You’ve heard over and over how successful content marketing can be (in CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Trends Report, 73% of respondents said their organization’s content marketing approach was either moderately or very successful) – so it’s even more disheartening when you can’t seem to get there yourself.
Luckily, content problems are common enough that we might be able to boil yours down to one or two (or a few) reasons why your content marketing creations aren’t working.
Read through these scenarios and see if any could apply to your content. Then, keep scrolling for tips to help you turn it all around so you see success the next time you roll up your sleeves to create.
[bctt tweet=”Are you having trouble seeing results from your content marketing? Here are 6 methods to help you re-focus for killer results, via @JuliaEMcCoy ” username=”ExpWriters”]
Your content failure might have happened because…
1. Your KPIs and Content Expectations Don’t Match Up
If your content expectations versus the reality of your KPIs (key performance indicators) present two wildly different pictures, something is up.
Either your content is flat-out failing or your expectations are too unrealistic to achieve.
Both scenarios require a reassessment of your approach, whether your content needs an overhaul or your expectations need tweaking.
2. You Don’t Have a Strategy
If you’re creating content on an ad-hoc, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants basis, this could be the major reason why it isn’t performing.
Without a content strategy, you won’t have a roadmap that leads to achieving your goals. It’s exactly like driving on a dark road without any directions or headlights.
One of the major ways a strategy helps your content is by laying out how each of your pieces maps to the buyer’s journey.
When a customer is able to find the exact type of content they need at the exact sales stage they’re in, it helps them move steadily down the sales funnel – closer to a sale with your brand, in fact, since it’s your content they’re engaging with.
Without this mapping guiding your content creation, you’ll be taking wild guesses about what types of content will nurture leads and encourage conversions. It just won’t work.
3. You’re Overly Focused on Selling
Yes, your ultimate end goal is to get those conversions (traffic to leads, leads to sales), but you’re self-sabotaging if your focus is on selling your products/services, promoting your brand, or a mixture of the two.
Overly salesy content is a cause of death for any campaign because it moves toward being interruptive and valueless for the consumer rather than helpful, interesting, or educational.
Consumers (especially millennials and Generation Z) don’t like ads for a reason. They’re pushy, annoying, and can feel a bit slimy.
82% of Gen Z-ers say they skip ads whenever they can, according to a Kantar/Millwardbrown study.
Do you want to be seen as an authority in your field and a helpful advisor, or like a shady used car salesman? Promoting yourself too much in your content will lead to the latter, which turns people off.
4. You Aren’t Talking to the Right Audience
If publishing content feels like shouting in an empty room (*taps mic* — Is this thing on?), consider this:
Are you speaking to the right crowd?
Content targeted at the right people is more likely to hit its mark.
The people you need to talk to are the ones who will care about what you have to offer, whether that’s your knowledge, your brand, or your products/services.
If your content isn’t connecting, it might be because you’re throwing bananas at horses or apples at monkeys.
6 Tactical Tips to Turn Your Content Marketing Around
1. Study Up on Your Audience, Then Write FOR Them
If your content isn’t performing, you should take a hard look at your target audience and buyer personas.
Are they still relevant? Or are they off the mark?
Go back and do your research. Do surveys, interviews, and polls with your customers and social media followers. Look at who your competition is targeting. Reassess who your brand ultimately seeks to help with content.
Michelle Linn has a great method to help you refocus on your correct audience: Ask yourself who you can help rather than wondering who you can target.
Once you have an updated handle on your audience, write your content FOR them.
Put yourself in their shoes.
Speak their language. Imagine talking to them across a dinner table and what you would say.
Address their fears, pain points, desires, and questions.
A good exercise to try if you struggle with content that’s too self-promotional: Eliminate all uses of pronouns like “I,” “we,” and “us.” Instead, use “you” and “your.”
2. Research and Capitalize on a Trending Topic
If you understand your audience well, yet regularly hit “publish” and hear nothing but crickets chirping, you need to start getting more eyes on your content.
You can easily do this by jumping on a trending topic. Their impact is fleeting, but it can be big once it hits.
To find one:
Check industry news.
Look at top posts on competitor sites and search for patterns.
Check BuzzSumo for current trending topics in your niche.
You need to be quick to find a hot topic and get related content pushed out in a timely manner, but it can be worth the time crunch for the traffic potential alone. Plus, these types of pieces are great lead-ins or introductions to your brand for that all-important awareness phase of the sales cycle.
3. Return to Start and Put a Content Strategy in Place
If your content creation is willy-nilly, unorganized, or undocumented, stop.
Do not pass “go.”
You needed a strategy yesterday.
Reaching any type of goal requires a plan of action. Especially if your goal is content that performs and leads to profitable results.
For content marketing, the plan of action that helps guide you to ROI is a content strategy.
The most current research in the Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Report shows that the majority of the most successful content marketers have a strategy in place (62%). Meanwhile, among the least successful marketers, only 16% have a strategy.
This is no coincidence. A strategy gives you all the tools you need for your content to perform.
Period.
4. Stop Using Too Much Industry Jargon
Another reason your content might be falling flat?
Your tone or style might not be gelling well with your audience (see point #2).
If you’re not writing for your audience in a way that connects with them, it doesn’t matter how well you know your targets or how interesting/useful your topic – a wonky tone throws everything off.
A prime example is peppering your sentences and paragraphs with too much jargon.
For instance, if you are writing content aimed at cancer patients for the medical industry, you don’t want to overuse a term like “malignant fibrous histiocytoma” without explaining what it means in layman’s terms. (It’s bone cancer.)
The paragraph below is not aimed at patients. However, if you write content full of industry jargon like this and it’s not intended for your peers, it’s time to get simpler, more general, and less formal.
5. Trim the Fat from Your Content (or Get an Editor)
Another way to alienate readers and throw off your content performance is to stuff it full of fluff.
Phrases like the ones below are unnecessarily long, wordy, or redundant. They all have simpler alternatives that are easier to read, as Grammarly has shown:
Filler words and phrases decrease the overall value of your content. They stuff your pieces full of hot air and make them harder to read.
