Monetizing a blog for bloggers and influencers has been made more effective by affiliate marketing. The internet ecosystem has made it possible for bloggers and advertisers to have a mutually beneficial relationship.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase using one of these links, I’ll make a small commission without impacting the price that you will pay. I recommend just services or products I find useful and that I have tested or currently use
Affiliate marketing has empowered bloggers to earn money from promoting advertisers’ products. Advertisers also increase their sales from affiliate links as they are getting wider-scale promotion of their products. Like any other business, success is determined by the affiliate marketing strategy you put in place.
Affiliate marketing can be used to complement your blog regardless of your niche. The overheads and startup costs are minimal, and it is a form of passive income in the long run, as you can earn money even when you sleep. Your location doesn’t matter as long as you have an internet connection.
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– commissions when someone who clicks on your referral link makes a purchase,
– pay per action whenever a customer finishes carrying out a specific task, bounties which are paid for every client sent to the advertiser’s site.
Most often you are paid via PayPal, direct deposit, cheque, redeemable rewards, or company credit.
As a general idea, you don’t have to be worried about searching for new clients or creating your own products, you can simply use affiliate links. But like in any strategy there are pros and cons for this one too.
As a blogger, your key content should help you identify your pillar products to promote as affiliate products. Mastering affiliate marketing will definitely take time, but you will learn and see the results as you continue to practice and grow your traffic numbers. Your blog isn’t the only way to reach your audience, you can use affiliate marketing on all your other social media channels.
Two main factors determine your affiliate marketing success rate:
Traffic
Quality traffic is when you have the right target audience following you, and this is how you can score your sales.
All you need is just enough traffic to earn a few hundred or thousands in affiliate earnings. Your blog should be targeted to a specific audience and have a traffic of about 100-200 visitors per day to earn a couple of hundred dollars as income. If your blog is not specifically targeted or is all over, you will need a lot more traffic to see conversions.
Promotional tactics and strategies
When you are a new blogger, traffic might not be working so well for you, so your alternative option is to promote and keep promoting. You should keep in mind that this has to be done the right way or you risk losing the little traffic you have.
Inserting a referral link into relevant content is the best way to promote. Spamming and fishing are things you don’t want your name to be associated with.
Webinars, email series, social media contests, tutorial videos, are some ways that increase your reach and authority. A customized coupon can also be requested so that you can add it to your newsletter. The current audience doesn’t like feeling like they are being sold to, what they want is to get additional value, not a sales pitch.
Finding Affiliate Programs or Affiliate Networks to Apply to
There are thousands of networks and programs to apply to. You can find the signup pages for affiliate programs from:
a) Company’s site
Once you have made a decision on the product or service you want to promote, go to the website of the respective company and look for a link that states ‘affiliate/referral link/affiliate program/partner program’ then follow the link and sign up.
A search for the company’s affiliate program will have some results pop up.
c) Ask a friend who is an affiliate for guidance.
Friends can give you recommendations of what worked for them and what didn’t. They can also give you the company contacts to sign up.
d)Join an Affiliate Network.
Affiliate networks like ShareASale, Rakuten, CJ, give you a huge pool of advertisers or merchants to choose from.
How to Be Successful in Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate Marketing Tips
That’s the one-million-dollar question, right?!
Content marketing is one of the best ways to make you successful as an affiliate marketer. It allows you to create trust and consistency and deliver expertise as well as usefulness to your readers.
These affiliate marketing tips for 2023 will help you:
1. Promote Products and Services You Believe in or You Have Used and Loved.
When picking an affiliate program, you have to choose one that offers a lot of value to your audience. This is why choosing an affiliate program for products you have used, or really love is important. Whenever you make a purchase and you hate it, you tend to inform everyone about it. The same happens when you love a product, you tell everyone about it.
Affiliate marketing now pays you to spread information on the product you love. Your audience will be grateful for recommendations that delivered great value to them. Giving too many options to your readers makes them go elsewhere for additional information. Blasting your followers with affiliate links might also make you unwelcome and have you unfollowed.
Focus on the value added to your readers’ life, not on product features.
2. Affiliate Marketing Tips: Build Trust with Your Readers
Being honest and fair when giving a review will build trust. Creating a connection with your audience takes time but using your own experiences and personal words builds trust. Tell them what you liked about a product and what you didn’t like. Once they follow your recommendation and they love the product, they will come back to you creating a repeated engagement. This leads to shares, more clicks, and conversions.
3. Promote According to the Person’s Position in the Buying Cycle
Focus your affiliate marketing strategy on sites where people are ready to make a purchase. For example, people go to Pinterest to look at different products and services. Hence your affiliate marketing success rate will not be high if you focus on Pinterest instead of review posts. Review posts that rank in Google are more likely to bring you qualified leads that are in the decision phase of the buying cycle.
4. Affiliate Marketing Tips: Use Effective Call to Action Buttons and Excellent Copywriting Skills
Catchy titles always draw people in. Excellent content and affiliate links always perform better than an affiliate link with no content. Call-to-action paragraphs and buttons push readers to perform the actions they are called up to hence bringing them into the sales funnel.
5. If Freebies Are Available with Your Affiliate Program, Take Advantage of Them.
Affiliate programs have free lead magnet materials that are targeted to get potential customers in their sales funnel. Using your affiliate link, you can share the guides, webinars, and other materials available to equip them with the information they need to make a purchase. People prefer to grab a freebie before they make a purchase and skilled advertisers can easily turn people in the sales funnel into actual clients. This is one of the most valuable affiliate marketing tips for beginners: you don’t have to create your own lead magnets, work with the ones provided by the affiliate program.
6. Affiliate Marketing Tips: Have a Bonus Giveaway to the Affiliate Deal
People always go for a deal that offers more value for their money. A bonus giveaway sweetens the deal and adds more value to what your reader is purchasing. Make sure the bonus you offer is a complementary product to the affiliate product.
Also, check if the affiliate program allows bonus giveaways.
If you have the opportunity, ask for a special coupon to be shared with your subscribers only.
A simple spreadsheet can be used to do this. Some people use Airtable or PrettyLink plugins to have vanity links (pretty links). However, you have to check if the affiliate program you are using prohibits the use of a particular plugin to track affiliates.
8. Affiliate Marketing Tips: Affiliate Links Should Be Created as No Follow Links
Google always follows the links on your page as it believes the links you have are to a page that you like. This way the linked pages are ranked high in SERPs. This has led to Google’s disapproval of compensated relationships which include ads and affiliates as a way to impact search results.
All affiliate links in your images or text should have a no-follow tag to inform Google not to follow the page.
9. Be Cautious of Posting Negative Reviews
As a blogger or influencer, you should be careful of the bridges you burn. It is encouraged to be honest when posting reviews and sharing both the positive and negative of a product.
Regardless, before posting a negative review it would be fair to contact the company first and let them know of the negative feedback and complaint about their product. They might make the corrections you have suggested, and you will have positively influenced the final product and developed a good working relationship with them.
10. Affiliate Marketing Tips: Create an Out of the Box Tutorial Post or “How to” Guide
This is the most used method to promote affiliate links – blog posts, but try to deliver more value and to dig deeper into details, or be creative, and come up with an original idea. A ‘how to’ post explains step-by-step details of doing something. It gives you the opportunity to inform your readers of the tools, services, and products you believe in or have used to achieve a certain goal.
A ‘where to’ post can also be used for the same purpose.
You can walk your readers step by step through a process, and use images to explain how you proceed, like in this tutorial example on quiz creation.
11. Most Important Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Links
There is a plethora of options when it comes to promoting your affiliate links, some of the most reliable are:
Write well-balanced, honest reviews
Create side-by-side comparisons
Interview the creator of a certain product or Q&A the affiliate company’s stuff
Video content: speak about your affiliates in your videos, include them in the video’s descriptions, and in your webinars
Audio content: promote your affiliates while speaking in podcasts, in the ones that you host or when you are invited
“Thank you” pages can host also some affiliate links
Compose an interesting case study
If you have important discounts for several affiliates you can create a “current deals” page
In your already published blog posts
Link relevant images in blog posts to affiliate links
Make use of extra space available on your site: sidebar, footer, space between the end of a blog and comments, and sometimes maybe the header
Insert affiliate links lists in DIY posts and provide a helpful reference for the reader
Use affiliate links in email campaigns and newsletters
Profit on Social media channels to promote your affiliates, if this is permitted
Add affiliate banners on your site to promote prominent affiliates
“Tools I Use” or “Resources” page – Sometimes readers enjoy having a glimpse behind the scenes and are interested in checking out your list of favourite tools, and this is simultaneously an opportunity to highlight some affiliates too.
