook, the best way is to determine what the value of each lead who downloads your eBook is. To do this you can work backwards through your funnel. Here’s an example:

1. Each new paying customer has a lifetime value of $100
2. Of leads who download the eBook, 10% become paying customers
3. Each eBook lead is therefore worth $10
4. Since we spent $3,000 to produce this eBook, we need 300 eBook downloads for it to break even

This is just an example to illustrate this calculation. If you can track your ROI with actual numbers, you’ll be way better off.

Wrapping It Up

Quality eBooks can have a hugely positive ROI when used as lead magnets to support your other marketing efforts. Since the content they contain is so extensive and valuable, your audience is much more likely to offer their contact information in exchange for them. And, that’s not even counting other benefits such as increasing your perceived authority or boosting SEO.

But, they can be a big investment.

One way you can reduce the cost of creating an eBook and maximize ROI is by working with a reliable source of eBook writers. Crowd Content can help you find cost effective solutions for eBook creation and any other content needs, no matter how specialized or extensive.

Be sure to reach out if you could use a hand with your next eBook writing project.

The post What Is the Total Cost of Creating an Ebook? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Marketers that understand how to create content for every stage of the buyer journey know that leveraging different types of content is critical.

One of the most valuable mid-funnel content types you can leverage is the white paper. These are incredibly valuable resources for buyers who are looking to learn more, evaluate options, and ultimately help nudge them towards the decision stage of their journey.

But, white papers need to be amazing to accomplish this goal in a world where readers expect more and more of the content they consume.

In this post, we’ll go over what makes a good white paper and then highlight some great white paper examples you can emulate. 

White Papers at a Glance

White papers are in-depth explorations of a topic, written to provide a targeted audience with valuable, actionable content. A white paper differs from a blog post because it’s longer and more thoroughly researched, with a formal tone and usually packaged in a PDF file. 

This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be engaging — it means the priority is giving readers authoritative information they can use to solve a particular problem.

Initially, a white paper was solely a government technical document that helped to gauge public reactions to legislative changes. Organizations and businesses now use them as part of their content marketing strategies to influence decision-makers. 

White papers can help you in the following ways:

1. Act as lead magnets that leads download in exchange for their contact information
2. Drive SEO results if published and indexed on your site (not in a PDF)
3. Establish you as an authority in your space

Why Are White Papers Effective?

A white paper is effective primarily because it communicates your expertise to other businesses and potential buyers and is a valuable asset that these people can use. 

Because your audience values them, you can write white papers with the aim of influencing b2b marketers or put them behind a sign up form on a landing page to generate leads or grow your subscriber base.

A good white paper contains unique, valuable information that your target audience of potential contacts would find difficult to find elsewhere. When you understand what your target market is looking for — you can preempt and exceed expectations by producing content the reader needs.

Good white papers address a common problem or challenge your audience is facing and provides a comprehensive solution. Spending time to understand what these challenges are and what questions your audience has is critical.

SIDENOTE – If you choose to publish your white paper, or a portion of it, ungated then your white paper can also help to drive SEO traffic. When you’re researching what topics you should cover, you should also find search terms that your audience uses in Google when trying to address the challenges you’ll cover. Be sure to build that into your content to capture valuable organic traffic. 

In the Inc. blog, Victor Ijidola points out two studies that back up how white papers improve marketing success. According to one by Eccolo Media, out of 10 types of content, white papers were ranked as the most helpful form to use in the initial sales phase. Furthermore, a survey by TechTarget reported that 91% of IT buyers consider a white paper to be the second most effective type of content to use in the first stage of buying — with product literature ranked first.

Harness the Broad Reach of Content Marketing

Blogs, case studies, eBooks, e-newsletters and infographics are just a few content types useful in content marketing. The acceleration of digital marketing and the growing influence and reach of technology means having a well-defined content marketing strategy is more crucial than ever. Its effectiveness lies in the indirect approach of becoming more than just a brand to consumers by adding value to their lives through content.

Social media and email marketing are particularly useful due to their prevalence in consumers’ everyday existence. Since it became the standard for people in our society to carry a smartphone, the reach of these channels has increased. These are great channels to distribute and promote your content.

Most people spend a significant portion of their day checking emails and scrolling through their various social media feeds for updates. If you’ve had a blog and noticed how effective it is as a means of engaging potential customers, creating a white paper would likely enhance your content strategy even further.

Ultimately content marketing needs great content to fuel it. You need content to promote and hook visitors in, who you can then nudge down your funnel by progessively showing them content that makes them more interested in your products or services. 

When it comes to mid-funnel and bottom of funnel content, white papers are amongst the best tools at your disposal. As you map out your funnel, be sure to identify what white papers you can create at these later stages to convert more of your traffic. 

Best Uses for White Papers

The modern buyer is savvy, and they understand that research is critical when they’re choosing which product or service to use. A well-written white paper feeds this thirst for knowledge while subtly positioning your solution as the definitive answer to their need. This is part of the reason why they’re so popular with workers and operators within the tech industry.

Often times these buyers will be researching products or services to solve a problem or challenge they’re facing. White papers that solve these problems are incredibly useful to potential buyers. 

White papers are also excellent tools for B2B marketers who are establishing themselves as thought leaders in their niche. You can expand your network and build awareness by inspiring fellow businesses with insightful and authoritative content which can lead to them contacting you when they need help that only you can provide. 

Your sales team will thank you if you have great white papers they can leverage. White papers perform a variety of useful functions throughout the sales process:

• White papers establish thought leadership and attract sought-after affiliates and partners.
• They teach potential customers and current clients relevant and valuable information.
• The content in a white paper is educational and not at all sales-focused.
• A business benefits white paper informs the reader about a product without using sales pitches.
• Technology benefits white papers are more technical and detailed about specific features.
• Product comparisons are popular types of white paper that give the audience impartial information to help them make a choice.
• You can generate leads if you put them behind a paywall or contact form — this can be especially effective if you already have a blog or provide content that people read regularly.

Know Your Target Audience

Before you start writing, you must develop a clear understanding of your audience. For example, if your subject matter is aimed at expert engineers, your content should be appropriately technical. On the other hand, if your audience is content writers — they’ll enjoy slightly more elaborate adjectives and fewer statistics. You should also reflect these preferences in the white paper design and layout.

Who Is Your Audience?

Firstly, ask yourself who you want to target. Build a profile of an individual representative (a persona) of your target audience and find out what they need. Search engine data gives business owners a uniquely honest and direct insight into the queries your audience has. You can also interview people in this audience, or ask your sales team what questions they often hear during negotiations. 

To write the best white papers, you’ll need to find out the questions your audience needs answering.

How Do Their Needs Align With Your Business Offering?

Now you’ve established the audience’s question; you must find a way of providing them with factual information that compels them to use your product or service to fulfill that need. Remember — it’s not a direct sell. You need to frame the solution as your brand, as opposed to explicitly pointing the reader towards it.

What Are the Main Elements of White Papers?

A captivating and effective white paper relies upon six essential elements:

• Captivating title and headlines: The title is the first opportunity to have to entice readers in. Clear and compelling titles and headlines keep the audience interested and provide markers to help them navigate your content.
• Executive summary: This helps decision-makers whose time is precious to make a quick decision about whether you’re delivering a solution they require. It’s a summary of the key points, with a succinct conclusion that doesn’t leave any questions unanswered.
• A clear introduction or abstract: An introduction should clearly outline your main points and tell the reader what to expect.
• Thoroughly researched and actionable content: This is the main body of your content and the area where the value lies. You must conduct thorough research to provide information that’s easily digestible but goes into enough depth to be a complete resource.
• Snackable layout: Don’t underestimate how crucial layout and design are. Readers quickly lose interest in monotonous content with unbroken blocks of writing. So, make sure you use blocks of color, diagrams, pictures, headings, subheadings and lists to break up the content and keep the audience engaged.
• Implement a clear distribution strategy: Now you’ve written your white paper, you need to release it into the world as part of your content marketing strategy. You’ll need a clear plan in place about whether you release it for free on social media or build a broader strategy around a paywall or sign up form.

How to Promote White Papers

There are myriad ways to ensure maximum exposure for your content, and it’s a time-consuming piece of writing to create — so make sure it gets the reach it deserves. In particular, you’ll need a well-structured promotion plan to make sure your B2B white papers reach a wider audience. Here are several ideas to help you distribute your content :

• Create a landing page on your website with a short opt-in form to download the white paper
• Create a blog post promoting the white paper or post a portion of your white paper and ensure it’s SEO optimized to rank and drive organic traffic
• Promote your white paper by publishing it with hashtags on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Quora, Instagram and Pinterest
• Submit a guest post to an influencer’s blog with a backlink to your landing page for your white paper
• Use email to promote your white paper to your existing mail list, or pay to send a sponsored email to a relevant partner’s list
• Host a conference, podcast or webinar about your white paper and interview industry experts
• Develop relationships with fellow influencers in your vertical and encourage them to share your white paper
• Email the owners of resources lists and ask them to feature your content
• Share your white paper with your partners and affiliates
• Create an infographic based around the info in your white paper

Where Does a White Paper Fit Into the Buyers Journey?

As mentioned earlier, statistics suggest that white papers are most useful at the consideration stage of the customer journey. This is when a consumer is most likely to conduct extensive research regarding their purchase. They understand what their problem is, and they’re looking for a solution. Encouraging downloads and getting contact details at this stage can be the most effective way of finding leads and converting them. The three steps on the sales journey are:

1. Awareness stage, where you capture the audience’s interest
2. Consideration stage, when they’re gathering information
3. Decision stage, when they decide which product of service to use

At the consideration stage, you have the opportunity to give them information about how you intend to solve their problem. Once you’ve obtained their contact details, you can follow up with targeted content to further encourage a conversion.

White Paper Examples and Resources

You can find an array of helpful resources and excellent white paper examples from some of the biggest companies in the world. Here’s a selection of useful tools and resources for white paper writing.

Sample White Paper Templates

The American Marketing Association has a handy white paper template.

B2B

HubSpot produces a slew of great content resources including a range of white papers. Their white paper on How to Use Instagram for Business is a great example of a piece that offers solutions to a common challenge many of its audience face – how are B2B companies supposed to leverage Instagram? 

An outstanding example of a B2B white paper is Networking and Your Competitive Edge from Cisco. It uses a futuristic and sleek design to communicate the benefits of its services to decision makers.

LinkedIn is highly adept at using content to build a relationship with its users. The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Content Marketing helps content marketers to succeed with valuable insights from industry leaders.

B2C

While most white papers are aimed at B2B audiences, they’re often just as valuable for B2C audiences.

Google wrote a detailed piece entitled the Google Cloud Security and Compliance Whitepaper, targeted at the public as much as it’s aimed at organizations. It aims to communicate the brand’s dedication to security and privacy, encouraging trust and affirming Google’s commitment to its users online safety.

Increase Conversions at Each Stage of Your Sales Funnel

White papers are useful for many reasons, but their primary advantages are that they establish you as a thought leader in your field while improving your website’s search engine ranking. No matter what your area of expertise is, a well-constructed white paper instills confidence in consumers and partners that you can provide the solution to their problem.

To find out more about content marketing strategies, sign up to Crowd Content’s blog, and get actionable SEO and digital marketing advice delivered straight to your inbox.

ALSO – Do you Need a Content Writer or a Copywriter?

The post White Paper Examples & How to Advice to Drive Amazing Results appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

So which one do you need when clients come to you to boost their business online: a content writer for your website or a web copywriter? The answer depends on the goals and objectives of the client’s campaign.

Nearly 100 percent of the time, though, you need both a content writer and a web copywriter. Here’s why:

Why You Need a Content Writer

Customers love buying things, but they hate the feeling of being sold. Navigating this dichotomy is one of the most challenging things in marketing. The most successful campaigns don’t push products and services on customers. Rather, they give customers a reason to buy and make them feel like it’s their idea.

That’s where content writing comes in. Rather than always trying to sell, sell, sell, content writing provides value to the reader.

Let’s pretend your client runs a mortgage brokerage. The client wants to increase their online presence and capture leads from people searching the internet for information about mortgages. You help the client set up their website. Now it’s time to populate it with content.

Purely sales content doesn’t give the customer what they’re looking for, and it doesn’t inspire their confidence. There’s a time and place to switch into sales mode. But that comes after your client has built a rapport with the customer and earned the customer’s trust.

The way to build rapport and trust with a website or blog is through content marketing — using a well-defined content strategy to get a customer visit a page or fill out a lead form. It gives the customer something of use to them — such as detailed explanations of different mortgage types – without requiring anything of the customer in return.

It also establishes your client as an authority in their niche. It’s easier to sell to clients after you’ve demonstrated the depth of your knowledge and competence. According to Caleb Chen, Founder at The Highest Critic, “content writers are usually/ideally subject matter experts in the industry for which they’re going to be writing content. This allows them to bring context and expert opinion to their content when compared with a copywriter. Generally, a content writer will be more costly than a copywriter.”

Why You Need a Web Copywriter

Anyone who has ever watched a sales movie understands the importance of closing. Remember the iconic scene with Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, where he delivers the ABCs of sales: Always Be Closing?

ALSO – What is Copywriting?

It’s true. If your client doesn’t use their content to compel a specific action, then they’re essentially just a free source of information.

That’s why good copywriting goes hand in hand with good content writing. Your client’s content writing establishes trust and provides value to the reader. Their copywriting calls the reader to action and closes the sale. Says Chen, “copywriters are generally people who have a solid writing and editing skill base and can be trusted to write grammatically correct copy for any purpose — but don’t often have experience in the industry for which their copy is being generated.”

While the two types of writer vary in their expertise, their skill set, and often, their cost, the interplay between content writing and copywriting forms the crux of a winning online marketing campaign.

A Place for Both in the Customer Journey

By now you understand the difference between copywriting and content writing in a theoretical, goal-oriented sense: content provides educational, valuable, and relevant information about a brand, while copy is used to convince audience members to take an action. But what does it look like in practice?

Sunny Ashley, CEO of Autoshopinvoice, helps put the concepts on more accessible ground: “The difference between the two boils down to their end goals and deliverables. The end goal for content writers is to enhance SEO and build a following. Their content is targeted more towards the top-of-the-funnel. Their performance is ultimately judged on things like page visits and keyword rankings.

Conversely, a copywriter’s is to convert leads into sales. Their content should be less about brand awareness and more about persuasion and calls-to-action. Conversion metrics, form submissions, and new signups are better indicators for success for copywriters.”

Content: First Steps Toward Your Marketing Goals

Content writing serves a few different purposes, including audience awareness, brand recognition, and lead generation. It comes in a wide variety of different packages, from emails and social media posts to blog posts, press releases, well-researched white papers, and e-books.

Imagine you’re building a campaign for a new brand. You don’t have an audience that you can send sales letters or conversion-optimized emails to, so you have to start at square one with a content marketing campaign. You hire a writer to write content related to your brand, something with mass appeal to your audience; preferably, something that brings to light a problem that can be solved by the products or services you’re selling.

Once you have a strong, engaging piece of content, you can strategically deploy it in ways that will best reach a cold “top-of-funnel” audience.

Whether it’s via paid traffic on Google or Facebook, organic social media, an email campaign, or successfully ranking for your target keywords, the next step is driving traffic to your content. When a prospect clicks on a link in any of these channels, they might be taken to a landing page that advertises what they’ll be able to read or download in exchange for submitting some simple information, like their name and email address or phone number — this is called gated content.

Side note: the writing on landing pages tends to be a mix of content and copy; it continues to engage the audience while using the value of the content to persuade them to take the desired action.

Now, you’ve put together a list of leads and you’re starting to grow an audience that has engaged with your brand and is looking forward to what you’ll give them next. That’s when it’s time for marketing copy to take the stage.

Copy: The Hitter That Cleans Up the Leads

Writing copy is all about understanding what the audience wants to hear in order to take the next step in the buyer journey. Luckily, having all clicked on the same piece of content, your audience is filled with prospects that have similar priorities to each other.

Conversion-based sales copy is then deployed through email, direct mail, and other channels that directly advertise the products or services of the brand. It also fills the pages of your website so that anyone who visits is automatically engaged by compelling writing. In this case, copywriting follows up on the awareness of the customer’s problem, strongly positioning your brand as the solution.

Christian Antonoff, a content writer at Independent Fashion Bloggers, says, “the copywriter’s role is to sell products and services by appealing to your senses and emotions. They write persuasive copy targeting brands, selling the notion of needing them in your life.”

But What About Writing that Serves Neither Purpose?

This is actually a trick question: writing that is neither copy nor content has no place in today’s digital marketplace. Some marketing managers will look at certain types of writing and see it as filler; placeholder text to take up space on a page. But, this is a counterintuitive way to think about writing. After all, if any text on your website, blog, or emails isn’t being written to accomplish a goal, what’s the point?

Are Copy and Content Becoming Less Distinguishable?

At the same time, as the world of digital marketing continues to evolve, finding a writer with skills in copywriting and content writing becomes increasingly valuable. Google’s search engine algorithm gets more sophisticated with every new update, becoming better equipped to find and elevate valuable content of all kinds up the list of search results. As the burden shifts away from the rigid guidelines of SEO, the lines between copywriting and content creation will blur even more.

And, there’s mounting evidence that Google values pages and content that have strong engagement metrics. People engage with good content if it provides value to them, but they’re more likely to visit other pages on your site and convert if you also employ strong copywriting. Using both types of writing together can help you boost your overall engagement.