When you create content that’s concise, you don’t hem and haw. You get to the point(s) quicker, which gives the audience the satisfaction they crave.
Uncoincidentally, that leads to our next point.
6. Tell Them Why They Should Care
In high school or college, you probably wrote essays and papers in a specific format. The introduction was where you announced your topic and told your readers where you were taking them.
That’s still a good practice, but one major piece is missing for online writing: the point.
In most college essays, you save the main point for your conclusion, where you hammer it home.
Doing this in your content is a sure method to make any reader lose interest right away. Since their attention span is fleeting, they need the “why” to smack them in the face.
Why should they keep reading?
What’s in it for them?
How does the content apply to their concerns, desires, needs, fears, etc.?
If you can hand your reader the “why” right away, they’ll be more likely to keep reading, which can improve your content performance.
If Your Content Is on Life Support, Don’t Give Up
Even if your content is underperforming (or lying on its back with its legs in the air), there’s still hope.
Take the opportunity to analyze what might have gone wrong, then make an effort to fix it.
Update old content pieces that never realized their potential, keeping the above tips in mind. Brainstorm and work hard to be super creative – that will help you stand out a lot.
Let’s face it.
Getting traffic, maintaining traffic, and creating content they come back for—and keeping that cycle thriving for years—is hard work.
Yet this is something we’ve been able to achieve successfully, day in and day out, at Express Writers.
We’re a content writing agency that does what we do best for ourselves, before we sell it to others—creating winning online content that brings revenue, markets a business, and informs and helps an audience.
Since I launched my website with a $75 investment in May 2011, Express Writers has relied on creating content for ourselves and publishing it online, organically, as the #1 source of all our leads, marketing, and revenue. We’ve focused on creating content without a thought to a sales funnel: and we’ve never paid a penny to advertise our services on Google. (You heard that right. We’ve never, once, invested in PPC. And the publications I write content for, guest blogs, don’t pay me a direct paycheck.)
Instead, we’ve just focused on writing and publishing useful, outstanding content, on our site, consistently. Consistent guest blogging. Creating a Twitter presence that rocks out organically.
Call me crazy, untypical, you-name-it… but it’s worked for us—extraordinarily well.
I’m about to reveal it all to you, in a case study I sat down to create across a five-week span.
We Are Our Own Success Story: How We at Express Writers Dominate Online & Outrank Competition Through Our Content
Our major form of marketing is the actual service we sell: well-written, engaging, optimized online content.
And for the first time, I’m pulling back the curtain in a major case study where we’ll reveal exactly where we stand with content, how we fare against our biggest competitors, and much more. (I’m using a pro account at SEMrush to pull every analytic.)
Here’s a quick table of contents, so you know what’s coming:
Ready for this? Sit back—you’re in for a ride!
What does our organic online presence look like vs. competition?
A five-year-old company (launched May 2011), we outrank our major competitors on average by 5% on Google. Check out this graph:
We’ve climbed to over 4,100 total keyword rankings in Google. Our estimated worth of traffic and rankings is at $13,200 (what we’ve have to spend to achieve these rankings through sponsored ads).
(Don’t worry about that dip in traffic. I have an upcoming post, How I Lost 30% of My Organic Rankings & Traffic (On Purpose) & Added 25% Additional Monthly Revenue By Going After the Traffic I Wanted, coming out soon to explain.)
Over 300 keywords are indexed in the top 10 of Google (example in point, this is from the bottom of page 3, 100 results per page, in SEMrush):
Back to our competitors. Here’s what a real-life look at our keywords vs. theirs look like—on Google, two out of four of our competitors don’t even have a presence for the keywords we rank #1 for:
Overall, at first glance it looks like there is an extremely oversaturated market if you Google “writing agencies,” but only a few are worth really comparing ourselves to. Their funding: One of our two major competitors gained $700,000 and another $4.5 million for funding since launching in 2011; and the second competitor has been around for over 16 years, raising a private amount of seed funding in 2011. Our funding: We have zero investors. We don’t have a penny in outside funding. Yet we’re doing big things. I started Express Writers in May 2011 with a pocket investment of $75. It was a five-minute business idea born from a huge load of personal freelance writing I didn’t want to turn away. I learned how to code my first website; today, Josh McCoy leads our branding, building, and all our new upcoming development has been personally funded by ourselves. And without any outside funding, we’re launching a custom-built, 200% more efficient Content Shop that we’ve developed from scratch—coming out end of 2016/early 2017. Hand-in-hand with this will be the launch of custom writer team room systems we’ve built as well. (Get on the notification list for the upcoming launch!) And Josh is knee-deep in launching a boon to all content creators, Copyfind, which will offer the deepest content checking search for originality that’s on the web. (Get on that notification list here!) Yes, we have a lot about to launch. 😛
Today, we serve more than 1,000 clients worldwide, and we easily handle 300 pages in a given week. And we outshine most of our competitors’ quality because of a very personal, one-on-one mentoring environment we’ve given our writers—and because of incredibly dedicated, uniquely qualified experts I’ve been able to hire for our management staff.
I won’t lie: to stay personally funded, I’ve put in many an 80-hour work week on my part, and invested 65% to 100% sometimes of our net profits from the company back in. It’s been hard to find good people, but thankfully, today I have just those people. It’s all been worth the intensive hard work to see growth happen this way. Organically, from hard work, without a huge million-dollar bank account solely responsible for and behind the growth—as is the reality with many, many other VC companies.
How does our content perform?
We have over 785 published blogs on our site, with the first one published live on our WordPress site in September 2012. The average word count of each is 1,500 (with the highest blogs at 3,700 words, and the lowest around 500—we’ve actually been working on adding more content to the shorter ones now). Our two most-shared posts are a blog published in December 2015, on how to do a website audit—coming in at 1k shares. An episode on my podcast with Sujan Patel, published in March 2016, coming in at 800+ shares. (But I don’t think shares mean everything! Here’s why.)