In your freebies, books or ebooks, if the case and if it is allowed
Come up with a social media contest on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook
Share on social media photos of yourself while using your favourite tools or products
Leverage the power of micro-influencers to promote your affiliate links, if you consider this a winning tactic
Create small digital products starring the affiliate product – email series, mini-course, mini-video sequence
Combine creatively two or three tactics to see improved affiliate commissions
12. Affiliate Marketing Tips: Include Affiliate Links in Emails and Signature
Only include affiliate links that are relevant to the content in the discussion. Avoid fishing or spamming your followers as this always creates poor results.
A professional email signature with an affiliate link accompanied by a quote that tells how the product has changed your life is one of the best affiliate marketing tips in 2023.
13. Diversify and Experiment
The old dictum “do not put all the eggs in the same basket” goes for affiliate marketing strategies also, use several affiliates and multiple strategies.
Do not forget you have to experiment and test what works best for you. It’s your task to identify the mix that will bring you more affiliate revenue. Change tactics, switch networks, content types, affiliate link places on a page, ads types. Sometimes small tweaks make an important difference in terms of revenue. What works for others might not work for you and vice versa. So, always test and improve.
Affiliate marketing has made it possible for bloggers to make up to six-figure income from their affiliate links. It is a very competitive domain and sharing secrets might bring your sales down a notch. The bloggers who have made it big in affiliate marketing used it first to supplement their income. They usually have their own digital services and products and the affiliate links promote their products or are complementary to their products.
You also learn a valuable lesson with affiliate programs and networks: how to sell digital services and products. This helps you make sales when you create your own digital product. It is so practical how sitting in someone else’s shadow teaches patience, dedication, and taking risks, and finally helps you build valuable networks.
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Tips for 6- Figure Affiliate Marketing
Focus on high-priced products and services
Making six figures on low-priced products is next to impossible as you will need a very large volume of goods sold. This means millions in email subscriptions and in readers.
Expensive courses and equipment, and high-priced services should be your focus for affiliate programs.
This is not to say the low $5-$20 sales are a waste of time. When starting out in affiliate marketing, these sales help put your blog on the map.
Niche matters
Your niche determines the price range of products you should target. In some niches, people are used to paying low prices for products and services e.g. the wellness niche. Getting people to move to $500 worth of products and services is very hard.
Conclusion
As a new blogger, getting started in affiliate marketing is essential as you learn your audience, the process of driving traffic, email marketing, etc. Jumping ahead into having your own digital product can take you back to starting over as all the stages of growth are important.
The knowledge required to add affiliate banners to your site, create social media posts, link products to your content, create e-mail campaigns, link products to your e-books, create deal pages, and offer discounts. Affiliate marketing terms and details can be intimidating and overwhelming, so it is important to learn the basics and terminologies.
If you can sell an affiliate product then you can definitely sell your own product. Knowing how to achieve success in affiliate marketing is most often a prerequisite for your own product’s success.
This article was featured as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B review and ratings company targeting digital marketing agencies and various other marketing consultancy and service providers”.
Leverage social media content strategy to boost your business.
“Content is fire, social media is gasoline.” Jay Baer
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase using one of these links, I’ll make a small commission without impacting the price that you will pay. I recommend just services or products I find useful and that I have tested or currently use
For any company or brand to thrive, it needs customers as they offer valuable feedback when developing and launching products and they drive the sales required to grow the brand or company. Your customers or clients are the lifeblood of your business.
You need to find them wherever they are and grab their attention and eventually retain their loyalty for the long term. One sure place to find them is through social media. And an effective social media content strategy is a surefire way of earning and keeping customers.
Social media is a great tool that allows you to share bits and pieces of your business from anywhere in the world in seconds, it offers expanded opportunities for your brand’s interaction and with a well-calculated social media strategy, you can gain great brand awareness and become a recognized leader in your industry.
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A basic social media content strategy definition would be a statement of intent outlining your brand’s goals and measurable objectives for using social media to achieve its communications purposes and identifying the supporting platform and tools it will use to achieve this. It must be actionable and have consumer-led insights as its aim is to ease creating content, conversations, and conversions.
Why It’s Important for Your Business to Have a Social Media Strategy
You may personally not be active on social media, but you must understand that other businesses out there including your competition as well as your clients actually are on social media. It’s a place where conversations are started and held, it’s where influence is created and you miss out a lot if you’re not there. But your presence must be strategic to be able to reap the benefits.
Here are some key reasons why you stand to gain if you use a social media marketing plan.
I. Your Customers Are Active on Social Media
Technology has created a simple environment where people can access, use and share information anywhere and in any way they like. And whether you like it or not, the top social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter are part of many peoples’ (customers’) daily lives.
The detriment of having no social media presence or worse still, having an outdated and inactive account can leave you out of immeasurable potential. You can’t afford to lose all that by ignoring social media.
Recent statistics have shown that there are 4.59 billion social media users worldwide with an average of over 2.5 hours spent on these platforms daily. They also show that 73% of marketers believe that social media marketing is very effective and that 75% of social browsers use social media to research brands. 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends or family.
This means more buyers are using social media to get reviews or recommendations about products or services and this is why you should, in fact, have a prominent social media presence.
II. Purchasing Decisions Are Influenced by Social Media
The initial era of social media was audience growth and engagement; the current era is driven by commerce and personalization. All major social media platforms have heavily invested in advertising solutions that attract marketers with the promise of advanced APIs, smarter targeting, and the ability to upload email lists to enable running personalized re-marketing campaigns.
You can for instance create campaigns and ads, manage your own audience data and be able to customize it for better targeting, and so on.
Why do you think they’re going out of their way to provide such solutions? It’s because as said above, there are over 4.59 billion social media users and 75% of social media browsers use social media to research products before making a purchase. Peer recommendation has an enormous influence on purchases if you’re able to identify the social platform that best suits your business.
For example, Facebook (which is the social media market leader with over 68% users) is best suited for people looking to share content and find promotions while Pinterest is great for people that are looking for inspiration and works exceptionally well with visual product storyboards.
So, a clear social media marketing strategy will help you understand the role of these networks and how to use them to understand your target customers, their buying cycles and preferences, and much more.
III. Influencers Are Impactful
49% of consumers claim that they depend on influencer recommendations on social media to inform them about their purchasing decisions. This is because influencers offer the authenticity that they’re constantly looking for. These users only promote relevant content to a targeted audience; if you’re a food brand looking for influencers then you’ll want to pair up with a food blogger or food Instagrammer. This will deliver your content to an already-defined audience.
These influencers can range from obvious celebrities to self-made social stars such as vloggers or top Instagrammers. You risk losing the mindshare of socially aware competitors who are going out in bold and innovative campaigns. Step up, be seen, and let your voice be heard.
Source: Thumped
IV. It’s a Feeding Ground for Brand Insights
Is there a better way to gather information about your brand from your target audience than to listen to candid conversations that they’re having?
Social media allows you to “listen in” trending conversations happening within your target market relating to your brand as well as insights on what’s happening in your industry as well.
And guess what? It’s all for free!
V. Your Brand Becomes Human
Social media has changed the business environment by a great deal, this means you must also adapt to the changing expectations of your consumers. And one sure thing that has been changed is the fact that your consumers expect you to be more human, more understanding, and a solution-giver.
The reviews, comments, and recommendations offered on these platforms require you as a brand to be more candid. When you become more responsive to them, you create a world of authenticity that can’t be bought by any paid advertisement. What more could you ask for?
So, having understood why a social media marketing strategy is very beneficial to your business, of course then it means that you have to put in some work.
The word audit really can sound pretty scary, but it’s not, here it simply means the process of identifying all your company’s or brand’s social accounts as well as any impostor accounts and putting together key information in one document.
As you fill out this document, take into consideration what your initial goal for each account was, this will give you an idea of whether anything you’ve been doing in the past has been working or not and thus will guide what you do in the future.
Here are the main steps to take:
Create a document for your audit, the most advisable is spreadsheets. Put down all your findings including the links to your profiles, the handles, the person responsible, the mission statement, etc.
Track down all your accounts and list them.
Ensure each account is complete and branded. This involves images, profile bios, handles, and so on.
Identify your best posts.
Evaluate performance using various social media analytics.
Understand the audience for each network.
List down the channels you think are working best for your brand.
Centralize channel ownership and passwords to be able to control approvals and ensure security.
