Content Marketing (Book 1 - Introduction) (Digital Marketing) by shashi shekhar - HTML preview

Content Marketing

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.

When done correctly, this helps create a relationship with your audience, which leads to trust. And when your audience members trust you, they’re more willing to do business with you when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.

To communicate with your audience, you need to produce content. Content has the very important job of pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another.

Your content should attract the right people to your site, engage those people into leads, and nurture and help close them into customers. But it doesn’t stop there. Your content should also delight your customers and turn them into promoters of your brand.

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In a nutshell, content marketing is the art of communicating with your prospects and customers without having to sell to them. As opposed to advertising your products and services, you’re creating helpful, engaging content that your prospects and customers can enjoy and learn from.

The Power of Storytelling

Why your business needs a story

Everyone loves a great story. People want to feel connected to a group, to belong. Stories give us a reason to communicate and relate. Stories are stimulating and give us something to believe in. Stories make us feel better, smarter, safer, or even loved.

Business storytelling is similar. It’s about creating alignment between your business and your prospects and customers.

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But telling your brand’s story is more than what you write on your website, your blog, or even social media. It’s your value, your mission, and how you communicate them consistently to your audience — wherever they are.

Four million search queries per minute? Wow! That’s a lot of people looking for answers.

But, capturing their attention can be difficult. In just one minute...

● 1,388 blog posts are published.

● Facebook users share 2.5 million pieces of content.

● YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video content.

● Twitter users tweet nearly 300,000 times.

● And Instagram users post nearly 220,000 new photos.

All in this one minute.

Content marketers are constantly battling for the attention of their prospects and customers. To help ensure that you’re heard, you need to be genuine and tell a story that appeals to your audience.

Your goal is to make a human connection. It’s about resonating with people, people that need your help or guidance.

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In the world of business, a story helps you create contrast between choices. Stories will help your prospects make sense of decisions they’re about to make, whether it’s deciding on a needed product or service or making a purchase.

Chances are, you’re not the only business that does what you do. To survive in today’s crowded informational marketplace, you need to stand out. This is where your business’

story comes in.

Stories can make your prospects the main characters, and even change the way they think and feel.

And storytelling is used in all formats of content. It isn’t just used in a lengthy ebook. You can use storytelling in blogs, email, videos, case studies, guides. The list goes on and on.

So, what’s NOT a story?

A story is not just your history. A story is why you’re doing what you’re doing, and telling it in a way that appeals to your audience.

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It’s also not cliche, it’s not what everyone else is saying. Sure you may think you provide the best customer service within your industry, but that’s not your story. Storytelling is about standing out, not blending in.

Many companies play it safe and use data and ROI to attract customers, which is important.

But logic very rarely is appealing and remembered. On the other hand, emotion gets remembered. Emotion gets shared. And it’s not by saying we’re the best. It’s more about appealing to the emotional side of your prospects and customers than the logic of what you do.

Stories are how audiences remember. And to help make your audience remember you need to stand out by telling a story with the right context, and create contrast by being consistent and authentic and being conversational to elicit emotion from a specific audience.

As a content marketer, use stories to better engage and, most importantly, teach your audience.

What do you need to tell a great story

Okay, so now that you know WHY your business needs a story, what do you need to tell a GREAT story?

First, it’s all about how you frame the story that you are trying to tell. You need to keep the audience and tone in mind, but to really help nail your branding story, you need to understand the golden circle.

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Yes, the golden circle. Sounds mysterious right?

Simon SInek says, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it.” Simon Sinek is an ex-advertising executive and author who is best known for his concept - Golden Circle.

The Golden Circle looks like this and is all about starting with WHY.

According to Sinek, most people communicate by starting with the “what” they do aspect and eventually work their way back to talk about “how” and “why” they do what they do.

But companies that are universally identified as unique and successful, think Apple or Google, communicate with an “inside-out” type of thinking. They start with the why and only then do they move on to talk about the how and what portions of what they do.

To keep it simple - WHY is Why are you doing what you’re doing? HOW is How will this help your audience? And WHAT is What are you offering?

So, why does the order in which you communicate the story matter? It has to do with the parts of the brain.

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When you’re talking about what you do, you’re speaking to an analytical part of the brain.

But when you talk about the why and how, you’re communicating with feelings and dealing with human behavior. And remember, storytelling is all about making that connection.

When you’re planning a story, take time to think through the way you’re choosing to tell it.

To really connect with your prospects and customers, express the why of your story. Tap into the emotional side of things and begin to educate or build awareness from there.

The Golden Circle can help you create your mission statement and set the tone for all of your content.

Now that you understand the ordering of a story, it’s also important to discuss the elements that make up that story.

Regardless of the story you’re trying to tell and how you’re trying to tell it, storytelling has three essential elements - characters, conflict, and resolution. But how do these three parts relate to storytelling and content marketing?

Let’s start first with characters.

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With any good story, there will be characters. Every story revolves around at least one character. You need to introduce the people involved. With content marketing, the people that are involved are your readers. Your audience. Storytelling can’t happen without valuing and understanding your audience. You should always be listening and responding to your audience’s wants and needs.

If potential customers can get the answers to their questions AND see themselves as characters in your story, they’ll be more likely to use your product or service and experience the happy ending you offer.

Take a second. Think about a piece of content (maybe a blog post) that you found helpful and really resonated with you.

Are you thinking about it?

Okay.

Why is this piece of content so memorable?

There may be a few reasons why, but some of the most memorable pieces of content (or stories) stick in an audience’s mind because of the characters involved.

For the content that you were thinking of, were you the character in the story? Did it resonate with you because you felt like it answered a question? Helped solve a problem?

The character is the connection between you, the storyteller, and your audience.

To make sure you’re focusing on the right characters, start with your buyer persona. This semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer can help guide you to understanding the goals and challenges that your character will face.

Is your buyer persona a full-time parent? Well, you might know that time is not on their side and they would describe themselves as busy. You should keep that in mind for your storytelling.

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Or is your buyer persona a business owner who is looking for a better way to communicate between her team members? She’ll likely see herself as the character if a team is used within your stories.

Or maybe you’re an educational organization looking to attract students who want to take online courses. They might want to read about success stories of students that are just like them.

