Content strategy: Five blogs you need to follow

When it comes to content strategies like most things it is best to gather as much information as possible, read opposing arguments and make your on conclusion. In today's post I'm going to share with you my top five blogs that I read on a regular basis to keep up with new trends, different ideas and gain diverse opinions on what is going on in SEO, Google and content marketing.

The first blog that I read on a regular basis is Search Engine Journal. This is the place where I gather SEO tips and read articles and opinion pieces on what is going on in the industry. There are some great pieces that get you thinking and has sparked a few conversations at work. You can find interviews with Matt Cutts, explaining why Google are taking the directions they are along with many other interesting articles.

For blog tips, Dailyblogtips.com is one place that not only gives you tips on how you can create content that will seen, you can read advice on SEO, links you should be placing along with other areas.

Content Hero is aimed for digital agencies that again provides opinion pieces on what is going on in the industry and how it can or should work for you. Google are releasing new algorithms and updates on a regular basis that can shock some sites so it is best to always keep in the know and apply it to your future content strategies.

For more social media specific content I look to Social Media Examiner. From reports to podcasts along with commentary on the newest trends in the industry, Social Media Examiner pretty much covers it all.

Lastly, the Content Marketing Institute is one of the best resources for white papers, webinars and research. The content that they write and the advice they offer nearly always sparks new ideas for me, and can be quite inspiring.

So these are my top five blogs to read and follow if you're a content strategist or want to apply this sort of activity to your marketing. Do you have any sites you think deserve a mention? 

Writing that maximises sales

The art to gaining the maximum sales predominately lies with timing. It's best to have a good, solid content plan to begin with; time is money and unless you have money to spare you need a well organised content strategy to implement. The most well executed plan is based on when you believe demand will increase and when it's estimated to be at its peak.

Once you have the plan you need to think about:

• Call to actions - Does the customer or follower need to phone, place an order online, like a post or page or tweet something? Make sure it is easy to see and that the user journey is as simple and as time effective as possible. There are programs such as Click Tale that allow you to see the user journey in real time and know where your customers go off site (this can also be measured through the bounce rate in Google Analytics) - generating all the data you need to improve the ways your customer uses your site.
• Your message - What are you selling - is it a product, a special offer or a service? 
• When do you need to publish each piece of content? Do you publish a teaser, gain as much intrigue as much as possible and then publish the main body of content. When will you offer the products? Will this be before the launch date, offering bloggers an exclusive?
• What content will you publish and in what order? Will you publish a blog post, a video, a white paper or an infographic? What comes first? This all depends on the message that you want to deliver and the campaign you are running within your industry.
• Support - Finally you want to think of the ways you will support your campaign. If it is a new product, will you have some stock put aside for reviews and competitions that other sites can host for you? Are you going to support these competitions by featuring them on competition sites such as Loquax? Are guest posts and press releases the way you want to go about supporting your campaign?

These are the main areas where you need to provide a lot of thought. Next is the language you need to use for each part of your campaign. In a video for instance you want to be perceived as approachable, chatty, informal but not so much that you loose the brand's tone of voice. A guest post and press release needs to strike a balance between the blog/website's tone of voice and the clients' - it needs to be relevant to the company/service/product, but it also needs to mirror the message and tone of the blog/publication.

Next you need to find out where you want your campaign placed. If you are going to send a press release to a magazine or newspaper you need to make sure you are going to the right publications; target your audience, take a look at the magazines media packs and see where their traffic is coming from and who is reading their blog. Your media list may not be large after you have vetted the original document, but it should be more effective.

If you are marketing a new product or service you may also want to investigate into PPC. To discover how to create the best possible quality score to ensure each campaign's effectiveness, why not have a look at my piece, Writing for PPC?

The difference between PR and Online Outreach

Online outreach has stemmed from traditional PR to help websites gain a wider audience and increase brand awareness online, however there is a distinct difference between the to. Let’s start with the ways that these two marketing activities are similar so we can begin to understand why these teams need to work together in the modern marketing world:

• You’re pitching to people – language is key whether you are speaking to a journalist or a website/blog owner – they need to relate to you and understand what you are asking/informing them about.
• You need to follow up your initial contact – so many potential relationships can be lost if you don’t follow up with another email or better still a phone call. If I haven’t heard back from a prospect I will forward on my initial email to them four days later and ask if they received it. If I feel I’m being a little pushy I will create a white lie and say that I have been experiencing some technical difficulties with my email and just wondered if my message was received.
• You’re marketing a company’s image, service and or product, aiming to increase their fan/customer base. Visibility is key whether it is online or print.