Repeat frequently.
With this information at hand, you’re now ready to get deeper into your social media content strategy.
2. Set Smart Goals
Your social media marketing goals should as much as possible be aligned with your company’s overall goals. Marketing goals can vary greatly depending on the size of your business, your industry, your audience, and so on. But with that said, here are some common goals:
Boosting brand awareness
Increasing traffic to your website
Lead generation
Increase conversions
So when setting your social media marketing goals for 2023, apply the S.M.A.R.T goals criteria. They stand for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant and
Time-bound
For effectiveness, break down each of the above goals and identify key metrics that you can use to measure their progress toward achieving their individual targets.
If for instance one of your goals is conversions, you’ll have to identify the metrics to track, these may include:
Page views – be it a blog, contact page, or any other landing page, you will need to know how many people visited your site. This is a great indicator of web traffic and the people checking you out.
Mobile vs. Desktop visitors – this will show you the types of devices people are using to visit your site; the information can help you improve your content, for example, start to design using mobile-friendly formats.
Page timings – This just shows how long your page takes to load, the faster the better.
Traffic acquisition – this will let you know how people got into your website, was it organic, social, or direct clicks? This will guide you on where to focus your energy.
Time on Site – This refers to how long people spend on your site per visit as well as peer page. A longer time is a good indicator.
This list really goes on and on but you now have a clear picture of how to go about it. This will ease the analysis process later and will also ensure you leave nothing out.
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3. Know Your Audience – Research
Before seeking out your audience and before carrying out any social media strategy plan, you first need to identify who your primary consumers are. Among the questions you must ask yourself include:
What age groups do you want to reach?
What’s their average income?
What are their common values?
Where do they hang out?
These questions (and more) should help you create an avatar, which is an ideal person who would buy what you’re selling and therefore avoid spreading yourself too far. You should consider the platforms in order to invest in the right channel where your target audience hangs out the most.
One way to learn more about your audience is through social media analytics tools, another way is through customer surveys. Surveys are a great component of content marketing best practices. There’s no easier way of knowing which social media platforms your target audience prefers than finding out directly from them. Here are some of the questions you can ask:
What’s your preferred social media site?
Do you like to read blogs? If yes, which ones?
What persons do you follow on social media?
All this information is important because besides understanding your brand and your target audience, irrespective of your business size, you have to keep in mind that most social media platforms have some degree of user fluidity that you need to keep abreast of, to ensure that all your brand efforts continue to reach your ideal consumers.
Platform demographics may shift in the future and with that shift, a brand’s social media content strategy should shift as well.
Like any other business strategy, you’re going to need to find out if your efforts are holding any water as far as your business is concerned. So, what metrics will you use to evaluate the effectiveness of your plan?
Ideally, the goals you set above should guide the key performance metrics (KPIs) that will provide you with answers to whether you’re meeting your goals or not.
However, here are some key social media metrics that you can track.
Reach – This is the most important of the metrics as it shows the number of people that saw your post across the social platform. It’s a great indicator of whether your content reached your target audience’s feeds.
Clicks – This great metric will show you what creates curiosity or inspires users to buy. It gives you the number of clicks your content got.
Engagement – This is the total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. It will give you an insight into how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
Sentiment – this basically tells you how well you impressed your targets. It shows you how they reacted to your content or your brand.
Hashtag performance – what hashtags were most associated with your brand? This will show you the hashtag that created the most engagement.
5. Analyze Your Competitor’s Social Media Approach
You most likely than not, have competitors, it’s important to know what they’re doing in their social media strategy. Why? Consider this as a social media strategy example, study them, and select the best ideas to apply to your own strategy.
The deal isn’t to copy or steal ideas, but rather inform you of what’s working and how you can design yours accordingly.
So, it will be good to know where their focus is in terms of target and how they’re approaching it. It’s advisable that you also conduct an analysis that will help you identify their strengths and weaknesses in order to gain a deeper understanding of your industry needs. This includes looking out for gaps that you can take advantage of.
So, how can you spot your social competitors?
Google is your friend. Thus, you can just type the most valuable keywords and phrases your industry uses and check what results pop up. After putting together your industry competitors you can use social media competitive analysis tools like Sprout Social or Social Blade to track their content. These tools can tell you the kind of content they’re posting and the tags they may be using as well as the frequency and times that they post. Are they using rich media or are they using comedy and so on?
All this is to give you an idea of what your market requires from you.
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6. Content Creation
Your entire social media strategy is centered on content. But first of all, remember that this is all about social media. It’s a digital social place to hang out and not a market, so even before creating your content, have in mind that you need to strike the perfect balance between informative, entertaining, and promotional material.
Having established clear goals and identified your audience, will indicate to you exactly what kind of content will resonate with them. To help you keep your focus on what’s important; here is a brief list of the social content trends for 2019.
Video content – Statistics show that 85% of internet users love video content and 88% of video marketers are satisfied with the ROI. All social media platforms have incorporated either live, long-form, or short-looping video formats in their channels. Short videos are winning.
User-generated content – authenticity is the name of the game that you will never go wrong with. Consumers yearn for authentic content; this also means less work on your tray.
Tell stories – nothing drives a point home than a well-told/ engaging story.
It’s also important to note here that while you’re preparing for your great, high-quality content, you must have identified the platforms that you will be using. It’s also important to have a social media calendar that lists the dates and times at which you will be publishing your content at each of the channels you have identified.
This ensures your posts are spaced out appropriately and published at the most optimal times.
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There is no specific social media strategy template to keep year after year, a lot keeps changing and this makes work look a lot like trial and error. But it’s important that you’re able to adapt your plans as you progress.
Consistent analysis of your metrics in real-time will give you clues on what needs to be tweaked and what needs to stay the same or vamped up.
Conclusion
Establishing yourself as a reputable presence in the social media marketplace can be a daunting task, and there are many approaches you can take to social media marketing, ideally, you should implement the above mix of steps to build the most effective social media marketing plan to help boost your results and leave your competitors in the dust.
So, what’s the best way to reinforce your social media strategy? Experiment with the above tactics, leverage the use of data and analytics and consistently optimize.
How mobile-tailored is your marketing campaign, content, and overall strategy? Or are you still focused on the desktop? Mobile use and marketing apps were once just a trend, but today they’re a way of life. 72% of people worldwide will be using smartphones as the major way of accessing the internet by the year 2025.
With this in view, the revenues created by subscriptions and in-app purchases broke the record in 2020 and continue to rise as consumers prefer the convenience that comes with social media marketing apps. As of 2022 global in-app purchases surpassed the $380 billion barrier.
This new way of life means consumers simply can’t imagine life without marketing apps. The best marketing apps are not just hype, they’re all about agility. With the heightened competition all over the web, you need to be consistently re-strategizing your campaigns to be able to be heard by your target audience. And the best marketing apps are just what you need for a leg-up.
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There are many ways your brand can benefit when you use the best marketing apps in the best way while observing best practices. Here are the main ways you will benefit:
Manage social media content.
Create social media content.
Grow your audience or following.
Share your content in the most effective way with your target audience.
Collaborate with marketing teams.
Manage campaigns and projects.
Enhance engagement and customer relations.
Generally, grow your brand.
Here are the best social media marketing apps in various categories depending on what you need out of them:
It’s easier for people to recall content that’s accompanied by visuals, and this is why marketers are using more visuals today. However, this strategy may not be an easy task for many people, but this is where social media marketing apps come in. They are so easy to use you’ll do it all on your smartphone.
From images to videos, here are the best marketing apps in 2023 that can help you create high-level content:
This is one of the most popular content creation marketing apps thanks to its wide variety of templates that allows even novices to create stunning graphics and visuals to uplevel their content. It’s very easy to use and it offers a free version. A premium version is available with even more templates.
They offer a huge library of images and graphics that you can use and it’s possible to share to social media platforms directly from the app.
Canva is available both on Google Play and App Store.
Express your creativity with the help of hundreds of themes and effects that you can easily apply to your content. This marketing app allows you to edit, crop, filter, dehaze, and use borders, backgrounds, and much more. It’s a more advanced photo editing marketing app.
When you upgrade to premium, you gain access to furthermore advanced features and tools to do more complex tasks and it also creates automatically scrapbooks of your favorite work.
It’s free and available on both the App Store and Google Play.
This is one of the best marketing apps for small businesses because it has all the video editing solutions in one place. Inshot, a feature-rich app allows you to filter, apply effects or stickers, trim, add music, combine multiple videos with blank canvases, and so on, all in one place.