As Isaac Hammelburger, Owner & Founder at SearchPros.co, puts it, there’s no better time for a diversified skill set as a writer: “As the marketing world continues to evolve, the roles of content and copywriters are blurred, but this is exactly what people need now. Writers have to learn a little bit of the other side to take full advantage of their talents.”

Some feel that the difference between the two is nearly obsolete. Adriana Tica is the Founder and Owner of Idunn, and having worked with writers for a long time, is beginning to see them as indistinguishable. “Both of them actually need to write copy and content that sells and converts”, she says. “A blog post with a cleverly placed CTA can convert as much as a long-form sales page. An insightful white paper can bring a lot of sales if written and marketed correctly -— we’ve seen this happen for a lot of our clients. Our point of difference has always been that we create both copy and content that aligns [with] our clients’ financial goals. And we know that both content writing and copywriting can bring sales and conversions.

So, Do You Need a Content Writer or Copywriter For Your Project?

As we’ve discussed, both types of writer have a role in moving your audience through the customer journey. But, what type of content should you assign to each type of writer?

Here’s a quick summary.

Content Writers

You’ll want to send content that is meant inform and engage to content writers. Common content types to send them include articles, blog posts, ebooks, guides, white papers and social media posts. You may also need to find a subset of content writers – technical writers – if you have complex documents to create like how to manuals, reference documents, etc.

Copywriters

Writing that is meant to compel action should be sent to copywriters. Common content types include advertisements, brochures, city pages, landing pages, print ads and collateral, website copy, social media updates, and more.

Mentioned earlier, but one example of the line between content writing and copywriting getting blurry is advertorials. These are short content pieces that look like blog posts or personal stories, inform them reader, but then also compel them to take action. These are very common on Facebook now.

The Takeaway

The easiest way to determine if your client needs a content writer or a web copywriter is to ask this question:

Is my client looking to build their brand and become an authority in their industry, or are they trying to close the sale and compel customers to take a particular action?

Chances are, they want to do both. And for that reason, having a winning content writer and a winning web copywriter on the job is vital for producing a successful campaign. The outlook for the future suggests that finding a writer who can master both skills will give your client the agility to accomplish their marketing goals even more easily.

Need help with your web copy or blogs? Fill out our contact form or call us at (888) 983-3103 to learn about our engaging content solutions.

ALSO – Who’s on Your Business Content Writing Team and How Do You Manage Them?

The post Do You Need a Content Writer or a Copywriter? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Many businesses — online and off — are facing serious challenges in 2020, particularly given the impact that COVID-19 is having on bottom lines. But some companies are finding a way to resolve some current business issues — or, at least, create a more solid foundation for the future — by using this time to work on content marketing.

ALSO – Need a hand creating evergreen content? Try our content writing services

Yes, in the current environment, many businesses are understandably scaling back on content budgets. But at the same time, other businesses are actually increasing budgets — and it’s not just those that are enjoying a traffic bump during this period.

Businesses Are Still Investing Because Content Is Valuable

For example, Kevin Miller, the founder and CEO of The Word Counter, says he’s doubled his monthly content budget during this time. “I am increasing content spend because many others are slowing down,” says Miller. “Also, writers have a greater capacity to get new topics completed. It helps me plan out the entire years’ worth of content and get it at a cheaper rate.”

But Miller’s not just looking out for his own bottom line. “It feels great to give work to people who are really in need right now and allows me to feed money back into the freelance writing economy that can use it.”

Meg Marrs, the founder and CEO of K9 of Mine, is also increasing content spend in April 2020. “With more folks stuck at home and spending more time online, we expect to see an increase in traffic and want to take advantage of that with as much content as possible.”

5 Reasons to Keep Creating — or Even Create More — Content Now

1. The competition can outpace you. If you’re not creating content now and the competition is, you may never catch up. They will have weeks or months of content where you have none, which can help them perform better than you in SERPs and engage with consumers at a time when people are looking for entertainment, support or guidance from brands.
2. You have time to invest in quality. Changes to projects or business priorities might mean you have time to invest in quality. And, as Miller pointed out, if you don’t personally have an opening your schedule, you may find qualified, experienced freelancers happy to provide high-quality content right now. It’s a time to stock up on editorial for the future.
3. Content has long-term value and builds authority. When choosing what to spend marketing budget on in this season, consider what will provide long-term value. Advertising is short-term. Morgan Taylor, the CMO for LetMeBank, points out that, “nobody wants to feel marketed to at this time. It can come off as tasteless if you directly market at a time like this, but that doesn’t mean we have stopped producing and using content.” Taylor recommends switching focus to content that’s informative and drives SEO and brand awareness.
4. SEO takes time, and creating content ensures you don’t waste it. Since SEO takes time to build, Taylor’s recommendation is sound. Investing in more content during this time — when advertising might not be an option — puts you in a strong SEO position in the future.
5. You can use it again later. Plus, all the content you create during this time can be reused in the future. You can pull components out for social media posts and repurpose content for future posts, ebooks or white papers, providing additional value down the road (and reducing the cost and time associated with future content creation).

Measuring the Long-Term Value of Content

Staying the course with your content budget during a time of uncertainty can be bold, and investing more in content even bolder. Whether you’re trying to ease your own concerns or get buy-in from clients, bosses or other stakeholders, you need a way to measure the value of content.

How you advocate for content depends on your business model. We reached out to business owners, marketing managers and others who are confident enough in their plans to hold steady or increase content right now. Here’s how they’re calculating the value of content.

• Kevin Miller of The Word Counter uses Google Adsense revenue per post. It’s simple, available on his dashboard and lets him create projections of what his content is likely to earn in the future.
• Morgan Taylor advises tracking the value of the customer over their life with you. A solid CRM system lets you gather this type of data; once you know what the average customer brings to your bottom line, you can calculate content value by how many customers it brings into your fold. And since content can keep bringing in new customers for months or years, that value can be big.
• Jesse Nieminen of Viima provides a formula for calculating the lifetime value of content: “Total number of inbound leads * conversion to paying customers * average lifetime value of customer – cost to convert traffic and deliver service.”
• Meg Marrs also provides a formula, stating, “We try to calculate a value per visitor amount by dividing the revenue the page generated by monthly traffic to get a revenue per user number. So for example: $400 of revenue / 5,000 page views per month = .08 cents per user.” Marrs says this calculation lets them compare the revenue generation of various articles.

Time to Make a Decision. . .

Are you going to invest in the long-term value of content during this season like many of the businesses above? Steps for doing so include:

• Figuring out how you calculate the value of your content
• Understanding what your customers need during this time and how to serve that need with content that also provides long-term value (based on the metric above)
• Getting buy-in from other stakeholders by showing them how much today’s content can do for the business in the future
• Reaching out to internal teams or qualified freelance writers to create the kind of content that will have a lasting impact

ALSO – 5 Ways To Make Your Content Budget Go Further

The post The Long-Term Value of Content and Why You Shouldn’t Put Off Creating It in the Short -Term appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Creating original, engaging content is not easy (though a good content writing service can certainly help). Yet, it is the least that’s expected of you as a content marketer today. The real content marketing challenge of 2020 is getting your content in front of the right audience. As Ross Simmonds often preaches, “distribution rules everything around me.”

As more businesses realize the importance of content marketing, the competition for content promotion is getting tougher. So, how do you rise to the top of your space? Keep reading to learn about the top content distribution tips for 2020.

1. Find Your Target Audience

Who is interested in what you have to say? Ideally, this question should be answered before your content is created.

Identifying your niche audience is one of the key steps in creating and distributing content. Sadly, it is also one of the most overlooked! Too often an article, a video or a blog post are created without well-defined audiences in mind. So, here is your chance to stand out.

Creating targeted content also means identifying and using keywords and key phrases that your potential customers are using in their search engine queries.

Many keyword research tools are available to make the task easier for content marketers. The most widely used are Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ubersuggest and Answer The Public.

By understanding how your audience describes the topics you want to cover, and understanding the intent behind their searches, you can tailor content that speaks directly to them.

ALSO – Qualitative Keyword Research: How to Invest 10 Minutes into Your Content Marketing Process & See Your Content Rise to the Top of Google

2. Create and Promote Blog Posts

Everyone seems to run a blog these days – so, is it still worth it? The answer is definitely “yes” – if you do it right. A recent study by Content Marketing Institute confirmed what many of us have intuitively known for ages – that 7 out of 10 customers prefer promotion through articles rather than ads.

So, what makes an effective blog? You need to:

• Publish original content that is genuinely useful, insightful and/or entertaining
• Maintain high standards – create comprehensive, best-in-industry content
• Post regularly
• Stay true to the topic and purpose of your blog
• Engage with your audience and build community
• Keep the information up to date
• Promote widely – there’s no point in publishing great content if nobody sees it!

Well researched and written blog posts help establish and support your brand’s reputation and expertise – building trust, making your audience more receptive to your messages, and creating lasting customer relationships.

When your blog post is combined with a logical, well-defined call to action, it is also invaluable in building highly targeted email lists. For example, if readers of your blog find your content useful, they will be more inclined to provide their active email address to access a comprehensive guide on the topic – and to stay subscribed to receive further messages from you.

The blog format allows for a more informal, personal tone than your main company site. That makes blog posts great for sharing on social networks, and for using such opportunities for cross-promotion as guest posting.

ALSO – 13 Types of Blog Posts to Fire Up Your Readers (And Your Editorial Calendar)

Guest Posting Might Be Harder to Get – But It Still Works

Guest posts remain a great way to get more exposure for your content.

Marketers today may be more wary of allowing guest posts on their site because the practice has been abused by spammers. Still, the collaboration between bloggers can be very effective – if done right. If you can enrich each other’s content, you instantly increase exposure and provide more value for your audience.

For example, BackLinko’s Brian Dean has recently teamed up with PitchBox, an outreach and content marketing platform, for an impressive study on the effectiveness of outreach emails. Backlinko benefited by acquiring some cutting-edge data-driven content, while PitchBox got significant exposure for their product.

Guest posting can also be a great way to promote your existing content. Including links to other relevant topics in your blog ensures that your evergreen or updated content keeps being discovered by new audiences.

3. Keep Search Engines Happy – Never Neglect Your SEO

On-page SEO remains as important as ever. The tedious bit – optimizing your posts for their target keywords using the latest SEO best practices – should never be skipped.

One well-targeted, informative blog post that makes it to the first page of Google results for a given keyword can drive substantial organic traffic for years. So, the time and effort invested in SEO are well worth it when considered against the long-term gains.

As the competition among content creators heats up, it is particularly important to understand search intent – the reason why users look for information – behind queries that are likely to bring traffic to your site. Your primary keywords should always be chosen with search intent in mind.

When you have decided on your primary keyword, make sure to use it:

• in the page title
• in the H1 heading
• early in the body of your content

Every post should have a custom meta description that includes your keywords and accurately summarizes your content. If your description matches your audience’s search intent closely, it will drive up the organic CTR (click-through rate) on your listing in Google search results.

The quality of your content is the most important ranking factor with Google now. That means it needs to read well, offer valuable information, satisfy search intent, and perhaps most importantly – it needs to be comprehensive. Additionally, you’ll want to spend time ensuring your content is surrounded by good design so that it’s more appealing to visitors.

All of this impacts how visitors interact with your site. If your site has a low bounce rate – meaning that your visitors spend time on your site consuming your content – it will help your content rank even higher as a result of Google’s RankBrain, which looks at behavioral metrics like this, bringing in more visitors from search engines.

Sharing your content widely and building backlinks from authority sites in your niche are also solid off-page SEO techniques that you should use.

ALSO – 7 Tips for How to Write SEO Content

4. Know Your Content Distribution Channels

What channels can you use to distribute your content in 2020? All content distribution and sharing channels can be grouped into the following categories:

1. Channels that are under your complete control (often referred to as “owned” distribution channels). These include:

• Your website
• Your blog
• Your email newsletter
• Your brand profiles on social media
• eBooks, PDF guides, infographics, etc. (downloadable from your site or emailed by you)
• Video content (posted on your YouTube channel or your blog, included in your emails, etc.)
• Audio content (your own podcasts, audiobooks, guides, etc.)

2. Channels that you have limited control over (“earned” or “shared” content distribution channels):

• Strong organic search engine rankings
• Social shares and mentions
• Reposts on other social networks
• Citations on other websites and blogs
• Reviews that link back to your site

3. Channels for paid distribution:

• Paid advertising – Display Ads and Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
• Sponsored content on social networks (like LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, promoted posts on Facebook or Pinterest’s Promoted Pins)
• Native advertising and content discovery platforms (like Taboola and Outbrain)
• Paid influencer campaigns
• Social media advertisements

Your budget, as well as your overall brand strategy, will determine which owned and paid distribution channels you use the most.

Earned channels have the potential to provide the biggest return on your investment in content. At the same time, content sharing carries some risks, as the spin that can be put on shared content is largely out of your hands.

The effectiveness of earned channels has been steadily declining over the last few years. On Facebook, for example, the decline in organic traffic has been particularly noticeable since the 2018 algorithm update, which changed the way content appears on users’ timelines to prioritize, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words, “friends, family, and groups” over “businesses, brands, and media.”

As a result, the competition for earned channels in 2020 is set to be tougher than ever. In this situation, your paid distribution efforts should be used to try and increase your earned reach.

For example, promoting a post on Facebook or LinkedIn can help generate some organic shares. You can also invite the people who like your promoted posts to follow you, increasing the audience for your future content. Having a network of people that will like and share your post also ensures that it gets picked up and promoted by social network algorithms.

ALSO – Content Advertising: How to Leverage Paid Ads in Your Content Marketing

5. Pick the Right Content Distribution Channels for Your Target Audience

Once you know your channels, it’s just a matter of matching them with your potential audiences. If you’ve done your homework researching your niche audience, then the task of finding the right channel for distributing your content becomes easier.

Are you trying to reach busy professionals that are likely to use LinkedIn daily? The fashion-conscious crowd on Instagram and Pinterest? Is your audience more likely to use Facebook – or Twitter? If you know your target audience, the above questions should not be hard to answer.

Then you need to put a sound content distribution strategy in place. Alexander Porter, Head of Copy at  Search It Local, explains:

“Successful content marketing heading into 2020 must exist within an integrated framework. You can’t release it in a handful of channels and expect to keep up with your competition if they are casting a wider net. At Search It Local, we build the foundations of our results like we were building a pyramid.”

For example, if your goal is to create brand awareness and build trust by running a business blog, then your content distribution strategy for new posts could include:

• Publishing an SEO-optimized blog post on your company site.
• Posting the key quotes from your post to Twitter.
• Emailing the summary of your blog post with a link to the full post to your mailing list subscribers.
• Posting summary/infographics/video promoting the post to your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.
• Sharing the post through Facebook and LinkedIn Groups.
• Using sponsored listings on social media feeds to promote the post.
• Contacting influencers that might be interested in sharing your post.
• Using remarketing to promote the post to the audiences that have shown interest in similar content or have recently visited your site.
• Using Google Ads to drive paid traffic directly to your blog post.

Finding the right channels to connect with your audience will initially require some experimentation. Once you are confident that you are reaching your crowd, you can play with the formats and topics of your posts, fine-tuning your messages so that they are tailored to your chosen channels and platforms.

6. Maximize Your Social Shares

Each content sharing platform has strengths that should be used to maximum advantage. For example, short video content is perfect for sharing on Facebook and Instagram, while some eye-catching infographics can be created for ease of share on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Always look for usage patterns of the content sharing platforms – then, look for ways to stand out.

Jason Thibault, the owner of the content marketing agency Massive Kontent, shares some insights on the optimal use of LinkedIn:

“LinkedIn now has just over 300 million active monthly users, 40% of which visit the site daily. Only 3 million of those users share content every week – so creating and sharing content on the platform automatically puts you in the “one percent”. This year I started including short PDFs with my LinkedIn posts. Just 6-7 pagers that summarize my main points. The posts with PDFs generate anywhere from 250% to 600% more views (4,000-12,000 views) in the LinkedIn newsfeed.”

It is crucial to create your content with the distribution platform in mind. For example, the optimal length of a Facebook post for ease of sharing is between 40 and 80 characters, while the ideal content length on Twitter is often reported to be 70 – 100 characters. At the same time, some brands have discovered that much longer Facebook posts work for them, while others swear by multi-tweet messages on Twitter. Ultimately, you are the best judge of what works best in your space – and figuring that out does take quite a bit of experimentation!

ALSO – Social Media: How Does it Impact Your SEO?

Paid promotion may be a good tactic to use to start things off. The initial traction that your post gets from paid placements start leading to organic shares.  

Samantha Milner, the food blogger at RecipeThis.com, has been able to grow her blog to 8 million pageviews a year using the following strategy:

“When a new recipe is published, we will share it first to our Facebook page and Twitter account. It will also have every image featured in it shared to a relevant Pinterest board. It is then distributed across Pinterest with Tailwind until it has gone through all relevant Pinterest groups, shared with relevant Tailwind Tribes, and then shared throughout social bookmarking channels – as well as to recipe sharing sites and link parties. Then each Friday it will be shared with our newsletter subscribers.”

So, to maximize social shares:

• Consistently share quality content on the platforms that your target audience uses
• Use the best formats for sharing on your chosen platforms
• Use paid promotion to initiate organic shares of your top content
• Always study the competition – then look for ways to stand out!