No matter who your buyer persona is, the art of storytelling is making sure you empathize and relate to your audience.

While keeping your buyer persona in mind, you should also determine the point of view that your story will have. Will it be first-person, second-person, or third-person? And there’s no right or wrong option. It will depend on your buyer persona, the story you’re trying to tell, and the format of that story.

From a first-person point of view, this is when the character is yourself. When you use “I saw this” or “I learned that”. Using this type of language in storytelling is more confessional.

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It can help you establish a personal connection with the reader. You can use this to build authority. Try using first-person when there is a known person, an author, behind the content. This could work for a blog post, video, or even an ebook if the author is noted.

As for second-person, the character in this point of view is your audience. “You will see” or

“you will learn”. When using “you” language, you need to really understand your buyer personas. Make it personal for them by knowing their pain points. Their goals. Tell the story in a way that shows empathy.

Lastly, can’t forget about third-person. This is the “he said” and “she said” type of language.

Think back to that buyer persona example for an educational organization. That buyer persona could potentially benefit from a story done in the third-person. Case studies about your customers are a good example of using third-person. Stories for this point of view can be both fictional or nonfictional.

Again, there’s no right or wrong when it comes to point of view. Keep your buyer personas top of mind and think through what will work best for them.

You may have noticed that all content is in second-person or “you” point of view. That’s on purpose. Since this is YOUR training and this content contains key takeaways you should learn and act upon, it’s important that these videos speak directly to the intended audience

- and that’s YOU!

Most importantly, when it comes to point of view, decide on one and keep it consistent.

Consistency is key when it comes to content and storytelling.

Once you have an idea of who the character will be for your story, it’s important to understand the conflict.

The conflict is the lesson in how the character transforms through challenge. An emphasis on lessons. Remember, when it comes to content marketing and storytelling the power is in what you are teaching.

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Conflict helps build developmental and emotional dynamics. It helps make a connection between two entities, and human-to-human connections are the foundation for a successful business.

Remember, you’re dealing with people, not machines–your company is providing answers, relieving stress, creating happiness, and making life easier for the end user. The revenue your company makes comes from a well-thought business plan and customers who believe in you and what you do.

If your story lacks conflict, then you’re probably not telling a story. Instead you’re telling a pitch, tagline, unique selling point, or a plain statement. This approach won’t resonate with your audience, and from a content marketing perspective, it won’t get you views, shares, conversions, or customers.

Conflict doesn’t mean that you should be overly dramatic. Be genuine. The conflict should drive the overall story and affect how characters react. This is what should inspire your audience to engage.

Make sure the conflict fits your prospect’s problems, needs, or stage of the buyer’s journey.

If it doesn’t fit, why would they be interested in reading the story? How will they connect?

As important as it is to understand your buyer personas, it’s equally as important to understand their buyer’s journey and the conflicts that they face at each stage.

What problems are your buyer personas facing in the awareness stage? Those are the conflicts that should be in your story.

Spend the time outlining the problems, solutions, and products or services for the different buyer’s journey stages and you’ll have a better idea of the conflicts you can use in your content.

Last element is resolution.

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Where there’s conflict, your audience will naturally want some sort of resolution. But what happens next? How does the story end? How did the character or characters change?

It doesn’t always have to be a happy ending. Every good story has a closing, so the idea of the resolution is to provide context and emotion for the audience to relate and process the story.

The resolution should wrap up the story but should also clearly call your audience to action. It fulfills the purpose behind the story.

For content marketing, a resolution could be next steps or even a call-to-action for more content. Either way, don’t leave them hanging.

Let’s take this storytelling framework and apply it to a business.

Let’s choose a market that’s saturated with competition, like shoes.

TOMS is a slip-on shoe company that focuses on spreading social good; with every product you purchase, TOMS will donate a pair of shoes to a child in need. They’ve made this a part 12 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

of their brand identity, by creating a slogan that reinforces who they are and what they’re about, “The One for One Company”.

Now let’s break TOMS’ story down into three parts.

Everyone needs shoes to protect their feet.

But not everyone has the money to pay for shoes. While traveling in Argentina in 2006, TOMS Founder Blake Mycoskie (the story’s character) witnessed the hardships faced by children growing up without shoes.

TOMS is striking an emotional chord with their audience by raising awareness for an issue that they’re passionate about.

The best part is how TOMS ties it all together with their resolution, if you buy a pair of their shoes, then they’ll donate a pair of shoes to a child in need.

Now that’s a powerful story. And while TOMS started off as a shoe retailer, they’ve created a much bigger, more emotional feel-good story that makes their customers feel like they’re changing the world, by simply purchasing a pair of shoes from them. And just how much success has this brought TOMS? Well, they’ve sold over 60 million pairs of shoes, which means they’ve also given over 60 million pairs of shoes to children in need.

Beyond the three elements that make up the story, there are also some best practices to follow and keep in mind.

To help make your story great and resonate with your audience you need to: Use content to create emotional appeal, be consistent and authentic, and keep the story clear and concise.

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First, using content to create emotional appeal. Your story needs emotional resonance.

Emotion is what will give your story power. Make sure to give your story’s character some emotion. Think about the emotional response that you’re looking to get from the reader. Is it fear, survival, guilt, energized, amusement, maybe even hope?

To get buy-in from your audience you need to elicit emotion. What’s the difference between your story and someone else’s story? What’s the mission or purpose of your company? Why should your audience care?

Next, your story needs to be consistent and authentic. It’s not just what you say through your website or content, but the entire experience that your company has to offer based on your buyer personas needs.

David Ogilvy, one of the most well-known advertisers of all time, once said, “tell the truth, but make it fascinating.” You can make any industry, any product, or any service stand out and that’s done with providing an experience.

And lastly, you keep things clear and concise.

Everyone can benefit from cutting down a lengthy story. Ever had a friend tell you a story that took them 10 minutes to get through but probably could have taken them under a 14 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

minute? Even long stories benefit when you whittle them down to just the most important parts.

And be specific. You’re not trying to speak to everyone. Your story and experience should not be a one-size-fits-all approach. Communicating with the correct audience niche, and creating that need is just as important, if not more important, than the story you’re telling.

So remember, create emotional appeal, be consistent and authentic, and keep the story clear and concise.