Thus, instead of investing in many apps and paying for premium subscriptions for all of them, Inshot makes it easy and cheap for you because it’s free!
It’s available on iOS and Android and gives you a subscription option if you want to access some premium features. Alternatively, you can buy the additional features without necessarily having to subscribe, but the subscription offers more and therefore cheaper. The subscription also removes ads and watermarks.
It is an intuitive app that manages all your social media platforms in one place. It helps you schedule your posts and publishes them at the ideal time for maximum engagement. It also enables you to share content you find online directly to your schedule by using their browser extension.
Available on iOS and Android, Buffer comes with a free plan as well as a subscription plan. The free plan allows for up to three social media accounts with up to 10 posts each. While the subscription plan allows for more social media accounts and offers analytics as well as team collaboration among other features.
It’s a great marketing app for small businesses as well as for larger ones.
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If you’re looking for an app that does more than social media management, then this is it. This app helps you create your brand’s social media profiles, allows you to manage multiple accounts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter all in one dashboard.
Besides being able to schedule your posts, it also monitors your brand name on Facebook and Twitter. And will notify you each time you get a mention and generate click-through stats that you can track simply from your smartphone.
This social media marketing app has a free plan allowing you to manage up to three accounts and schedule a maximum of 30 posts at a time. And a payment plan that allows for more accounts and has a feature where you can add team members to ease workflow.
This is another pretender to the best marketing apps out there with more features to offer. You can schedule, publish, analyze and track your social media accounts from a single point.
Sprout Social app has been created in such a way that there’s zero parity between its desktop features and mobile features. It, therefore, means that you as the user will enjoy a seamless switch in managing your social media platforms no matter where you are.
Another thing that makes this one of the best apps for advertising on social media is the asset library feature. You can access remotely your images, artwork, and messages. In addition, it allows you to add new assets such as images and all your team members can access them immediately.
It’s available on both iOS and Android and has a 30-day free trial.
Social Listening
Besides being able to effectively deliver your marketing content to your audience, it’s important to know what they are saying about your brand. This will keep you informed on your KPIs, what’s trending, and what needs immediate action. Here are the best social media marketing apps that will help you stay informed:
Keep a real-time track of what’s being said about your brand. This app sends you notifications showing your mentions as they happen. It monitors your social media platforms, news sites, and blogs and will give you an alert each time you’re mentioned. Allowing you to respond to real-time questions, and comments or simply show appreciation.
It can also give you hints about your competition. It has a feature that allows you to retweet a mention or share a mention on Facebook.
The alerts contain what’s being said, the date and who said what. All you need to do is link it to your social media accounts and customize the kind of statistics you want to receive with an option of filtering what is relevant and what’s not.
You can create alerts linked to your brand name, your competitors, and anything related to your market that would be of interest to your marketing strategy.
This app is available on Google Play as well as on the App Store. They have a free plan and several paid options tailored for businesses of different sizes.
One of the most intelligent social media marketing apps has to be Buzzsumo. It does more than just listen. It offers great analytics and can be considered a curation tool. This is one of the best marketing apps because it searches for relevant content based on web search queries and analyses it according to the backlinks, the rate of social engagement, and an evergreen score.
It has an advanced search engine that identifies the social’s most shared content for a specific topic and allows you to view the kind of content that performs best. It’s for this reason that’s considered a curation tool. You can also keep an eye on your competition, the key influencers in your niche, and more.
Available on the App Store as well as Google Play, it has a 30-day free trial.
This is another app that helps with centralized management of all your social media platforms and more. It offers insightful analytics and a unified inbox to handle all your messages from one place. It has the Boolean feature to help you search important parameters for YouTube and Twitter.
It allows you to sort out your tasks by labeling them to enable quick retrieval of what you need. If you need statistics in analytical order, it will do that for Instagram and Facebook.
It allows you to follow the key metrics to gauge your campaign and provides real-time insights.
Agorapulse has a free plan and various paid plans to suit your brand. It’s available on iOS and Android.
Communication Marketing Apps
When you need to communicate with your team, what are the best marketing apps that integrate it well?
This is one of the best apps for marketing communication. It enhances teamwork by allowing a smooth and open flow of communication either as a group or individually. You can share files, images, videos, edit documents, and generally have better team organization. You can also view previous communication threads if you need to reconfirm any details.
It integrates with social media platforms and other tools such as Dropbox and Google Drive, Asana, and more.
This communication app has a free version and a paid plan. It’s available on iOS as well as Android.
This is one of the most popular communication apps for both iOS and Android users and is popular for video conferences of up to 10 members, phone calls, text messages, etc. And this can be done via your smartphone no matter your location.
This app is taken more seriously and professionally compared to others such as Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.
It’s a free app and is available on Google Play and the App Store.
Trello is another great communication marketing app for teams as well as individuals. It’s an intuitive team and project management app with drop-and-drag features and an interface that makes it possible for everyone to follow the progress of tasks as they happen. It has cards that represent various tasks and members can rearrange, edit or add to the tasks.
Members can tag each other on various tasks to ensure clarity of work responsibilities.
The app is made to function exactly like the desktop app and this makes your marketing tasks smooth.
It has a free plan and a paid plan which offers more features. It’s available on iOS as well as Android.
General Management Marketing Apps
These are tools to help any marketer ease their workload and increase their output. Which are these?
How about staying on top of your marketing analytics via your smartphone? This is one of the simplest yet vital marketing apps out there. It gives you your brand’s analytics in simple graphs.
You can use it to track your marketing campaigns, traffic, engagement, and so forth. It’s a free app that’s available on iOS and Android.
If your business is active in the eCommerce arena, then run it wherever you are. Because Shopify, one of the most popular marketing apps out there, enables you to communicate with your buyers, process payments, track your stock and update your listings among other features.
It also lets you upload product photos, add pricing, track web traffic as well as sales, and much more.
It’s available on both iOS and Android and it offers a 15-day trial.
You don’t have to get home or the office to pen down those brilliant ideas. As one of the best marketing apps in 2023, WordPress gives you the power to create, publish and share your content instantly from wherever you are.
Besides these, you can check your statistics and keep updated on how your blog is doing. This app lets you manage your website content even without an internet connection.
It’s available on iOS and Android and has a free and paid plan.
Podcast Marketing Apps
One marketing strategy that is slowly gaining popularity, especially among B2B is podcasting. If you have any interest in this, here are some of the best podcast marketing apps you can leverage to maximize the reach, engagement, and basic growth of your channel.
This app will easily generate a real speech from text incorporating text-to-speech voices from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM. It uses an AI voice generator to convert text to audio. You can use this to create relevant content that will drive traffic and engagement.
You can pick from over 60 languages and 570 voices to use depending on what’s a fit for your audience. You can also easily publish your audio files on Google Podcasts using RSS feeds, iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, and so on.
They offer a free trial and various payment plans. You can get it on both iOS and Android stores.
Brought to you by Spotify, Anchor is one of the best marketing apps when you want to start podcasting. It has very simple features that make it easy even for a newbie to get started. It also offers uncomplicated statistics to help you know how your content is doing.
Anchor also comes with easy-to-use one-touch distribution features with unlimited podcast hosting all for free.
It’s available on both the App Store and Google Play.
Here is another easy marketing tool you can use in podcasting. It only requires you to upload your audio, and it will enable you to distribute it to Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
It will also offer you analytics for the required period of time that you will set. This app has a free trial and is available on both iOS and Android.
This app is among the best marketing apps for discovering news and new content that may be relevant to your marketing plans. It’s a smart reader application that enables you to gather and share relevant web content on your social media platforms to boost engagement. And also, to get a reaction from your audience as a way to discover more insights.
It’s a useful marketing app for monitoring your brand mentions, your keywords, or competitor activities. As a matter of fact, when linked to Google Alerts, it can give you an alert each time content that features your keywords is identified.
As a marketer, this is one of those very important marketing apps needed on your smartphone. It will offer you vital insights without you having to read everything on the internet.
It’s available on both iOS and Android. It has a 30-day free trial and other paid options.
One way to build a professional brand that’s also a thought leader is to share well-curated content with your audience. Scoop.It helps you gather and organize your industry reports and relevant news from which you can curate them to your audience.
It integrates WordPress, Drupal, Tumbler, and more. Can monitor views and clicks and also allows sharing on various social media platforms, emails, websites, and blogs.
It has a free plan as well as several paid options. Their app is available on iOS and Android.
This may come as a surprise, but Reddit is really a goldmine of discovery for marketing apps. It generates interesting content all for free. With this app, you can see the kind of content that’s ranking, and you can leverage its search engine feature to discover what’s happening in the thematic communities.