The traffic, lead, and conversions that subsequently happen from our organic rankings bring in 90% of our company revenue. That’s right. That’s a six-figure gross yearly amount. The other revenue is brought in through cold lead outreach, a unique strategy I’ll be unveiling soon in another guest blog. We’ve seen five-figure clients (including big brands) walk in through our door of organic rankings in Google; we’ve created client relationships through organic connections on social media, and have seen four-figure client conversions come in without sales pressure from those that have read my guest blog content.
We’ve never bought a single PPC ad, we’ve never relied on sponsored content, and I’ve never created a single sales funnel—instead, our organic content presence brings in thousands of clients to Express Writers every year.
You might call me crazy for not making sure a sales funnel exists, but here’s the thing: I’m so busy creating relationships and the content that is behind those relationships, that I don’t have time or even need to worry about making sure a marketing or sales funnel process is there. My blog CTAs are as simple as a unique, well-written text link back to our Content Shop on the end of a blog post.
Curious as to how we do it? Here’s the organic content marketing process I’ve followed, fully unveiled for the first time!
Our #1 Source of Marketing & Traffic Is In Consistently Creating a Ton of In-Depth, Long Form Content
Full disclosure here. We create a lot of content to win in content marketing. The majority is on our site, but our publishing schedule includes guest platforms that I blog on, too. Let’s look at how and where we’re publishing content, and where it’s gotten us.
A Split-Focus and Total of 32 Long-Form Pieces/Month Across the Web: A Huge, Consistent Amount of Quality Content (Quality over Quantity)
For the creation part, I write over 30 blogs monthly (average of each post is 2,000 words) with the help of some of my best team members, who guest author on our site. Primarily, 20 of these blogs go to our site. (You want your best content to be on your own real estate!) The other 10-12 get spread across various high-quality, large audience guest blog networks.
In-depth, specific research is key to a great topic and a great piece, and the actual writing requires time and team effort.
For the research part, I’m always on BuzzSumo, and looking up keywords in SEMrush and KWFinder to see what’s being talked about and asked the most (questions on Quora) in our industry, consistently. I’m also in Twitter chats to see what people talk about and ask each other questions on. I use all this community/research activity to find the best questions, create blog topics and then focus on highly in-depth blogs that fully answer the question in the topic.
Here’s what our EXACT content amounts and publishing times look like:
1. 20 Blogs/Month: How We Publish Content on Our Own Site (A Blog A Day, Except for Weekends)
We publish a content piece every day on our site except for weekends (5 blogs/week). Every post goes live at midnight (00:00 on WordPress scheduling) the day of. Here’s the kinds of content that involves:
I post 2-3 times a week on our own blog, with posts that range from 1,500 words minimum to 4,000 (with custom created visuals, screenshots, and even GIFs included in each). Each post I write takes about a week. I backdate my content and stay a week ahead by devoting onefull dayjust to writing, planning, and creating content. I start a whole line of new posts instead of just writing one, and flip back between documents to pen down a flow of ideas that should go in various channels. I type fast, so I can finish up to five half pieces in a day, then wrap them all up the next full day of content creation. (Sound scary? This is a unique process that I’ve found that works for me—after five years of blogging every week. My typing speed is 150 wpm.)
We just opened our blog to internal team member guest authors only (no outside bloggers). We feature 1-2 intensive guest blogs weekly from our full-time copywriters, social media managers, and strategists.
Once/week, Rachel creates and posts our Twitter chat recap. It’s always near 1,000 words. Keep in mind it’s full of tweets, which are already indexed in Twitter.
You’re already heard about our organic presence with our site, but here’s a recap: we’re at 2,600+ organic visitors monthly from 4,100 keywords, more than 300 of which are in the top 10 of Google.
I audit and review our content in the rankings weekly. Once a week, I pop in to SEMrush and check out what ranks, for what keyword. If the content is at all crappy, it gets an update! (Case study coming out soon on how I’ve been successful at auditing old posts.)
2. 12 Content Pieces/Month: How We Rock Out Guest Blogging (The ROI Is Greater Than A Paycheck)
If you would have told me “blogging for free” was worth a TON of money, in the beginning I would have laughed at you. Because I needed the paycheck then, not the exposure.
But today, the exposure is worth far more than a paycheck.
And that’s why I guest blog for free. A lot.
Personally, I limit myself to about 12-13 pieces per month. I may take on one or two more channels next year, but not many more. I’ve learned that a guest blog on an amazing platform like Search Engine Journal (with nearly a million high-value, relevant readers) is worth more in potential leads that will buy our services, than if I dilute and post five blogs that week among other channels like Social Media Today, Business 2 Community, etc. And if I tackle more, I easily get overwhelmed and lose sight of devoting quality on each one.
Here’s where I currently guest blog—I recently got accepted to the HuffingtonPost, and go live on Copyhackers in October!
Social Media Examiner: 1 piece every other quarter (I’m working on improving that, a new piece here is coming out in October)
Grammarly: I guest blogged here twice. Didn’t see results from the audience at all, despite high shares (not a marketing audience), so I stopped last year.
Copyhackers: My first blog will be live in October!
The Life Cycle of One Impactful Piece of Content
To emphasize just how impactful online content really can be, I’d like to walk you through a real lifecycle of one organic piece of guest blog content I published. This piece of content returned 100x on the content investment.
Before I show you this, keep in mind one thing: my guest blogging isn’t just a one-time post, but most of the time, it’s an ongoing column. That’s preferential for me, because of the opportunity an ongoing presence affords: a much more sustainable, long-term way to build reputation, traffic, and leads, as you’ll see from this very example.
Let’s take a look at a $5,000 sale that happened five days after someone read my column at SiteProNews.
January 1, 2015: my article How to Create Shareable, Likeable and Organic Content goes live on SiteProNews.
2:25 PM: We received this contact form. (Names blurred out. We’ll call our lead Dave.)
By January 26, after several email conversations and custom project bids from our staff, Dave purchased expert copy, our content planning, and enough content for several sites at a worth of $5,000!