7. Email Is Still HUGE

It has been around forever, but, year after year, numerous studies agree that email remains a powerful content distribution and marketing channel – even for younger generations. As many as 68% of millennials report that promotional emails have influenced their purchasing decisions.

Build a quality email list

Building targeted email lists is more important than ever. One successful tactic is to offer some actionable, in-demand content – like an eBook or an instructional video – for free in exchange for mailing list subscriptions. The pieces of content that you offer as subscription incentives should:

1. Add immediate value to your audience – teach them a strategy, show them a technique, etc.
2. Be as targeted as possible.
3. Promise to deliver more – soon. (Make sure you deliver on that promise!)

If you provide immediate value, your readers are more likely to stay subscribed. They will also be more motivated to open your subsequent emails and be receptive to your messages.

Keep your email formatting clean and simple

While it is tempting to experiment with formats of your email messages, it is important to remember about the overwhelming number of emails your readers open daily.

People are becoming tired of the visually bulky “traditional” newsletter formats.

Simple, brief, to the point, letter-style emails are easier to skim through and are more likely to get attention and initiate immediate action.

In fact, emails sent by some of the most prominent content marketers of today are concise to the point of using an almost bullet-point format.

Your email promotion success also greatly depends on your attention to detail and persistence. To get better response rates, personalize the subject and body of your messages as much as possible, and be prepared to send multiple emails to the same contacts.

ALSO – Email Copywriting: Tips for Mastering a Profitable Niche

8. Share in Social Network Groups (and Create Your Own!)

Your top content deserves extra distribution effort. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have the Groups feature that is great for reaching out to people that are actively looking for information on very specific topics.

Oksana Chyketa, a B2B marketer at Albacross.com, has the following tips on distributing content via Facebook Groups:

“A great way to promote your content on Facebook is through Facebook Groups. In this case, you have two options: 1) You can join Facebook groups and boost your reach by sharing your content once you’re a member. Or 2) You can create your own Facebook Group and invite users to join and promote your brand. Both options are excellent in an organic increase of page ‘likes.’ It’s important to mention that only high-quality, problem-solving and engaging content will attract and retain your prospects.”

As a content marketer, it is important to make sure that you are present on all major social platforms that your audience frequents. Be it Quora, Reddit, YouTube, or smaller niche forums – before you start promoting your content in any way, you need to learn the rules of the group, and add value by answering questions and genuinely contributing to discussions. Do not post any content that can be perceived as spammy. Reddit, in particular, has zero spam tolerance and can be more valuable as an audience research platform than a content distribution one.

9. Always Look for Emerging Channels (and for New Opportunities to Use Existing Ones!)

Who heard of TikTok two years ago? Very few people would’ve predicted its amazing rise. The same could’ve been said about YouTube just a few years earlier.

The new channels for publishing your content emerge every day, and, as overwhelming as it all might feel – it’s crucial to keep up with them.

At the same time, new uses of established platforms should never be overlooked.

YouTube Community Feature Can Be Used for Content Sharing

If you have access to a YouTube channel that has over 1,000 subscribers, you can use the Community feature to share your content.

When a piece of content is shared with the community, the post will appear to all of your subscribers.

“We tripled our referral traffic from YouTube since we started posting to our community,” says Antti Alatalo, Marketing Director at CashCow.

Use Audio to Establish a Deeper Connection with Your Audience

Audio is another traditional content distribution channel that appears evergreen.

Simon Elkjær of Nutimo believes that the audio format has given him a deeper connection to his audience:

“I have been doing blogging, YouTube, book launches, events and public speaking amongst other things. But through my podcast, I feel the listeners are getting a deeper connection. When I meet people who are podcast-subscribers, they feel like they know me, they listen to me on evening walks, while commuting, going to the gym or just in a quiet place, in a nice chair. In this way audio is unique. It requires nothing of you, and no screen time to consume. It’s a way of disconnecting from a stressful smartphone or tv screen, and just listening.”

According to Simon, with audio, it is best to go in-depth:

“We changed our format from 15 minutes to about an hour and our listeners loved it. Our format is 20% on topic, and 80% anecdotes, stories, and small talk. Those who listen now really care, and listen because of us, not because of the information.”

Look for New Ways to Use Your Channels

Always be on the lookout for new features of your main distribution channels. Identify and follow the experts in the field. And don’t forget to always experiment yourself – it’s little, subtle touches and tweaks that often help you stay ahead of the content distribution game.

10. Use Paid Promotion Channels for Retargeting

Paid channel targeting is becoming more sophisticated every day. One of the most valuable tactics is retargeting – keeping your brand and content in front of the customers that have already visited your site, or showing ads based on the history of their interaction with some of your content. Content marketers need to make full use of this trend in their social media marketing efforts.

You can build your retargeting lists based on the type of content that your target audiences have already interacted with. Then, you can use these audiences to promote your new content. For example, when promoting a new instructional video, you would target people that have already watched some of your videos.

Once you have a good understanding of your main audience, you can start to experiment with the Lookalike Audiences feature (offered by both Facebook and LinkedIn), targeting audiences with similar characteristics and expanding your reach.

Here is how some content marketers do it.

Oksana Chyketa of Albacross shares some of her Facebook ads strategy insights:

“…One more way to boost your content is by using Facebook ads. The tip here is that you don’t need to target the unknown people, but those who have already been to your site, let’s say during the last 60 days. In this way, you’ll manage to drive only quality leads to your blog and the bonus is that your CPC will be much cheaper.”

Jason Thibault of Massive Kontent has been successful in distributing content on Twitter and Quora:

“Currently, I’m finding that the Twitter ads platform and Quora for Business are offering the best return on ad spend. With Twitter, I upload custom-tailored audiences and continuously build a second ‘website visitors’ audience via the Twitter conversion pixel. If I’ve set everything up correctly I can send 2-400 visitors to a new piece of content for 20-40 cents per click (sometimes less).”

11. Influencer Marketing Tip: Don’t Overlook Micro-Influencers!

According to a recent study by MediaKix, 80% of marketers find that influencer marketing is effective. The good news is that your influencer marketing campaign does not have to come with a hefty price tag. Emerging influencers and micro-influencers often have more genuine engagement with their followers than established ones. While marketers can find themselves working harder initially to identify and contact micro-influencers, it is usually worth the time and effort if you want to reach your niche audiences.

Micro-influencers are also more likely to be interested in collaborations that involve distributing content for free in exchange for the exposure they get.

One great practice is to contact micro-influencers with relevant expertise and ask them to contribute to your pieces of content. “They’ll be your content marketing advocates,” Alexander Porter of Search It Local explains. “Show them the finished content and thank them for their contribution. Avoid overtly asking them to share it, by developing authentic relationships you’ll find these micro-influencers naturally share your content which increases its reach and exposure.”

12. 80/20 Rule: Your Main Focus Should Not Be on Creating Content

Gone are the days when content marketers could just distribute quality content blindly and expect results.

The 80/20 rule of content marketing for 2020 is that only 20% of your time should be spent creating content, while 80% should be devoted to content strategy, distribution and promotion.

Spend More Time Sharing

Outsourcing your content creation to experts with content writing services such as Crowd Content allows you to direct your main efforts to where they matter most – developing an effective strategy and putting your content in front of the right eyes.

The post 12 Content Distribution Tips to Ensure Maximum Exposure in 2020 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But good copywriters know that there’s a lot more going on than words on the page. Here’s what you need to know about copywriting for modern marketing purposes.

So, What Is Copywriting in 2023?

It’s exactly what good copywriting has always been: Engaging content that focuses on the needs and desires of the consumer and connecting those with your business goals. But to succeed in marketing today, you need to produce excellent copy that accomplishes numerous things — or hire freelance copywriters who can do it for you.

Some things copywriting in 2019 and beyond must accomplish and include:

• Connecting with consumers in an authentic and authoritative manner
• Presenting your brand as a trustworthy expert
• Jumping through SEO hoops to enhance your site’s performance in the search engines
• Providing the right type of information for consumers in specific parts of the buying journey
• Persuading consumers to take the next step (signing up, clicking through or making a purchase)

ALSO: Do You Need a Content Writer or a Copywriter?

7 Traits of Professional Copywriting

So, how do you write copy that does all those things? Whether you’re crafting a clever call to action or paying a freelancer to create content marketing materials, understanding what good copy looks like and does is important. These seven traits of successful, professional copywriting epitomize what copywriting is in 2019.

1. Consumer-Facing

Here’s the deal: Consumers want content that meets their needs. Obviously, right? But Google wants content that meets consumer needs too. So this one is a double-edged sword — how well your content performs for a specific person doesn’t just impact whether you make that sale. It could affect whether you get a chance at a future opportunity.

Good copywriters identify consumer motivations and create content that speaks directly to those motivations. Rather than avoiding consumer questions, good copywriting addresses them upfront. If you bury the information, you force consumers to leave your site to find what they seek. When that happens, you lose the sale and your behavioral metrics (such as time on page and bounce rate) are negatively impacted. That can lead to poorer performance in the search engines.

2. Authentic to Brand

Authenticity is increasingly important in today’s marketplace. Consumers are wary of fake information online and savvy about avoiding phishing schemes or click bait. The gig is up, and many people understand that not all content on the internet is coming from a place of expertise and authenticity.

That makes it critical for you to uphold your brand voice — and mission, vision and values — in all copywriting and marketing efforts. If you or one of your writers strays from those foundations, consumers may not believe the content is coming from you or they may begin to question your message.

3. Social

Web pages certainly don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s important to understand that all your copy is connected. Whether you mean to or not, your channels will overlap, and being proactive about this helps you make the most of your content marketing and copywriting efforts.

In 2019, copywriting is social; you must approach it with the concept of likes, shares, comments and other engagement in mind. Consider how you can:

• Integrate short answers into content that can be picked up as featured snippets
• Create one-liners that are Tweetable
• Ask questions to invite consumers to join the conversation
• Weave an overarching culture through all of your copy so that it works as a whole

4. Visual

Technological advances have led to more visual capability in the form of images and video. Online copywriters have always had to be sensitive to the way their words appear on the screen, but now they must find ways to incorporate visuals to remain competitive and hold the user’s interest. A good copywriter understands which text elements should be incorporated into graphic elements and how to translate a blog post into an engaging video.

5. Mobile-Ready

As of 2015, mobile phone access to the internet exceeded desktop access. By 2019, more than 63% of individuals were accessing the web on smartphones or tablets, and that number is going to continue to trend up. You can’t afford not to write for mobile users.

Mobile-ready copywriting includes:

• Short paragraphs to avoid walls of text on mobile devices
• Bullet points and subheadings to break up text further
• White space that makes the content easier to read on any screen

6. Always Optimized

No element of your digital content should ever be published without being optimized for search engines. If it exists on your webpage, social profiles, Google My Business page or a guest post you write for someone else, then it is copywriting that has the power to draw organic traffic — which means it needs to include the right keywords in the right places.

Make sure you or your writers are conducting keyword research and placing those phrases:

• In page titles and meta descriptions
• In H1 headers
• In H2 and H3 subheadings
• In the first paragraph of content, if possible
• A few times throughout the rest of the content on the page
• In alt image tags

ALSO: Copywriting for SEO

7. Aligns With Business Goals

Finally, make sure that copywriting aligns with your short-term and long-term business goals. Content marketing is complex in this digital age, and it’s easy to get lost in analyzing the metrics and reach for the wrong star. For example, many brands get caught up in the chase for organic search traffic and end up targeting keywords that get them thousands of views. But if those are the wrong views, you’re not going to drive sales or revenue.

It’s better to have 100 views with 50 that convert than 1,000 views with only 10 that convert. Always keep the bottom line in mind.

What Are Some Common Types of Copywriting Jobs or Projects?

The traits of good copywriting can be applied to all types of content marketing projects. Here are just a few types of copywriting your brand may require.

• Product descriptions use strong marketing language to educate consumers about the features and benefits of a product, often painting a picture so the person sees themselves using or enjoying the product. The goal is to persuade the consumer to make a purchase.
• Landing pages are the first port for consumers who journey in from ad links or organic search results. Content on these pages should address the likely needs and questions of the consumer in whatever portion of the buying journey you’re targeting and include a call to action for the next step.
• Sales letters or emails are often targeted to specific audience segments or those who have taken some previous action, such as signing up for a newsletter. These messages can be informative, entertaining or even a hard sell, but they should all attempt to enhance the consumer relationship with your brand and include a call to action of some type (to click a link, respond, make an appointment or call).
• Blog posts are typically less hard sell and more brand development; the copy on these pages tends to be educational or entertaining and is meant to create your brand culture, position you as a leader in the industry or provide something of value readers are likely to share.
• Social media posts are similar to blog posts, except much shorter.
• Long-form marketing collateral can include white papers, case studies and even eBooks. The point of these pieces is to position your company as a thought leader or to operate as a lead generating tool. For example, you may offer a free ebook answering common questions about a topic in your niche for anyone who signs up for your email newsletter.

ALSO: Can You Outsource Landing Page Copywriting?

Find Copywriters for All Your Content Marketing Needs

Whether you need cleverly worded product descriptions or eBooks that position you as an expert, discover copywriters at Crowd Content who know what it takes to get the job done in 2019.

The post What is Copywriting and What Are Its Best Practices for 2023? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Think of it like setting up a brick-and-mortar shop: you can have the best store out there, but if you don’t have signs, an address on the map or other ways for potential customers to know what’s inside, you’re not going to get people coming into the store.

For freelance writers, this need creates opportunity: businesses need high-quality articles, blog posts, city pages, website content and other types of SEO-optimized written content to help build out their search engine marketing strategy. Even the best written content won’t deliver the search traffic businesses need if it hasn’t been optimized for SEO, including the proper use of keywords, solving searcher intent and more.

Some companies leverage in-house talent to bridge the gap, but many now recognize the value in specialization of labor and are looking for highly skilled SEO content writers to help drive their content strategy. It’s no easy task: SEO writing takes discipline, focus and the ability to shift gears or change topics on demand. But for writers with the raw talent and willingness to improve their craft, SEO writing offers substantial opportunities.

Ready for a crash course? Here’s how you can become an SEO content writer.

Writing Is the Foundation

First thing’s first: Make sure you’ve got the writing skills to pay the bills. (Yes. I do like cheesy sayings.)

In practice, this means you’re able to create high-quality content that’s free of grammatical and spelling errors, draws in and engages readers and quickly communicates key points.

When it comes to SEO writing, there’s a tendency to think of it as more mechanical and less creative than other types of content, but the truth is that brands now recognize the value of SEO-driven articles and blog posts that draw in potential consumers with great storytelling and subtle brand positioning.

If you’re already comfortable with the basics — great. If you think you can use some improvement, check out our Writer University for actionable lessons to get your writing where it needs to be. There are also plenty of other resources, including Poynter University, Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), and my personal favorite, Minion Fogarty’s Grammar Girl. You should also subscribe to AP’s online stylebook and do a bit of studying.

For help with content questions, writing structure or workflow you’ll find plenty of forums and writing groups online. One of the most popular is WriteWords; the site offers everything tips and tricks articles to job opportunities to writing groups that can help evaluate and critique your work.

You’re going to have to do all the groundwork on getting your writing, grammar, logic, flow and structure up to speed. This article is about how to add to those skills by learning how to take the really compelling, engaging content you write and adding value by optimizing it for SEO.

ALSO – 10 Things to Know Before You Start Writing for a Client

ALSO– Copywriting for SEO

Understanding Searcher Intent

Modern SEO demands more than simply using keywords in your writing. It’s critical that you understand what the most relevant information is to satisfy someone plugging in those keywords.

The days when keyword-stuffed content (Read: “I love peanut butter sandwiches because peanut butter sandwiches have a lot of peanut butter in the sandwich.”) are gone. Today’s search engine algorithms like Google’s RankBrain look at the behavioral metrics of content such as bounce rate and dwell time to determine how actual readers view your content and whether it’s deserving of a high placement in the search engine results.

Start by reviewing the set of keywords you’re given, and then try to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. Let that guide you as you write.

Someone who’s thinking about getting a new dog might search for these keyword terms:

• Best dogs for families with kids
• Cost of canine veterinary care
• Dog training

While these are more likely queries from someone considering a career in the veterinary field:

• Canine anatomy
• Common diseases in dogs
• Veterinary schools

And someone who’s shopping for their dog might use these terms:

• Cheap dog collars
• Best doggy doors
• Soft dog beds

Though the topic — dogs — remains the same, the people plugging in those groups of search terms were looking for something very different and had unique searcher intents. Make sure you come to that same type of understanding before you head for your keyboard.

Good SEO-optimized content should focus on solving searcher intent instead of simply slotting in specific keywords. Focus on doing that through great storytelling, and your content should rank well.

The A to Z of Keywords

Keywords, key phrases, targets — call them whatever you want. But rest assured, they drive SEO content. If you’re an SEO copywriter, chances are assignments will come complete with keywords designed to help them perform well across multiple search engines.

Types of Keywords

Most clients will provide you with several different types of keywords. Though they may look the same and have a similar purpose, the way you use them in your copy differs.

1. Primary Keywords: These are the most important keywords for SEO. They typically have a high search volume and low competition, though you’ll also see clients rely on long-tail keywords — those that are more specific and have a lower search volume but a much more focused searcher intent.