Before creating your story, plan out who the character is, the tone of voice you’ll be using, what is the conflict, and what is the resolution.

Business storytelling in action

There’s a lot of brands that are already doing storytelling and creating great stories. Let’s take a look at an example.

This is Wistia. Wistia provides professional video hosting with amazing viewer analytics, HD

video delivery, and marketing tools to help understand website visitors.

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For content, they create a whole bunch of fun and engaging educational videos. They also create other forms of content

- blog posts, guides, help articles, and webinars.

Now, think back to the golden circle. Starting with why.

Wistia’s purpose is to empower everybody to get more out of video. Of course, their product helps with this, but it only solves a small percentage.

All of their content and storytelling circles back to this purpose.

Let’s look at two pieces of content and see how they did with their storytelling.

They created this blog post: Improve Your Audio: How to Reduce Echo in Your Video Right from the title you can tell what the conflict is - reducing echo in video. A title isn’t always going to be about the conflict. Sometimes it might be the resolution and other times it might summarize what the blog post is all about.

But in this case, it’s the conflict.

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The blog post even starts out with “Bad sounding audio can ruin even the best of videos.”

Their buyer persona can instantly relate. They’re pulled into the conflict and now asking for more.

Let’s dig deeper. Who is the character? From the title it appears like the character will be the audience or the reader. Since it’s about improving YOUR audio in YOUR video.

As you’ll see, Wistia continues to use this point of view throughout the blog post.

And finally, the blog post provides the resolution. Step-by-step instructions on soundproofing for video.

The story is clear and concise and ties back to their purpose - empowering people to get more out of video.

They use language and a funny tone to stay consistent and authentic with their brand.

What’s the difference between Wistia telling you this information or finding some video on YouTube?

Wistia does a good job at eliciting emotion and really empathizing with their buyer persona.

They make the conflict appear as something that needs to be resolved but isn’t impossible to do. They teach while telling the story.

This is a simple piece of content, so how does this work for something that’s more long-form? You might find that for some of your content, you’ll be telling multiple stories within one.

Take this example: Hiring an in-house video producer. Another piece of content that Wistia created. Like the earlier example, you can tell what the overall conflict is.

But the more you look at the content, the more you’ll see that there are several different conflicts that come up because there are several different stories.

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Within this piece of content, all three points of views are used. Wistia talks about their own experience with this problem. They use first person to relate to the audience. To let a reader know, “hey. We’ve been there too!” As mentioned before, using first-person is a way of being confessional.

They use the second-person to describe next steps the reader can take to interviewing a video producer. And even use case studies to help get a third-person point of view.

What’s important to note is that within these smaller stories, Wistia is consistent with the point of view.

And like with all of their content, they keep the story clear and concise.

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Building a Content Creation Framework

Why does your business need a content creation framework?

A lot of work goes into creating a single piece of content: research, planning, editing, and more.

Then after the content’s done, there’s promotion work, reporting...the list goes on. As a content professional, you need to publish a lot of content for each of your buyer personas at different stages of the buyer’s journey.

This can feel laborious or complicated—especially if you're working solo.

But a content creation framework that’s repeatable, organized, and agile can make the content creation process smoother and more rewarding.

A content creation framework is a structure of processes for publishing content—from the beginning stages to post publication.

Are you thinking, “A framework for creating content? But won’t that hurt creativity?” No.

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With a framework in place, your team can foster creative ideas in an organized, scalable manner. A framework strikes that perfect balance between autonomous creativity and long-term content sustainability.

That’s a lot of moving parts! So to keep things organized, we have a framework. Let’s take a look.

The “Status” column reflects what stage in the creation process the blog post is in:

● Pending: The slot may be filled by an article, but the writer hasn’t confirmed yet.

● Confirmed: The slot has been filled with an article and confirmed by the writer.

● Submitted: The writer has submitted their article for editing.

● Scheduled: The editor has reviewed the article and scheduled it for publication.

● Published: The article is live.

Lastly, the “Editor” column lists the name of the person who’ll be editing each article. This way, the writer and editor can communicate before, during, or after the editing process to make sure everything’s in order for publication.

So that’s one example of what a content creation framework looks like for content in the short term, planned one month out. You also might want to create a long-term content creation framework, where you plan content up to a few months to a year in advance.

Why would you want to plan content this far ahead?

Well, you need to serve your audience’s needs and educate them over time depending on what they’re looking for.

On our team, we needed to

create content and publish it

quickly to align with product

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releases. So to make sure we could update our current articles and create new ones on time, I worked closely with our product team to keep track of all upcoming product changes and new releases. These were usually planned up to a few months—and sometimes a year—in advance. So we planned our content to align with those timelines.

We used Trello boards to keep track of how changes were moving through the product team’s pipeline. When a change was coming closer to launch, the technical writers had time to collect content for updating and write drafts of new content to educate users about the releases.

These releases also involved product announcements, blog posts, emails, and other forms of content to serve a variety of personas. So we all needed to work together and stick to our long-term content creation framework.

When you’re planning your content for a month or even a year in advance, remain flexible to account for the changes that will inevitably come up. Sometimes campaigns, timelines, and personas will need to be adjusted.

How to build a content creation framework

So, you want to create your content in a streamlined manner. Let’s jump into the five steps to building a content creation framework.

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1. Conceptualizing content

2. Planning a timeline

3. Creating a workflow

4. Reviewing and editing content

5. Organizing and storing content

When conceptualizing content, the first step is coming up with appropriate ideas for your content offers.

A content offer is something you create and publish in exchange for personal information like a name and email address.

Struggling to generate content ideas? Do some online research, like reading blogs related to your industry or checking out content marketing survey results. Another option is to write down frequently asked sales questions or important industry knowledge that would be helpful for your target market to know.

If you’re looking for a list of ways to generate meaningful content ideas, check out the resources section below.

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As you gather ideas, focus on creating content for every stage of the buyer’s journey—

awareness, consideration, and decision.

In the awareness stage, a prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. They’re doing research to more clearly understand, frame, and give a name to their problem. They’re looking for educational content to help them answer some of their questions and concerns—think blog posts, ebooks, social content, and how-to webinars.

