Content Marketing - Page 4
A collection of posts on Content Marketing
When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog and the content you personally create. So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses. Writing tips are a good place to start. And to supplement the words you use to
When you’re creating useful, actionable, epic content, everyone deserves to see it. So how do you get your hard work and effort seen by the largest audience possible? We’ve considered that question often at Buffer, as we try to maximize our content so it reaches the people who need it. There are certain strategies you can put into place for spreading your content far and wide, and there are a good number of tools that can help these strategies run super smooth. Here are the tools we use (and
You’ve heard it said that storytelling is an essential element to drawing the reader into your content and driving more engagement. So how can you add this element to the blogposts you write? Can you fit a captivating story into a social media update, even one that’s 140 characters long? Here’s the great news: There’s a formula for that. Many storytellers and copywriters have tested out the best intros and segues to draw readers to a piece of content. Their copywriting formulas just plain wor
The very first Buffer blog post—Want to Tweet While You Sleep? —was published in January 2011. Three-and-a-half years and 595 posts later, we’ve covered a lot of ground, learned a huge number of tips and tricks that make
Imagine that you arrived at your local movie theater this weekend to see a show and the options featured were “The Final Destination,” “Inglorious Basterds,” and “District 9.” If none of those movies sound familiar to you from recent buzz, that’s because they topped the box office charts in 2009—the year Brian Halligan and I released the first edition of Inbound Marketing: How To Get Found Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since the 1st
Content Crafter Kevan Lee joined us for #Bufferchat to talk about the unique nature of writing for the web. Check out the full Storify recap here , and continue reading for 32 web writing tips from Kevan and the community about how to write successful blogposts, tweets, status updates, and more. What makes writing for the web different than print? “We have less time to grab attention on the web. Web writing is
A headline can serve either as an apple pie on the windowsill of your content or as its bouncer. It’s all in the way you phrase things. Fortunately for us, many people have found headlines that work wonders, consistently, time after time. And they go well beyond the saturated listicle or clickbait. Why not take some inspiration from the best headlines of the best headline writers? The blueprints exist to get your tweets, emails, updates, and articles clicked. I collected a trove of interesti
A few weeks ago, we tried a little experiment. We tested two different headlines for one of our blog posts. The first used a headline that teased the post’s content: The second used a similar headline, but we made it clear that the post was backed by data: The results were more than a bit surprising: Now, I admit, we expected the variant that mentioned research to win. But we didn’t expect the delta to be more than 40%! For us, that small test shaped a new way of thinking about what makes
Since visual content arrived on the scene back in 2012, it has showed no signs of stopping. Best practices on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter always reference images and videos as key elements for driving engagement. Graphics and visuals on blog posts are one of the best ways to get the most value and deliver the best experience for your content. Visuals are a big deal. If you need any more convincing, or if you’d simply like to hear the argument in a beautiful visual form, I roun
Where do blog post ideas come from? This one came from someone else’s headline. We are constantly inspired by the amazing work of others, and we owe a lot to the deep thinking and amazing resources that are readily available within the industry. How can we get more ideas more consistently? There’s inspiration everywhere. We’ve just got to keep our eyes open. Copyblogger gave us the inspiration for this post. One of their recent headlines mentioned “idea curation,” a new-to-us term that really
We have dozens of ways to measure a successful blog post or social media update , and I’d imagine you’re familiar with all of them. You can track blog traffic by digging into analytics . You can view engagement data on every update you send. The measurable aspects [https://buffer.com/library/the-ideal-length-o
Six in ten of us are visual learners : people who learn best when information is delivered through the eyes; by looking at images or videos, or reading. That’s just one of the reasons why visual content is so important in today’s content marketing world. Another is i
What does Skrillex have to do with blogging? It took us awhile to put the pieces together ourselves. We’ve been thinking a lot about the optimal way to produce content for the Buffer blog. We’ve pivoted the blog multiple times before—the latest came just in the past two months when we shifted from lifehacking and productivity to a purer focus on social media. The blog is both a huge driver of conversions for us and an ongoing experiment. What kind of content works best on the blog? And, more j
Is SlideShare part of your content strategy? Truth be told, we have yet to fully integrate it into our content creation process here at Buffer. We’ve felt lots of great nudges, though. We’ve heard tell of the amazing opportunity on SlideShare, how it’s a primed network of highly engaged influencers just itching to find and share your stuff. What might ultimately sell us, though, is the response we got from a single slide deck, created in a hurry, that garnered over 5,000 views in one weekend.