2. Secondary Keywords: These keywords are very relevant to your primary keyword, though they typically have a lower search volume. Think of them as keywords that support the primary.

3. Semantically Related Keywords: These terms are related in some fashion to your primary keywords, though they go beyond mere synonyms. Often referred to as LSI keywords, these indicate topics that would naturally be included in an article about your primary keyword. Sticking with the canine theme, an article about “dog training” might have LSI keywords that include “potty training puppies,” “dog whisperer,” and “interpreting dog behavior.” Semantic keywords might indicate subtopics you should cover.

Keyword Placement

There’s no definitive way to use keywords, and how you will use them varies depending on the type of content you’re writing. But, here’s an example of instructions for a standard blog post:

1. Primary Keyword: Include in the page title, meta description, H1, at least one H2 and early in the body text.

2. Secondary Keyword: Include in an H2 and in the body text for that section.

3. Semantic Keywords: Include as many as you can at least once in the body text.

Each client may have their own philosophy on keyword placement, so be sure to ask questions before you start writing.

Occasionally you’ll have clients that ask for each keyword to be used multiple times or to reach a certain keyword density, but this is becoming less common. The approach outlined above lets you get your keywords in while still focusing primarily on writing for the user and solving search intent.

Stop Words and Such

Trust me — the time will come when you’re handed keywords that are grammatically incorrect or very difficult to work into the content, especially when you’re dealing with SEO-optimized local content (dentists New York, plumbers near me, etc.).

Making slight variations, adding/removing punctuation or changing a keyword from singular to plural should have no impact on how Google reads the keywords. You’re also able to add what Google calls “stop words” without impacting the recognizability of the keyword.

Don’t be mistaken — Google has gotten really, really good at figuring out what the actual keywords are meant to be despite everything else going on around them, but you are bound to run into clients who are adamant that their researched keyword terms can’t be altered.

Each of your future clients will have their own rules on what to do (or not to do) with the keywords they provide you, and it’s in your best interests to adhere to what they say — even if it may not be in their best interest SEO-wise. If what you know to be true conflicts with what the client says, simply make your point, send them some links to authority sites on the subject and then get back to work.

Keyword Research

While it’s not very common, clients sometimes ask writers to do keyword research for content they write. There are a number of tools that can help you do this including Google’s Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, SEMrush Keyword Magic, Moz Keyword Explorer, etc. You can also use Neil Patel’s new UberSuggest tool to get keyword ideas and analyze traffic, and LSI Graph to generate semantically related keywords — and they’re both free. It just doesn’t get better than that.

What you’re looking for is a keyword or group of keywords that have a reasonable search volume, show a clear intent you can address with your content and ideally isn’t overly competitive.

How do you know if a search term is competitive? Look at the existing top search results for the search term, and audit the resulting content. How long is it? Does it include lots of data and sources? Are semantically related topics covered? If the content does all these things well, it might be tough to rank higher.. But, if they’re lacking in all these areas, you have a good shot at outranking them.

Keep in mind that keyword research is generally executed by SEO professionals and not writers or editors. If you’re going to take this responsibility on, think about how you’re going to charge the client — whether it be an hourly rate or by the keyword — so you get compensated for all your time.

Keyword Formulas

On very large projects such as writing product descriptions or city pages, clients often won’t have a specific keyword for every assignment they order. Often, what they’ll do instead is ask writers to create their own keywords based on a simple formula involving broad keywords.

For example, if a client wanted city pages for a car rental business they might give writers this formula to build keywords:

Primary – “CITY NAME” + “Car Rentals”

Secondary – “Best Cars for” + CITY NAME”

For product descriptions, it usually looks something like this:

“BRAND” + “MODEL NAME” + “DESCRIPTOR” + “PRODUCT”

Formulaic keywords are simple to work with, but just make sure you get all the requirements you need from the client before you start.

Why You Should Care About Featured Snippets

Here’s the hard truth — 75 percent of users never click past the first page of search engine results.

Featured snippets in the form of instant answers, knowledge graphs and videos are stealing traffic from the top organic results.

Ahrefs reports that 12.29% of all search queries have featured snippets in their search results. On these searches, the featured snippet captures 8.6% of clicks, which takes away from the top ranked search result. On the flip side, Inc.com reports that if you can earn a place in the featured snippet, your page traffic could increase 20-30% and your organic CTR could go up by 677%.

Combine that with the 70 to 80 percent of users ignoring paid advertisements and the reality sets in: If brands can’t get their SEO content in the top 10 search results or featured snippets (position 0), almost no one is clicking through and their competitors will take most of their potential audience.

What you can (and should) do is optimize for featured snippets as you write. There are three basic types:

Paragraph Snippet

Listicle Snippet

Table Snippet

There’s lots to learn about writing content that Google will consider for a featured snippet, and we can’t fit it all in here. But it’s fair to say that most featured snippets are the result of a searcher asking a question. You just need to supply the answers.

Answer the Public is a great (free) tool to use. Simply plug in your topic or keyword, and it will spit out ideas in the form of questions:

Read this article from the Content Marketing Institute to get more advice on how to rank for featured snippets. This HubSpot article also gives some great advice.

The Importance of Metadata

Start strong. Searchers don’t see much of your article in search results — in most cases, all they’ll see is the title and meta description. The result? Your title and meta description need to grab attention and compel users to click through.  

There’s been a lot written about how to write engaging titles, and there are even (free) tools to measure their effectiveness. Though the data may be out of date, this 2017 study conducted by BuzzSumo is a great starting point for learning how to craft good titles. Once you’ve got the hang of it, use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to see how well you’ve done. Ideally, you’ll want a score of 60 or higher.

The meta description is a short blurb — anywhere from 160 to 320 characters, depending on where Google stands on the subject at the time.

The sole purpose for meta descriptions is to get searchers to click on the link. That’s it. You don’t have a lot of words to use, so what you write has to be concise, informative, compelling and reflective of the article or post it points to. Shopify has a really informative post on the subject, a does Neil Patel.

Finding the Right Fit

No beginner’s guide to SEO copywriting would be complete without a few tips on where to get you first job and where to go for help if you need it.

Looking for a job? Great content marketers are hiring. Crowd Content is a great place to start — we offer jobs for writers of varying skill levels and specializations along with opportunities to work directly with clients if they like what you create. In addition, our quality rating system means that when you write great content you get more chances to write for better pay. It’s a win-win.

SEO Writing Jobs Going Forward

SEO is here to stay. Companies need content writers who can deliver fresh, creative articles that grab user attention and satisfy search engine algorithms. If you can master everything I talked about here and stay current with SEO trends, your skills will always be in demand.

The post Crash Course: How to Become an SEO Content Writer appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Why?

Because the sheer amount of writing now required for even small and midsize businesses makes this impossible to avoid: Any content created for organizations should be subject to proofreading at a bare minimum and more thorough editing at best. But, that doesn’t always happen.

For many companies, however, a more specific pain point has emerged: Technical writing. Engineering firms, software development companies, medical organizations and manufacturing enterprises must transform complex concepts into actionable, easy-to-read insights. For many, it’s hard to strike a balance in-house — how do they retain core concepts without frustrating their audience? How do they ensure simplicity without compromising specificity?

The solution? Hire a technical writer. But what makes a great technical writer? What skills are must-haves for businesses to get the biggest return on their writing investment?

Technical Writing at a Glance?

Technical writing is the ability to simplify complex concepts for a specific audience. Great technical writing does more than just get the message across — it helps engage readers and motivate them to learn more about a subject.

Given the increasing complexity of business operations and the quickly-expanding role of technology in day-to-day business processes, highly-skilled technical writers are now in demand. As noted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the market for technical writing is forecast to grow at 11 percent per year — faster than average in comparison to the job market at large.

It makes sense: As companies look for ways to deliver engaging content that both demystifies complex topics and resonates with readers, they’re on the hunt for technical writers capable of quickly delivering top-tier content on-demand.

While any company could find themselves in need of a technical writer, organizations involved in IT, manufacturing, engineering or medical sciences are often tasked with converting nuanced and detailed concepts into clear and concise prose. This could take the form of user manuals, eBooks, specification sheets, technical product documentation or even press releases.

Top 10 Business Must-Haves

As the job market grows, both business demand and the technical writing labor force will increase.

The result?

Evaluation becomes critical: What separates one writer from another? What skills and talents make them the best-fit for your business? What assurances do you have that their work will be completed on-time and require minimal revision?

Here’s a look at the top 10 must-have skills for your next technical writer.

1) Content Clarity

The top skill for any technical writer? Producing content that’s easily readable, engaging and logically segmented to draw reader interest. This is no simple task — many experts in your company have vast technical knowledge but lack the ability to clearly communicate what they know to anyone who doesn’t share their skill set.

Best bet? Before bringing on a technical writer, ask them to create a small set of trial content based on information you provide.

2) Audience Awareness

Not all technical writing targets the same audience.

Consider a user manual. For front-line staff members, actionable and simplified use cases are ideal — they need to understand how the service works and what to do if they encounter common issues. For more tech-savvy management staff, this same manual requires greater depth and complexity; a stand out technical writer can speak to both audiences with equal facility.

ALSO – Find Your Target Audience With This 4 Step Formula

3) Brand Alignment

Your brand has a mission. Key values. Value propositions. And while technical writing is often used to create internal documentation for a product or service, brand alignment is critical to ensure users, managers and stakeholders alike recognize can identify a cohesive brand narrative. In the same way software developers consult with IT teams to understand their needs, technical writers should ensure all content meets brand expectations.

4) Professional Planning

Creating great technical documentation requires great planning. The result? Businesses need writers capable of creating content plans and carrying through on expectations to meet specific deadlines. While this can be difficult to evaluate in face-to-face meetings or via email, it’s worth asking prospective writers for references that can verify both timeliness and attention to detail.

ALSO – The Struggles With Content Planning and How to Overcome Them

5) Corporate Communication

A great technical writer also has the soft skills to go beyond the keyboard and easily interact with SMEs (subject matter experts). Why? Because these SMEs are the critical link between products and services that require documentation and content that clearly articulates requirements, expectations and context.

Simply put? Great writers aren’t enough: You also need great technical communicators.

6) Superior Sourcing

From creating user experience documents to product guides and technical checklists, sourcing is critical for above-average content. Great technical writers need the ability to combine provided sources with relevant outside information to produce documents that can be adjusted to serve multiple end users.

7) Concept Conversion

Many companies recognize the need for good technical writing but aren’t sure how to effectively translate business concepts into readable content. Great writers do more than simply write to the brief their given — they’re able to take abstract concepts, ground them in conversational language and create relatable work that doesn’t lose its technical impact.

8) Education (or Experience)

Writing skill sets vary considerably, making it difficult to directly compare technical content creators. A degree in communications is often a good indicator of technical writing skills, but it’s also worth looking for more specific training such as Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in computer science or engineering. Experience is also critical. Writers with years of experience and extensive client lists are often in high demand for a reason.

Depending on your industry, finding someone with demonstrable industry training and experience could prove a huge asset. Technical writers tasked with writing documentation for programming languages, for instance, benefit tremendously if they have a background in software engineering.

9) Web Savvy (or Willingness to Learn)

Web skills are great add-ons for technical writers, such as the ability to use and modify HTML documents, interact with CMS tools or leverage CSS. If these skills are a must-have but experience is lacking, look for established technical writers with a willingness to learn.

10) Adaptive Aesthetics

Great content that looks terrible won’t engage users or drive uptake. In addition to their “core” writing skills, technical writers should also have the ability to visually assess technical documents and make adjustments as required. This includes everything from breaking up long paragraphs for better readability to including bulleted lists that provide actionable takeaways.

Note – this doesn’t mean that technical writers need to be designers. It means they should write their content in a way that isn’t going to drive the designer crazy.

The Write Stuff

Technical writing is now a must-have for companies of all sizes and industry verticals. But not all writers offer the same ROI — start with our top 10 must-find list to make sure the writer you hire can produce the content you need.

The post What Makes a Good Technical Writer? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If you want to get ahead with your freelance writing business in 2019, it pays to keep up with trends. Here’s a look at six types of freelance writing jobs that are in high demand this year. Read up on them, and ensure you can prep your portfolios to support pitches to potential clients in 2019.

1. City Pages

City pages or local pages are landing pages that integrate marketing copy about goods or services with information and terms relevant to local users. They can be written with an entire city in mind, but as local marketing becomes more important, many brands are choosing to publish pages at a neighborhood level.

This type of content continues to be important because local search is a driving force for all types of businesses. According to Google, around a third of all searches have local intent, and Wordstream notes that 72 percent of local searches visit a business within five miles of their location.

Local businesses can’t afford to ignore this content marketing need, and freelance writers can’t afford to avoid learning to write local content.

Examples of city or local pages:

2. eCommerce Content

Product descriptions, category pages and buying guides — any copy meant to educate buyers who are well into the sales funnel and might be looking to make a purchase — are examples of eCommerce content. It usually employs strong marketing copy that entices the reader by pairing features of the products with benefits to the user in ways that help the person imagine owning the items or using the services themselves.

eCommerce content isn’t a new star in 2019, but as consumers repeatedly turn to the search engines to start their buying journey, it remains a critical component of any website. That’s true whether a brand makes sales online, in physical stores or both.

And since marketing copy has to be constantly refreshed to be competitive, freelancers who know how to write it can keep themselves in work all year.

Examples of eCommerce Content

3. Long-Form Content

Long-form content can be divided into two basic camps.

First, the long blog post or article — typically a few thousand words or so — that delves deeply into a topic or gives a comprehensive high-level overview. Sometimes these are called pillar posts, and brands create offshoot posts on more specific topics and link from the pillar post to these shorter articles.

Another type of long-form content is often used for lead generation purposes — ebooks, white papers and case studies are all examples. Businesses tend to gate these informative pieces of content and trade them for an email address or newsletter signup to build their marketing lists.

Again, these aren’t new formats for 2019, but online content does continue to get longer. One reason is that Google is placing increasing emphasis on expertise and quality; it wants to serve up links to companies that can and will help the user most, and long-form content is a good way to capture Google’s attention. Plus, if the content is engaging, it causes users to spend more time on the page. That can drive up a site’s RankBrain score, which in turn can help the page’s search rankings.

Freelance writers interested in the long-form content game should start in industries where they have hands-on expertise or long-term writing experience. Often, companies want high-level or thought-leadership content for these pieces.

Examples of long-form content:

• Neptune Society’s guide for veteran burial and cremation
• Crowd Content’s post on SEO content

4. SEO Content

Freelance writers may notice that increasing numbers of clients are more concerned with quality and less concerned with playing whack-a-mole with keywords. But that doesn’t mean SEO is down for the count. In fact, to be a successful freelance content creator in 2019, you have to know more about SEO than ever.

You need to know:

• The differences between primary, secondary and semantic keywords and how to incorporate them into content in natural ways (by using common sense and stop words, for example)
• How to write meta descriptions and title tags to go with any content you deliver
• How to write SEO-optimized content for all search types, including searches from desktops, mobile devices and voice
• How to create feature snippets, which are short answers to specific questions that are friendly for display on Google or being read by a voice assistant

Want to prepare to please SEO clients in 2019? Check out all the SEO tips and tricks on the Crowd Content blog.

5. Social updates

Short and sassy. Short and sweet. Short and any other alliterative adjective a brand wants to throw at you — just know that social updates are not a short-lived form of content. Continuing throughout 2019, social posts will put brands ahead of the competition, and freelance writers who know how to turn a clever phrase while maintaining brand voice can land high-paying work that’s fast and fun.

Social posts include:

• Facebook posts
• Twitter posts
• LinkedIn posts
• Google My Business Posts

Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest are also big players in social marketing, but they tend to create less work for the freelance writer as they’re so image heavy.

Examples of social posts:

• WealthSimple’s Facebook page
• Wendy’s Twitter account

6. Advertorials

An advertorial is a cross between an advertisement and editorial content. Specifically, it’s an ad that parades as native content on a blog or even the site of a publisher such as the New York Times.

Successful advertorials look and feel like real content, though. They say something valuable the reader will engage in. The benefits of advertorials in 2019 is that they let brands get in front of new users or target users who read specific websites or publications.

Companies that can form lasting partnerships with publishers so they can present regular advertorials do well with this type of content. Freelancers who can write the kind of pieces that publishers want and slip some advertising in on the side will become favorites of these brands.

Examples of advertorials:

• The Captain Morgan content on Buzzfeed

Interested in writing any of this type of content for clients in 2019? Make sure you’re signed up as a freelance writer with Crowd Content. Our growing client list needs all these types of content to succeed in 2019.

The post The Top Freelance Writing Jobs For 2019 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

In short, you get a ghostwriter.

Everyone from Richard Branson to Michelle Obama has brought their books to market with the help of professional writers who know how to turn a life well lived and meteoric business successes into a narrative the public would ultimately devour. Other authors, like Bond-inventor Ian Fleming and thrill-expert Tom Clancy used ghostwriters to create new works of fiction in order to meet audience demand.

Whatever your goal, realizing your long-awaited book project isn’t as easy as hiring a ghostwriter and awaiting the finished copy. This is without a doubt a collaboration, and it all hinges on you setting your writer up for success.

