Content Marketing Articles
Guest Blog Posting Tips to Keep You Out of Trouble
Not too long ago guest blogging was a popular SEO link building tactic. Write a guest post for a website, include a link back to your site, and improve your link portfolio. It was a “win win” scenario. The website that published the guest post was getting content to keep the site active and the ...
That Old Blog Post is Worth More Than You Think!
When you publish a new blog post and promote it across your social channels there is usually a flurry of activity. It gets shared, Liked, tweeted, read-through, and more. But within a day or two (unless that post goes viral) the traffic and activity usually falls off. The organic value of that post ...
Content is For Your Target Audience First, SEO Second
Any good SEO company is going to tout the benefits of producing high quality content on a regular basis for SEO purposes. Content is what fuels an SEO campaign, generates natural inbound links, and improves social media efforts. However, it’s important to note that ultimately, content needs to be ...
5 Qualities of the Best Guest Blog Posts
Guest blog posting might not be the SEO link-building tactic that it once was, but that’s actually a good thing! It’s weeding out the low quality “just for links” posts. The people/businesses that have kept guest blog posting in their content marketing strategies are doing it for the right r...
How to Conduct an SEO Friendly Website Content Audit
As a business evolves, its website needs to evolve along with it. A website redesign is recommended every few years to keep things fresh, but what also needs to stay fresh is the website content. When redesigning a website, it’s a good time to conduct a content audit too so that the new site launc...
What Makes Content “Share Worthy”?
Content creation doesn’t come easy. It takes a lot of time, effort, and resources to create quality content. If you’re investing so much in content, you obviously want to get the absolute most out of it. To some, the goal is to create content that will “go viral”. Let’s be honest here, of ...
3 Ways to Be a Better Business Blogger
There is no denying that business blogging is a huge part of being a successful online brand. The content you produce not only helps you grow your organic presence, but it also builds your brand's reputation, helps your site earn links naturally, feeds your social media presence, and more. But being...
Reasons Why Your Content Isn’t Getting Shared
There are many reasons to be creating content on behalf of your business. Content informs your target audience and establishes your business as a thought leader in the industry, which generates trust. This is the top goal of content, but another goal of content should be to get it shared. Conten...
How Much Traffic is that Blog Really Worth?
In July 2012 this client's blog pulled in 3,416 visitors. Two years later that number hit 14,892! That's more than a 400% increase in traffic to the blog over a two year period. How exactly did we grow traffic to the blog so substantially in such a relatively short amount of time? First off, ...
Ways to Build Your Content Audience
In a recent interview with Jeffrey Rohrs, VP of ExactTarget’s Marketing Insights Team, we asked him how a website owner can get their content the attention it deserves. His response: “Content marketers need to understand that publication does not equal distribution. “Build it and they wi...
How Long Should Blog Posts Be?
Once we convince our clients that a blog hosted on their company website is an SEO “must have”, we usually get two questions. The first question, “How often should we publish blog posts?” The answer to that is as often as you can while maintaining high quality content. Regular posting means ...
Find the Amount of Content That’s “Just Right”
We’ve all heard the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. She sneaks into the house of three bears and tries their porridge, chairs, and beds only finding one of the three in each instance to be “just right”. The options that were “just wrong” were the extremes. The hot and cold porridg...
Where to Look for Content Inspiration
A necessary component of online marketing today is content. Marketers must be writing and publishing content on an ongoing basis. This content improves SEO efforts because it helps to generate natural links back to a website. Content also improves brand visibility across the web. Unfortunately, cont...
Enhance Blogger Outreach Efforts with These Tactics
There are many benefits to guest blog posting. It’s a way to showcase your expertise on another industry site in order to gain visibility where your target audience members are spending time. In most cases a guest blogger is allowed a short author bio at the end of the post. This is a great place ...
Should Google Authorship Be Used On Every Page of a Website?
Google Authorship is a way to connect authors with the informational articles (blog posts) that they write. It tells Google who the original author of the content is and links content written on your owned domain to your individual (not company) Google + profile. Content that is written by an author...
Leverage Old Content for New Links
Constantly creating interesting, informative, and engaging content day after days is no easy task. There are plenty days where I just stare at my screen for a half an hour, trying to think of what to write about. What will our readers be interested in? What new angles can I take on old topics? What ...
