You want your website to be rewarded by Google’s search engine crawlers, too, or you wouldn’t be optimizing your content for search engines. But, how can you give your online content a facelift? 

Here are some practical tips you can use to improve your content marketing and SEO strategies. 

Remember That You’re Building An Audience

Many marketers are focused on building an audience regardless of their current levels of success. This is good news, because many online users have started to distrust ads and other traditional marketing tactics, since the Facebook scandal of 2018. 

Naturally building your audience increases trust between your customers and your business. 

Data given, rather than scraped or gathered unwillingly, is simply more valuable as a marketing asset, said Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute. Then it stands to reason that providing valuable content-driven experiences where the data is given willingly, trustingly, and actively is the way … to thrive in this new business environment.

Your goal when creating online content is to have your target sign up to receive your content willingly. From there, you can build a relationship and create loyal customers. 

The main goal for your content marketing is to develop your audience. Ask yourself whether you have your audience personas down to target the right people. Take a look at your subscriber growth to see if any specific marketing initiatives caused your growth directly. 

Remember to nurture your target audience, once they’ve subscribed to your content. You want to deliver your content via email to your subscribers at a frequency that isn’t overwhelming. 

Assess Your Content Planning And Creation

Content planning and creation is the backbone of your SEO strategy and content marketing. Without planning and creation, you can’t create high-quality content that’s shareable and marketable. 

If your process is stuck in a creative slump, consider organizing topics into an editorial calendar. Ask yourself whether you have enough resources including, which includes talent and budget. 

Reach Out To A White Label Seo Reseller

Sometimes it takes a pair of fresh eyes to deliver fresh content with SEO strategies. If you’re struggling with content planning and creation, and you want to branch out to build your audience, consider using the services of a white label SEO reseller. 

White label SEO services provide search engine optimization and content for businesses and agencies without branding the content themselves. For instance, you can buy the content the white label SEO service creates and brand it as your own. This helps to cut costs and reduce time spent on in-house content creation. 

Stay Updated On What’s Relevant

Creating high-quality content isn’t just about making sure your content is polished grammatically. It’s also about making sure the content is up-to-date with what’s relevant in your industry at the time that you’re writing it. 

For instance, if you’re an HVAC company, it’s always relevant to talk about improving air quality around the house. But if there’s been pest problems around your area, you could boost your content by writing an article on how to get rid of pests in your air ducts. 

These simple alterations to your content not only make your content unique but they also make your business appear more in-touch with your target audience. 

Set Realistic Expectations 

By taking the steps to improve your content marketing, there’s a chance you’ll reach a wider audience and you’ll rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). But it’s important to be realistic about the expectations you have for your content marketing efforts. 

SEO is a slow process that takes time, especially when you’re building links organically. The results your content marketing strategies will achieve will vary based on your industry, resources, goals, and other factors.  

By setting yourself up for realistic results, you’ll not only be happier with those results but you’ll also be able to see how your company is growing. It’s easy to say your content marketing isn’t succeeding when you set unrealistic goals. 

Ask yourself if your company’s content marketing goals are realistic based on your: 

• Available resources 
• The competitive landscape of your industry 
• The nature of your audience within your industry 
• Your management commitment 
• The size of your organization 

If you do decide to make changes to your content marketing program, take a look at the things you’re changing and ask yourself why you’re making these changes. By asking yourself these questions, you can be sure you’re making informed decisions that will improve your content. 

Make A Commitment To Your Content Marketing

To create successful content, you need to stick with your content creation. You can’t improve your content marketing program or your SEO if you’re not committed to the process. 

Your successes in your content marketing build on each other like blocks. You won’t see long-term results that improve your SERPs or build your audience if you’re looking at content marketing like something you just want to try. 

Keep your website updated with high-quality content regularly and inform your partners and employees with success stories. Report on the things you’re trying in your content marketing and why you’re trying them. Just be cautious about showing vanity metrics. 