Recruiting Talent

When interviewing ebook ghostwriters, consider — or outright ask — the following:

• How are they with deadlines?
• Are they working on other projects, or can they dedicate their time solely to you? (If it’s the latter, be prepared to pay accordingly.) Hiring an ebook writer who tells you they don’t have the time to work on your project midway through could set you back significantly.
• Do they have set work hours? In other words, will they return an email on a Saturday, or should you expect a couple days before you get a response? Every ghostwriter works their own schedule, so knowing this upfront is key.
• Do they have experience writing in your niche? There are different types of writers, and not all will be well-suited for the task at hand. Can they reference any other ghostwriting clients of theirs?
• Are they willing to do interviews or conduct research, if applicable?
• How flexible are they? Can they adjust their writing style to fit your tone?
• Can they handle constructive criticism? Will they act as a book coach and be proactive or are they only willing to take a passive role?
• Can they share examples of other quality ebooks they’ve written?

These questions help you identify if a writer has the experience you need and if their working style matches yours. It’s critical you know this upfront, because given the time, research and writing that goes into ebooks, discovering your writer isn’t a good fit mid-project can be very costly.

Once you know what you’re looking for in a writer, the question turns to where you can find them.

You can place ads on well-known job sites and sift through resumes or ask friends for referrals; if you have a social media following or room in your budget, sponsored posts and ads may work too.

I know this sounds like a ton of work and it will take a lot of time, but there’s a shortcut: shop for writers via a platform like Crowd Content. We’ve already vetted our talent and have account managers standing by to help streamline your experience, so you won’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty details like writing up a contract or arranging payment.

Laying Out Your Objectives

Once you’ve chosen “the one” (swoon!), make your intentions clear. Traditional companies include a detailed job description in the onboarding process, and you should too. Your writer shouldn’t have any doubt as to what you’re trying to accomplish.

There’s a huge difference between writing for an audience already familiar with your work or writing a book intended for mass-market distribution. There’s also a big difference between creating a book that will be downloaded as part of an email-capture campaign or writing a book you hope will one day be turned into a major motion picture.

How the finished asset will fit into your overall campaign or sales funnel will shape the entire project. Skip this step and you put your writer at a major disadvantage — and you’re unlikely to get the results you’re hoping for, either.

Putting Together a Game Plan

Some things in life are more fun when they’re left to chance. Ghostwriting is not one of those things. You need a framework in place that includes a comprehensive to-do list and shared milestones — basically checkpoints where you and your writer will touch base or exchange notes.

Everyone’s method is different, but in general your plans should look a little something like this:

1. Know your goals, budget and basic content design elements such as target length and tone
2. Identify a few promising candidates, conduct interviews and ask your finalists for their project proposal
3. Choose your ghostwriter
4. Hand over any existing research and other relevant materials
5. Decide on an outline for the book
6. Set dates for a call or series of calls so the writer can ask whatever questions they need to flesh out the outline
7. Agree on an expanded outline that includes a detailed chapter-by-chapter blueprint
8. Look over a single-chapter draft and evaluate for structure and tone, and then let the writer loose
9. Receive and read through an entire draft
10. Offer feedback and go through the agreed-upon number of revisions
11. Submit for editing (if you’ve hired a separate editor)
12. Revel in your monumental accomplishment

Providing Data and Info

If you want data-backed results (and you do), you must start out with plenty of data your writer can use to paint an accurate and authentic picture. The type of information involved depends on the kind of book you’re creating. For an autobiography, you may want to gather everything from elementary school report cards to pictures from spring break ’99.

A business book on launching a startup won’t work without real-life success stories, while a company manual will be almost entirely made up of tech-speak you’ll probably want to run by your legal and mechanical experts before sharing.

Other bits of data are linked to your objectives. Things like your buyer persona are crucial — no one can write quality content without a specific reader in mind.

Communicating with Your Writer

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: some writers are serious introverts. And by serious, I mean that some of my favorite content writers would rather give up their beloved Oxford commas than answer a phone call. I get all that, I really do, but ghostwriting jobs are more demanding and, in many ways, more intimate than typical freelancing gigs, and your chosen form of communication should be more personal as well.

Feel free to use email to create a paper trail of ideas, trade edits or scribble and send moments of inspiration, especially if your best brainstorming happens in the wee hours. When it comes to your initial communication and ongoing discussions, though, it’s often better to connect via phone or video conference. From a face-to-face interview to shared readings of chapters currently in progress, picking up the phone or signing on to Zoom is a fast and efficient way to quickly iron out any kinks and make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Reviewing Drafts and Formulating Feedback

Real talk: you aren’t doing anyone any favors by being too nice.

Your penchant for passivity? Ditch it.

Your tendency to swallow critiques because you don’t want anyone to feel bad? Stop it right now.

Your book is your baby. That’s why you’re investing time and money into finding a professional ghostwriter to whip your concept into an award-winning book. When your ghostwriter sends you a draft, pore over it like it’s in the running for Oprah’s book club. Depending on the type of book and intended audience, you may be more concerned with grammar and citations or tone and feel.

Do the chapters feel isolated or does the book read like a cohesive whole? Does the narrative feel authentic and personal? Does the introduction grab you immediately? Is your message clear? Does the conclusion give the reader a sense of finality — or leave them wanting, depending on your goal? Are the statistics or study numbers accurate? Is this book something you’d be proud to put your name on?

It may help to read the draft out loud. Repeated readings are also useful, especially if you read the book once, sit on it for a day or two, then read it again. Don’t rush the editing process. When you do make comments, be clear about what you don’t like and why. “This doesn’t feel right” isn’t an actionable piece of feedback, but “This has a more negative tone than I wish to convey” does.

If you’d like more tips on revising effectively, check out The Writer Center’s guide for some great advice.

A Quick But Effective Process

To sum things up, remember these core tenets:

• Hire smart. A blog post is not a book, and hiring a writer who excels at one form of content doesn’t necessarily mean they can nail your ghostwriting project.
• Pony up the data/details. We’ve all read a book that went on and on without saying a thing. That’s not what you want from your own project, is it? Nope. Whether you’re sitting on client surveys, Yelp reviews, case studies, Google analytics, personal anecdotes, proof of concept — whatever it is, it should be in your writer’s inbox.
• Communicate often. Cultivate a relationship with your writer that encourages an open dialogue. If you value your writer’s opinion, they’re more likely to make suggestions that could exponentially improve your book.
• Own your results. With ghostwriting, you’ll only get what you give and ultimately, your book sales are your responsibility.

The world is waiting for your story. Isn’t it time to write a book and give your readers what they want? If you’d like to get started today, check out our ghostwriting services to find the perfect writer today.

The post How To Get a Ghostwriter To Craft an eBook That Drives Results appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Hiring outside help is a phenomenal way to boost marketing efforts while ensuring your brand is in experienced, linguistically capable hands — but writers aren’t all created the same. In fact, there are several different types of writers, all of whom have their own strengths, weaknesses and areas of specialty.

Finding the right person to write content for your website isn’t just a matter of connecting with someone who can string together a convincing combination of nouns and verbs.

For your content to excel, you need a writer whose skill set and expertise matches the project at hand.

With that in mind, here’s a quick overview of the three types of writers your business might consider hiring and for what jobs.

Copywriters

Copywriters are the word-spinning geniuses behind marketing content and other kinds of promotional material. “Copy” generally has three goals:

• Connect with the target demographic
• Communicate brand messaging
• Convert, as in compelling a sale or inspiring the reader to click, email or call

Think of copywriting as action-based writing. It’s sales, but instead of knocking on doors and demonstrating the handy-dandy features of an upright vacuum cleaner or convincing car shoppers that they really need that upgraded interior, copywriters are using the power of the written word to position a client’s products or services as the solution to a specific pain point.

ALSO: What is Copywriting?

You might hire a copywriter for:

• Ads
• Product descriptions
• Landing pages
• Sales pages
• Copy-based search engine optimization (SEO)

Some copywriters dabble in multiple niches, while others are the master of landing pages or Facebook ads and won’t touch anything else. If you’d prefer to have one writer take care of everything, make sure you discuss that up front, but also know that sometimes it’s good to have a surgeon, anesthesiologist and scrub nurse all on your team. In other words, there are occasions when a copywriter with a practically Lilliputian area of expertise is far more valuable than a supposed jack-of-all-trades.

ALSO: Copywriting for SEO: How to Be Sure Your eCommerce Copy Converts and Ranks

Content Writers

Content writing is also part of marketing, but it’s a softer sell and involves more layers of the overall sales funnel. Depending on the piece, content writers may try to inform, entertain, establish authority, nurture rapport and build trust — or all of the above.

Where copywriting seeks to make a sale, content writing is how you soften up a potential customer, laying the groundwork for the idea and promise behind a product.

Most often, content writers create content that’s top of funnel near the awareness and interest stages. Copywriters tend to create content at the desire and action stages.

Content writers are responsible for projects such as:

• Blog posts
• Articles
• White papers
• Ebooks
• Social media posts
• Press releases
• Reviews
• Web content
• Employee bios

As with copywriters, the content writers you hire may do a little bit of everything, or they might stick to a single industry — say, plumbing or wine — or a single category of content.

ALSO: How to Tell Freelance Content Writers What You Really Need

Fiction Writers

All writing involves a certain level of imagination, but creative writing has more leeway. Fiction writers may be inspired by real-life people and events, but they aren’t tied to that narrative. They can conjure characters out of thin air. They can even conceive of entire worlds a la Tolkien or Rowling, writing a book that takes readers places nobody on the planet has ever been before.

It may not seem like fiction writers have a place in the cold, hard world of sales and marketing. While it’s true that both content writing and copywriting require a strong factual thread that lends credibility and legitimacy, how you flesh out that truth skeleton is up for grabs.

Some people choose to fuel their marketing initiatives with pie charts and statistics. Others turn to storytelling to share information in a format that’s attention-getting and gently leading. It’s not surprising, then, that some of the greatest literary minds of the last century also offer up some sage marketing advice.

ALSO: How to Revolutionize Your Copywriting Strategy

How They All Work Together

While many freelancer writers specialize in one kind of writing — and some niche down even further, focusing their energies just on newsletters or blogs posts, for instance — others offer overlapping services. You may find a talented writer who churns out unbelievably pithy social media posts but also creates catalog copy and collaborates on children’s books on the side.

Sound confusing?

It can be. Maybe this will help: Pretend you have a business selling a new kind of mop. Everybody needs mops, right? But there’s also a thousand other mops on the market, so you need to find a way to differentiate your brand.

A fiction writer might create a story around your mop, introducing the Duke of Dirt and the Princess of Perfection who are locked in an eternal battle of clutter versus cleanliness.

Your content writer will build on those tales from the Land of Tidying Up by referencing them in blogs, using the characters to connect with consumers on social media or author an article that uses the Duke and Princess to recount the many benefits of clean floors and research behind your brand’s cutting-edge mop technology.

Finally, a copywriter steps in to create a sales page to convince those clicking on a Facebook post or blog CTA that this is the mop they want — no, the mop they need.

The point is this: take the time to vet and hire a writer who knows how to open closed doors and invite readers in. Whether you’re looking to publish a book or launch a new website, the writing process doesn’t start when your freelancer picks up an order and starts tapping on their laptop’s keyboard — it starts when you choose the talent whose skill set best serves your needs.

The post The Three Types of Writers Your Brand (Probably) Needs appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

What does all that have to do with editing? Everything.

Businesses tend to pony up for copywriting services without too much hesitation, but when it comes to the other two tiers in the content marketing system (editing and quality assurance), the ROI isn’t always so easy to identify. A good writer should be able to forge a cohesive message, work in the right keywords, and arrange words in an entertaining and accessible manner, but even the best scribes benefit from a keen eye and the digital version of a big fat red pen.

Investing in copy editing services is like supercharging your copywriter; their talents are suddenly magnified and, at the same time, given extra focus until your vision is expertly tailored for maximum connection, conversion, and engagement.

Crossing I’s and Dotting Your T’s

See what I did there…? Seriously though, as potent as great content can be, web copy or blogs marred by typos and grammatical oopsies can be just as potent — albeit in a decidedly negative fashion.

Editors are the gatekeepers who swoop in and clean up any literary detritus accidentally left behind by the creative types. Some writers are technically brilliant; others are stellar at generating compelling concepts but wouldn’t know an infinitive from a gerund.

A talented editor ensures that you’re never called out on social media for an oh-so-egregious your vs. you’re error (and we all know how forgiving those eagle-eyed commenters can be) or surprised by awkward copy that makes your new site launch less than perfect.

I can practically hear the “but what about Grammarly?” protests already, and it’s true that there are tons of online editing tools that will catch basic errors and keep you from inserting commas willy-nilly, but AI editors are deeply flawed too.

Grammarly flags every instance of passive voice with admirable enthusiasm but eliminating those completely will likely cause your content to read aggressive or robotic. Other times you’ll intentionally use colloquialisms or grammatically incorrect language to make a point or reinforce a specific voice; Grammarly can’t recognize tone and giggle at cheeky reference the way a real editor can.

When you’re commissioning content for a live audience, you should hire a live editor to review it.

A Quick Review: Two Types of Editors

The confusion over why you need an editor when spellcheck is so darned effective (not) is probably at least partially connected to the misconception that an editor is an editor is an editor.

Nope.

A copyeditor is the hawk-eyed specialist who pores over things like parallelism and punctuation. They can typically rattle off the finer points of Chicago style or AP guidelines with the greatest of ease, and their ability to spot even the tiniest typo is legendary.

A strategic content editor, on the other hand, is your audience’s representative during content creation. Your customers have wants, needs, concerns, and questions. They have pain points that must be addressed and preferences in terms of visual components. Your editor looks not so much at how a piece is written, but at how it reads. Does it tick all the boxes attached to your brand persona? Does it slot into your overall content marketing strategy? Is it useful? Will your audience care?

A copyeditor is valuable; a strategic content editor is priceless.

Ann Gynn, editorial consultant for the Content Marketing Institute, defines these two types of editors this way: “Strategic editors (or someone who has that role) are critical to ensuring first that the content meets the needs of the audience and the company. Second, this editor can review and edit the piece to ensure the content is written appropriately — it puts the topic in the relevant context, includes pertinent details (and excludes unrelated ones), is accurate, and explains the topic in a way that the audience can understand and wants to read/consume.”

She goes on to say, “Then, this editor can smooth the rough edges, refine its structure, and make it audience ready. A line editor or proofreader who is fresh to the copy will be able to catch grammatical and style errors more easily.” As the strategic editor for CMI, she focuses on making sure that the content published speaks to the brand’s audience and meets the company’s business goals and needs.

With the rapid evolution of technology, we’re now also seeing what you might call a third type — AI-based editors. Cynthia Spiers, who heads up content and digital at Acrolinx, relies on human content creators, but then everything is put through the company’s content optimization platform. “Powered by artificial intelligence, it ensures the content we produce is aligned to our content strategy. That means that the platform understands our standards for brand, style, tone, and terminology, and it evaluates our content against those standards,” she reports.

Here’s the Sad Part

We heard from more than 50 companies on the subject of how critical an editor is to the content creation process, and more than half of them don’t understand that there are different types of editors. In fact, they view editors as little more than human spell-checkers. These are brands that are missing out.

Shelby Rogers, content marketing manager for Solodev and DigitalUS, sums things up quite nicely on this front: “I’ve seen on a handful of reputable marketing resources that editing should be an afterthought, and I cringe each time. Clearly, no one thought to edit that piece of ridiculous advice. Editing — both prescriptively and conceptually — plays a massive role in our content creation.”

Highlighting Your Differentiator

Brands get ahead by showcasing whatever makes them different from their competitors. That much you probably already know, but the how of this whole scenario is harder to pinpoint. Some C-level suits turn to a strategist, but marketing mastermind Seth Godin backs a different approach.

According to Godin, the key to building a better brand media property is to avoid playing it safe and instead figure out how to make your content more interesting. “You need editors, not brand managers,” says Godin, “who will push the envelope to make the thing go forward.”

Good editors are strategic and largely responsible for driving results. Have a specific business goal in mind? Editors shape drafts to better conform to the task at hand. When your messaging threatens to meander away from the point, an editor can step in and tweak the content until it better adheres to the directive. Concerned that your core values aren’t reflected in your home page? Editors also look over content to see whether you’ve had a chance to shine.

There is such a thing as flawless content that is also lifeless. Cold copy never drives traffic. Bring on an editor who has a feel for your brand’s heart and soul and you have another person on your team who’s dedicated to capturing the spirit of your message rather than just joylessly adhering to the style guide.

The Importance of Consistency

The modern editor isn’t just a proofreader with an attitude but a smart and savvy brand tactician that knows how to wield content on a way that fuels max ROI. When you’re churning out content on the regular – and by all accounts you should be – it can be tempting to try and be all things to all people. Don’t.

Random acts of marketing are disorienting, and a disoriented audience isn’t inspired to take action. It’s fine to have blog posts, newsletters, emails, eBooks, white papers, case studies, and social posts all in various stages of development and publication, but each type of content needs to relate to each to each other and back to a central strategy for any of it to make sense. Editors are big-picture people who monitor flow, delivery, and cohesion, asking for rewrites or revisions and rallying the troops so that everything that arrives in your inbox commands the right kind of attention not just separately but also as a whole.