In the consideration stage, a prospect has clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity. They’re committed to researching and understanding all available approaches and methods to solving their problem or opportunity. Create content that positions you as an expert in your industry. Demo videos, case studies, and FAQ articles are great resources to build relationships with readers and establish trust between your audience and your brand.

In the decision stage, a prospect has now decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. They’re compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their given solution strategy. They’re researching to trim down this long list into a short list and ultimately make a final purchase decision—and that final purchase decision could be YOU.

So provide them content such as free trials, consultations, and articles that provide education on your products or services.

Now, back to building a content creation framework.

Step two is planning a timeline. When putting together a timeline, keep in mind that you’ll want to maintain agility while still having time to execute on your initiatives.

When planning content creation over the span of a quarter, try to have at least two or three content offers you want to create, and organize your content by buyer’s journey stages.

Keep your goals in mind here. Is the focus for this quarter improving volume of leads? Is it increasing the close/won rate for your sales team? Is it growing blog traffic?

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Use your goals to determine what content you need to focus on. From there, map out what content you need and when it needs to be live. This will give you a sense of the resources you’ll need in-house to create this content yourself. You can also use your goals to decide if you need some external help from freelancers.

In addition to planning out your content offers, identify any company-wide initiatives that will need support from content over the next three months. Examples of additional content are posts on events that you’ll be attending, rebranding information, and new corporate partnerships.

The third step is creating a workflow. In the context of content creation, a workflow is an intuitive breakdown of the content creation work. It consists of the sequence of steps a piece of content moves through from its initial creation to publication.

Your workflow should clearly identify who will do what. It should also identify if outside influencers or freelancers will be contributing and, if so, in what capacity.

Because there are multiple components involved when creating a piece of content, you’ll want to get pretty granular with your steps—even if you’re a team of one. This way, as your content grows over time, you’ll have a clearly defined workflow to use when adding the resources you’ll need to create more content at a fast pace.

For example, instead of having written, edited, and published as the work stages for an ebook, you might have something like outline completed, first draft completed, editing completed, design and formatting completed, final draft completed, and published.

Here’s a pro tip: Think about how you created a piece of content in the past before you had a content creation framework. Consider what went well, what roadblocks you hit, and what you’ll need to work into your process to avoid those roadblocks the next time around.

Document your thoughts, and create a workflow based on that. You can always change your workflow steps as your content evolves.

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This brings us to the fourth step: reviewing and editing content. You need a reviewal system in place so that your content is accurate, well written, and aligned with your brand.

Depending on your team’s setup, this review process could involve working with an in-house or freelance editor and having an SEO specialist format and update the content.

In the review process, follow these seven best practices:

● Set clear expectations.

● Define roles in the reviewal process.

● Determine a timeline. • Use a style guide.

● Track edits.

● Manage progress.

● Optimize for search engines.

Let’s dive into each of these in more detail.

Set clear expectations: The reviewer should know what they’re looking for: grammatical errors, fact-checking, story gaps, wordsmithing, and more.

Define roles in the reviewal process: Each person should know what they need to do and when. Maybe you have a developmental editor looking at your content’s overall focus and structure before a copy editor goes in for more detailed edits. Or maybe you have a single editor reviewing everything. Whatever your team looks like, clearly defining who does what will eliminate chaos and keep things on track.

Determine a timeline. With so many people involved in publishing content, set due dates and a high-level timeline so that each person is held accountable for their contribution. In many content environments, one missed deadline affects everyone’s work. To keep your team agile and conscious of their deadlines, share a rough timeline with the team, get everyone’s buy-in, and then finalize it.

Use a style guide. Your content needs to be consistently authentic, well written, and aligned with your company’s brand—even among various writers with different writing styles, skill 25 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

levels, and voices. A style guide is that common thread all content reviewers can use so that their edits establish consistency across a diverse group of writers.

For information on how to create a style guide, check out the resources section below.

Moving on to the next best practice: Track edits. Whether you have one editor or multiple editors, have your content reviewers make suggestions by tracking changes as opposed to making edits directly. This way, the content creator knows where to make changes as opposed to figuring out what was altered.

Next, manage progress. Use some sort of document, like a project management software, to track progress. This document should reflect the roles, timeline, and deadlines you’ve determined for your reviewal process. Since you could have a team of people working together on a final product, tracking the reviewal progress provides transparency across the team and keeps all stakeholders on the same page. It also allows for agility so that you can remain flexible and adjust deadlines if need be.

Here’s a pro tip: If you’re looking for a place to start, consider using Trello. It’s free, and—

more importantly—Trello makes collaborating with others easy.

And finally, optimize for search engines. You put a lot of effort into creating your content, so you want your audience to find it in their web searches. After your content is created, do some spot edits to search engine optimize your content. This could involve swapping out some words for keywords or maybe having an SEO specialist optimize specific sections.

So that wraps up reviewal best practices.

The sixth step in building a content creation framework is organizing and storing content.

Once your content is done, store it in a centralized location where your team can access it—like Google Drive or Dropbox. If you have a content management system, also known as a CMS, then you could choose to store it there as well.

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Organizing your content in a way that’s easy to understand is critical for repurposing, reusing, or even finding that content down the line.

One way to organize your content is to develop a clear naming system. A sample system could include content format, buyer’s journey stage, campaign, and year.

For example, let’s say you developed an awareness stage ebook back in 2015 to support a campaign for a new product launch on rock climbing gear. Your name for this content offer could be ebook awareness-rock climbing gear-2015.

While you can choose a specific naming convention formula for hosting your files, the goal should be to easily access files when needed.

Keep in mind: Your content creation framework should always be evolving. Your business’s goals will vary from quarter to quarter and year to year, so your content creation framework should align with those changes. On top of that, content marketing is always changing. Stay up to date on industry trends and best practices so that you can incorporate them into your framework.

Determining the resources you’ll need for a content creation framework To build a framework for scalable and organized content creation, there are two main types of resources you’ll need: your team and your tools.

Let’s start with your team.

There are five primary types of responsibilities in content creation:

● Content management and strategy

● Writing

● Editing

● Designing

● Distributing

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First, let’s cover content management and strategy. This responsibility involves creating a long-term content plan, mapping it to the business needs, ensuring the other responsibilities are met, and analyzing the reports.