Don’t Forget Calls to Action on the Blog
One of our biggest rules when it comes to business blogging, and a tip that we pass on to our clients, is that the majority of all blog posts should be informational as opposed to promotional. It’s OK to add a few promotional posts in there when you add a new product or service or have another imp...
Old Guest Blog Posts May Need to Be Revisited
If you’ve been using guest blog posting as a link building tactic for quite some time now, it’s recommended that you go back and revisit each one (hopefully you have been keeping track of their locations!) and make edits so that the post is now up to Google’s standards. Guest posting is still ...
Why You Must Be Blogging for SEO Success
Are you looking to get more visitors to your website? Perhaps the most important thing you should be doing in order to improve an SEO campaign and drive traffic to your website today is to be blogging. If you have a blog component to your website, you’re already halfway there. If you don’t, it...
Tips for Creating Link Friendly Content
When it comes to links for SEO purposes, it’s become more about earning links as opposed to building them. The majority of inbound content links that a company creates on their own behalf including guest blog posts/articles, online press releases, infographics, etc. should now include the nofollow...
3 Steps to Content Marketing Success
If you want to do content marketing right, it’s not something to just dabble in when you have some free time. After all, who has free time today? Content marketing needs to be incorporated into the business and marketing plan and ample time/resources need to be dedicated to it in order for it to b...
Put Together a Winning Content Marketing Team
When developing a content marketing strategy, it’s often better to take a team approach as opposed to an individual approach if possible. In a very small company, sometimes there might only be one person that can handle content responsibilities. However, if you have more than a few people on your ...
Your Content Marketing Shouldn’t Be About You
Content marketing is a necessary part of an online marketing campaign today. Unfortunately, far too many companies are missing the boat. Either they aren’t doing enough (or any) content marketing or they aren’t doing it correctly. Companies need to understand that their online content marketing ...
Be Smart About Your Guest Blogging Choices
Towards the end of March, Google announced that they actively penalized MyBlogGuest, a well-known service that helps pair writers and blogs for guest blogging. MyBlogGuest was created by up Ann Smarty, a well-known blogger and social media user. I was often invited to guest post and some people e...
Are You Really Ready to Publish that Blog Post?
Blogging has become an important component of online marketing and SEO and what’s great about it is that is has essentially leveled the playing field for companies that are trying to build their brand up online. Any company can set up a blog on their website and publish content to be shared with t...
3 Tips for Creating Content People Will Want to Link To
In today's world of SEO, the real goal is to earn links naturally as often as possible. While traditional link building, as long as it is handled properly, is still very important, naturally earning links through your content marketing efforts is key to long-term success. But if you want to earn lin...
B2B Video Content Marketing Ideas
Content marketing is where it’s at for B2Bs. Content that is published and shared online is what captures the attention of target audience members, encourages them to click over to your website to learn more, and eventually leads to conversions. While we are huge proponents of blogging, it’s imp...
4 Places Where You Should Be Distributing Content
To see content marketing results, it requires the proper mix of content creation and content distribution. You can’t be doing one without doing the other. If you’re creating great content you need to make sure that people can find it, which means that you need to be sharing content in the right ...
5 Ways That Content Can Capture Attention
Content needs to be shared in the right channels in order to capture the attention of target audience members, but there are additional things that you can do to stand out in those channels. Remember, the Internet is full of distractions and noise. It’s necessary to do everything possible to incre...
Getting Strategic with Your Content Marketing Campaign
In a perfect world (the kind Google wishes we all worked in anyway), no site would actively build links; they'd simply create great content and let it earn natural links over time. And while there is no denying the SEO power of a great piece of content, most businesses can't afford to create content...
Understanding What Content Topics Work Best
One of the most difficult things about content marketing is deciding what topics to write about. Many businesses tend to overthink it, which usually results in content marketing not getting done at all. No matter what line of business you are in, there is plenty of information to share with your tar...
How to Make the Most of Your Content Marketing Efforts
A successful online marketing campaign involves the ongoing creation of content. Content must be published across the web in order to improve visibility among target audience members. Content creation is a necessary component of an SEO program since it’s what generates natural inbound links. If yo...
Cast a Wide Content Net to Increase Sales and Traffic
One thing you need to be careful of when it comes to content marketing is getting into a content marketing rut, where you post and share your content to only a select few places over and over again. It’s recommended to create blog posts on your site and share them on your Facebook, Twitter, Linked...