If you’re not feeling committed to your company’s content marketing program, ask yourself why. Are you unsure about your SEO strategy or don’t know how to improve your content creation process?  

Identify the challenges you’re struggling with that could be holding your content marketing program back. The more informed you are, the more you can narrow down these issues and find the solutions you need to succeed. 

Your website’s content marketing is a major part of your overall SEO strategy. By following the tips above, you can boost your content marketing efforts and increase your chances of Google’s search engine crawlers rewarding those efforts. 

Copywriting is the art of persuasion, and can be directly connected to sales figures both short and long-term. Content writing is the art of creating compelling content that makes visitors love your website. Writing for SEO is the strategy used to make sure your content is visible in the search engines.

Statistics show proper content marketing increases blog traffic by 2000% and boosts revenue by 40%. To see a similar boost resulting from your marketing efforts, you need to know the difference between all three writing strategies and hire an expert in each field.

A Writer Is Not Just A Writer

The unspoken myth many business owners believe is that a good writer automatically makes a good content writer, SEO writer, or copywriter. This belief makes sense, considering most people view writing as the art of forming concise, engaging sentences with proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling. With this view of writing, anyone skilled in writing should be able to take on any writing task.

That conclusion sounds logical, but it’s not accurate. Think of it this way: Say you need to hire someone to write a fictional novel similar to James Patterson’s style. If you hire a non-fiction, technical writer for the job, he or she will struggle. He or she might produce a final product, but it’s unlikely to hold a reader’s interest. If you need a fictional novel, you’re better off hiring a fiction writer.

Similarly, a good content writer will struggle to write effective sales copy because content writing isn’t the same as copywriting. At first glance, the result might look similar, but copywriters spend years learning how to persuade readers through the written word. Persuasion isn’t just about the words used, but the format as well.

Effective copywriters need to ditch their attachment to proper grammar and punctuation, and adopt unfamiliar formatting habits that would make any high school English teacher uncomfortable. In the copywriting world, it’s all about creating rapport with the reader, making them feel understood, and creating copy that feels more like a conversation than a distribution of information.

What Is Your Goal?

The type of writer you hire should be determined by your goal.

Do You Want More Traffic And Inbound Links?

When your goal is to boost credibility and authority in Google to get relevant traffic, you need high-quality, SEO-optimized content. Avoid looking for writers on Craigslist or Fiverr.

The top SEO writers don’t sell their services a-la-carte for pennies. Skilled SEO content writers work for themselves or for the top marketing agencies out there. If you want skilled writers to create your content, you’re better off going through a reputable agency that can show proven results.

Good writers can bring you great content in form of blog posts or infographic ideas.

Do You Want Readers To Make An Immediate Purchase?

When your goal is to generate quick sales, you need to hire a professional content writer. For instance, if you’re in the health and nutrition industry, skip the internet marketers and go straight for David Deutsch. Deutsch is the man behind the direct response copy for nearly all the major health-related publications.

If you don’t have the budget for an A-list copywriter, send whoever you do hire to a copywriting boot camp or enroll them in a coaching program taught by other A-listers like John Carlton or Harlan Kilstein. Buy them courses designed to improve their skills as a copywriter. Don’t hire anyone unwilling to continue learning their trade.

If you’ve never hired a professional copywriter, you’ll see the difference rather quickly.

Do You Want Visitors To Love Your Blog?

Maybe you just want your visitors to love your blog so much that they bookmark it and come back to visit regularly.

A content writer will help you achieve that. A content writer will create engaging content for your blog, whether they’re trained to write for SEO or not. Of course, it’s always better if they can write for SEO.

Hiring The Wrong Kind Of Writer Postpones Your Online Success

Just as it’s rare for a brilliant graphic designer to also be a skilled programmer, it’s rare for a person to be highly skilled in both content writing and copywriting. If your writer is a content writer, stop tasking them with writing sales copy and hire a copywriter.