Fundamentally PR and outreach pitches are the same. However, with online outreach being a more recent phenomenon the rules are not so strict. – it takes a modern approach to traditional PR. 

Pitching language

The main difference between PR and outreach is the tone. The tone can be less formal, more conversational depending on the industry you’re pitching to.

In the pitch you need to keep it short, simple and punchy. Create a bullet point list about the product you're pitching, or the ways that you believe you can collaborate with them.

Relate to the site, tell them what blog piece you really enjoyed and how it helped you.

With outreach you need to tailor your pitch to each site along with any content that is agreed to ensure it keeps with the site or blog’s tone of voice, like you would each press release you send out through traditional PR.

Content

Another large difference is the amount of content you’re able to market. You can have a much broader scope of content to market. You can market your client’s industry knowledge in the form of guest articles, white papers, PDFs, promote events, success stories to industry news lead sites, infographics, photography and press releases. Whereas with traditional PR you typically send out press releases, which can market a product, service, success story or event and then tailors each one to the specific magazine or newspaper.

Guest articles you provide to relevant sites can be an opinion piece or specific article on a topic that will be well received by the site’s readers. The story you pitch through PR can’t be as loose such as writing an opinion piece on an important piece of industry news, the story has to be about the client – it’s far less open. 

Links 

With outreach you need to think about links and where you want to direct the reader and Google, something that you typically wouldn’t have to think about with PR. In the article you build brand awareness by linking to the homepage with brand anchor text, you can build links into specific landing pages or product pages to make sure they can be easily found in Google searches. 

Links can also come in the form of credits for photographs. If you are sharing photos of a client’s design project for example you can simply ask if the site owner wouldn’t mind crediting them to your client with a link using brand anchor text. This however, can only be done if you have bought the copyright of each image, which in some circumstances can be quite costly.

The marketer's way to searching in Google

Each search you put into Google can produce varied results. Even by changing the keywords around can have a slight affect to what you’re shown in your searches. If you are looking for something that is more generic changing keywords around and adding additional terminators such as ‘UK’ can be a good way to get a vast range of results. However, if you’re looking for something more specific you may want to start adding these shortcuts.

• allintitle - This is a great way of finding wesbites that talk about a certain subject that you are interested in; "allintitle:beauty" will give you all the websites that talk about beauty.
• allinanchor - This is a good way of searching for a link or anchor text; "allinanchor:beauty discount" will give you all the websites that are linking to a beauty discount 
• inurl - Will help you find sites that have your desired search term in their URL; "inurl:beauty" will show all the websites that has the word beauty in their URL.
• allintext - This is a shortcut that will help you to find articles that feature the keyword or phrase you are searching for; "allintext:beauty discount"

These are a few others I have come across that I have found to be quite useful:

•  “Site:”  - Typing this before you add the URL along with your keywords will only show you results from the site. For example “site:http://www.bbc.co.uk teachers" will show you all the articles and landing pages the BBC have concerning teachers.
• “ Info:” – This is used when you want to find an about page for a website. If you type “info: http://www.knomobags.com” you should see an about page. What is also interesting is that Google will then show you other results that you might want to find out, such as the web pages that link to the homepage, landing pages that are similar to the site you have searched and so on:

• “ Related:”- One of the best shortcuts that I use. When  I see a site that I like the look of and talks about the products/services that I am interested in I would like to find out how many sites offer the same sort of service and then compare how valuable a link would be from each one. It is a good way of finding out how big a campaign will be, how much effort will be required and estimating the time frame the campaign will take to complete. It is also a great way of finding out what information and how much information can be found on a certain subject, enabling you to determine if you can add something unique or that it would be a task that wouldn't provide any benefits. For instance type in "related:http://www.bbc.co.uk" and your results will come back with the Telegraph, Independent and ITV, among others.
• "Cache" - putting this in front of your search will show you what the page looked like in a previous version. "cache:http://www.littlemisschatterbox.co.uk" will show you a snapshot of the page as it appeared the last time it was updated. 
• "Filetype" - this will help you find any white papers any website has published. If you know a case study was published and it was in PDF form you can use this shortcut to easily obtain the document. Here's an example: case study filetype:pdf - to narrow your search I would add the case study name or subject area before 'case study'.