This person is the leader of the group and works with everyone involved so that things move along smoothly to the finish line. Most businesses hire a content marketing manager or content marketing strategist to fill this role.

The second responsibility is writing. Typically, a content writer or marketer will do the writing. While many businesses have niche or technical markets, the individuals writing your content don’t always have to be subject matter experts. Instead, much like a journalist, they can work with internal and external subject matter experts to create compelling and useful content. While many companies choose to write their content in-house, some choose to outsource that work. Writers from companies like Scripted or Upwork can create tailored content for your marketing campaigns.

And where there’s writing, there’s editing. Once content has been planned and created, it needs to be edited. Just because a piece of content has been created doesn’t mean it’s ready to be published. Editing ensures alignment with your business’s messaging, your target market’s needs, and the goals the content is meant to solve for. An in-house editor or freelance editor is perfect for this. But if you don’t have an editor, consider having a teammate with a knack for communication review your content. A fresh set of eyes and a different perspective can make your content stronger.

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Next is designing. Once the content has been written and edited, it needs to be packaged in a way that’s appealing to readers. Having an attractive, fluid format and design can make all the difference in getting someone to stay on your site and enjoy consuming your content.

Effective design also plays a huge role in information hierarchy. You need a high quality design to structure your content in a way that’s easy for readers to understand and navigate.

Think about it: Can you remember a time when you looked at a website or flyer and decided not to read it because it didn’t visually make sense?

In marketing, we use the term blink test to refer to the 3 to 5 seconds an average site visitor spends scanning a website visually and then deciding if they want to spend time looking through it. So make it easy for your audience to scan your content, pull out a few important details, and then engage further. A good designer can be the difference between a below average blink test pass rate and consistently getting people to stay on your site.

Try using tools like Canva to step up your content design. If you’re not able to do this work in-house, consider a freelancer.

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Finally, there’s distributing: A content distributor, also known as a social media coordinator or specialist, is responsible for bringing the content to market through a strategic promotion plan. They need to either create or coordinate the creation of promotional content, map it to the available channels, and schedule it for publication. They’re also the person responsible for analyzing the results of the campaign.

Depending on your team and business context, you might have one person fill multiple roles. Just make sure that person isn’t strapped with too much responsibility. Have a checks and balances system spread amongst multiple teammates. If your team members are already at full capacity, look into freelancers to pick up the additional work.

Here’s a pro tip: If you’re just getting started with building your team or looking for resources to help you complete a project, consider hiring a freelancer as your first team member. To learn more about the advantages of using freelancers as well as how to get started with hiring one, check out the resources section below.

So that covers your team. Now let’s talk about tools.

To build your content framework, you’ll need 3 main tools:

● CMS

● Analytics tools

● Planning and internal communication tools

A CMS is a tool for creating, editing, and publishing digital content. There are different types of content systems—such as HubSpot and WordPress—so you’ll need to identify what works best for your company’s needs. Whichever CMS you use, be sure you have the ability to edit your website, create and publish content for your blog and landing pages, and optimize content for search engines.

You’ll also need analytics tools. Use your analytics tools to understand the impact of your content on your business and identify opportunities for improvement.

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Most paid-for CMS tools come with built-in analytics. And any social platforms you use will also have built-in analytics. But if you're looking for an analytics solution with extra insights, then HubSpot and Google Analytics are strong choices to consider. In fact, try using both—

the two platforms offer different kinds of insights that, combined, create a complete picture.

To learn about the differences between these two reporting platforms as well as how they work together, check out the resources section below.

Also, consider adding tracking links to all your promotional activities. This way, you can see what’s working and what’s not. To build a trackable link using Google’s campaign URL

builder tool, check out the resources section below.

Once you have your CMS and analytics ready to go, you’ll need planning and internal communication tools. You’ll use these tools so that your team can communicate easily, see any updates, avoid version or draft control issues, and clearly delineate their responsibilities and assignments. You could start off with Google Drive or Trello, then transition to something more robust as your team and content grows.

With these resources in mind, you’re well on your way to building a content creation framework. And you’re one step closer to making meaningful connections with your audience—at scale.

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Planning a Long-Term Content Strategy

Why is long-term content planning important?

So you’re looking to create a long-term content strategy for your business. You’ve come to the right place. By the end of this, you’ll understand the importance of taking the time to plan a well thought-out content roadmap. You may be eager to get started with creating content, but if you don’t have a strategy in place, then you shouldn’t expect to be successful in the long run. Knowing how to plan and organize your content initiatives will set you and your business up for long term success with your content strategy efforts.

To start, planning provides a roadmap for your content. You’ll be making confident and more tactical decisions regarding what topic you’ll be talking about, what format your content will take, and when you’ll be publishing it.

With a content plan, you and your team can stay organized and even factor in ad-hoc content requests like company initiatives or other on-demand marketing tasks.

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To get the most out of your content planning efforts, think of your long-term content plan like a savings account. If your goal is to retire someday, then you need a plan. In order for that plan to be successful, you need to be dedicated to putting away a certain amount of money on an ongoing basis. The more consistent you are with contributions, the better your return on investment.

The same can be said about your content. If you make a plan and are consistent in executing, then you’re giving yourself the best chance at achieving a positive return on investment from your content creation efforts. Think of each piece of content you create as an installment towards a growing library of helpful, educational content. The more content you create, the stronger your authority and relevance, turning you and your business into thought leaders within your industry.

It’s important to note that obstacles and roadblocks will come up along the way. It happens to everyone. But having a plan will make it that much easier to regain alignment, as well as understand your team’s bandwidth and priorities for what needs to get done and when.

And speaking of priorities, a long-term content plan helps you stay organized.

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Most often, marketing teams place a focus on more than one content initiative at any given time. A long-term plan accounts for all upcoming initiatives and allows for an agile content creation process.

When you're organized, you can align your content marketing goals with the overall goals of the business. In essence, it gets the marketing team in-line with the current initiatives of the entire organization.

Content is not just about supporting the marketing team; it should be about supporting the sales team, customer service team, product and services team, and so on.