You’ll get better results in a shorter amount of time, and you’ll wonder why you waited so long.

Many freelancers take a lot of time to write the article but the article won’t be that effective irrespective of the hard work put by them. They might feel disgraced that the article is not up to the mark or they are not a good writer. But in reality that is not the issue, the problem is the content which they have written is not promoted well and need a good promotion.

Here are some of the tips for effective promotion of the article.

Form Viewers

The content which you have written needs to fit the audience that is being targeted. The targeted customers need to see your article and for that, we need to reach them rather than them reaching us. If the customers messages you, do reply back and if possible give an idea to them regarding your next article in order to build and curiosity in them.

Present the content in as many website or journals or wherever there is scope so that the targeted audience get it than confining to a single website.

Strong Title

The title of the content needs to be strong enough so that it gets attention.

If possible while posting on various social media post it with different titles on each website so that you can understand what a good title is according to the responses. Based on this research we can get details of the interest of the audience.

Posting at Right Time

Posting an article when no viewer is online or active is a waste of your time. The article needs to be posted when there is a maximum number of viewers who are interested in seeing the articles.

Though it changes from customer to customer, we need to do certain research before posting the article. Post a mini-article or a glimpse of the article at the various time on different social media networks so that we can know when is the right time to post. By doing this we can also create an interest in the audience regarding our article. It is like two birds in one hit.

Get Feedback

Feedback is one thing where the freelancer gets to know the areas where he is needed to improve and he can also know the taste and preference of the audience which is useful for him in the next article.

After the article, we can include the feedback which consists of certain questions regarding an article which helps the freelancer. There is nothing wrong with getting negative feedback and they must be viewed as skipping stones to success.

Get Promoted

There are certain website and organizations that promote the content of the freelancer for free or take a certain amount of money to do the service.

If you want to get more crowd for the article then it is advised to go for paid promotions. These articles go directly to the customers or the one who is searching for the similar type of articles. It gives an advantage to the freelancer.

Contact experts

It is good if the expert is contacted for getting feedback or for improving the quality of the article. Being in the same industry for long time experts will have a good knowledge about the viewers and the trend that is going in the current market.

Their help gives a plus and boost to the content. The experts can be either people who have knowledge of the similar content or people who have good knowledge about the market.

Post on Various Social Media

In today world social media is a key for anything that goes viral. People spend more time these channels rather than other things. So, post the article on various social media so that a large number of customers can be targeted easily in less time.

Even the article can also be shared automatically by the viewer who reads it. All that is required is that the article needs to have a catchy title and a well informative content that creates interest and helps the reader to understand what he is looking at.

Write Articles for Other Websites or Organization

In order to improve the quality and quantity of the article, the freelancer is advised to write an article for other website or blogs until he gained a good experience. By this, the freelancer can know his strengths and weaknesses and improve accordingly.

This helps him/her to understand the requirements of the customer so that when he writes his/her own articles it will be helpful as he/her keep in mind certain points. It also helps him to know the areas where the customers are more and at what time. It gives him an advantage while doing his own work.

Always Update

Certain articles need to be updated every now and then. Some freelancers post articles that have old information which misguides the reader and it gives a wrong impression in his mind.

So the freelancer needs to write or update the article where every update is needed. This gives a positive vibe to the customer about the article and he prefers to visit our blog for getting information. This helps both old and new audience.

Make It Easy for Audience

The people who are reading your article need to understand and find it useful. They need to understand what you are trying to say.

Always keep the article simple and make sure that it reaches the right audience, at right time.

Check for Errors

The article which you have written needs to be free from errors both grammatically and content-wise. Make sure that you have written the right content that meets the requirements.

The article needs to be free from spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes. Also, make sure that you have wrapped up the article in a splendid way.

Conclusion

These are certain tips that help the freelancer to promote his/her article.