Carrying a Big Content Stick
Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy boiled down to the now iconic phrase, "speak softly, and carry a big stick.” The basic meaning behind the phrase was to work for peace, but be sure to the military power behind you to make things happen. While I’m not saying you need an army in order to make y...
Consume Content to Create Content
Probably one of the biggest challenges that our clients face when it comes to content creation is generating a list of topic ideas. With a list of topics, you always know what you will be writing about which means that it takes less time. In a recent interview with Rebecca Lieb of The Altimeter Grou...
Guest Blogging In the Right Places
Back in 2013 we interviewed link building expert Julie Joyce about the future of guest blogging. There was a lot of talk in the SEO industry that Google was going to crack down on guest blogging as a link building tactic in one way or another in the coming months, as an extension of the Panda and Pe...
Avoid a One Size Fits All Content Marketing Strategy
The focus of an online marketing campaign today should be on inbound marketing and providing target audience members with information on your business when target audience members want this information. This information on the web comes in the form of content. If you are continually sharing high qua...
Press Releases are for Promotion, Not SEO Links
For the longest time press release distribution was one of the items on our list of monthly link building activities for clients. Whenever a client had something newsworthy going on in the company we’d write a press release that incorporated targeted keywords and a combination of keyword anchor te...
Keep Your Content Marketing Efforts on Track
Content marketing is the most crucial component of an SEO strategy today. It’s also the part of SEO that many companies struggle the most with. After all, it takes a lot of time and effort to develop a content marketing strategy and then execute it in its entirety. Many organizations find that som...
A White Hat Guide to Content Marketing
There are plenty of tips out there about “white hat link building”, and many can be found right here on this blog. However, the face of link building has drastically changed over the years. In fact, we’d even say that “link building” isn’t even the correct term for generating inbound lin...
What Are Your Author Stats?
In Google Webmaster Tools under LABS, site owners can check out their Author Stats and see what kind of impact their Google+ authorship has had on their content's performance in the SERPs. Take a look at a few of the stats from my own Google+ account that I have tied to the Brick Marketing Blog: ...
The Untapped SEO Potential of Content
A few months ago Matt Cutts came out against guest blogging, saying; So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know him or her well. Likewise...
What a Difference a B2B Blog Makes for Organic Traffic
One of the most important things to remember about SEO is that each page of your website is “evaluated” individually by the search engines. While each URL gets to piggyback on the overall value of your domain, a new page of content has to earn its way into the SERPs and demonstrate to Google tha...
The Case for Removing Dates from Evergreen Content
For SEO purposes, the best type of content to write and publish is evergreen content that will be just as valuable six months down the line as it is now. Of course, timely content that is newsworthy also has its place in the content marketing mix but we always recommend that the majority of SEO cont...
What to Focus On With Limited Content Time
If our B2B SEO clients had unlimited budgets we’d recommend that they hire a full time content writing team that could produce a never ending stream of blog posts, press releases, white papers, case studies, videos, podcasts, etc. After all, content is what really makes an SEO campaign work today....
Seek a Variety of Guest Author Opportunities
If you want to succeed with SEO today it’s necessary to be publishing quality content on behalf of your business on a regular basis. Optimized content is what appears on the search engine results page for related keyword searches and what will get shared across the web as a reference within conten...
Characteristics of Content That Gets Shared
Online content is only worthwhile if people are actually finding it and reading it. The first step is to optimize the content so that it will appear organically in the search engines for related search terms over time. However, in order to create content that is “share worthy” and generates inbo...
How Much Content Should We Be Publishing?
When it comes to SEO, we can’t stress the importance of quality content enough. Each page of content that is published on the web is an opportunity for that page to rank organically for related search terms and to generate inbound links back to your site. The best types of links today are links th...
Long Form Versus Short Form Content – Which Works Best?
There seems to be little doubt that our attention spans, especially when it comes to consuming online content, are getting shorter and shorter all the time. You only have to look at a social site like Twitter, where you’re capped to 140 characters, to get a sense that short form content is in and ...
What to Do When Someone Is Stealing Your Content
There is nothing more heart wrenching as a writer than to see someone else taking credit for your content…except maybe someone else taking credit AND reaping all the rewards. The Google Panda updates were designed to target “scraper sites”, or sites that pull content from elsewhere on the web ...