You can narrow it down to see what people are saying on niche topics and the keywords and phrases that are carrying the day.
Reddit is a free app and is available on both iOS and Android.
This is the largest social network with the most advanced platform for organic and social marketing. Besides its social aspect, Facebook is used by brands to maintain a digital social presence. Marketers also use it as a source of data that offers great insights about the niche, products, and such related data. It prides itself on over 2.8 billion active monthly users.
Marketers also use this platform to gain new customers, offer customer service, and sell.
Facebook is available on both iOS and Android and it’s also free.
It’s the second-largest search engine in the world, which makes it a mighty fertile spot for organic marketing. 8 out of 10 digital marketers find YouTube as the most effective video marketing platform. Google also found that 90% of people discover new products on YouTube. This means there are consumers ready to buy and waiting to find your products.
That and many such relevant statistics make this easy-to-use platform a perfect place to market. It’s a free app that’s available on both iOS and Android.
This app started as a simple photo-sharing app and has morphed into an enormous social commerce site. Instagram is a full virtual shopping mall with over 1.22 billion active users. And it’s for this reason that they have added features to just make that more real and also simpler for both the user and the marketer. Most notable are the shoppable posts and stories.
The rise of ephemeral content has also shifted how brands present themselves. It has added to more creativity and the humanization of brands. As one of the most popular marketing apps, Instagram makes business more fun and vibrant.
The app is free and available on both iOS and Android.
Other high-ranking social media marketing apps include LinkedIn with 756 million users and Twitter with over 350 million active users.
Conclusion
The best marketing apps can be considered the tools that will propel your marketing efforts by giving you deeper insights and guiding you on your marketing campaign plans. By helping you create better visuals, stellar content and implement great marketing strategies.
An effective marketing campaign must have a method of balancing varying types of marketing mix for promotion as well as distribution. The above list of best marketing apps offers you the first step to having an advantage over your competition. You only need to know the right tools for the right task.
Reach your audience through the right channels, offering the right message in a way that they understand. And the demand for more of your service or product will keep going up. In the mobile world, all that matters is creativity, flexibility, and agility and all these marketing apps can get you there.
There are over 600 million blogs on the internet and about 2 million new posts are published daily according to recent statistics. And these statistics are still headed up as most marketers say blog content creation is a top priority in their inbound marketing. For this reason, marketers and bloggers in general are searching for more blog ideas in their quest to increase or maintain their audience.
With this need to keep up with the competition, it’s possible that you’ve reached a point, at which you’ve run out of blog topic ideas, yet you still need to draw eyes and drive traffic to your page. And while this is a fine goal, a serious lack of blog post ideas can make frequent and regular blogging a difficult task. It’s even worse when you can’t think of relevant content that rhymes and resonates with your audience, and the question is how to come up with blog ideas that will work.
So, before diving into what to blog about ideas you must first ask yourself whether you have a content creation strategy. An effective strategy in itself is a great motivator for some of the most brilliant and effective blog post ideas. It acts as a foundation from which your blog ideas spring up. You therefore cannot afford to miss one. Here are a few of the most important content strategies.
It goes without saying, before searching for exciting blog ideas you must know who you’re writing for. This will help you identify their problems or needs and interests. It will give you an idea of what they want and this is what you will base your content on.
Remember being able to solve your audience’s problem must remain your focus, even if all that brings them to your blog is entertainment, then entertainment is what they must get. If they won’t find what they’re looking for in your blog, they won’t have a reason to stay or come back.
How do you do this?
Sketch out these key pieces with respect to your intended readers:
i. What problems or needs are they facing and which ones do you want to address first?
ii. How well-versed with the topic are they?
iii. What’s the goal of your blog topic? Is it to motivate? Educate? Entertain or inspire?
This information will be the first pointer to the direction your blog topic ideas will come from.
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
This is not rocket science, pay attention to the news (especially online related to your niche). If for instance, you think you’ve landed a great blog idea, search it on Google and take a keen look at what your competition is saying and how they’re ranking and use this to make your blog idea a few times better. Make it a wow post.
How?
i. Do more, if your competitor made a list of 10 things, you can create one with 15, or give it an extra boost with free tips, offer solutions plus some sort of bonus for your readers.
ii. Personalize your blog post ideas with a touch of your personal experience to make them unique.
iii. Give it a personality and take advantage of multimedia. Video for instance improves the shareability of your content because people generally love videos and images more than plain text.
3. Put the Pen Down, Read More
Your mind needs some flexing. And reading is one way to flex your mind and induce more creative and inspiring ideas.
Pick up something and read, it doesn’t have to be within your niche, it could be as far from your niche as the East is from the West, but just read something and avoid writing for a while. You’ll spring back with a load of brilliant blog ideas.
4. What Makes You Stand Out?
Your readers will need a reason to come to your blog and not go to the next one, so, what makes you unique or different from the others? Therefore, you must have this thought when planning for blog ideas as this is the point at which you’ll sell or not.
With this basic content creation strategy, you’ll find it less tedious to come up with relevant and great blog ideas. This article also offers bonus tips to take your blog topics to another level, but first, here is how to come up with blog ideas.
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How to Find Blog Ideas That Are Guaranteed to Win
1. Keyword Research
Most often you use keywords in your content for ranking purposes, relevant keywords drive quality traffic. It’s therefore important to understand what those potential customers are looking for through the use of keyword search data provided by Google, and this will give you great insights for your next blog ideas.
2. Leverage Questions on Forums for Blog Topic Ideas
You’ve probably heard about Quora, this is one of those platforms where people go to get answers for some of their problems. You can go through these questions and get blog ideas that can be relevant to your audience. Remember it’s all about offering some solutions to your audience.
3. Brainstorm with Friends or Business Partners or Colleagues
Brainstorming offers a great platform for diverse perspectives widened by the collective understanding of topical issues. It can help you discern and create themes for topics you’re passionate about that could compel your readers. You can make this a monthly thing for everyone concerned to plan ahead for the best results.
4. Random Discussions
Sometimes you may try too hard to get good blog post ideas from sitting in front of your computer for hours without an end when all you should really be doing is having more conversations with people over drinks, at the dinner table, and so on. These common topics people are always talking about are the exact same ones they want to learn more about and are likely to enjoy reading about.
5. Niche or Industry News
This tactic will work in many ways for you, it’ll show you’re up to speed with current issues that are relevant to your audience, and it will also get you the blog content you’re looking for. For instance, you can write about some new technology within your industry, developing trends, predictions for the next quarter, and such content. From this, you can actually get blog ideas to last you even a month!
As you may have realized by now, your audience is a primary source for your content. The important thing is to identify their insights and work on them. You may realize that asking them questions may be a little biased and therefore may not give you accurate results, it’s better to identify their frustrations or challenges and address them from that point. Now this will give you very relevant blog topic ideas.
This is a trending tool with the most popular blogs; it will show you what’s being shared most on social platforms. You just need to plug your topic into the tool and get a list of the most shared content within a certain topic. This will give you great resources and your only goal here will be to understand why this content is going viral and use that information to inspire your own blog topic ideas.
8. Get Personal
Talk about yourself. It may sound narcissistic, but people are always willing and looking forward to hearing about others’ experiences and generally about other people’s lives. So, sharing your experience with your audience is one quick way to generate an interesting blog idea. You can for instance:
· Write about what you do in a day as in your daily schedule
· How your morning routine affects your work output
· What you do differently that helps you succeed
· How you got into the industry and the skills that got you there and so on.
These can offer you several blog ideas to be enough for a few weeks or months.
9. Use a Survey
Ask your readers about something that they would want to see or learn; create a survey without necessarily overwhelming them by only focusing on the most important content. You can do this by making a list of questions that you’d like to feature in your survey. Create them in such a way that you’ll get your audience to share as much feedback as possible. You can use relevant incentives to motivate them into taking the survey and then in the end use this as your blog post ideas.
10. Create Complete Guides
Most manuals around the world end up in the bin; people tend to Google for instructions then read the provided manuals. Thus, within your niche, find out what they’re curious about and create a complete one-stop guide for them. Ensure to back up your guides with legit statistics from trusted sources and acknowledge them.
These skills could range from technology, crafts, photography, or basic survival skills; it all depends on your niche.
11. Invite a Relevant Guest
Guests can be refreshing at times; your audience might just appreciate something different. If you don’t have someone in mind that you can invite, you can post a call for willing writers or bloggers to submit their blog ideas, you would have killed two birds with one stone. You will get many blog ideas and still find someone with worthy content to share with your readers.