As Lisa Barone, Chief Marketing Office for New York-based creative agency Overit, puts it, “It’s great for content to be well-written and grammatically correct, but if it doesn’t connect to the larger marketing strategy than it isn’t truly serving its purpose.” Her content editors are tasked with upholding strategy and brand standards and ensuring a high level of quality control.

Barone goes on to say, “A good editor is someone well-versed in the industry and larger business goals who can help guide a writer to make sure he or she is touching on the important aspects of a topic, that they are finding the right way to engage, that they are using terms with correct context (not just grammatically correct), and that they are seeding content for reader shares from the very onset. There is a lot more to content than simply words on a page and a good editor can help guide this process.”

At Crowd Content, we utilize a three-tier editorial system that funnels content from the writing stage through editing and QA, so our clients get the best of copyediting and that strategic eye. You get exponentially more attention, and those extra steps often translate into content that sells faster and reaches farther. In other words, it fuses the talents of our visionary writers, editors and reviewers into a dynamic, multitasking Transformer-like entity that could very well save the world. Or at least give your brand the market share it deserves.

The post Are Editors Essential to Your Content Marketing Success? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

• Pens
• T-shirts
• Notebooks
• USB sticks
• Lanyards
• Keychains
• Stress balls

I should probably mention pens twice.

These are all great items to pick up and are often good to bring back to the office and share among your colleagues. That said, when we decided to exhibit at SMX Advanced last month in Seattle, I was determined that we’d hand out something a bit different that didn’t ring true to the classic swag cliche.

With that in mind — and given the fact I’m a major dog mom — I decided that we’d give out something that attendees’ fur babies could enjoy.

After a bit of searching, I found these awesome dog bandannas:

I must say, we were a bit unsure about this decision up until the moment the first rush hit our booth. Fortunately, many dog parents were in attendance, and it was great to make friends while chatting about our doggos.

Reasons why this swag worked:

• It’s unique and memorable
• Great conversation starter or subject changer
• Three people took one for their child (multipurpose?)

When we handed these out to attendees at the show, we also asked them to send us pictures of their dogs wearing them…because, why not?

I was overjoyed to see some of our new friends sending their pictures in, posting them on Instagram and Facebook, and I’m happy to share them with you now.

Here Are The Dogs of SMX

The post Introducing the Dogs of SMX appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Online retailers can get a jump on their own revenue spike in the 3rd quarter by integrating back-to-school content marketing strategies. Even if you don’t offer traditional school-related goods (think notebooks, pens, clothing, locker decor and dorm furniture), finding creative ways to link your content marketing to back-to-school mindsets can be profitable. If you do sell school-related goods, this type of inbound marketing is pretty much compulsory, and here are some shrewd steps you can take this season and use again next September.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”r7UP0″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Get a jump in the third quarter by integrating back-to-school content marketing strategies.[/ctt]

Target the Right Back-to-School Search Phrases

Say what you will about the relevance of keywords today: people have to find your pages somehow, and search engines still play a big role there. Seasonal keyword word research requires some extra steps, though. You need content that targets what consumers will search for in the days before and as school starts, and those phrases may differ from high-performing niche keywords from December or May.

Real-time keyword research may not give you all the data required to target correctly, so consider reviewing 12-month trends. You can see what keywords performed well last school-shopping season and couple that data with current keyword performance and market research to make better informed SEO decisions for blog posts, titles, landing pages and product descriptions. One tool that lets you see keyword performance over time is SEMRush.

Related: 3 Tips to Help Your Emerging eCommerce Business Surge

Create Show-and-Tell Content and Product Descriptions

Getting kids ready for school can be stressful. Parents and guardians have to meet multiple demands —€” teachers and schools want very specific, and not always easy-to-find, supplies, but kids have their own ideas about accessories and style. Add in the need to get things together in a timely manner and stay within a budget, and it’s understandable why parents dread back-to-school shopping.

Online retailers can make the entire process easier by creating informative, concise content. From buying guides to how-to videos, incorporate content that goes beyond telling parents (and kids) why they need your products. Show them how to use those products, help them decipher the confusing language of school supply lists and provide tips for getting the most out of each supply. Use tags and categories to organize products so shoppers can easily find different types of goods or filter offerings by age, class type or interest. Create a slide show that explains the difference between types of paper, or put together a video showing how your product can help kids with academic, social and extra-curricular activities this school year.

Even your product descriptions can be informative as well as salesy. Not sure how to strike a balance between helpful expert and retail shop? Professional product description writers can convert unengaging feature lists to PDs that entertain, inform and convert.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”Qdk39″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Get the most from back-to-school eCommerce content marketing by enriching product descriptions and offering targeted promos.[/ctt]

Host Contests and Promotions for Kids and Parents

School shopping can get expensive, so deals and promos definitely catch parent eyes. If you offer free shipping, participate in tax holidays or have a BOGO option, incorporate it into content marketing on your blog, landing pages and social profiles. Remember that kids —€” especially teenagers —€” often have a say in what items are bought for them for school.

Many eCommerce companies don’t leverage promos well in marketing campaigns, so take some time to create an editorial calendar specifically for contests and deals. Ask yourself or your team:

• How can messaging be incorporated onsite, via social and through email? Remember: content has to be customized to both the target audience and the medium.
• Can you issue a press release? PR services don’t typically accept purely promotional pieces, but if your organization is offering a specific, temporary promo, you may be able to spin it into a newsworthy piece tied to the season.
• Who is the audience for the promo? Remember to meet them where they are: teens are more likely to be on Snapchat and Instagram while their parents are on Facebook.

Content marketing that leverages seasonal pain points — such as school supply shopping —€” and promises an easy, helpful solution wins. Incorporate back-to-school campaigns to get a head start on end-of-year revenue boosts.

The post Make the Most of Shrewd Back-to-School Content Marketing This Year appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Step up your social media strategy by getting a good understanding of the Facebook followers and fans who are actually reading your posts and (hopefully) interacting with them. Armed with that information and some insight into Facebook user behavior, you’ll be in great shape to craft posts that resonate with your audience and dramatically increase engagement.

Learn About Your Facebook Followers and Fans via Facebook Insights

Using Facebook’s analytics, you can get a top-level view of who’s reading and liking your posts. Click Insights at the top of your page, and then choose People from the menu on the left sidebar to see basic demographics:

The Page Views and Actions on Page options let you see who is reading and interacting with your posts by age and gender, location or device.

To break things down even further, navigate over to Facebook’s Audience Insights via the Business Manager page. This tells you a lot more about your audience, including lifestyle, relationship and education metrics, as well as job title.

Facebook User Behavior

All of those demographics tell you who you’re reaching and what they do, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how they use — and consume — social media. Understanding user behavior makes it even easier to bump up audience engagement, as you can take your targeted posts and fine-tune them even further.

Though there are many types of Facebooks users out there, including the Power Users and Contributors, I believe that these are the groups you should put a bit more effort into as you start to build out your social media strategy:

Related: How Facebook is Changing the Marketing Game with Influencers

The Lurkers

Who They Are: This segment of the Facebook population is simply not interested in interacting with brands very often, even though they read your posts and watch your videos. They’re voracious consumers of social media, but you won’t see them liking or sharing your posts often – if ever.

Why They’re Important: Of the 263 million people who use social media, lurkers are the largest segment. Some estimates put the group’s size at 90 percent of all social media users. This gives them dramatic power when it comes to making – or breaking – your brand. They may not show their loyalty with likes and shares, but they will when it comes to choosing which brands to spend their money on.

How to Engage Them: The truth is, you probably can’t. The only way to keep them loyal is to continually provide them with the content they want to see. Use Facebook Insights and blog and website analytics to get a feel for what this powerhouse segment likes and doesn’t like, and tweak your content strategy accordingly to keep them around.

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The Influencers

Who They Are: These popular people have a high level of knowledge and credibility in their niche and a large group of followers because of it. Influencers are typically bloggers, activists, industry experts or celebrities, but they can also be ordinary people with a specific expertise. The people who follow influencers tend to be a loyal bunch and typically have a lot of trust in the person.

Why They’re Important: Influencer marketing is slowly edging out the traditional advertising trio: television, radio and print ads. In fact, a full 54 percent of companies now have a budget line item for sponsored social media for their brands, and much of that is devoted to partnerships with influencers. Having an influencer (or two or three) engaging with you publicly on social media or talking about your products exposes your brand to an entirely new audience and gives it almost instant credibility.

How to Engage Them: It’s always wise to create an organic relationship with influencers before reaching out to them. Build that initial relationship by engaging with their content across platforms, including likes, shares and comments. You can often get their attention by crafting high-quality articles that expand on topics they’ve written. Mentioning them or linking to their content in your articles is also a good idea.

The Superfans

Who They Are: This tiny segment of the Facebook community is passionate about the brands they love. Marketing Land likens this group to those football fans who don’t just attend games; they show up at the stadium at dawn and spend the day tailgating. They also make it their mission to convince their friends to attend with them. During games, they’re the first ones to start the wave to cheer on the team.

Why They’re Important: On social media sites, superfans are the ones writing reviews about your products and commenting on your posts. The result is an amplification of all your social media efforts with almost no additional effort on your part.

How to Engage Them: Use social media monitoring tools to find out who your superfans are, and then get to know them. Follow them on the social media platforms they’re active on, and always respond when they comment on your posts. It’s also in your best interests to build up your superfans as brand experts. Make sure they have the media and information they need to be loyal brand ambassadors.

Information is key in the digital age – and especially in the world of social media. Once you know who your fans are and how they consume social media, you’ll be better able to engage them. Remember that some of your most loyal fans may not be vocal and, in fact, may not interact at all. But ignoring this group is not an option.

The post Who Are My Facebook Followers, and How Do I Engage Them? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Companies have been able to promote branded content through the Facebook pages of bands, media outlets and celebrities for some time, but not through private profiles. This changed with the October update; Facebook announced that verified private profiles could promote branded content to harness the power of influencer marketing. Facebook also added a series of new marketing analytics to a feature called a Facebook sponsor tag.

Here’s a breakdown of how it works and just how both parties involved benefit from this major step forward in Facebook’s marketing policy.

New Facebook Sponsor Tags

When you create content promoting a specific product or brand as the owner of a verified profile, you’re given an option to click on a handshake icon and tag the brand directly in the post. This new feature, which is called a Facebook sponsor tag, works for Facebook’s whole range of posting options from simple text posts to interactive live streams.

When brands are tagged, Facebook provides marketers with the ability to quantify the reach and ROI for sponsoring influencer posts. A brand’s marketers can view their marketing metrics such as reach and unique engageements on individual posts and are given the option to boost or share branded content to extend customer interaction possibilities.

For example, a brand might approach an individual social media influencer asking for a product promotion. Instead of paying the person via an independent interaction and then letting him promote the brand, companies pay through Facebook’s new platform, and the influencer would tag the page for the company using the new handshake icon.

As you can see, the quick summary of a branded post’s reach includes key insights that are crucial to deciding whether or not to keep spending a brand’s marketing budget in a specific direction.

Who Benefits?

In short, everyone. Marketers are given wider options to promote their brands to new audiences, while influencers are given a clearer way to monetize their popularity, a method Instagram has already used effectively.

• Influencers are given new options to market themselves. It’s a sort of symbiotic relationship, really. Notable figures with verified profiles who previously had preferred other social platforms where making money off of their public image was simpler will now use Facebook more often.
• Marketers are able to better understand their reach with the Sponsor Tags feature. Facebook intends to make its platform more friendly to brands by expanding the parameters of their marketing ability and adding a toolkit that makes them able to harness the power of word-of-mouth in a major way.

In essence, Facebook has generated a ton of buzz with its new branded content policy. It fosters a more friendly environment for brands and marketers alike and facilitates marketing transactions that are clearly separated from other posts on the platform so that Facebook benefits, their B2C users benefit and the community benefits.

The post How Facebook is Changing the Marketing Game with Influencers appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Writers who want to cultivate their own private clients must have a website. It serves as a resume, sales pitch, writer’s bio and more.

If you’re a freelance writer and don’t yet have a website, or if your site is outdated, here are the essential pages that make a great writer website for landing your own clients.

1. Showcase Your Published Pieces

Clients will be hesitant to hire a writer who hasn’t previously either been published or written for other clients. Therefore, you should include a page on your site that shows where you’ve been published.

When listing credited pieces, every writer wants to post their most prestigious works. Not every writer has Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces in The New York Times, though. List a few of your best works, but don’t fret over whether they’re in well-known publications.

Every writer has to start somewhere, and you need to begin where you are. Post a few of your bylined pieces regardless of how prestigious they are. As you get published in more recognized pieces, you can update your list of published works.

If you’re regularly published in one source, you may want to show that you’ve been published a lot but also demonstrate that you’ve been published in multiple venues. You can do this by listing a few different places where you were published at the top, followed by a longer list below your top few that shows your multiple publications. Scott M. Brodie does this on his site.

To incorporate graphics into this page, you should post the cover of any magazine you’ve been published in. If you have pieces in multiple magazines and journals, showcasing the covers of all of them both enhances the visual aspect of your website and looks impressive.

2. Mention Past Clients (with Permission)

Private clients will also be interested in what companies and businesses you’ve written for. Thankfully, it’s often easy for content writers to find recognizable companies that they’ve worked with in the past.

For instance, Crowd Content lists the following businesses on their homepage: RingPartner, BigCommerce, Shopify, Hootsuite and Rack-a-Tiers. If you’ve written for any of these businesses — which a lot of writers on Crowd Content have — you might be able to list these on your own site.

Depending on your site’s layout and your particular focus, you might list them alongside your published pieces or on a separate page.

Before listing any client, you should first ask for permission to do so. Most content writing jobs are a form of ghostwriting, and some companies may not want it known that you wrote for them.

Some companies and editors, however, will be happy to let you say that you worked on a project for their company.

3. List Your Services and Specialties

With your credentials established, you can now include a page on the services you provide. This should be an outline of the types of writing you do, and it should note any specialties you focus on. If you’re new in your career, this page might list a lot of different subject areas and formats, as you aren’t yet established in any particular field.

If you’re a veteran of the industry, you might only have a few specialties and be able to portray yourself as more of an expert.

When thinking about specialties, don’t just consider subject areas (e.g. insurance, finance, education). You can also set yourself apart by specializing in a form of writing, such as blog posts and articles, product descriptions, white papers or ebooks. One of the beauties of the writing field is how vast it is.

There are many ways you can narrow the focus of what you write and find your place within the field.

If you’re going to list your prices, this page is a natural place to do so. Whether to do so is a personal decision that every writer must make. Untamed Writing lists the pros and cons of listing rates.

You’ll weed out writers who won’t pay your rates and increase the likelihood that people get in touch with you, but you are stuck at that price, can’t negotiate different amounts with different clients and may loose some people based on a quick judgment of your prices.

Not listing your rates may net you fewer serious inquiries, but you’ll be able to make more tailored offers to those who do contact you.

4. Create an About You Page

Finally, your site should have a page about you. Not only is it standard practice to include an “About Us” or “About Me” page on a website, but you’re ultimately what potential clients are interested in. They’re considering hiring you for your writing ability and expertise, so you need to establish yourself in both those areas.

Your “About Me” page isn’t just a place to tell your personal story, but it’s the place to establish your credentials.

Mention any degrees, industry experience, certifications or professional memberships you have.

You’ve already listed where you’re published and what clients you’ve written for, which lets you focus on other qualifications on this page.

5. Let Potential Customers Contact You

Finally, you need a way for potential customers to contact you. You can simply have them email you or set up a contact form on your site. However you decide to have customers get in touch with you, don’t forget this step. If they can’t reach you, all other parts of the site are for naught.

With a website like this set up, you’ll be ready to begin pitching ideas to private clients. You’ll be able to show them what you’ve done before — and ask them for their business.

Do you have a website? Are you just starting to make one? 

Share your tips and questions in the comments section below.

The post 5 Best Practices for Building Your Writing Website appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

However, for those who are in charge of deciding the direction of their online marketing efforts and those who work in the industry of providing suitable content materials, it is somewhat essential to know the differences.

That is not to mention, with the wealth of conflicting information available online, it’s hard to know just what to believe when you CAN find a clear answer.

Here’s what you need to know about content marketing and content marketing strategy.

The Definitions

After sifting through countless definitions, which all had their own take on the terms, here are the most relevant explanations for practitioners.

For content marketer Amanda Maksymiw, the definition of “Content Marketing” is as follows:

“Content marketing is the process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to target audience with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers.”

On the other hand, a “Content Marketing Strategy” is a bit different.

“A content marketing strategy can leverage all story channels (print, online, in-person, mobile, social, etc.), be employed at any and all stages of the buying process, from attention-oriented strategies to retention and loyalty strategies, and include multiple buying groups.” – The Content Marketing Institute

To further explain the subtle differences here, author of the book The Elements of Content Strategy, Erin Kissane has a wonderful analogy.

“Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.”

Or as the Content Marketing Institute’s Ahava Liebtag’s understanding of the definitions infer – Content marketing is about building relationships, while content marketing strategy is more about repeatable frameworks.

What is Content Marketing?

Now that you can clearly define content marketing, let’s delve a bit deeper so we can better see how it affects marketers and content providers.

This is probably the part that most of us are familiar with, the common elements of content marketing – blogs, social media, visual content, eBooks, webinars and so forth. In fact, a content marketing team can easily consist of multiple people performing specific jobs.