By aligning your content marketing goals to the overall goals of the organization, you can rest assured, knowing that your focus will provide an immediate impact to where it matters most — creating the best end-to-end experience possible for your audience and customers. How do you do this? Tell a story. Content is the fuel that keeps the inbound methodology running. The inbound methodology is composed of three stages: attract, engage, and delight. Inbound

businesses use this methodology to build trust, credibility, and momentum. It’s about adding value at every stage in your customer's journey with you.

If you want to learn more about the inbound methodology, then check out the resources section below.

With this inbound approach, you'll grow a well-informed audience. And when this audience is ready to make a purchasing decision, they’ll likely consider your products and services.

And even if they don’t become a customer, by you taking the time to educate them, it’s possible they’ll share your content with someone else who may find it helpful, another opportunity for you to convert this person into a lead, customer, and promoter of your brand.

How to create a long-term content plan

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Let’s review three things you need to do to set yourself up for success; setting marketing goals, auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and assets, and identifying the buyer’s journey for your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The buyer’s journey is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase.

The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying document you can use to keep track of your long-term content marketing initiatives.

First, let’s talk about setting your marketing goals.

Setting marketing goals provides you

long-term vision and short-term

motivation. It helps you organize your

time and resources so that you can

make the most of your content creation

efforts.

Each piece of content created for a marketing initiative should be tied to a goal that is also directly related to the overarching goals of the organization. Alignment like this creates purpose and focus with each piece of content you create.

Let’s take a second to think about this. Assume your company’s quarterly customer goal is 100 new customers. You know the number of leads needed to generate 100 new customers is 250 website leads, and that the number of unique website visits needed to generate 250 website leads is 1,500. Now, you need to take into consideration what content you need to create to hit your unique website visits goal.

Each goal you set should be a SMART goal. SMART stands for 35 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

● Specific

● measurable

● attainable

● relevant

● timely.

A potential SMART goal example could be, “Increase monthly unique website visitors from 1,000 to 1,500 by the end of the year.”

The second step in creating a long-term content plan is auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and assets.

Your audit will consist of two parts. First, a content audit to organize and evaluate your current assets, and second, and event-based audit to account for upcoming activities or events your business plans to host.

Let’s begin with the content audit.

Your goal with the content audit is to identify all the assets your business uses to attract and engage your audience. Your goal here is to identify gaps or opportunities in the content your business is currently using to help turn your audience into customers. And while your entire business may be creating and using this content, understanding and organizing it is generally a function of your marketing department.

There comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content for a while when they realize they have no idea where all of their content is or how much they actually have.

Content has likely been created by you or your predecessors for a long time. However it’s possible content has also been created by other individuals in the marketing department, or subject matter experts from other departments, and is scattered just about everywhere.

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By doing your content audit, you’ll be able to identify resources that you already have, which could save you hours of content creation time in the future. No use in duplicating your efforts.

And don't forget to stay organized when conducting your content audit. To keep things streamlined, organize your content audit by these categories: content title, buyer’s journey stage, lifecycle stage, content format, targeted buyer persona, topic, and any additional notes that provide value or context.

Now, it’s time to do some digging for content assets such as guides, worksheets, or sales collateral. I recommend systematically combing through the following dark corners where content can typically hide, like that old file manager or marketing folder on your computer.

Ask your sales team what type of collateral they use. Check in with the more tenured employees (you’ll be surprised at the wealth of knowledge here). And pore through your customer relationship management system, also known as a CRM, and your content management system, also known as a CMS.

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Okay, I think you get the picture here. Let’s take a look at a content audit from a company called Kids Talk, created by Maren Schmidt. Maren offers advice and resources backed by 30 years of experience working with young children.

Notice how Maren already has content spanning the awareness, consideration, and decision stage of the buyer’s journey for multiple buyer personas. Additionally, each piece of content corresponds to a specific lifecycle stage. Moreover, Maren has many different types of content formats to offer her buyer personas, like an ebook, a study guide, and a webinar. Notice how Maren uses the “Notes” field to explain the contents of her content offer, though she may not need this for each piece of content in her audit.

Now that Maren has documented her assets, she’ll be able to refer to this audit in the future to pinpoint what content she already has as well as easily identify gaps for future content creation projects.

The second part to completing your audit is to conduct an audit on your event-based initiatives. This means you’ll need to take into account any upcoming projects, priorities, or events that would involve content creation.

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By doing this exercise, you'll identify content that could support each initiative. Additionally, it will give you the opportunity to see how you can connect this content back to the buyer’s journey through an inbound marketing campaign.

An event-based audit should be organized by the following areas: upcoming monthly priorities, initiative overview, theme or topic, prospective blog post topics based on buyer personas, and an inbound marketing campaign that ties your efforts together.

Take a look at what Maren did for her event-based audit.

You can see that Maren has a few events and workshops she may need content for. You can also see that the content is grouped into an overall theme for the next three months with associated blog post topics that integrate with an inbound marketing campaign called

“Preparing Your Home the Montessori Way,” which is an ebook.

Try and imagine for a minute if Maren only planned the month, initiative overview, and theme without topics for blog posts that associate with a relevant inbound marketing campaign.

Yes, she would have noted there are a series of events coming up in the next few months, but she would have missed out on the opportunity to tie everything together with a series 39 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

of blog posts that could connect to a relevant content offer and provide value to her marketing offer library.

There’s one last important step needed to create a sustainable long-term content plan, and that’s identifying the buyer’s journey for your buyer personas.

Remember, you’re creating content that’s meant to attract and engage your buyer personas through their buyer’s journey: from the awareness stage where this person has a problem or a list of questions that they’re trying to learn more about, through the consideration stage where you’re discussing possible solutions to their problem or list of questions, and ending in the decision stage where you’re recommending next steps. The consideration and decision stage is generally where you’re talking about what your organization’s products and services have to offer, while the awareness stage is more industry-level education. Identifying this content will help give you content ideas to work with in the future.

But before you can identify the buyer’s journey, you first need to know your buyer personas.

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at one of Maren’s buyer persona’s, Montessori Mom Meena.

Here’s an overview of Meena as a buyer persona.

Meena’s a working professional, a married woman, and a devoted mother to at least one child under the age of six.

Meena generally skews female, is between the ages of 28 and 35, and lives in an urban environment. She also has a bachelor's degree and earns around $60,000 per year.

Meena wants to understand child development and do what’s best for her children, understand how to set limits for behavior, and have effective communication tools to use with her kids.

