Summer is just a few short weeks away (unless you live in Florida like me, in which case it has been summer for the past two months!), which means warm weather, vacations, and a slightly lower work load (hopefully). So you can spend more time lounging on the beach, and less time digging up content marketing tips, I rounded up some of the top content marketing blog post published in the last month.
This month’s round-up includes how to create a free content calendar, how to create content on a tight budget, and lessons from the worst performing blog titles on the web.
Editor’s note: This list is completly subjective and listed in no particular order.
17 Content Marketing Tips for Any Size Budget by Michael Brenner
When you have all the budget in the world, creating awesome content is pretty easy. But, since most of us don’t live in that fantasy world, we need to know how to create great content on a smaller budget. Michael’s article on Content Marketing Institute offers 17 actionable tips on how to hack the world of content marketing.
My favorites from his list:
- Create a list of your favorite resources
- Ask your sales people what questions they get asked the most
- Turn videos in to blog posts (or vice versa)
Why Ambitious Content Is the Only Content That Matters by Ryan Galloway
“But that is the way we’ve always done it!”
“But our competitor doesn’t do that.”
If those phrases (ahem, excuses) make your blood boil, you will want to read and share this article by Ryan Galloway on The Content Strategist. With all the noise online today, brands need to create content that is really special if they want to stand out. It’s not enough just to publish a blog post once a day or develop an eBook.
My favorite quote from the article really hit home:
In short, if you’re publishing unambitious content, you’re throwing your money away. There’s no ROI for being just another voice in a crowd.
Copywriting Lessons From BuzzFeed’s Worst Headlines [New Data] Andrea Lehr
Oh, click bait titles. How you annoy me. This article from Hubspot includes actual data from Buzzstream and Fractl that breaks down exactly what the least shared article titles have in common. If you want to avoid BuzzFeed-like titles and actually develop headlines that will get shared, this article and the accompanying infographic should be on your radar. (If you want even more data, the infographic links to a full report you can download on Buzzstream.)
Some of the stats I found most intriguing:
- Without Facebook, 8 of the 10 lowest-performing headlines earned nearly 90% fewer shares.
- The lowest performing headline type is “Community Post”.
- A great headline has the potential to increase traffic by 500%
Content Marketing is Hard – 7 Lessons Learned by Mike Huber
I see a lot of brands get frustrated or just totally lost when they first approach content marketing. Many marketing managers are used to hard and fast numbers – which can be a little more tricky with content marketing. That is not to say you can’t calculate ROI for content marketing – you definitely can. It’s just that, well, content marketing is hard and Mike so eloquently puts it. This article, posted on Business 2 Community, digs into seven lessons about content marketing learned the hard way.
A few of my favorite lessons:
- Published does not mean perfect
- Content marketing requires time
- You need buy-in from the rest of the company
How to Build a Content Calendar Using Google Docs by Larry Madill
Newsflash – to be successful in content marketing, you need an editorial calendar. Really. It will help you stay organized and make sure you publish consistently – which is the biggest struggle for most of us. But needing an editorial calendar and having the budget to buy fancy tools are two very, very different things.
In this article on SEMRush, Larry breaks down how to use Google docs to create a (free!) editorial calendar your whole team can access and update in real-time. If you are a spreadsheet guru, this won’t help you much. But if Excel makes you want to cry, this is article is perfect.
The Takeaway
Content marketing is an ever changing, ever growing field – which is part of why it stays so interesting. Did you read any particularly interesting content marketing posts this month that you think should have been included? Please share them in the comments below!
Featured Image: Created By SEJ
Image 1: Shutterstock