For example:

• A Blogger Who is Responsible for
  • Writing appropriate blog posts
  • Providing feedback for contributors
  • Editing other writers
  • Optimizing content for SEO
  • Analyzing blog performance
  • Increasing subscribers and reach

• A Social Media Manager Who is Responsible for
  • Building and managing social media profiles
  • Creating appropriate, share-worthy content
  • Listening and engaging with industry-appropriate customers and leaders
  • Running and tracking promotional campaigns
  • Driving traffic

In essence, content marketing is much more closely related to building meaningful relationships with consumers and industry leaders through the use of various content forms.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy, or content strategy, is not restrained to online content alone. Content strategy is the development, use and governance of usable content across an entire organization.

A content strategy is basically more focused on designing the end-users’ entire experience, the informational architecture available to them and the content’s utility.

The biggest benefit of having a content strategy is organizing the use of content throughout the entire organization to determine who is in charge of what content forms, how do they all fit together, what is the purpose of various content forms, and overall strategy for content.

To see what other experts have to say on the subject of content marketing vs. content strategy, click here.

As startups, small business owners and content providers it is important that we familiarize ourselves with every aspect of the content marketing industry and how it applies to us. Knowing these subtle differences can help us in both directing our marketing efforts and providing the appropriate content for the job.

For more information, head on over to the Crowd Content resources for content marketing.

The post What You Need To Know: Content Marketing and Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If you have ever looked into using eBooks for small business marketing, then you have most likely heard that eBooks are a great form of content for business marketing.

However, if you’re new to the content marketing scene, then it may be somewhat confusing…

The Benefits of Using eBooks for Small Business Marketing

For anyone who is looking to build their business online, eBooks offer a wide array of tangible benefits.

• Lead Generation – This is the one you are probably most familiar with, offering a free eBook in exchange for an email address. This allows you to build your email list and potentially generate new leads.
• Thought-Leadership – Obviously, one of the hardest tasks to accomplish is establishing yourself as a leader in your industry. By publishing and sharing an eBook, you can position yourself as an authority in your niche.
• Share Your Business With Customers – One of the biggest problems with growing your business may simply be that your potential customers do not understand what you’re offering. With an eBook that thoroughly explains your products or services, and their benefits, you can help your clientele understand what you offer.
• Build Your Brand – Whether you are selling products, services, your business or yourself, building your personal brand is an essential part of positioning yourself as someone that consumers can trust and look to.
• Offer Expertise – Whatever your area of specialty may be, an eBook can help you share your valuable expertise with your target audience, which further builds trust and establishes you as an authority in your niche.

Using PDF eBooks for List Building & Lead Generation

The simplest type of eBook comes in a PDF format, and can be created using your average Microsoft Word or other writing program. These are great for small business marketing because other than the writing part, they can be put together relatively easily.

Simply use whatever email program that you prefer (AWeber, MailChimp, etc.) to create a popup or sign up form to capture emails and have it redirect to a hidden page or post on your website.

This allows you to easily build and grow your emailing list and generate leads without having to sit and send out each copy of your eBook individually.

For those who are already on your email list, simply send out a special newsletter advertising the free eBook download.

Publishing on Amazon Kindle for Authority & Profit

For the more experienced business marketers, you may want to consider publishing on Amazon Kindle for eReaders. This option offers the chance to establish your authority, share valuable information and still make a profit.

That is not to mention, Amazon also offers a free preview of the first few pages. This allows you to insert links to your site that users can follow even if they cannot afford to purchase the eBook.

Although there is a bit more work involved in publishing via Amazon, it offers plenty of benefits that make it worth the while.

The most important ingredient for this type of eBook publishing would be creating plenty of hype before actually releasing the eBook.

Regardless of what type of eBook you choose to publish and promote, there are numerous benefits that can be had by the savvy startup or small business.

The best choice is simply to decide which method is best for your business and hire an ebook writer today.

The post How to Use eBooks for Fantastic Small Business Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Where there used to just be a simple thumbs up icon, you may now see a variety of smiley faces, or even a heart. These new icons are part of the Facebook Reactions that Facebook recently rolled out.

New Icons?

Even if you do frequent Facebook regularly, it is very possible that this review is the first you have heard of Facebook Reactions. The reason is that it isn’t immediately apparent how to use the new options if it hasn’t been explained to you, because the user interface hasn’t changed.

The old “like” button appears on every post, but there aren’t obvious buttons to produce the other reactions.

In order to do anything other than like a post, you have to hover over the “like” button until a pop up menu gives you other options.

Facebook Reactions In-Depth

Facebook Reactions increase the ways you can non-verbally respond to a post. In addition to being able to like a post, you can now also express shock (wow), anger, love, sadness, and even laugh at a post.

There are some limits to this new system, though.

First, you can not express multiple reactions for a post. You can change your reaction, if you want, but you simply can’t laugh and love at the same time.

Second, Facebook Reactions only apply to the initial post. Comments are still restricted to simply being liked or not.

Third, only the top three reactions (ordered by number of reactions given) are visible on the post. Anyone who can read the post can click on the reactions to get a more complete accounting of how many of each type of reaction was given and who gave each reaction type.

Where is the Dislike Button?

Simply put, there isn’t a dislike button. Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2014 that Facebook would never include a dislike button, because he doesn’t think such a button is a force for social good and doesn’t want to see posts getting demeaned on Facebook in that way.

Bullying Concerns

Facebook reactions were released worldwide on February 24th, 2016, which happens to coincide with Anti-Bullying Day in Canada.

This is rather appropriate because there are some concerns that the new system could be used for bullying. Whether this concern is merited has yet to be seen.

There are some who believe that Facebook Reactions can actually be used to fight bullying. And while Facebook hasn’t made any direct statements on the matter beyond those made when referencing a potential “dislike” button, at least one part of the feature does seem to combat bullying.

Since only the top three reactions are visible on any post, even if a few individuals do give inappropriately negative reactions to a post (like anger on a happy post), those reactions are likely to be hidden from view by the positive reactions.

Additionally, at least in the first 24 hours, the system doesn’t seem to be getting abused yet. On one of the most abused Facebook pages in history, Feminist Frequency, not a single person has yet to post an “angry” response to any post.

Final Analysis

It is too early to tell for sure whether Facebook Reactions will become popular, but the initial response by Facebook users shows a lot of excitement.

The system has been thoroughly tested for months in other countries, so hopefully the bugs are fully worked out.

Even if interest fades, the flexibility of Facebook Reactions is sure to increase the overall value of Facebook for private and commercial users alike.

What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments section below!

The post Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Facebook Reactions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Skip directly to the Complete Guide for Using Campaigns (Beta)

Today, Crowd Content released the beta version of Campaigns. Campaigns is a tool that helps marketers organize and automate their entire content strategy.

Campaigns allows marketers to plan their content calendar weeks, months, or even years in advance. The tool then automatically places content orders with your team of writers according to the schedule you have created.

Campaigns makes it easy to add different content streams to your calendar such as blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, ebooks, or white papers.

You can pre-assign each piece of content to a specific writer or set each piece on a first come first serve basis for your writing team.

Have a list of titles or keywords that you need content written for? Bulk upload tools make it easy to add hundreds of titles in minutes. The calendar then schedules each title as a separate content order on the days you want them.

Need to make changes to your content calendar after scheduling it? Bulk edit tools allow you to edit several content orders at once. A bulletin board also lets you communicate with your entire writing team from one place.

Combined with our publishing apps, Campaigns will significantly reduce the time it takes for marketers to plan, schedule, approve, and publish content. Completed content can be sent directly to your website. You can also export content with full HTML coding or export in bulk to a CSV file.

Campaigns truly does make managing and executing a robust content marketing strategy easy for brands and agencies. To learn more, view the tutorial below or contact us today for a live demo.

Complete Guide for Using Campaigns (Beta)

Below is a complete guide with screenshots on how to use the beta version of Campaigns at Crowd Content. Because Campaigns is currently in beta, you will need to request access to this section of the platform by clicking “Campaigns” in the top navigation bar and then contacting your Client Account Manager.

If you’re new to Crowd Content, then you should check out the Quick-Start Guide for Crowd Content Clients.

Guide Contents

1. Campaigns Video Tutorial
2. Creating a New Campaign
3. Create a Campaign Brief and Default Settings
4. Select Writers for Your Campaign
5. Schedule Content for Your Campaign
6. Launch Your Campaign
7. Monitoring Your Active Campaign
8. Editing Scheduled Content Orders

1. Campaigns Video Tutorial

2. Creating a New Campaign

Click on Campaigns in the top navigation bar of the site. Click Create New Campaign to get started. The site will walk you through an easy Campaign set up wizard which we outline in the following steps.

3. Create a Campaign Brief and Default Settings

Every Campaign has a Brief and a group of Default Settings.

Brief

The Brief should cover your high level objectives and guidelines for all content that will be created in the Campaign.

Give your Campaign a name, upload a logo for your Campaign, and outline your general guidelines in the Campaign Overview section.

You can also upload an attachment for your Campaign. You may want to do this if you have a more detailed set of guidelines in an existing document.

Default Settings

Specifying your Default Settings will save you time when adding content orders to the Campaign.

These settings will be automatically applied to all new content orders added to the Campaign going forward. However, you will have the option to change any of these settings at the time of adding each new content order – these are only default settings.

Most of these settings are optional, but you will at least want to select a default Content Type. Select Custom for any type of content other than tweets or Facebook posts. For example, for articles, blog posts, press releases, ebooks, and white papers, you should select Custom.

The other settings in this section are the same settings you would find on the normal order form at Crowd Content. These settings tell the writer what you are looking for. Specify any settings that you feel will apply to most content orders added to this Campaign. If you’re unsure about any of the settings, leave them blank.

Remember, these are only default settings – you will have the option to change them when adding any new content orders to the Campaign.

When you’re happy with your Campaign Brief and Default Settings, click Save and Continue.

4. Select Writers for Your Campaign

On this step, you select which writer or writers will have access to the content orders in the Campaign.

This will be a default writer setting for the Campaign, but you will be able to adjust your writer settings for individual content orders if you wish.

To select writers, choose between Open, Direct, or Team Order.

Open Order

If you don’t have any preferred writers yet at Crowd Content, you may want to start your Campaign with Open Orders. This means that your content orders will be available to all qualified writers at the Quality Level you select.

For example, if you choose Open Order > 3 Star, only 3 and 4 Star writers will have access to your content orders.

Direct Order

If you have a specific writer you want to work with on this Campaign, choose the Direct Order option.

The writer search tool will appear and you can select your preferred writer.

While in the writer search tool, you can view a writer’s profile by clicking on the blue square icon in the bottom right of their listing. The profile will show you useful statistics, samples, and previous ratings for that writer.

Team Order

If you have a group of writers you want to work with on this Campaign, choose the Team Order option.

A list of your existing writer teams will appear. Hover over a team name to see a snapshot of the writers on that team.

Simply click on a team name to select that team as the default writer setting for content orders in this Campaign.

Don’t have any teams yet, or want to create a new team? Click the blue Create New Team button in the bottom right.

Give your new team a name and click Save. A label for your new team will then appear in the left column under Teams in the writer search tool.

To add writers to your new team, you have two options. You can select multiple writers using the checkboxes on the left of their listing and then click Add to Team at the bottom left. Select your new team and click Save.

You can also drag and drop writers into any team by clicking and holding to the left of the checkbox on any writer listing.

When you’re done adding writers to your team, click the green Save and Continue button. This will take you back to the team select page. Simply click on the new team name to select that team.

Once you have your team selected for this Campaign, click Save and Continue.

5. Schedule Content for Your Campaign

The final step of creating your Campaign is to schedule your content calendar. This is the fun part!

On this screen, you’ll see your content calendar on the left and a list view of scheduled content on the right. To start, your list view will be empty because you have no scheduled content yet.

To add content orders to your calendar, you have a few options. Click on any date on the calendar, Quick Add, Upload File, or Paste In.

Quick Add

The easiest way to add a new content order to your calendar is by clicking Quick Add. This will bring up the form to request a new piece of content.

Alternatively, you can just click on any date on the calendar. This will bring up the same form, but will have the date you clicked pre-selected as the Place Date for the content order.

You will notice that your Default Settings are already applied to the content order. Your Order Type (Open, Team, or Direct) will be pre-selected along with your Quality Level (pricing level).

You can change either of these settings at this time if you wish.

You should then add a Title for this content order, select a Word Count, and add the instructions for this specific order. Your instructions tell the writer how to approach this content piece.

The rest of your Default Settings can be view and edited by clicking Advanced Edit in the bottom left area of this order form.

You can easily set this to be a recurring content order by clicking the dropdown menu beside Repeat Order?

You can choose to have it repeat Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly.

You can even specify an end date for the recurring order. Choose to have this recurring content order end after a certain number of titles (occurrences) or on a specific date.

After you’re happy with the settings and instructions for this content order, click Save Order.

The content order will then be scheduled as per your settings. If you’ve set it on a recurring schedule, you will see all future occurrences of the order listed on the calendar.

Hover over the icons on the calendar to see details about that order.

Upload File

If you’ve already created several titles and saved them into an Excel file, you can use the Upload File option to add them to your content calendar.

You are then brought to the same content order form that we saw with the Quick Add option. The difference here is that the settings and instructions on this form will apply to all the titles in the batch you are adding.

Just like the Quick Add, all of your Default Settings will already be set on the form when it opens. You can change any of those default settings now if you wish (remember, you can see all settings by clicking Advanced Edit).

When you’re happy with your instructions and settings, you need to decide if you want to place all of these titles on the Place Date or schedule them over several days.

If you want to place all of the titles on the Place Date, click the Yes button beside Place all on Place Date?

If you want to schedule them into the future, leave the Place all on Place Date selection to No and use the Repeat Order tool.

Use the dropdown menu to select Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly.

IMPORTANT: The system will automatically set your schedule to end after the number of titles you are adding in this batch. For example, if I am adding 3 titles in this batch, the system suggests to end the schedule after 3 titles. You can change this suggested setting if you wish. However, if you schedule past the number of titles in your batch, your titles will be repeated after each title has already occurred once. In other words, the system will just keep running through your list of titles over and over again until the schedule ends.

Paste In

Another easy way to add multiple titles is with the Paste In option.

A large text area will appear when using the Paste In option. Paste your list of titles into the area.

Each title should be on a separate line.

Click Add Titles.

Just like the Upload File option, you will have a chance to review the list of titles, edit them, or add more titles if needed.

When you are happy with the list of titles, click Save and Continue.

At this point, you will go through the same steps as explained in the Upload File section.

6. Launch Your Campaign

After your content calendar is scheduled, you’re ready to launch your Campaign.

Click Save and Continue.

A confirmation box will appear asking if you want to launch the Campaign now or pause it and activate it later.

To launch immediately, click Activate Campaign Now.

To pause the Campaign and activate later, click Activate Campaign Later.

You can also see your dedicated account manager’s contact information on this pop up. This is just a reminder that you can reach out to your account manager at any time for help with Campaigns or any other part of the Crowd Content platform.

TIP: If you aren’t ready to schedule any content at this time, you can skip the scheduling step and still finish creating the Campaign by clicking Save and Continue. You will be able to add content orders to your calendar later on when you are ready.

7. Monitoring Your Active Campaign

Now that your Campaign is active, you can monitor it from the Campaign home area.

To go to the Campaign home, click on Campaigns in the top navigation bar of the website. If you only have one Campaign, its Campaign home will automatically show when you get to this page.

If you have multiple Campaigns, you can select the Campaign you want to monitor by clicking on the dropdown menu in the top left corner of this page.

On the Campaign home, you will see the following areas:

Bulletin Board: Here, you can add messages that all writers in your campaign can see. This is a great tool for announcing updates to guidelines or for motivating your writer team. If they’re doing a great job, let them know! Writers in your Campaign can also post to the Bulletin Board if they have general Campaign questions.

Campaign Logo, Brief, and Default Settings: You can view all these elements on this page and can edit them at any time.

Default Order Type (Writers): Here, you can edit your default writer settings.

Upcoming Content: This list shows you content orders that are scheduled to be placed soon. You can edit any of these upcoming orders by clicking on them.

Active Content: This list shows you all content orders that are Placed, Being Written, Ready for Review, or Completed. You can see the writer’s progress on Being Written orders and see the ratings of ones that are Completed. Click on any piece of Active Content to view it.

Mini Calendar: In the bottom left, you’ll see a mini calendar that shows all of your scheduled content in a month view. You can flip through different months using the left and right arrows. Hover over any content icon to view details about that piece of content.

Pause or Activate Your Campaign: Controls exist in the top right corner of this page to either Pause or Activate your Campaign. You can also Delete a Campaign, but only if it does not have any Active Content in it.

8. Editing Scheduled Content Orders

After scheduling your content calendar, you may need to make edits to the details of certain content orders.

It’s easy to change the Place Date, instructions, or other settings to a single content order. Simply locate that order on your calendar or Upcoming Content list. Click on the content order to bring up the same form you saw when you created the order.

Here, you can make changes to any of the details. You can also click Advanced Edit in the bottom left to see more options and settings.

Editing Multiple Content Orders (Edit Series)

If you want to edit several content orders at one time, you can click Edit Series in the top right corner of the edit form.

This will take you to another view that shows you all the titles in that series.

This view will also display the schedule settings you have in place for the series.

You can make updates to the schedule to change the dates that orders in that series will place on.

When you’re happy with your changes, click Update Order.