Variety is the spice of life … and digital marketing? Variety can certainly make a digital marketer’s life a little easier. When you’ve worked hard to create a perfect piece of content , you can help that content go the extra mile (and then some) by repurposing and recreating the content in a huge number of ways. Is it easy? Well, I wanted to find out. I took a favorite piece of cont
Phew! Talk about pressure. Writing a blog post about how to write a perfect blog post is the most meta of burdens. It’s a bit different than writing about perfect tweets or ideal Facebook posts. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re blogging about perfect blogging. So I hope you’ll still trust the advice here even if you don’t find this post itself to be flawless. I’m sure we’d all love for each of our blog posts to be absolute perfection—however it is that you measure perfection—so I researched
We love setting goals for improvement here at the Buffer blog, and one of our most recent challenges has been this: Every post gets an original image. This might not sound like such a tall task until you consider that Courtney and I are journalism majors whose skills lie in painting pictures with words and not so much in painting pictures with Photoshop. We try our best, in the name of visual content. You’ve perhaps heard of visual content? The term seems to be everywhere these days. We come a
Do you know what you’re posting, sharing, and blogging this Thursday? How about two Thursdays from now? Thursday of next month? Thursday of next year? We don’t have things figured out quite to that extreme here at Buffer, but we do have some idea of what’s ahead . (Those of you who are yearly planners, our hat’s off to you!) Planning content far into the
Being a columnist means something a bit different to me than it did growing up. When I started down my writing path, I adored magazines and newspapers and the superheroes who wrote weekly or monthly columns in the op-eds or the back pages. Now, I adore those who write at my favorite blogs and websites. The back page of Sports Illustrated has become, for me, the featured spot on Huffington Post. And the most amazing news of all is that being a columnist online is a dream that anyone—you, me, yo
Museums curate works of art. We digital marketers curate blog posts. Though our link shares may not be artistic contributions, the idea of curation is at least the same at museums and online: We’re all seeking only the best material to pass along to our patrons, customers, fans, or followers. Finding and sharing exquisite content has never had more value than it does today. People love being told what’s good to read or essential to see. With that in mind, we’ve collected some ways to get start
Imagine that you’ve written a blog post that can help thousands of people solve a really painful problem. You’ve written the post, edited it, looked it over a few times to make sure that you didn’t miss anything important, and hit ‘publish.’ You send the post out to your list, share it on all of your social networks , and settle in to see what
Recently I dug into all the research I could find about headlines for a Mozinar on The Science of Writing Must-Click Headlines on Social Media. I found plenty of data about what words are used in the most shared headlines and social media posts, how long headlines should be and more. What was especially interesting was to dig into the psychology behind some well known headline formulas to begin to understand what makes them so irresistibly clickable. Here’s an overview of what I discovered—8 w
A good tweet peaks at 18 minutes . An evergreen blog post lasts for years. It’s crazy to see the disparity between two pieces of content that we all create on a regular basis. It’s a little reassuring, too, that some things we make online have a chance to endure. Having this long-lasting content on your blog and in your archives is a boon to traffic, social
I often get asked about my research process for the Buffer blog. For my science and life hacking posts in particular, I rely heavily on scientific research to back up my points, so there’s a lot of research to be done. Unfortunately there’s no secret sauce or magic bullet when it comes to this process. It’s mostly just a matter of time and practice. I do have a few tips to share about where and how I find the sources for my research, though, so hopefully you’ll find these useful. Finding the