How to find the stories people want to read

Finding stories can be a simple task, you can pluck an idea from pretty much anywhere and begin writing. However, these stories are not the ones that are often recognised, read and shared. It takes a lot more than that. After all anyone can seek inspiration, find it and thanks to the internet publish it. The trick is is to find the stories people want to read or find something they didn’t realise they needed to know.

There are many ways you can find such stories; Google trends, social media and Google Analytics can provide you with a strong head start. All you need now is time, the mentality needed to analysis the data provided and determine what the better stories to publish are.

Google Trends

I have mentioned this tool before, but it is a tool that is worth looking into. Through Google Trends you can discover what the top searches are, collect data and form an article round your findings. 

As it is October I would imagine a key search trend within Google is Halloween. However, as this is a vast topic ranging from how to make or where to buy costumes to guides on pumpkin carving along with decorations, make-up tutorials and so on; this isn’t a strong enough trend to ensure your story is read. You need to look a little deeper. 

Since 2004 there has been a strong interest in ‘Halloween costumes’ and ‘Halloween costume ideas’, which isn’t surprising, but now you have the two important keywords that will hopefully drive traffic to your article.

It is important with these keywords that you don’t use them as anchor text for any links especially if you are planning to feature this article on another site. This keyword heavy anchor text will be seen as commercial and Google will ignore it entirely and ensure no link value is generated from the article, or they will penalise such a link placement.

The more creative part now is finding the unique angle that will grab people’s attention. Once the angle is covered and the keywords are placed in a natural way, you now need to place useful links that will add value to your article. These links should be internal and external links. Internal links are ones that will keep the reader on your site, just to another piece of content and an external link will go to a resourceful page on another website. You want to use internal links to show Google you value your content, but you also want to show them that you’re not bias which is where external links come in.

Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends/

Social media

It’s important that you follow and read all the key players in your industry, whether they're a competitor or not. Social media platforms are now seen as the new and updated industry journal. Every hour or even minute a new update comes along, which is then shared or commentated on by other decision makers. These are the people you want to target and so you need to speak to them in a way that they can trust. Keeping an eye on what people are talking about, what people are commenting on and what people are acknowledging can put you in a very strong position. The only drawback is that you must act quickly. As an update swings by every hour or so, you need to write quickly and accurately to remain relevant.

Draw in people’s opinions into the piece as well. This is a great ego bait technique that can help you and your site generate more back links. By showing the key people you want to target that you respect their opinion and share their views by giving them a mention in the article, or perhaps a link they will often in return share with their social media followers and/or blog readers that they have been mentioned in it. (Some bloggers have ‘In the Press’ pages where they share all the coverage they have received along with a direct link to the article that features them.)

Find out more about using Facebook to find stories here: http://blog.storyful.com/2012/10/10/storyful-tips-and-tools-facebook/#.UmfYQflJOAj

Google Analytics

If you haven’t got Google Analytics on your site, do it now… and then come back. Not only does Google Analytics show you where your traffic is coming from (although not provided is becoming ever more predominant), how much traffic you're receiving, what landing pages are successful and can show you traffic trends, it can also help you find the stories your readers are looking for.

Go into your account; select ‘Behaviour’, ‘Site content’ and then ‘All pages’. This gives you the rundown of how popular and unpopular certain articles and landing pages are with your readers.   Can you see a specific trend there? Is there a certain phrase, keyword or subject that tends to do well statistically? If so then this should be your focus. If it is a subject, go into Adwords and Google Trends to see other related searches that you can target to generate more traffic and ultimately conversions.

Another way you can use Analytics is to see why some content has been out-performed. Look into it by selecting one article and then narrow down your search by selecting the exact publishing date of the piece through to the present day. Was it a piece that historically performed well? Was shared and read? Then all that should be done is to either update the piece or do a run up article linking the new feature to the original. The content worked and people enjoyed reading, it’s just outdated.

Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Now you have written the piece, it’s time you publish it. However, if you don’t want to feature it on your site and would rather have it published elsewhere, why not read How to place good content for some more of my tips?

Writing for PPC

To create a successful PPC campaign, content is just as important as management. To ensure each campaign boasts a pleasing click through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) you need to make sure it is well targeted with relevant content. 