IMPORTANT: The system will ask you if you want to update all content orders in the series or just this and all future content orders in the series. It’s important to understand that if the initial content order you clicked on to edit occurs in the future after other upcoming orders, selecting Following Orders will NOT update any content orders before the one you initially selected to edit. If you want to update every content order in the series from today going forward, select All Orders.

Request Beta Access to Campaigns

As noted, Campaigns is currently in beta. If you are interested in using the Campaigns tool, please contact your Client Account Manager to get full access. If you’re new to Crowd Content, please create a client account here or contact us for more info.

The post Crowd Content Launches Campaigns (Beta) to Automate Your Content Strategy appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

What is Quality Content?

If you help us define what high quality content is, you can win some killer prizes!

All participants will be entered into a draw to win a $1,000 content creation package from Crowd Content that includes any mix of the following:

• Professionally written blog posts, white papers, ebooks, or website contentTweets or Facebook posts customized for your brand
• Product descriptions written or re-written for your ecommerce store
• High quality stock images (over 15 million to choose from)

All participants will be entered into a draw to win 10 prizes of $50 of Content Creation Services. Plus, the first 100 people to participate will get a premium content marketing designer t-shirt!

How It Works: 

We’re on a mission to help our clients and writers create higher quality content. But, first, we want to help them understand what the term “quality content” actually means.

Because, let’s face it – everyone keeps telling you to publish quality content, but they rarely define what that means.

Instead of attempting to define quality content ourselves, we want to hear what 2,500 of the brightest content marketing minds have to say about it.

All you need to do is stop by and visit us at Booth 26, and give us your take on what you think Quality Content is.

After getting your input, we’ll head back to the lab and look for trends in what the industry believes quality content is.

We’ll then use this information to develop comprehensive a guide that helps define what quality content is and provides insight on how to achieve it!

Bonus: If we choose to highlight your response, your name, image, company, and URL will be published in the guide.

What Else Is Happening?

Tuesday night is going to be bumpin’! We have teamed up with Content Marketing Institute to bring you CONTENTFest featuring tasty food trucks, delectable drinks, amazing live music!

This is a great opportunity to network with other attendees, take some sweet pictures, and, most importantly, have some fun!

To celebrate Cleveland’s Rock and Roll history, there will be a Beatles cover band playing throughout the evening.

To stay in tune with the Rock ‘n’ Roll theme, we have created a Beatles photo booth where you can snap some fun photos with your friends.

One of our staff will be your dedicated photographer while you dress up in Beatles-esque props, and harness your inner John Lennon.

Still need some convincing? Those who get a picture at the Beatles picture booth, upload it to twitter, and give @CrowdContent a shout out, will get a free drink ticket for the Crowd Content Smurf.

These beautifully blue drinks were created and tested especially for this evening!

The post We Need Your Help at Content Marketing World 2014 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Freelancing comes with plenty of perks: You can choose your projects, set your own hours and work wherever you like. Yet the same flexibility that makes freelance writing an attractive career can put you at the risk of burnout if your workload and stress levels get away from you.

Burnout is more than the normal fatigue that comes with pushing yourself during a busy week and needing extra rest. Caused by prolonged stress that impacts the entire body, burnout is an emotional and physical exhaustion that won’t go away. It’s become so prevalent among workers that the World Health Organization now considers it a syndrome.

Let’s take a look at what this occupational phenomenon looks like for writers and how to avoid burnout as a freelancer so you can build a satisfying, thriving career.

What Is Writer Burnout?

A little stress or exhaustion is normal. Maybe you’ve taken on too many projects and are racing to meet deadlines. Or perhaps you’re struggling to meet the demands of a particularly difficult client. Occasional stress is a part of life, and most people bounce back and move on.

Burnout, however, occurs when the stress is so unrelenting you feel physical and mentally drained. Our bodies are built to handle pressure once in a while, but chronic stress impacts everything from the muscles and heart to the digestive, endocrine and nervous systems.

Why Freelancers Are Susceptible to Burnout

All workers are susceptible to burnout, but according to a study by IPSE, two in five freelancers report high levels of stress. It’s common for writers to feel obligated to be available around the clock — there’s no one to fill in when you need a day off, and dropping the ball can mean losing a valuable client.

Freelance writers can find it difficult to:

• Turn down projects. Freelancing is unpredictable, making it challenging to say no when work is offered.
• Establish a work-life balance. It takes effort to set clear boundaries when you don’t physically go into an office.
• Take time off. When you’re paid by the word or project, downtime can seem like lost income.
• Connect professionally with coworkers and colleagues. Writers often work in isolation without a network of support.

What Writer Burnout Looks Like

The World Health Organization characterizes burnout as follows:

Constant Feelings of Exhaustion

It’s normal to feel tired if you’ve stayed up late to meet a deadline or pitch in on a project. But if extra sleep doesn’t make you feel better and the exhaustion persists, you may be experiencing burnout.

Feeling Detached From Work

Sometimes, you might take on a job you don’t love just for the pay cheque, but if you’re consistently going through the motions, something else may be at play. When you’re burned out, you’re no longer energized by the writing process and take little satisfaction from your work.

Reduced Productivity

Writer’s block is normal, but if you’re easily distracted, lacking motivation or struggling to put words down on the page, burnout could be affecting the quality of your work. You may need to take time off to refresh your creative energies if your normally sparkling prose feels stuck or forced.

How To Avoid Burnout as a Freelancer

Fortunately, freelancers have more control over their workload and environment than most employees. Use the following tips to make sure your brain and body have regular opportunities to recover from work stress. When you’re at your best, you’re more creative, productive and engaged.

1. Create a Distinct Workspace

One of the biggest challenges for freelancers is to keep work life separate from personal activities. It’s hard to put aside thoughts of looming deadlines when you work in the same chair you’re trying to relax in or your client briefs are in plain view on the table beside you.

The best option is a designated office that you can close the door to or at least a desk in the corner of a room. Even if you’re short on space and write on your sofa, try to carve out a distinct work area — for example, use a table you can fold up when you clock out. Put away your notebooks and laptop in a cupboard, stop responding to email and signal to your mind the workday is done.

2. Manage Your Projects

Freelancing is notorious for being feast or famine. We’ve all had those days when projects are scarce and the bank account is low. That’s why it’s tempting to accept writing assignments when they’re offered, even if your plate is already overflowing. But if you continuously say yes to projects without a second thought, you run the risk of never taking a break.

As a freelancer, judge the amount of writing you can reasonably complete. Allow yourself time off or suggest alternate deadlines that fit your schedule. You can also expand your skills and marketability so there’s a steady flow of writing opportunities available when you need them.

3. Work Smarter

The easiest way to spend less time writing is to work smarter. Multitasking is a no-no — when it’s time to write, write. Don’t stop mid-blog post to make a dentist appointment, throw in a load of laundry or answer a text message. You’re interrupting your flow and stretching yourself thin.

If staying focused is a challenge, try the Pomodoro technique and work on a single task in blocks of time followed by short breaks. During a work block, tune out all distractions and concentrate on completing the set task before the timer goes off. This approach is great for writers who get easily distracted by the ping of notifications — most messages can wait until the work block is finished for a response.

Working smarter also means reducing interruptions. If you share your home with people who like to pop in any time, make your work hours clear and ask them to wait until you’re done.

4. Take Regular Breaks During the Day

It may seem like a good use of time to power through as much writing as you can, but regular breaks are important for refreshing your brain. Instead of working while gulping down a sandwich, take a real lunch break and walk around the block. Schedule your coffee breaks as if you were in an office. And don’t scroll social media during your break. Get up and stretch, walk on the treadmill or do something away from the screen.

5. Connect With Others

Freelancers tend to be more isolated than those in office environments. You may not be able to chat around the water cooler or spontaneously grab lunch with the coworker in the next cubicle, but you can make an effort to connect with others during the workday. Schedule coffee with a friend or call family members to check in.

It’s also helpful to make professional connections. Join writers groups and local business associations. If you’re able, consider a shared workspace with other freelance consultants.

6. Manage Your Finances

One of the biggest reasons freelancers push themselves so hard is to take advantage of work when it’s plentiful. A sound financial plan can go a long way toward relieving some of the stress that comes with the unpredictability of working as a consultant.

Yes, budgeting may be boring, but it’s essential. Build in savings for those slow times so you can better manage your workload.

7. Book That Vacation Time

While eight out of 10 freelancers want to take more days off than they currently do, it’s not always easy to book the time and get away. According to the above-mentioned IPSE study, 62% of freelancers worry they’re letting clients down if they go on holidays, and 60% are concerned about not having work in the future as a result.

While you want to be responsive and available to clients, it’s not realistic to work nonstop — in fact, 63% of those surveyed say taking time off improves their work performance. Budget for your vacation (see #6 above!) and let clients know ahead of time you’ll be away so they can plan around your holiday. You may also be able to complete some work before you go.

And when you’re away? Well, 58% of freelancers still check work-related email, and 30% work while on vacation. Check email first thing in the morning if you have to, but to thoroughly recharge, aim to disconnect from work completely.

8. Do Things You Love

While retiring to the sofa to binge-watch your favourite show seems like the ideal way to unwind — it requires very little effort, after all — finding engaging things to do in your time off is even better for keeping stress and burnout at bay.

According to Yale professor Laurie Santos, immersing yourself in an activity you love can put you into the flow and keep you present and involved. Try cooking, learning a new language or mastering a new sport to spark passion and energize yourself outside of work.

9. Practice Self-Care

Self-care is the easiest way to avoid writer burnout. Be mindful of how you’re feeling on a daily basis. Exercise regularly or practice meditation to relieve stress. You can’t be at your best if you start getting worn down.

Here’s What To Do If You Feel Burned Out

Despite our best efforts to manage stress, we can still hit the wall and burn out. If you’re feeling the effects of chronic stress, take steps to restore your well-being.

Figure Out Why You’re Burned Out

Are you taking on too many projects? Do you need to do something invigorating or restorative outside of work? Determine the source of your stress and take steps to remedy it.

Get Back to the Basics

When you’re rushing to meet deadlines, it’s easy to skip meals, drink too much coffee and sit at your desk all day. Prioritize your needs. Eat well. Get enough sleep. Exercise.

Take a Break

Cut back on your work commitments. If you’re severely burned out, a weekend won’t be enough for you to fully recover. It’s going to take some time for your physical and mental health to get back to normal.

Reach Out to Family and Friends

Connect with family and friends and let them know how you’re feeling. It’s natural to want to withdraw when you’re exhausted, but support is important. Make some fun plans together and do something you’ve always wanted to try.

Seek Professional Help

Burnout is specifically linked to work conditions, though it can affect other parts of your life and increase the risk of depression. Speak to your doctor or a health care professional if you’re having trouble getting things back on track.

Pursue a Writing Career With Crowd Content

At Crowd Content, you can access thousands of remote writing assignments in a variety of industries. Pick the ones you want to work on, set your own schedule and enjoy consistent income with twice-weekly payouts. And you’re not working alone — our supportive community includes content managers and editors ready to help build your skills. Find your next freelance writing job at Crowd Content today.

The post Everything You Need To Know To Avoid Burnout as a Freelancer appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

A successful influencer campaign starts with seeking out relevant influencers.

In terms of content marketing, these are people who weld the same power through various online platforms ranging from blogs to online review sites.

You want to build relationships with these discerning individuals in an effort to boost your brand and establish credibility among your target audience.

Solicit Content from Relevant Influencers 

Online influencers aren't as elusive as paparazzi-shy celebs. In fact, many influencers are more than willing to contribute a wide range of content to your site, write about you on their website or blog or simply pass on your eBook to their followers.

By turning to influencers, you get the benefit of:

• Free content from a reputable source with significant followers
• Building your brand by association with a trusted influencer 
• A steady stream of new visitors generated from your influencers' traffic stream

Identify Influencers Relevant to Your Target Audience

There are plenty of influencers out there. The key to successful influencer marketing, however, is finding influencers relevant to your target audience.

The research involved with this process can be as simple as searching on keywords and phrases your target audience is likely to be using to find you.

Google has a Blog Search feature you can use if you only want to find influential bloggers. You can also search on specific keywords on social sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter or use PR tools such as Cision and Vocus.

Prioritize Your Influencers

Once you identify relevant influencers, the next step is to prioritize your list of influencers.

Engage one or two of your influencers at a time to keep things manageable, especially if you're a smaller business with other tasks you need to perform on a daily basis outside of marketing efforts.

An easy way to rank influencers is to test the waters and engage each one in a small way. Make your decision based on how engaging they are with you and the results you see in terms of traffic.

Additional ways to rank your influencers include:

• Following them on Twitter or Facebook
• Re-tweeting some of their content that's relevant to your business or industry
• Leaving comments on their blogs

Introduce Yourself Establish a Professional Relationship

After a few weeks of testing the waters, you should have a good idea of which influencers jive with your business. Once you reach that point, send your selected influencers an email where you introduce yourself.

In a professional way, explain that you've been following them on Twitter or leaving comments on their blog. You'll also want to share a few of your collaborative ideas once you've identified topics relevant to both of you.

During your introduction, you should also:

• Include relevant stats such as how many visitors your site gets each month
• Offer incentives such as mentioning them in your newsletters or eBooks
• Delve into your stats and point out how you can broaden their audience

If anything, these examples should serve as an incentive to interact with followers and engage your target audience. The more personable you become, the more likely you are to form mutually beneficial relationships.

Finally, take time to build followers and become an influencer yourself.

The post Power Up Your Content with Influencer Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Keep in mind that when launching an eBook, you are essentially acting as your own publisher. You’ll be writing the content, or hiring someone to write effective content for you, and putting your content together as an eBook. There are plenty of eBook templates you can use to put your eBook together. Once you get passed the initial preparation phase, it’s time to launch your eBook.

Protect Your Content

Make it clear that you own your content to avoid someone, possibility a competitor, from using your content for their marketing purposes. You could either copyright your content or publish it via an attributions license, which permits people to copy and share your content as long as you are comfortable with how it’s being used.

Consider that an attributions license does makes it easier for people to share interesting parts of your content via social media and other online sources.

Note: If your content is copyrighted, clearly state this within your content. If you have specific rules for usage of your content, either mention this briefly at the bottom of the page or create a separate page disclosing your policy on sharing and reusing your eBook content.

Optimize Your eBook Metadata

While you can’t optimize your eBook content itself for search engines, you can optimize external factors such as the descriptions you use to promote it. The following types of metadata relating to your eBook should be optimized:

• Relevant tags
• Any websites, blogs or social posts referencing your eBook
• Meta description of your eBook
• File name used to upload your eBook

Let People Know About Your eBook

Once you have an eBook ready to go, you have to let people know it’s available. If you have an existing email marketing campaign, this is a perfect way to get the word out.

You could either include a link to your eBook or a link to subscribe to your blog or newsletter if you want this to be a condition for someone to get your eBook. Additional ways to get the word out about your eBook include:

• Mentioning it in as a new post in your blog
• Sending out a Tweet (grouped with a hashtag to take users to your related content)
• Placing a post on Facebook
• Creating a landing page to the specific page of your website that mentions your eBook

Now that people know about your eBook, the final step is to get people talking about it. Be active on your social networks. Rather than just posting messages and sending out tweets, actually interact with users by responding to comments in real time.

This kind of connection gets people talking and encourages more people to join the conversation. Consider guest posting on blogs related to your business or eBook topics.

Another option is to have a contest where the prize is a free copy of your eBook. The more creative you are, the better. With a little imagination and promotion, your eBook can be a highly effective marketing tool.

The post Tips for Launching Your Successful eBook appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But, how can you come up with quality creative writing ideas?

We all know that blogging can be difficult to maintain over the long haul. Keeping up with the demands of your blog posting schedule or content calendar can take valuable time away from other business tasks. The creative writing tips below can help you meet your blog posting goals.

1. Capture Fleeting Thoughts

Savvy writers know the importance of capturing creative thoughts before they disappear. Many carry small notebooks where they can make notes when they have great ideas. Others record short messages on their cellphones. Either way, they capture the ideas before they lose them forever.

Get in the habit of capturing fleeting inspiration so you will have ideas available later when you have time to blog about them.

2. Answer Questions in Writing

You probably answer dozens of questions about your business in the course of a week. You can make your answers do double duty by turning them into blog posts. Remember, every question is a clue to what inquiring minds want to know about you.

3. Use Pop Culture References

People like to have concepts explained with references they understand. Titles like The Star Trek Guide to Re-energizing Your Web Design or What the Miami Heat Can Teach You about Persistence promise a bit of fun mixed in with the information.

In addition, timely pop culture tie-ins make your blog appear in tune with current events. However, you have to be careful about the references you choose. Select those that are relevant to your audience and keep with the tone of your blog.

4. Write First, Edit Later

This is the secret of every prolific writer. Those who can turn off their internal editors and get the words on the page have a distinct advantage over those who agonize over every word.

Push yourself to write your first drafts as quickly as possible. Later, you can come back and make them shine.

5. Hire a Ghost Writer

As your business grows, you will find yourself pulled in many different directions. Outsourcing your creative writing to a competent ghost writer frees you up to focus on your other strengths, especially those that cannot be outsourced.

With a skilled writer creating your blog posts, you will not have to worry about where to find creative writing ideas. You can simply place an order to fulfill your content marketing goals and get back to doing those things that you do best for your business.

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