12. Review a Blog Post or a Book
Most people may lack the time or patience to go through an entire book or blog, some would appreciate a heads-up before they dive into such content, so you can make use of the strategy mentioned above to read some of this content and review it for your readers. The trick here is to review relevant content that they can resonate with.
13. Beginner Guides
Everyone starts from somewhere, and these are some of the most popular blog topic ideas, people are always looking for new skills. You can create simple 101 beginner guides for your readers on matters you’re sure are relevant to your blog. The same way you do a complete guide, this one also requires you to use authoritative infographics to guarantee your readers that they can trust your content.
14. Interviews
When you rub shoulders with experts, you’re considered one in no time. So, this gives you another blog idea and also, sets you apart from the other bloggers in your niche because of the professional valuable knowledge you’re offering. Set up interviews with experts in your industry; this doesn’t require you to sit down with them, draw some unique questions based on what your audience would be curious to know, and email them.
15. Blog About Productivity
This is an evergreen kind of content that will be useful to your readers no matter your niche or industry. It’s also very wide and therefore can be a great source of numerous blog ideas spread throughout time. This is because people are busier than ever and are constantly looking for how to do more with less time. As a consequence, you can give fresh tips or tricks to help people utilize their time better.
16. Upcoming Events
There’s always an upcoming event somewhere and if you look around your industry you just might find an event that you can blog about. Could be a meet and greet, a product launch, a book signing, or something that would be of interest to your readers. Just blog about it.
17. Create Lists
Lists are another very popular blog idea among bloggers. This is because people like quick analyses of lists of things or places in a straightforward and organized way. What you’re reading now is a list! Putting together a list of items within your industry is a guaranteed attraction for your blog. E.g. top ten holiday destinations and so on.
18. Infographics
Out in this content jungle people are always looking for a way to improve their blogs. If you can compile some accurate and relevant infographics about your industry, you’ll be a go-to source of information. You can use some appealing visuals for your infographics having in mind that visuals must always be incorporated into your blog content as mentioned above.
If you’re not good at creating such visuals you can get someone to do it for you because of the possibility that other bloggers will use your statistics for their own content, and they will require giving you the credit. This will be a great boost for your ranking and traffic.
19. Create a Series
Each industry has some topics that can’t be wrapped up in a single post even if it was made as a long-form type, they then must be broken down into a series. You can also create a monthly feature that can run on specific themes or topics. Thus, once you come up with such a feature it will be easier to get blog topic ideas.
20. Blog About a Customer Success Story
Every now and then you’ll meet a very happy reader or customer who will contact you to express satisfaction and appreciation in what you do. When it happens, engage them further and find out if they would like to be featured in your blog.
For a good impact of your blog, describe the reason or problem your reader or customer had, that led them to your blog and explain how this problem was resolved thanks to your blog. This blog idea will seriously boost your engagement rate.
21. What’s the Best Advice You’ve Ever Received?
Everyone that’s interested in your blog content would be interested in something that earned you success. Share the best advice you’ve ever been given and tell your readers how this changed your life or career. Whether it’s blogging advice or just business advice, sharing this wisdom with your readers is always a welcome blog idea.
22. Talk About Your Courses
Most people generally support brands that put their weight behind worthy causes because they’re naturally appealed to by the good in people. Therefore, sharing about your contribution to these communities can grow your readership. This can make for great blog ideas that can keep featuring every once in a while.
23. Controversy or Concern?
There is no industry to lack controversy. These make for rich blog topic ideas. Staying neutral or positive sounds like the easiest and safest bet but calling out brands or people may spark healthy conversations that may draw readers into it. However, it may bring you unpleasant consequences that could turn some people away. So, it’s at your own discretion, after all, most of these large and popular brands were built on controversy.
24. Share a Behind the Scene Content
As said earlier, people are naturally curious about how other people live. Thus, you can offer your audience a sneak peek of what goes on behind the scenes in your personal life outside of content creation.
25. Share Your Challenge and Videos or Images of Progress
Challenge yourself to do something spectacular and document it for your audience to keep track of. This will make for great blog ideas based on each new record you set and the challenges you face while trying to achieve it. It’s also a very inspiring type of content that will keep your audience glued and coming back to keep up with the progress.
Source: YouTube
26. Talk about Sports Within Your Niche
Fitness is never going to go away, and it makes for very useful blog post ideas. You can talk about sports that can boost skills within your niche. For instance, some photography or travel bloggers love to hike. Explain how this can boost their photo-taking skills.
27. Compile a List of Top Social Media Posts by Industry Pros
Some of the best blog post ideas come free of charge from social media. Some great people share some amazing nuggets of wisdom on their social media pages, you can bookmark the ones that strike and sit in longer with you and later compile them to create a wisdom-filled post.
28. Tell Your Readers How to Improve Their Health at Work
You spend a lot of your time at work, and most of your readers too. Most people, in general, spend a good chunk of their day staring at screens, and in the long run, this unavoidable sitting habit can be detrimental to someone’s health. In your blog, you can suggest them ways they can engage in healthy activities during their breaks to give their backs and eyes some exercise. Make sure your content is backed by scientific research.
29. Ask Me Anything
This is one of the most liked blog topic ideas for blog readers on the internet. You can invite your readers to send in questions that they’re curious about, and then make it as real or as raw as possible. Don’t try to sound like a perfect human being, people love real grounded content that they can relate to.
30. Real Everyday Struggles of Running Your Business
Some brands love to portray a glamorous lifestyle and like to show how smooth and organized their businesses are, but by now everyone knows that true success doesn’t come easy. And again, people are tired of hearing success stories, what they want to hear is how you failed, and how you got back up. This realism makes for great blog ideas, the very kind that people need for inspiration.
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31. What Are Your Favorite Apps, Tools, or Websites?
The competition out there is stiff, and every businessperson out there is looking for ways to have an advantage over their competitors. Share with your readers the tools that give you that edge. Share about the apps or sites or strategies that help you ace your game. You’ll make very happy many readers.
32. Give Tips on Networking within Your Industry
The millennials use up so much of their time on the internet and this has seriously affected their ability to develop healthy social and interpersonal skills. Thus, when it comes to actual interactions, they find themselves unable to mingle freely with others and this eventually affects their professional connections. You can create a number of such blog post ideas offering them tips on how to develop these important skills.
33. Create a Glossary
Most people have a tendency to leave your page entirely after they realize they can’t understand some terms. Alienating your readers is not something you want. A glossary will give them a chance to feel like they’re becoming experts in the niche and they will want to come back for more of this feeling.
34. List Your Top Influencers
Influencers would be fellow bloggers, everyday people, journalists, consultants, and so on. They are people that command a great following and are popularly used to help boost a brand’s credibility. They are always defined by their various niches. You can use some free internet tools available to identify the ones in your industry and list them down for your readers. This will be great for your blog traffic.
35. How to Relax from Overworking
This is one valuable blog idea thanks to the obvious reason that most people overwork in a bid to find a balance between their personal life and professional life. Others even add a side hustle to this blend and that leaves no time for relaxation. You can share the most practical relaxation tips with your readers; you can research such ideas that may range from massages to cookery or even listening to music.
36. Which Technological Advancements Are Shaping Your Industry’s Future?
Magnificent stuff is happening in the tech world every passing day and the impact cannot go unnoticed. So, which technological developments are shaking up things in your industry and how are they changing things? Put your thoughts together and create a few predictions that your readers may be interested in.
37. Give Backstories
People love to hear about the failures, frustrations, and disappointments that successful people had to go through before they rose to fame. You can look through a few of the most successful and relevant people in your industry and do a background check of their previous life and share these backstories with your readers. This will make for great blog content and at the same time motivate them to get through tough times.
38. Highlight Your Loyal Readers/Customers
If you did something right and earned yourself a passionate loyal customer or reader that always responds to your CTA, then shine the spotlight on them. These customer-centric blog ideas always create a win-win situation for you and your audience. Such a move would increase engagement and inspire your customers to do more, they would know that you notice and value them.
39. What Books Can They Read?
What books have you been reading, that you think might be of interest to your readers? This is not about book reviews, this is just hinting to your readers about amazing books that have been insightful to you and that you feel will inspire them. They could be within your niche or general things that can apply to any human.
40. List of People That You Look Up to in Your Field
You probably (or must) have a few people that you feel are always making the right moves. It could be within your industry or even out of your industry, but their impact can be applied in any field. Share the lessons that you take home from their life experience, etc. This will make for inspirational blog post ideas.