A Success Story or Two: How We Implement Our Own Success Strategies for Our Clients’ Content
The content success strategy I use for our own content marketing is something I take to the bank, teach my writers, and implement for use in writing our own clients’ content.
We write everything, from bulk SEO content for agencies to resell to their clientele, to expert copy for niche firms. And in every piece we create, we implement these strategies: I teach every single writer in my team with internal, exclusive guides at Express Writers built by my staff and I the essence of great online content. From writing a meta description that reads as well as an online ad (because hey—it’s the organic PPC of Google!), to writing a blog that is oriented to the audience and uses the keywords naturally. We don’t fail: we have a 99% success rate because of the exclusive, personally mentored quality of our writers and their content. I can bet you anything that no other agency treats their writer base like we do ours.
And it’s not just a nice theory. We hear time and time again from our own clients that the content we write for them returns on investment.
Here’s a success story from one of our clients, Tom Dean, IT at www.andersonhemmat.com. For this Colorado based attorney website, we wrote brand new site pages to refresh their site; blogs; and press releases. Their results after we rewrote their content? They went up ten pages in the SERPs! With the blog posts we wrote, they also saw steady and increasing rankings in the SERPs. Our content made a tremendous difference!
Tom said:
“We’ve seen a huge jump in web traffic because of the great content you’ve done for us. We’ve gone from page 12 organic to page 2 organic since the site update. The main reason I find the content a successful investment is ROI. It costs very little to have you guys write something but in the long run if it’s on the web and written with SEO in mind it will help our rankings and possibly go viral.”
SnapInspect was another client of ours. By starting their brand new blog out with a consistency of two blogs per week minimum across six months, we were able to help them grow from a zero presence on Google to a subscriber list, active readers, social media followers, and a presence in the top five pages of Google.
There you have it! Our own clients are succeeding online with the content we write that is specifically targeted to perform well. Not just in the SERPs, but with readers.
Now, how have we been able to be successful with our content? I’m going to delve into a few strategies before revealing the last part of how we dominate online—on social media, specifically Twitter.
How to Be Consistent with Great Content
I’ve heard an echoing statement among bloggers that consistency is hard.
But the key in all of this is staying fresh, being relatable to the audience in your industry, and being consistent.
The balance? Never publish rushed, but publish as much as you can while staying within quality.
Time is what you need. If you don’t have time, a resource you can trust.
Spend the extra day to proofread, if it’s late at night and you just aren’t proofing it as thoroughly as you’d like. I’d describe my consistency of publishing as a careful balance between two constant thoughts:
The Thursday I don’t publish content is a missed content opportunity. (Thursday is one of our best posting days: early in the morning, a lot of people seem to be reading blogs.)
The Thursday I publish rushed, non-proofread content, is the Thursday I should not have published content.
What has significantly helped me in creating amazing content is to set aside one day called my “content” day. Seriously. If you are a blogger or online content marketer, you need to do that. There’s no other way.
Till the day you can hand the process off to a trusted resource, you need to allot one day to content creation. Plan your topics then. Finalize drafts. Create new drafts. Never create and publish one piece in one day. You can take breaks and create new pieces of content to break it up, but never, ever write and publish one whole piece in one single day. I never knew how much a fresh eye really mattered till I spent four weeks on one piece of content! (This piece you’re reading—six weeks. Probably my longest to-date.)
How Do We Successfully Guest Blog? 4 Simple Strategies
How do I pitch to the right platforms, and perfect the right customized content for each one?
My “secrets” to guest blogging are fairly simple. It’s a novel in and of itself, but to sum up, top strategies: 1. Less is more: I’ve noticed that if I focus on less channels, I can present better quality on each. Plus, a few top channels are worth their weight in gold, and sometimes that’s all you need to bring in serious ROI from the blogging you do. 2. Find platforms that align with who your ideal online customer is: It’s all about the right platforms—find ones with a huge audience, and readers that align with your ideal lead demographic. 3. Make a relationship with the right person: This is key in actually getting through and being published on your ideal guest blog. Think of the blog as a person you need to connect with, not an entity. This is how I made all of my guest blog spots happen (all!), from my CTO Josh personally finding Kelsey Jones, myself being invited on the #MarketingNerds podcast, and getting invited to write for Search Engine Journal, to connecting with Joanna Wiebe by offering her a podcast spot, and then getting a “yes” on the guest blog draft I sent her. Never put time and effort in a contact forms—always find a person to contact! Sometimes starting the relationship can be as simple as finding the right “managing blog editor” to contact, following them on Twitter, and tweeting or DM’ing. 4. Always give your best, most in-depth, most useful content, oriented to the guest blog audience: If you’re writing for Business Insider, for example, you don’t want to be as conversational and story-like as if you were pitching to the Huffington Post. A technical voice might do better there. Find the guidelines for each platform, and follow them to a T. Go beyond by using the right tone that fits their audience! When making points, use screenshots. Don’t short any point you make. Be as in-depth as you can!
#2 Major Way We’ve Built Up Our Online Reputation: Domination on Twitter With #ContentWritingChat, Joining Other Chats, & My Best-Selling Book
Besides content creation, which is truly our fundamental source of valuable rankings and organic traffic, we maintain a strong presence on social media, specifically on one of my favorite social platforms of all time—Twitter.
Back in January this year, on the very first Tuesday in January, I made a resolution to launch a Twitter chat. I researched a hashtag for my chat, settled on #ContentWritingChat, and registered the hashtag to @ExpWriters Twitter handle on Twubs. I created a Twitter chat account specifically for the chat, @writingchat, as well, and started following everyone I knew, as well as major influencers, from that account. My key strategy was to a) hire help! I have had a social media manager run the chat since I started it, from @ExpWriters account. Our current one is Rachel. She’s been with me since the first month of the chat! b) remind everyone who is interested, via Twitter. Rachel takes care of that as well. Reminders are a huge way to get people to hop in your chat!
