Content Marketing - Page 3
A collection of posts on Content Marketing
Content marketing comes in many different shapes and sizes. Creators like you have a lot of options: blog posts, social media updates, visuals, video, slide decks, and even more. You can even add podcasting to this mix. Audio is being used in clever ways to fit into the content plans of some of the top forward-thinking websites and blogs. Tim Ferris—author of The Four-Hour Work Week—started a popular podcast on his blog. Copyblogger runs their Lede podcast amid their traditional awesome marketi
Every company is a media company these days, and Buffer is no different. We started the Buffer Social blog in January 2011 and since then it has been a key component in the success of the company. We have published more than 1,000 posts—and we’re honored to receive more than 1.5 million visits every month. It’s been a long, challenging journey, though. We first hit one million sessions in a calendar month during March 2015—a full 4 years after launching—and after months of floating around 1.1
There’s so much content in the social media space, so how we can get more creative with the content we share? That was the topic of this week’s #bufferchat and, boy, did our community come through with awesome ideas for content creation! We discussed ways to make social media posts more interactive, how we can think outside the box with visual content , how to rep
I like to think that reading the blog of a marketer I admire is like having a coffee with them and getting a chance to learn all about their approach to marketing. ☕ Personally, I have benefited a lot from reading these blogs, especially blogs published by startup marketers. Here are a couple of reasons why I love them: 1. When they write about their work, I get to learn about how they approach growth and marketing at their company and what tactics, techniques, and channels they use. 2. When
Most people don’t read content online. In fact, eight out of ten people will only read the headline . For content writers, that fact is alarming. But it also places extra importance on the headlines we choose for our content, as headlines have the power to influence readers even if they don’t read any more of the article. I don’t believe the perfect headline exists,
“Join us!” “Sign up!” These phrases litter the huge variety of email newsletter boxes you’ll come across online, and they generally serve the same purpose: Click here to give us your email address. They serve the same purpose, but do they say the same thing? Can one word change the way you feel about a button? In my experience, yes. I subscribe to the copywriting school of thought where every single word is absolutely worth stewing over and A/B testing because one single word can change ever
Millions of blog posts are published every day. A small percentage gain traction and attract readers. And among those readers, 55% will read the blog post for 15 seconds or less. (If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking with this one!) The internet is a daily battle for attention. Everywhere you turn, people are trying to share the latest marketing hacks with many of the same points echoed repeatedly. I’m guilty of it myself, and I completely understand why many of us write articles th
Whenever I dream up a home improvement project for my place, I end up working smartest and fastest when I have the right tools at my disposal. It’s amazing the difference a good tool can make – and the extra time it takes to get work done without a helpful tool. Fast-forward to online marketing. How can you work smarter and faster with SEO? It starts with having the right tools . I’ve collected
If you’ve asked this before… “How can we get more visitors to our website?” … You’re certainly not alone, as increasing traffic is often the number one problem faced by marketers today. The bad news? Saying “get more traffic” is easier said than done. You could write guest posts (Leo wrote 150 articles in 9 months when Buffer first launched), optimize for SEO traffic [http://www.anumhussain.com/presentations/topics
The good news: your boss or client is totally on board with your running content marketing. (SCORE!) The challenge: she wants to see a content marketing plan . . . and you have NO IDEA what that’s supposed to look like. I’ve been there. It’s a tough situation, because you’ve been doing content marketing with your gut this whole time, and now you’re being asked to put all that into a document. (And the gut-to-document process can be pretty painful.) Plus, you know that awesome content marketin
Infographics are such a fun and effective visual way to display information . We at Buffer have certainly used them quite a few times to share information . I always enjoy looking at them, but always feel like there is no way I c
Treat every piece of content—every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email—with the utmost care. There needs to be a bit of an internal struggle when we hit send or publish, if we don’t feel it, I don’t think it’ll be good enough. This shouldn’t be confused with perfectionism, we want to push things out with consistency and without lingering. This is about self-discipline to go through that struggle—even if it’s felt ever so slightly—every single time. We don’t want