41. Create a Dos and Don’ts Blog
Every growth journey, whether personal or business, is littered with obstacles that may not be obvious to many. You can highlight some of these obstacles and the dos and don’ts in dealing with them. Detail all the possible risks and opportunities that they may need to know. These heads-up type of blog ideas are always appreciated by readers who are keen not to sabotage their career growth.
42. Draft Them Emails
You have a knack for writing; most of your readers may not have it. Do them a favor and draft some templates for the common emails you’re always sending. This will be very handy since emails are today’s primary means of official communication. You probably send a few emails daily. Compile resourceful templates for them and then post and wait for endless thank you note in your comments.
Source: YouTube
43. Share Your Best Podcasts
Podcasts are massively growing in popularity, it’s the latest easy medium for people and professionals alike to learn new things while either driving somewhere, cooking, or even working out. They’re very useful because they can listen while doing something else.
So, which ones are you listening to now? Pick several, especially the ones that would be valuable to your readers, and say something about them without spoiling them. This would be another source of powerful blog post ideas.
44. Is There Anything You’d Like to Change in Your Industry?
Throughout your career, there must have been things that you wish were different. You’ve probably wished that you somehow would be able to improve on some of them, what ideas did you have? Float them to your readers and see what they think, you never know just what you might be able to achieve beyond getting great blog ideas.
45. Tough Times Don’t Last
The whole world is going through tough times, in 2020, Covid19 was wreaking havoc all over and people were feeling the effects of struggling economic times. People are going through fatigue, stress, and depression due to immense losses being experienced all over. Gather some realistic tips and advice in a series of blog topic ideas that would help your readers on a personal level, business level, and even generally as humans.
46. Be Humble, Be Patient
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, these skills are of absolute must-have for anyone. We live in times of instant messaging, instant food, and instant everything, well almost. And what this instant gratification is doing is raising a generation of impatient people, who consider it’s their right to get things done when they want. Enlighten your readers on the benefits of patience, and how it’s related to humility, and guide them using facts on how these skills can be acquired and how they’re useful for their personal and career growth.
47. Break Large Tasks into Smaller Chunks
A million miles starts with one step. When handling massive tasks, it becomes easier and more manageable if you break them into more achievable and less stressful steps. Talk about this to your readers and give them possible guidelines through a feature or series of blog post ideas showing how they might use to break down their targets into easier quick ones.
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48. Unplug from All Things Internet
The internet is extremely useful. However it’s often abused through extreme use that leads to addiction, and this is enabled by things like social media. Social media can cause great anxiety and lead to depression.
And since it’s hard to separate social media from the internet, then offer them advice on how they can keep away from the internet for a couple of hours a day or every other day.
Create a series of blog ideas highlighting some activities that would help them stay away from the screens while utilizing their time in healthier and fun activities.
49. Therapy Is for Everyone
Most people think therapy is for mentally unstable people, however, therapy is great for everybody whether going through emotionally disturbing times or not. The blog post ideas on this topic can discuss the benefits of therapy in relation to your readers’ profession, personal relationships, and so forth.
50. Best Video and Photo Editing Apps for Your Smartphones
Most smartphone users love selfies, and there is a myriad of photo editing apps out there with millions of filters. You can research the best based on experts as well as the ones you’ve tried and make a neat list of reviews that would be of great help to your audience.
Tips on Creating Brilliant Content That Will Earn You Traffic
As you beat yourself up with questions on how to come up with blog ideas, you must not forget that they can’t ride on their own; they need some tweaking in order to gain the engagement and earn you the traffic that you’re looking for. Here are some tips that can push your content far:
a. Create Evergreen Content
This is a blog topic that will remain relevant to your customers or readers at any given time. It’s a solution to an ongoing problem. Give them content that will be relevant even five years from today. For instance, “how to boil an egg” or “how to lose weight” are simple examples of evergreen blog topic ideas.
These kinds of content are very important because it means you’ll not have to keep updating them often and this will save you time. They are a great source of organic traffic because they will always be relevant. So, as you consider good blog topic ideas, pick evergreen ones.
b. Catchy Headlines
Make your readers want to hear more. That’s the whole statement. Think of your headline as a quick opportunity to make a quick pitch to someone that’s so difficult to meet, your two seconds must leave them curious to hear more. Consequently, if you do it right then you earn an appointment, if you get your headline right, your readers will want more. Thus, your headline must:
· Offer a hint of what your whole blog is about
· Incite the reader to skim the first paragraphs.
It needs to be magnetic. This can be achieved by the use of emotional words; people are always drawn by emotions.
c. Give a Compelling Lead
Your first sentence or paragraph must compel your visitors to read the next one and draw them in as much as you can. Don’t take ages to land the plane. Ensure there are plenty of build-ups to make the readers want to know more about the blog topic ideas you’re presenting to them until they get to the understanding point.
Use the strategies discussed above to understand your readers’ issues and base these compelling leads straight on their solutions.
d. Use Subheads
You need subheads for three reasons:
i. They have a more visually appealing look on your page
ii. They help your reader head straight to the important part if they don’t have time to read the whole article
iii. They boost SEO
Using long never-ending pages is a complete turnoff to most readers. Break them with graphics or use subheads or both. Subheads are also very useful for the reader who wants to jump back to a specific point that they read previously. Using descriptive words and phrases in your subheads will most likely boost SEO.
e. Engaging and Informative Body
This is the meat and potatoes of your blog topic ideas. It varies in countless ways, but if you want to establish your authority then your content MUST be able to do it. If you’re trying to build a personal relationship with your audience, then the blog must be written in a manner to achieve exactly that. The trick is in your goal, what do you want to achieve with your content?
If you explain your blog topic idea properly, Google will pick up what you’re trying to say and rank you accordingly, even without the robotic keywords.
Graphics are important in illustrating different ideas within your blog, they also do a good job of breaking the text as mentioned above. Visuals are great for promoting your content on social media. And as you may be aware, Google tracks the time spent on your blog pages. Thus, relevant, fun, and excellent graphics, color scheme, and typography encourage your readers to stick around longer. And you need that.
Almost every article written on the internet must have some type of call-to-action. The action you want your visitors to take is dependent on the goal and purpose of your content. Some want it to be shared, others want a comment, a subscription, or learn more, and others might want a sale. It varies hugely. Decide on what CTA you want your readers to take, just one per blog topic idea. And then make it clear and encouraging to your readers to make the move.
h. Use Relevant Internal Links
One main goal of a blogger is to have his readers stick around longer. Advertise your own content within your blog by linking this content to your newer or latest content. Internal links are also good for SEO since they increase the number of times and pages per visit each time a visitor is on your site. So, for effectiveness ensure that the link is as relevant as possible to the person reading your blog topic ideas.
i. Use Bullet Points
People have a tendency to just skim through content before they decide whether to read or not because when they get to your page, there’s usually specific information they’re looking for. This requires you to highlight all the valuable information to help them quickly realize that your post is just what they were looking for.
So, besides the subheadings mentioned above, bullets are another key element that helps spoon-feed your page visitors making them happy and willing to come back for more.
j. An Elaborate Metadata Description
If you’re new to blogging or have been blogging without necessarily having a marketing team, then coming up with a meta description may be a task. The meta description appears underneath your headline on a search result page and summarizes your blog posts’ content. It usually gives a searcher the succinct details of your blog post ideas. So, you need it to work properly, here is how to do that:
· Use keywords that are relevant to your blog topic ideas
· Keep the characters under 160
· Don’t overdo it with extra descriptive words
· Provide a brief description of the things that’ll benefit the reader
· Don’t use promotional information
Did you get any new ideas? There’s no perfect idea but all the above blogs’ post ideas are better than no idea. With the above bonus content strategies coupled with the elements of an effective blog given here, you’re well on your way to increased blog traffic with a very engaged target audience. It’s also obvious that your audiences are the primary source of great and relevant blog ideas. Thus, go ahead and get blogging.
The content strategy is like a magnetic compass, a roadmap, and a framework that you create to show you what content to create, for who, how, and when to reach your business goals. If you are wondering what are the steps of a content strategy you will find them below.
The steps of a content strategy are:
Set your goals
Define your Unique Selling Proposition (or what’s your distinctive element)
Run a content audit
Define your buyer persona(s)
Define the metrics of your content strategy
Create your content plan
Create your content promotion plan
Define the needed budget
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
Thus each company needs to develop a marketing strategy, that includes a content strategy.