The serious evolution of our graphics, which you might notice—check out the first chat graphic, and then our last one in October with Joe Pulizzi—is because I was doing them in Canva at the beginning. Now, we have an amazing in-house graphic designer who creates our weekly featured Twitter chat graphics and the blog recap graphics. Our Social Media Specialist, Rachel, creates the Tuesday questions (eight total) on writing-related imagery backgrounds in Canva.
Our last Twitter chat was with Joe Pulizzi himself!
Here’s a short timeline of the fast-track success we’ve seen happen from it:
#ContentWritingChat day 1, month 1: we climbed to #42 trending on Twitter!
Month 6: we were trending at #9 and #11!
Month 7: we were #4 on Twitter! Major influencer Brian Fanzo said yes to guest hosting one session this month.
Month 9: Major influencer Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute joined our chat to guest host!
Month 9: We pulled in a sponsor! I traded a live sponsored spot during our Twitter chat for extensive discounts on tickets to a Search Engine Journal event.
We’re at 1,000+ tweets from people around the globe during our live hour now! Want to learn more about my Twitter chat strategy? Listen in to the podcast I recorded about it with our Social Media Specialist, Rachel.
A Presence in Other High-Ranking Twitter Chats Brings in the Leads
Another way we’ve significantly grown our presence is through joining other Twitter chats. Check out the guide from Rachel with 8 chats that we love. One chat that has a huge presence is Madalyn Sklar’s #TwitterSmarter. We’ve received offline chat messages from interested people clicking through to our site, like this one, from our participation in her chat:
Get in Twitter chats, if you’re a marketer! Or pay your social media person to join for that live hour. You might just find a potential client relationship. It’ll be worth your time.
How Do We Fare on the Other Platforms?
I won’t lie. Our Facebook is a bit dead: I’ve often considered following in Copyblogger’s steps of killing their Facebook page. I still might do it unless we can hand it over to someone who revives our Facebook. We occasionally get the interested writer and client who messages here, so I don’t want to entirely kill it yet. However, I do have a Facebook group, Learn Online Writing, which I’ve grown to just under 140 members. It’s a tight-knit community that mostly comes from my book readers, staff and writers.
Our Instagram, @expwriters, has grown significantly since I created it in August of 2015. We have over 1,800 followers, and we get about 50 likes and 3-5 comments per post. A lot of the traffic on Instagram comes from our Twitter chat followers! Rachel does a great job at summarizing our blogs with unique <100 word summaries and posting that in a new Instagram post, with a themed blog visual specifically made for Instagram, created by our lead designer.
How Publishing My Book Brought Us Organic Leads
I spent literally a year of my life (all of 2015) writing a book that’s out on Amazon, So You Think You Can Write? A Definitive Guide to Successful Online Writing. It’s maintained #3 bestseller in it’s category since it launched mid-April, 2016—a feat because I haven’t been able to advertise it outside of emailing my list, sponsoring one tweet, and telling my social platforms about it!
Here’s what I’ve seen come through the forms… “I want Julia to write my content. Can I get her? She wrote her book really well and that’s why I’m here at Express Writers. I want her to write my book.” After a good chuckle, I told the lead he was in the best hands possibly with our mentored, trained writing staff! He was very pleased with the content results. We’ve had other leads that turned into clients because they read my book and were impressed, as well as writers come in to apply after reading and learning from my book. I’ve also used it as education among our own team writers.
I also have a podcast out, but it’s been hard to quantify results. I’ve had 4,000 downloads since launching it as well in April. I’ve had several appearance and interview opportunities occur because of it, and have gotten on the radar of some of my favorite influencers (an episode with Mark Traphagen will go live this October, and I’ve had the chance to interview Joanna Wiebe, Sujan Patel, and Steve Rayson)! If anything, podcasting has been a major tool in connecting with influencers for me.
Have We Spent a Penny on PPC Ads?
Not one. Ever.
Social ads?
We just started delving into Facebook and Twitter ads for the first time ever and have barely spent $75. (We’ll spend more when I launch our first-ever webinar, coming up soon.)
I belly laugh every time I think of the $75 we just started spending on ads, versus the huge organic results we’ve had so far.
Here’s what I’m going to tell you that’s solid advice to achieve a solid, strong customer base out of your online presence: it really isn’t about advertising anymore. It isn’t about creating a funnel and a sales process on rinse and repeat.
It’s about relationships. Creating meaningful content. Building a community, over time. Answering questions. Helping people.
And that’s what we’ve managed to focus on, and grown to be successful in, here at Express Writers.
Time, effort, and people (amazingly creative people) to help you out—these are the major tools you’ll need to replicate my process.
Creating great web content online is the best way to help push site conversions and bring in awesome new clients. But, how can you create content that sells? In other words, have content ROI? Content that is crafted well has the ability to return on investment, or ROI, for your brand. In this infographic, we take a look at the top reasons you need great content, with 25 useful, fundamental tips to help you get knee-deep in the creation of copy that sells. Full transcript below. Enjoy! And if you like this, we’d love a share and comment!
Transcript
Why is Awesome Web Content Vital?
You have approximately 8 seconds to convince someone to stay – after that, you could lose them.
Around 96% of site visitors are not ready to buy yet, and content keeps them coming back until they do.
If you create and publish around 31-40 landing pages, you’re likely to generate 7 times the amount of leads than those who don’t. And 40+ generates 12 times more.
Visual content like product videos can increase purchases by 144%.
Research shows that Google consistently ranks posts over 2,500 words.
25 Surefire Ways to Create Web Content that Sells (Content ROI)
Here are some great ways to create wonderful content that can help boost your sales and bring you ROI.
Emotions Help Motivate. Emotions are an incredible way to motivate clients to act. Peer pressure, self-improvement tips, and more are excellent motivators. Weave these in your copy.
Create a Sense of Urgency. When writing your content, make sure you create a sense of urgency. Show that there is a demand for your product. Tie in brevity to urgency to compel your reader.
Create a Case Study. 63% of UK marketers think that case studies are excellent marketing tactics. You can use them to show customers information about your company and product, convincing them to choose you.