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Meena’s challenges are her children won’t listen and she has to deal with tantrums, all of which overwhelm her as a parent.

Maren knows that Meena looks to her friends for suggestions on solutions they use with their children. However, Meena’s resourceful and uses Google to find answers to problems she’s looking to solve.

Great. Now that you know who Meena is, let’s take a look at what her buyer’s journey might look like in more detail.

To start, you know it’s important for Meena to do what’s best for her children. So what about an awareness stage ebook which offers a list of parenting problems you can avoid?

This is something that would bring value to Meena’s search.

Once Meena’s been educated on parenting problems to avoid, she’ll be looking for more content. What about following up with consideration stage information like a questionnaire regarding family needs to better understand a possible solution—in this case, Montessori?

The questionnaire outlines both the needs of the child, as well as the parent.

But maybe Meena needs a little bit more information to progress into the decision stage—

something that educates her more on how to best prepare for Montessori. What about a free consideration stage workshop that explains how to prepare your home the Montessori way? That could do the trick.

With a solution to her problem, now Meena’s ready to make a decision. What about offering Meena a one-hour strategy consultation to discuss next steps for her child and Montessori? That could be a helpful service to offer Meena.

That’s an example of a complete buyer’s journey. It’s important to note that a buyer’s journey is ever-evolving. The more you learn about your buyer personas, the more you’ll be able to refine and grow their buyer’s journey resources over time. But it starts with first identifying content needed to complete the buyer’s journey, which you can then plan out over the course of a year to keep your content creation sustainable.

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If you’re interested in seeing how Maren organized and project managed her priorities in support of launching an inbound marketing campaign, then check out the resources section below. I’ve included a link to Maren’s long-term content planning worksheet. It’s in the form of a Google spreadsheet. This way you can use it as a template if you don’t already have a solution for planning your long-term content creation efforts.

Working with influencers to improve your content strategy efforts Let us see how influencer marketing works together with content and search engine optimization. Now, we all know that this is a big trend. Influencer marketing isn't going anywhere-- it's big and it's getting bigger. Just put "influencer marketing" into Google trends and you will see a line going straight up. There's a lot of people who are thinking about this and working on this and adding this to your skill set can do wonders for your content and your search rankings.

We did some research and found that bloggers who use influencer marketing are more likely to report strong results from their content than bloggers who use any other promotion channel. I'm going to define influencer marketing as simply connecting with people who have already built that audience that you want to reach. And I'm really talking about collaboration-- I'm not talking about paid influencer marketing. I know that's a big thing. I'm talking about content collaboration as in organic influencer marketing. Now, a lot of people, when they think about influencer marketing, they think about social media, they think about Instagram, they think about celebrities and trying to get those people to share your stuff. I'm going to make the case that that is not the best way to collaborate with influencers and not really the angle we should be looking for.

Now, I love to have a big famous account share my content. I'll give you an example. This is a screenshot of a tweet where the official Google Analytics Twitter account shared an article that I wrote. I was thrilled. I still am thrilled.

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Now, this is exactly the kind of thing that people are often trying to do when they do influencer marketing. But what do you think the real impact of this was? I can measure the traffic from Twitter that day to that post, and it's not a lot of visitors. About 160 visitors total from that channel that day to that content.

So maybe there's another way to look at this. Maybe social media is not the ideal outcome, the real benefit of doing influencer marketing. Maybe SEO actually would have much bigger, more durable benefits than just social media shares.

So how do we collaborate with influencers to benefit our SEO and our search rankings? We want a lead-- ultimately, that's what we're looking for is a lead. Now I'm going to back it all the way up. If you want a lead, you need two things-- you need a qualified visitor and you need to convert them. Traffic and a conversion rate equals leads.

Now, traffic in content marketing comes from three classic promotional channels-- search, social and email. But it's really the search rankings that matter, because those are the visitors that have stronger intent. They've got their fingers on their keyboard. They're looking for something. They need help that day.

So, we know from analytics and from research that it's really search that brings the visitors who are more likely to take action, more likely to convert and become a lead. So, we're going to focus on search, which means we need to focus on rankings. Now, there are two main search ranking factors-- links and content, as in authority and relevance.

So now we get to one of the most important questions in all of digital-- why do people link to things? It's actually quite simple. There are two things you need to win a link. You need a relationship with people who create content, because they make links, and you need to have content that is worthy of being linked to.

Now, we know from other research from Steve Rayson at BuzzSumo who analyzed a million articles to figure out what kind of content attracts the links and shares. And what he discovered is, most content nobody links to. In fact, 75% of the million articles he looked at 43 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

had zero links to them. But there's one type of content that consistently wins more links than any other, and that is original research. So, we're going to focus on that as the most link-worthy type of content.

The next thing we need is relationships with people who create content. Now, who are those people? This is called the 1% Rule. 1% of people make the internet, 99% of people just consume it.

When we are online and we are networking and building relationships, we want to pay attention to that tiny percentage of people who actually create content. Content creators create links, links pass authority, authority has ranking potential, and that's what we need in the long run to rank for that really valuable phrase.

There are five types of people who create content. Obviously, the big one is the bloggers and blog editors. They're not the only ones-- also we could say journalists, researchers, podcasters, event producers.

There arelots of different people who make links, but we're going to focus on bloggers at first here. And this is going to sound familiar to anybody who's been involved in PR-- this is simply blogger relations. Organic influencer marketing and collaboration is basically modern-day digital PR.

So if we want to find these people first, there's lots of tools for this. This is easier than ever to find people to collaborate with if you don't already know who they are. Just put your topic into a Twitter search tool such as Followerwonk, add a word that indicates that there are content creators, such as "blogger" or "editor," and you're going to find tons of people on basically any topic who create content and you might be able to collaborate with.

BuzzSumo also happens to be a great tool for this. BuzzSumo has an influencer search tool where you can just check a box for bloggers and journalists and put in your topic and you're going to find tons of people who are all content creators and relevant for that topic.

These are people you could build relationships with and collaborate with. Bottom line, 44 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

social media is the world's greatest phonebook. You can just imagine some super specific person and find them in seconds and begin to start a conversation.