Your quality score helps to improve your campaign, which results in a lower CPC thus saving you money. The quality score is dependent on your keyword relevancy, ad relevancy, landing page quality and CTR. This is where good content writing comes in. The landing page needs to offer relevant product(s) or service(s) and contains all the keywords the campaign is targeting without it sounding too abstract and advertorial. You still need to sound like a human talking to your customer on a one to one basis, but the content needs to also assist in the campaign’s success. Long-tail keywords are often used to find this balance. For instance if your targeted keyword is ‘copywriter UK’ you can use ‘copywriter based in the UK’ or ‘copywriter in the UK’ in the copy.

Ad creatives are the next part of any PPC campaign that requires copywriting skills. It needs to be concise and get to the point quickly – you have a short sentence to send your message across to your audience. This can be quite dynamic content or sells a unique selling point (USP) such as ‘Free delivery’ or ‘Huge range’. It also needs to include a call to action (CTA), price whenever possible and relate to the copy you have provided for the landing page. Relevancy is key. 

Further CTAs can be placed in the extensions, whether it is a phone number, an additional landing page for a similar service or product. Normally CTAs on a PPC ad is a destination link to the relevant homepage where the customer will then convert.

How to place good content

There is writing good content and then there is placing good content on the right website. A great way to build relevant and authoritive links to your site and create a balanced back link profile that will have Google jumping for joy is to place great content on other sites. Something we call outreach.

Content doesn’t have to be an article; it can come in many forms. An infographic, a study, an image, press release or case study can all count as good content so long as it's done properly. The trick is placing it where it will be noticed, read and shared.

When finding the right website I search in Google, narrowing down my search to blogs, news or web and then add my relevant key words, depending on what I’m looking for. Once, I have found a couple of sites that have caught my eye I begin to analyse it. (In another article I will delve into the ways you can narrow down your search to find the websites you want quickly).

I use Moz tool bar to discover what the page rank and domain authority is on each site; basically it is telling me how well Google ranks the website. I also have a look at the amount of linking root domains, not the amount of links. The higher the page rank and domain authority the better, and once I have interest in the site statistics I copy and paste the URL into Opensite Explorer. This will then show me who is linking to them. If they're good links, I begin to formulate a contact list.

So all in all the basic tools you need to place good content are:

•  Google
• Moz
• Opensite Explorer
• Excel

However, there are other things you need to look for. Does the site accept suggestions from third parties, and if so how many titles can you see on the first couple of pages that state “Guest post” or “sponsored post”? Google is becoming increasingly aware of paid advertising coming in the forms of guest posts and so it is best not to go to the sites that are riddled with them – after time, and a couple of updates I’m sure they will be penalised.

I would also consider vetting any sites from your contact list that make it known that they accept advertising. Although banner advertising is okay, if they state they accept sponsor posts and ask for money in exchange for placement, this could be sending the wrong signals to Google.

What is good content?

So what is good content? Well, good web content is easy to read, educates, informs or entertains – it has to ignite emotion and must be easily found. That is the tricky bit and why so many companies pay agencies to help them be found by their customers.

There is so much on the internet that it is difficult to find what is relevant to your search. This is why Google updates its algorithms; it wants to make sure that you find what you’re searching for without having to vet through all the rubbish. It just makes it that little bit more difficult for the writers.

Content is king and always will be. It’s just making sure you are creating the right content for your audience and for Google. Targeted keywords and building authority helps Google to see that what you are creating is relevant and trustworthy and so will place you and your site high in its SERPs.

It sounds all relatively easy doesn’t it? But when there are so many key players in the game, all trying to make the number one spot on Google, it gets a little more complicated. Not only do you have to deal with the competition, there will always be bigger budgets, larger teams and Google will always change its algorithms to make life a little tougher.

Localisation and not provided are two of the complications we are currently coming up against, so perhaps we shouldn’t be so obsessed with gaining the top rankings and actually go back to the basics - creating good content that is relevant, useful and trustworthy.

Go into Google Trends to see what stories might be extremely popular next month and start running a content strategy around it. Each part of your content strategy needs to be:

• Easy to read
• Relevant
• Uses authoritive sources
• Links to relevant external sites
• Improves readability with lists (if relevant)
• Concise and to the point
• Entertaining, intriguing and well written
• Utilizes internal links to relevant pages
• Has an author

Relevancy is one of the most important aspects of creating good content. Once you have created the content your audience wants to read next is to keep them intrigued and interested. Why would someone want to carry on reading your blog or website if you can’t entertain them? Why would they then share and link to the content you have provided for them?

Once you have these areas covered you should begin to see some good results in  Google Analytics. Print off this article or write down my short list above – these will become your main ingredients for creating content that will be seen and read.

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