Create Evergreen Content. Well-researched, in-depth, long-form blogs that answer timeless questions are considered evergreen. These pieces can convert readers and rank you high in Google if done right. And, they’ll always stay relevant.
Have Excellent Headlines. Half of your content creation time should be spent coming up with a persuasive headline. Make it useful, have urgency, be unique, and specific. Plug in power words and adjectives to transform an otherwise typical headline.
Don’t Be Afraid to Have a Conversational Voice. Think of this like how you’d talk to a client who is also a friend over coffee. Enrich your content with a lively, fun, conversational tone. This can help immensely with building connections that will convert.
Find Your One “Thing.” Each company has a “thing” that sets them apart – yours included. Find your “thing” and focus on it with your content.
Research Audience Needs. Content that sells needs one crucial element – audience research. Know what your audience needs and create content they can use.
Stay Authentic. Marketing now requires authenticity, especially if you plan to market to millennials. Be unique, for example showcasing pictures of your office on Instagram, and your daily grind—and have fun while you’re doing it. Your brand fans will love it!
Create a Plan for Content. Plan out your content through various tools such as editorial calendars. You will find it easier to maintain a consistent content plan with one.
Make Important Info A Focus. Simple tip, but a vital reminder. This goes for pricing, calls to action, and any other pertinent info. Don’t let it get lost on site or else you’ll lose visitors.
Refine Your Approach. Compile a full list, or “brain dump,” of your ideas for content pieces. Next, narrow down and refine your approach. Create content on just a few of your narrowed-down, hot topics for impactful results.
Make Vital Points Standout. People only read about 20% of all of the content on your page – make what you want them to see stand out from the rest.
Remove Distractions. Too many choices can create higher levels of anxiety for visitors, which can negatively impact conversion rates. Focus on your highest seller or main pain point and dwindle down anything else.
Make Your Content Easy to Scan. Only 16% of readers will read all of your blog content, but 79% of visitors will scan. Writing easy-to-scan content will help you reach out to every visitor and reader. Break your content up with sub-headers.
Use the Power of One. The “power of one” helps you establish one big idea that you can focus on. This can often be your one “thing,” as well. Focus on one thought for every page or post.
Know Which Content Types Work Well. Multiple content formats are excellent, but before you jump into each, make sure you know which ones will work the best. Test, analyze, and check the engagement of your content types; and tweak or change your habits accordingly.
Utilize Visual Content. When an image is used, tweets see more engagement with 18% more tweets, 89% favorites, and 150% re-tweets. And Facebook saw a growth of 3.6x in the amount of videos used on the channel.
Write Long-Form Content. Long content gives the perception of added value, making people more likely to trust and read. Posts over 2,500 words also do very well in the rankings.
Create Relevant Content. You don’t want content that is outdated or doesn’t make sense to your audience. Instead, write content on trending topics within your industry as well as content you know your audience wants and needs to see.
Bloggers, Include a Subscription Box. Email subscription boxes are a great way to give visitors access to content, eventually converting them into leads. (For every $1 spent on email marketing, average revenue is $44.25.)
Test Different Calls to Action. Just by changing and testing the copy on their calls to action, Mozilla saw higher download rates for Firefox. They went from “Try Firefox” to “Download Firefox – Free”, and saw more clicks. Try and test actionable verbs and adjectives to convince people to click, purchase, and share your products and content.
Define Your Conversion Metrics. Define your conversion metrics by taking a look at the patterns and amount of people interacting with your content. This can help you know which content pieces work best.
Create Co-Branded Content. Working with an industry partner can bring your content to a wider audience. Consider getting together with even a competitor company to co-brand content like e-books to expand your reach.
Be Assertive In Your Writing. No one knows your product and services like you, which means you shouldn’t write hesitantly. Write with assertiveness once you know you’ve researched your facts and are presenting knowledge, and you’ll be able to convert more people.
Depending on how much your friends or family like to prank, we’ll be considerate and avoid all pranks away this morning with this blog
(you’re most welcome).
We’re here to talk about having great content—which isn’t a joke developed by copywriters and Google, it is actually incredibly important. We promise we aren’t fooling you, and you will be incredibly happy if you focus on having great content. However, you might be wondering just how you can get excellent content all the time, especially if you are a very busy business owner. I am going to look at different content tips as well as services to help you create or receive excellent content you will be proud to share with your clients. Let’s take a look!
11 Awesome Ideas and Services to Help You Improve Your Content
There are several ways to improve your content and make it the best, and I am going to look at a few of these.
Expert Landing Pages are a Must. When you create your website, you always want to make sure that you have expertly crafted landing pages and web content. Having great web pages means that you have a higher chance of converting visitors into leads, and building your customer base. This is something that you obviously want because more customers means more revenue, and those customers might just tell others about your company and so on. Having these great, crafted landing pages is vital, and you need to find people who can expertly create them for you if you have any trouble whatsoever.
Blogs Are Vital to Any Online Presence. When you want good content, you need to have an ongoing blog for your business. Blogs currently run the content world, and these are what will help bring people into your business’s website and convince those people to search the rest of your site. You can use your blogs as new, individual landing pages, which gives customers several places to choose and learn more about your company and services. Blogs provide a unique opportunity to help your clients out while encouraging them to choose your company for their needs. If you want to get the most out of your blogs, hire our expertly trained blog writers who will know just what to do for your blog and business.
Get a Content Audit for the Best Content. Content audits are oftentimes overlooked because they can be time consuming. However, a content audit is a great way to make sure your content is still quality and fits with any new Google algorithms. A content audit is something I regularly encourage people to get because it really does help you learn more about the behind-the-scenes aspect of your site, and lets you know what you should change. You can take a DIY approach to content auditing, but it does take quite a bit of time, so the most efficient step is to hire our trained content auditors. Trained content auditors can help find everything you need to know to improve your website, making it the best it can be.
Content Curation is the Way of the Content Future. Are you looking for excellent resources to share with your clients or to generate blog topics and titles? Then you should be actively engaging in our (recently launched service), content curation. This is a perfect way to find high quality resources that will help you create consistently great content. In addition, content curation will help you stand out as a leader in your field, and if you curate top quality material, you are more likely to be trusted by your customers. Trust is a great way to bring in more customers and keep your existing ones.