If still in doubt that a documented content strategy is an absolute must here are some statistics. Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs in their research for 2023 called B2B Content Marketing 2023: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, found out that businesses with a documented content strategy slightly remains constant over the past years at about 40%. And as a direct consequence, just about 29% of the surveilled organizations consider themselves very successful with their content marketing.
Source: ContentMarketingInstitute
The purpose of this post is to define what are the steps of a content strategy framework based on which you can easily design your own content strategy. To face and beat the competition you absolutely need a solid content strategy in place. Check this simple content strategy template. Or if you feel you need help, hire a content strategist.
Sounds interesting?
Keep reading:
Now, conceiving content strategies is not as simple as it might seem, it implies time and sustained effort, Convince & Convert sustains that they need about 60 days to create a content strategy.
A content strategy gives directions and ensures that your resources, time, and money are spent for the purpose of reaching your own goals and expanding your business. This strategy will create the conditions to improve the distribution of your content, extend your audience, and attract new leads and customers.
In short, what are the steps of a content strategy? Here is the process to create it:
1. Starting Point: Set Your Goals.
What’s the aim of your content marketing? Knowing your why before starting will ease your job. This target, this purpose is the fundament of your strategy. Your goal might be:
90% of the online content was created in the past two years. Every minute in the world is produced and consumed a huge amount of content, see the infographic below.
In this overwhelming ocean of content, which will be your competitive advantage? What will differentiate your content from that produced by your competition? Why would your target audience read your content? This is a rough challenge for content marketers, how do you stand out?
Before starting any strategy, an analysis or an audit of the existing situation is needed. Check on your past content creation efforts and see what results you had, which of your content was the most successful, what format it had, etc.
Go to check your Google Analytics and run an audit via a specialized tool like Ahrefs.
Analyze the performance of your content using BuzzSumo.
Profit on existing tools and verify how you stand with your marketing efforts, use a site grader like HubSpot’s Website Grader for example. Website Grader appreciates and grades the principal areas of your marketing, from blogs, and SEO to social media, and provides a detailed report with strengths and weak points and recommendations for improvement. The tool shows you some ways to improve your site’s SEO and may offer some interesting content ideas.
Take a look at the content produced by competition and influencers in your industry and check on its performance. Count on Ahrefs or SEMrush to reveal some insights.
4. Define the Metrics for Your Content Strategy
The metrics you will use to measure the results of your content strategy should be in accordance with your goals. If your goal refers to “leads” measure that, if your goal is “views”, again track that. If your scope is leads, then likes and social shares might not be exactly relevant.
The objective settled will indicate who’s your target audience, your buyer personas, and the persons who are you writing for. You need to clearly establish and define who is your buyer personas, which are their characteristics (demographics, interests, scope, fears, etc), what problem they have and how can you solve it.
Use data mining, social media channels, and search to gather information and conduct face-to-face interviews with your clients. Also, ask your sales and customer service personnel for help in defining the buyer personas. The better you know them, the better content you can produce.
Knowing your audience’s needs and interests provides you with a valuable edge. Search for the keywords that your audience uses to ask her questions and use them in your content. Use tools like Answer the Public, Quora, Reddit,or Twitter Audience Insights to discover what are your readers searching and asking about and create the corresponding content.
Gather these needs for each persona and buyer’s journey stage and create a pool of content that is necessary.
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6. The Core Part of Your Content Strategy Is the Content Execution Plan
By now you should know who you write for and what you should write. It’s time to brainstorm and establish the type of content needed for each buyer persona and journey stage. Answer the questions of each persona in each of the buyer’s journey stages. The challenge is to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.
Map content towards your Buyer Persona and Buyer’s Journey. Source: HubSpot
Generate valuable content ideas
Finding content ideas might be tricky sometimes. To get some inspiration and new suggestions check on some existing content generation tools that might be of help:
* BuzzSumo: From such a list, BuzzSumo could not be excluded. It rates popular content, displaying social shares and likes. So, you will have a good idea of content topics that have great chances to become popular.
* HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator: Insert keywords, topics, or general terms, and after the tool makes its magic you will receive a list with blog post ideas.
* Feedly: A RSS feed that keeps you up to date with trends in your industry and can for sure drop you some juicy content ideas.
* Topic’s Blog Idea Generator: Insert Keyword, Get unique headlines and descriptions that are generated by GPT-3. Rank higher with unique content ideas!
Pick the content format to be used
Content can be presented for consumption in various forms. Nowadays the reader is in a continuous hurry and the content should be presented in an attractive form and easy to digest. This is the recipe to grab and keep his attention. Some of the most popular content formats to include in your content strategy are:
Blog posts
The most used and common format of the content is the blog post. To attract a new audience and keep your readers returning, you have to constantly publish new content. Posts, like all the content otherwise, should provide value for your readers and respond to their interests. From an SEO point of view, longer blog posts of more than 1000 words are preferred, but it’s better to keep an eye on your target audience’s preferences.
Ebooks
Ebooks are used in general as lead magnets. Generally, they are a long piece of content that potential clients download after completing a form with their contact details. Ebooks have a smaller publishing frequency and contain more in-depth knowledge relative to a certain subject.
Infographics are by far my favorites, especially when they have an elegant design. They are very attractive and visually appealing and extremely useful when you want to present a set of data in a simple, interesting way.
Templates
Templates are another very useful content format, as they provide high value for your readers and leads for your business. Templates are shortcuts that support your readers in their endeavors and save time for them.
Videos
Video is a type of format that rise significantly in the preferences of content consumers. They tend to be more engaging and are more shareable across social platforms. Producing them might require supplementary resources, but they are more likely to get more shares than other formats.
Podcasts
The podcast is an alternative format for persons that don’t like reading or don’t have the necessary time. As the number of podcast listeners is growing, this is a format to be considered if interesting interviews/talks can be arranged.
These are just the most frequent content formats, but there is a myriad of other format types. Here is a comprehensive list:
Content formats synthesis. Source: HubSpot
Then organize and put together a calendar for the content that will be created daily, weekly, and monthly.
Don’t forget to use call-to-actions to help your clients gauge what you want them to do next.
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
To cite Jonathan Perelman “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.” You might have the greatest content in the world, but if no one sees it, it’s useless. So, just creating content of high quality is not enough, you should spread the word too and share it.
Draw a detailed action plan, with steps and timelines, to establish which content will be published where, and when. Optimize your content before publishing it on your site and on social media.
Insert in your content strategy paid ads campaigns if your budget allows it. If properly managed, this is a great way to increase your traffic.
Create connections with authoritative sites and influencers in your industry to boost your traffic and generate leads.
Schedule original content for guest posts.
8. Establish a Budget
Budget is an essential point that cannot be absent from any content strategy. According to the Content Marketing Institute study for 2023, just half of B2B marketers expect to increase their marketing spending for the next year compared with 66% in 2022.
So, establish how much you can spend on content marketing. Include content creation expenses, promotion expenses, paid ads, and reserve funds for visual content.
Creating and implementing a successful content strategy that brings results takes time and effort. But you have listed above what are the steps of a content strategy to put in place a solid foundation.
Frequent Asked Questions
What is the purpose of content strategy?
The main purpose of content strategy is to create the right content to attract the right buyer persona at the right moment of its buyer journey. Its mission is to create valuable content that solves the clients’ problems while attracting them to buy the business’s products and services.
Is content strategy hard?
Yes, content strategy is a complex task. It is for sure hard for someone that is just starting with this activity or for a business owner that sees it as just another burden on his plate and has no idea how to solve it. Content strategy involves a variety of skills like content marketing, content writing, SEO, social media marketing, researching, and budgeting among others.
What are content strategy deliverables?
The content strategy deliverables are the buyer personas, the buyer’s journey, content audit, keyword research, content mapping, competitor analysis, editorial flow, editorial calendar, content distribution plan, and budget.
What is the best content strategy?
Since content strategy is tailored for each business, there is no one-fits-all strategy. Each business will have its own definition of the best content strategy. But in general, the best content strategy is the one that helps the business reach its goals in the defined timeframe with the minimum costs.
What is 3H content strategy?
The 3H concept – Hero, Hub, Hygiene – was initially launched by Google as a strategy for YouTube, but it’s perfectly applicable to any content strategy. The 3H content strategy is a model that helps businesses create helpful content, a cohesive and authoritative brand, and ultimately attract sales. It involves creating three types of content – hero (outstanding content pieces like case studies, white papers, or webinars), hub (pillar content like ebooks or long-form blog posts), and hygiene (short supporting articles).
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