Back in the old days of the Internet – that is, the late 90’s and early 2000’s – “build it and they will come” was a fantastic strategy. There were fewer people either building or visiting websites, and therefore, if you did create a website, newsletter, or e-course, it was almost a given that people interested in you would find you. It’s how I built my first business. I built it. They came. Today, that is no longer the case. You’re competing not only with people who offer similar content, bu
Emily Ahlbum of Emagine joined #bufferchat to chat all about content marketing. How do you define it? Where do you find your best ideas? and more! Catch our weekly Twitter chat, #bufferchat, every week on Wednesdays, 9 am PT/Noon ET/4 pm GMT, for valuable industry insights and networking with nearly 400 other smart marketers and community managers. How do you define “content marketing?” From
How can you create content with the most efficiency and ease? Are you challenging yourself to come up with new ideas and new ways of imparting information about your business? Are you experimenting with the different forms of content that your customers may like to read? We’d love to help you get there. The 2015 edition of the annual B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America report put together by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that while 69%
One of the implicit values in our Buffer marketing is to challenge assumptions. And one of the biggest assumptions I have about our content is that we should be publishing original articles to the blog multiple times each week. Well … what might happen if we didn’t? To find out, we stopped publishing new content for 30 days, focusing instead on repurposing and refreshing our content from the archives. I’d love to share with you every single thing we tried and all that we learned, both what wo
If you find yourself intimidated by the concept of creating video content, you’re not alone. Every minute of the day, YouTube users alone upload 72 hours of new video content , not to mention uploads to Facebook, Vimeo, Daily Motion or Wistia. With all that noise, making your video stand out , increasing engagement [https://buffer.com/resources/the-role-of-video
It seems like there’s more great stuff to read today than ever before. And still, finding the good stuff that’s just right for you or your brand can take a lot of time, according to this survey by Vertical Response: When you’re sifting through the whole internet, it can help to have a guide. What if could open your inbox every day to find new, relevant, curated articles that you’d be thrilled to share to social media? We’ve written before about the rise of high-quality niche newsletters, a fo
One of the worst feelings in the world of inbound marketing and enrollment is to write an incredible blog post, publish it, share it, and then … crickets. I actually just shuddered a little bit thinking about it. (Because I have been there way, way too many times!) It’s a lot better when the opposite happens: when you experience the thrill of seeing an expert in your space share and promote your content for you. This post will give you a practical, actionable approach to writing and designing
Sometimes when you get a good content idea, you can feel it. You just know that it’s fully formed, ready to be executed, and sure to be a hit. Other times, the idea isn’t quite so clear. Maybe it’s only a partial idea, or you’re not quite sure what actually creating it would look like. Anyone who’s dipped their toes in the content marketing pool knows that creating content can be incredibly taxing of our creativity. Worth it, but time consuming. Luckily, there are plenty of strategies and too
Did you know: Some bloggers recommend you spend as much time promoting your content as you do writing it. (Derek Halpern of Social Triggers has an 80/20 split : 80 percent promotion, 20 percent writing.) Wow, this is an area I fall well short on. I’m so impressed by those who hustle to get their content out there and in front of as many people as possible
One of our favorite tips on getting more value out of social media: Share your blog posts and articles more than once. We’ve come up with a sharing schedule for every new blog post that publishes on the Buffer blog—sharing the post when it publishes, later the same day, the next day, later in the week, and on and on into the future. And in doing so, we’ve come across so
Imagine starting a blog with zero overhead. Imagine having a place online to write your thoughts, tips, and learnings and share with a built-in audience and an immediate potential for viral traffic . Imagine a really great writing app . This is Medium , a blogging platform from the creator of Blogger and Twitter. It’s slick and snappy and could very we
Back when I started my career in SEO, content marketing didn’t exist—at least not in the way it exists now. We used strategies to boost traction and traffic to websites through the creation of great content—it was content marketing before the term even existed. And it worked. I’ve carried the lessons with me ever since. And I’d love to share them all with you—everything I’ve used to successfully help hundreds of companies benefit from content marketing over the past five years. Here are 37+ t