Optimization is Still Important. While I have discussed all the different methods you need to use when creating content, optimization isn’t over just yet. It is still vital to content because those keywords can help with the big picture. Optimization implements your chosen or needed keywords into your blogs and web pages to help them rank on the search engine results page. Your website, with its multiple landing pages gives you many opportunities for optimization, which will greatly benefit your business.
Keyword Research Helps You Find the Right Keywords to Use. When you use the above optimization, you will need to make sure you’ve researched the best, most impactful keywords for your site to get the best results. You can do this on your own through Google Analytics to see which words are bringing in more clients. One of the best ways, however, is to have our SEO experts do keyword research for you in your industry to find the ones that will have low competition while also being able to drive a lot of traffic and engagement. Depending on your business, there are a variety of keyword types that can work for you. There are the basic keywords that incorporate your services, but another form of excellent keywords is the long tail or local keyword for local based companies. This will help you come up on local searches easily, helping people in your area find your business.
Hiring Niche Copywriters Helps Significantly. When it comes to your business, it is one of a kind and might have a very specific audience. Because of this, you are considered a niche industry, and you need writers who can write specifically for it. This oftentimes holds niche companies back from developing blogs because the owners and workers don’t have the time to dedicate to writing blogs every week, but they don’t want just a generic copywriter. This is where a niche, industry copywriter comes in. You can find one that can write for your industry to help make the biggest impact and bring in more clicks and leads.
Have an Epic Social Media Presence. One of the best ways to have great content is to make sure you have an epic social media presence. This can help you convert new customers from people simply visiting your profiles. In fact, many of your customers are already on social media, which makes it a great way to stay in touch with them. However, even if you find that your current customers might not have social media right now, it is still important for you to use it. Social media helps you generate more organic traffic, and you have the ability to control your online reputation. There are many benefits to being on social media.
Press Releases Are Here to Stay. Another way to make sure you have excellent content is to hire someone that can craft an excellent and professional press release to send out. Yes, you heard me correctly; you need to send out press releases. They are still relevant, and are more commonly released in email or digital form. However, they can still have a major impact on your business and help drive more people to your website to purchase your products and services. Modern press releases can be written as a news story to tell people more about your company and what to expect in the coming year, making it more engaging for customers and those in your industry.
Have a Bundle of Topic Ideas. In order to make sure you have great content all the time, you need to make sure you have a plethora of topics at the ready. This will help you when it comes time to write your blogs and give your clients something interesting and engaging. You can research topics for your industry and see what your clients will be interested in to brainstorm some great ideas. However, if you hit a wall when it comes to topic generation, you can always find people who can help you craft excellent topics and headlines to create perfect content for your blogs and website.
Spend Some Time with Creative Writing. Creative content writing is another great way to create and have excellent content. While this might not work with every industry, it can be helpful if you are aiming to tell stories with your content or if you are working on a book for your company. Creative content doesn’t just have to be fairytales and epic battle scenes; it can simply be a blog with a creative voice on an awesome topic. Hiring expert copywriters who have strong, imaginative minds is a great way to get amazing creative writing and make a powerful punch in your industry. Having a creatively written blog will help you stand out from your competitors, as well.
Start Getting and Creating Excellent Content!
Simply by following the above points and implementing some, or all, of them into your content strategy means you will get excellent content. These points are all incredibly beneficial for all websites and businesses and can help you drive great, organic traffic and broaden your client base. If you are having a difficult time doing these yourself or finding someone to help, Express Writers is here for you! Just take a look at our products, services, and our rates page to see which service will benefit you. Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have.
In the last year, 2014, we saw a growth in the overall amount of media content that was shared by users in all forms of social media. The amount of users that utilize social media grew enormously, leading to a larger number of users sharing content across multiple social media networks.
In order to calculate the return on investment on content, we must examine the different factors that affect the interaction of the audience with the content and how much time the content resulted in a positive response. By using the metrics for these data we can build a picture of how well or how poorly the particular content performed in respect to the investment made on promoting the content. Due to the sheer number of different things that make up the calculation for return on investment, pinpointing a particular factor to change or to improve in order to raise the ROI would be nearly impossible.
10 Ways To Boost Your Content ROI This Year
There are wide spectrums of small changes that can be made to your content in order to make it more marketable. Let’s take a look.
Use The Human Element. In order to reach out to people in this day and age it is necessary to interact with them on a more direct level. Human beings tend to utilize social media as a personal space; meaning that they tend to like and share items that resonate with them most personally. In order to bring a level of humanity to social media, adding a human element is often necessary. In order to get users to appreciate your brand, you have to act less like a brand online and more like a person. The personal touch goes a long way towards having people like and share your content because it stops coming from a nameless, faceless entity. The world today has invested a lot in being impersonal and anti-social. Key among offenders is businesses, since they tend to isolate themselves from their clientele. By breaking down this barrier you establish a rapport with your audience which goes a long way towards getting your content out there and raising the ROI on your content investment.
Keep Focused. In social media as with anything that requires you to cover multiple angles in order to be successful, you have to keep your focus throughout the time of your social media campaign. Your target is audience is what you should be focusing on. Knowing your audience is probably the most important thing in conducting a successful social media campaign. By knowing your audience you can direct your efforts towards this particular niche, using the jargon to make them feel at ease. Once again, establishing rapport is crucial to getting your content around. Knowing your audience allows you to build targeted content that your audience would find both interesting and useful. The other point that you need to keep focus on is the quality of your content. Creating good content is as important as having a grasp of what your audience wants. You should give your audience what they want but not compromise truth in order to do so. Balancing these two aims will allow you to create content that your audience will love and pass around, directly affecting your ROI on content investment.