Now, there are basically five main ways to collaborate. The first one is simply mentioning someone as you make something, and then when it goes live, you let them know it's live.

Not really recommended. You're not really networking. You're not really collaborating. That content is something where you just made it and told them later. They're not really invested in the piece.

Far better is to reach out to someone while you're making the content and ask them for a contributor quote. Hey, I'm making this thing. Would you like to be involved? Another way is to do that with lots of people. Now you've got an expert roundup.

Guest blogging is, of course, a format for collaborative content, where you are reaching out to editors and writing for these other websites. And then when you meet the hardcore expert on a topic, it's a good thing to ask them if they'd like to be interviewed, and then you can build a good relationship that way. Virtually everybody wants to be interviewed. Very few people will decline to give you a contributor quote. People wake up in the morning hoping to get a PR hit, which is what you're doing when you reach out and offer to collaborate with them.

So, let's break down the contributor quote. This is one of my favorite content marketing tricks. It makes your content better. It's going to help you get social media traffic, which is in our main goal. But when we collaborate with those content creators, we've got a chance to later appear in their content, hopefully.

It works like this. I'm writing an article about social media profile pictures. I know Mark Schaefer is interested in this topic, so I reach out to him while I'm writing it.

And I say, “Hey, Mark, would you like to contribute a quote to this article?” He responds with a quote that I can include in the article and says, no problem, how does this sound? This is perfect. Thanks. I'll let you know when it's live.

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Now, the actual piece-- I'll show you an example. I included a little bit of research in this.

This is basically social media profile picture tips. And as you scroll down, you can see I've got a little tip in here for background and color and different things.

I'm including some of the other people's research. I've got some research of my own. And as you scroll down, you'll see I've got that quote from Mark Schaefer. A journalist would never write an article without a source. Why would the content marketer write an article without a contributor quote?

Two bloggers, for example-- Blogger A, Blogger B. Blogger B reaches out to their network, socializes the topic, what do you think of this headline, get some input from their community. As they write, they include people in the content. Those people then, when the article goes live, are sort of invested in the piece. They're much more likely to share. Which of these two bloggers gets greater social traction? Not that social media traffic is our goal in this case, but we need to build our content for promotion.

Everyone knows that content optimized for search includes keywords-- keywords in the title, the header, the subheads, using related phrases. But what not everyone seems to realize is that content optimized for social media includes people. You should have people in your content-- faces and names. It should be a little party in your post where people are engaged with it already, that they're invested in the content. That is stuff ready for promotion in both channels.

The bottom line is we're answering the question, how many people are waiting for this article to go live? That number should be greater than 0. If we have people invested in it, an ally in creating content is an ally in promoting that content.

Guest blogging and PR is another direct way to get SEO benefits from collaboration. There are two main search ranking factors, as we said-- authority and relevance. Authority as in links, and relevance as in content and keywords. Guest blogging directly leads to links to your content.

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Blogger A writes two articles. Blogger B writes two articles and pitches one to an editor.

They publish it-- that's that yellow box there. That's going to link back to their content in the author bio, if not in the editorial, and in a collaborative way they're inviting guest bloggers onto their platform. So that other blogger there is contributing an article so that Blogger B

has more content associated with their brand.

Round two, more links, more friends, more traction, more content. And round four, Blogger A, nice blog, buddy. But Blogger B is building those relationships, those links, those social and search benefits, those collaborations, that influencer marketing powered content strategy.

Now BuzzSumo again is a tool for this, because as you research people, it doesn't just show you the size of their following, it shows you the domain authority of the site that they write for. The domain authority is a measure on the scale of 1 to 100 the benefit of a link from that site to yours. Without doing a deep dive into SEO, paying attention to who writes, but also what is the authority of the sites they write for, is one of the most important ways to measure the possible influencer marketing, search optimization outcomes from that collaboration.

BuzzSumo is a paid tool, but you can do that research for free using MozBar, which is a Chrome extension. Install MozBar in Chrome and go search for your topic, go search for blogs to write for. Put in the topic plus "write for us" in quotes, and you're going to see all kinds of blogs who are accepting guest posts on that topic. And when MozBar's turned on, it's going to overlay right onto search results the authority of that website, as in the value of a link from that site to you.

To this day, one in three of my articles is a guest post. I don't know anybody who has a brand so big that they should stop writing for other sites. Why would we ever stop doing PR?

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11 years in content marketing, I'm still doing lots of guest posting. It's the most fun I've ever had in digital. I get to work with expert editors who can make me a better writer. I get to reach a larger audience, and there's the search and social benefits. So, it's useful to put out into the world as you interact with people online that you are open to these kinds of collaborations.

One of the ways to remind people that you're open to writing for their site, or contributing a guest post to them, or being interviewed in their content, it's helpful to put that little sentence out that says that you would love to collaborate yourself. I've done this 1,000

times. I say this sentence so often that I actually have a text expander installed on Chrome so when I hit the same button three times it automatically expands into this line of text-- "If you'd ever like to collaborate on anything at all, don't hesitate to reach out."

I love social media marketing, but what a lot of people do in social media is just trying to build a network on one platform. What I'm suggesting here is to use social media for research and to start conversations and for networking. Rather than build a big network on one platform, we want to connect with those key people on many platforms, because it's those relationships that will lead to the long-term SEO benefits.

What we're doing here is basically solving the problem of bad SEO. You don't need to send cold email. You don't need to send that a horrible form submission spam, that cold email that just says, "link to me now," or "pay me for these links," or "I write good article for you."

I get these emails all the time.

"Take my infographic and link to me." "You have a broken link. Link to me." These are five examples of bad email outreach and cold emails in a world where it's totally unnecessary to ever send a cold email.

Why not start the conversation, help them in some way? Include them in your content and then remind them that you're open to be included in their content. This is really the key to making that connection between the relationships, the links, the authority, the content, the 48 Shashi shekhar (Gobookmart.com)

rankings, the qualified visitors, and the lead generation. That is a much better way to approach influencer marketing, in my experience.

Make stuff with people. Find interesting people who create things and work together with them to make content, better content, better connections, better relationships. The benefits are much more durable for your brand.

Again, this is Andy from Orbit Media. We hope you found this useful. We'll keep making these. If you know anyone who would find this helpful, feel free to share. We'd be grateful.

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