Target Your Efforts. There are a number of different social media outlets available to a company. Any company investing in social media should be aware that the figure for a single arm of social media doesn’t necessarily carry over to other arms. Thus the outreach of a post on Facebook will not be the same as the outreach on a social media such as twitter. In order to maximize your ROI, you have to treat each one of these social media outlets separately instead of lumping them all together into a “social media” grouping. Many times, when a company seeks to lump all of its social media activity under a single umbrella department, the result is erroneous results where one arm of social media that has a poor results skews the statistics negatively. By selectively focusing how you market to each arm of social media and taking into account each arm separately you can find out which arm is the most in need of assistance in order to maximize the ROI for that particular social media network.
Be Engaging. Social media is all about interacting with the customer on their level and creating and sustaining a rapport with the customer. In order to get the most out of your marketing efforts you need to engage the user and convince them that your content is worth reading and worth sharing. Once your content is good enough, you break it down to convincing them that they should read it. Simply posting links and descriptions isn’t what being engaging is about. You need to have more of a presence on social media in order to increase your engagement level with your users. Proper engagement requires commenting on relevant posts by users, including your own input in debates, asking for feedback about your products or services and personally dealing with users as they speak to you. Creating unique content is also important in the quest to be engaging and the more unique and high-quality the content is, the less you’re going to have to convince the user to share and like it on social media. These, in turn, translate to a higher ROI on your investment in the content department.
Keep in Mind Your User’s Device. Social media and all content marketing over the last five years have seen a shift away from computer-friendly methods to methods that are intimately geared towards mobile users. Tablets and smartphones have taken over as the most popular ways of accessing the internet and content marketing has shifted focus along with it. Creating content today is mainly about developing engaging content, but at the same making this content accessible by all your users on all sorts of platforms. Optimizing your content for users on multiple platforms has the advantage of allowing more people to read your content and thereby creating more options for social media sharing and interaction. Outreach is the name of the content game in the twenty-first century and having more people aware of your content means that your ROI on content investment raises as each one of them shares the content and raises your visibility.
Build and Maintain Trust. Transparency has been a major issue among content producers for quite a long time. In order for some companies to share their work, they have created or paid for “dummy accounts” that increase the amount of shares they have artificially, flooding the social media stream with the post. Although this has worked in the past to create visibility, it is by no means an honest method of getting your content out there. Users tend to think twice about clicking on a link that is posted by a fake profile or shared by a nameless entity. Social media filtering protocols are slowly weeding out these fake accounts and removing their influence in sharing, meaning that this method of increasing visibility is fast coming to an end. The best way to encourage users to trust you is to be genuine in your interactions with them. Social media interactions allow for personal exchanges and create a deeper sense of understanding than sharing a link from a fake profile. By building and maintaining trust with your audience, you are more likely to get them interested in reading what you have to say and getting it out to their friends and acquaintances via shares.
Long Term Beats Short Term. Keeping the long term vision in mind is a surefire way to see your ROI grow exponentially. This can mean longer content, more research and more work put in your content. However, it may require taking a hit with your ROI early on in order to set up the late-game influx of interaction with your audience. By having content that makes it onto other media outlets, whether they are magazines or blogs (as guest posts), the initial spike in users to your content will eventually die down. The content serves as a selling point that can lead to increased user confidence later in time. The long term vision allows you to take into account the appeal of your future content by leveraging the hosted content as a means of increasing your credibility to potential users later down. Your content will only benefit from the exposure and as time goes by it will increase your presence across the internet and allow you the option of creating backlinks in order to boost your future content.
Track, Measure and Optimize. Understanding the analytical portion of your ROI calculation allows you to track the respective data variables that affect your ROI and create methods to optimize them in order to get more visibility. Using tools such as Google analytics to keep track of your site data tracks the amount of visits over time and all the requisite data for those visits. Using the built-in tools you can analyze the data in order to determine what sort of strategy works in getting visits and what doesn’t. Google analytics allows you to pattern your actions over the strategies that work and build around these strategies to create and overall marketing strategy. Combined with your social media analytics as provided by Facebook and other social media sites, you can create a strategy that will no doubt lead to an uptick in your ROI for content.
Think About the Rewards. The end result of your content marketing is improving the lives of others. In order for others to be able to benefit from your content, they need to know it’s there. Your marketing strategy to raise your ROI should focus on creating value for your content readers, and not just clicks for your website. Although it may sound altruistic, by doing the first you almost guarantee the second. You also don’t compromise your integrity by using underhanded methods to generate leads. Users tend to appreciate being thought of because of hoe easy they are to dismiss as clicks and not as people. Considering them as people pays of in the amount of people that support the brand and the amount of them that benefit from the content you provide. As a content provider, you need to be faithful to your audience. By giving them great content that affects their lives, you give them value and they are likely to remember that the next time they have the option of increasing your outreach.
Don’t Mislead your Audience. Very possibly, the worst thing that any content producer can do is use clickbait in order to get people to read their content. Clickbait is a term used for headlines that use hyperbole in order to inflate feelings about a story, encouraging the user to click on it. The result is that the story is usually much less than it’s hyped to be and the user feels cheated. Although the content might have been good with a regular storyline, the inflated storyline sets the reader up for a story that the body doesn’t deliver. This might be a way to get clicks cheaply but the long-term effect of something like this is horrible. By using clickbait, you effectively betray the trust of your readers by leading them on about content. They are much less likely to trust you in the future and although the initial uptick in visits looks good, the long term slide of visitors is a testament to why using clickbait is a very bad marketing strategy. It compromises your integrity and your truthfulness and instead makes you seem fake.
Real People Interest = Real Results
In order to increase the return on investment you get from your content, the thing you need to do above all else is get users interested in your content. Social media is the most obvious way to do this, but there are a lot of other ways such as SEO optimization and targeting ads. In order to utilize all of these disparate methods properly, you need to set goals for your marketing figures and you need to understand the niche to which you are marketing. Knowing these factors makes it easy to create a seamless and interlinked marketing strategy that incorporates statistical analysis of data from analytical sources in order to craft the ideal strategy for your content. Generating return from content can seem like a complicated task, but the rewards are well worth the effort.
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