However these changes from person to person. But these are required for almost every freelancer who is looking for promotion of their articles.

What do you think?

Please share your thoughts, thanks!

Every blogger markets his/her products/services/company/skills etc. by publishing useful content on his/her blog.

One of the most important things about marketing via blogging is connection!

With a blog, you have information for the world – no matter whether it is in the form of text, images, videos etc. – it is still some form of pixels on a screen.

The information, no matter how useful or amazing, is lifeless, unless you add some personality, and voice to it and use it to connect with people.

That’s the focus of this blog post.

I write this post motivated by the fact that I see so many lifeless posts. The posts could be informational and even entertaining. But if the posts don’t have a human touch to it, the information there is lifeless.

And it fails to make your readers feel connected, your business and the information you present.

Yes, no matter what kind of information you provide in your blog, it has to be in a conversational tone and not sound like a lecture.

I usually talk to myself when I write my blog posts – either loudly or within myself. I talk as I write and I write as I talk.

When I’m alone or if I’m working in a separate room in a house I usually speak out the post loudly.

I picture myself talking to my target audience (you) who is sitting just before me and I just type the blog post.

Believe me I do this seriously for every blog post I write.

There is an added advantage to this:

I also get to know the possible queries that the target reader will/could ask when I present a tip or a strategy.

I get questions like “what if it doesn’t work”, “what are the loopholes or drawbacks in this strategy” and so on. This helps me to write posts that cover many facets of a particular topic.

OK so let’s dive in further – before that, I have created a course specifically to help you with content creation. You can check it out here.

Content Marketing: How To Write Posts That Makes Your Reader To Feel Connected?

See, I came across this question when I was picturing conversing this topic with my target reader (you) and the reader asked this question:

OK Jane, you say that I can make my blog readers feel connected by writing every blog post as if I talk to my readers. But how do I write posts like that?

And here goes my answer.

Stay Super Focused

When you are writing a blog post, you cannot be tweeting, texting, updating Facebook and hanging out in Google+.

The more sharply you focus on writing your blog post, the more you can respect the reader who is sitting in front of you.

From my experience I’ve found that whenever I multi-task while writing a blog post, I just try to put the information in.

I usually outline my blog posts and I try to fill the bits in. Surely, posts written like this will be information-rich – but they will lack user-friendliness.

This is something I’ve found from my personal experience.

So stay super focused when you are writing your blog post.

Respect the blog reader who’s sitting in front of you and make that conversation really real.

Use “You”, “Your”, “Me” “My” etc.

Talk directly to your blog’s loyal reader. Did you notice how I’m talking to “you” in this post?

Let me pause the natural flow of this post for a second and give you a sample of how bad this post will read if I write in a different tone:

Well, that was so hard to write for me In fact I started putting “you” and “I” at many places and deleted to rewrite in an alien tone! That’s good for me and you.

Content Marketing Is Based On Understanding Your Blog Readers Well

How well do you know your readers? Have you identified your readers in the first place?

Do you know that you have to first identify YOUR target audience before you start writing blog posts?

Without understanding their current stand, you will not understand their problems.

And not just that – you won’t understand their capacity as well.

If you are going to guide them to overcome their problem, you need to know what language you should use to talk to them – basic, intermediate or advanced?

You need to know their current level of understanding and also how much they can afford (in terms of investing time, money, expertise etc.).

How To Understand Your Readers?

Now that’s a million dollar question, isn’t? But it’s not that difficult as you may think of.

I actually use the following methods to get hold of my readers’ levels and expectations.

On a side note, Semrush is great for finding what keywords your blog is currently ranking for – this information is gold and I have not seen any other SEO tool provide this information so far.

Content Marketing: Key Takeaway

I stress that again – talk to your readers! And that’s the best form of content marketing.

Before you talk, get to know about their level of knowledge, involvement and their capacity to invest time, money or anything from their end.

Content marketing that has the humane element into it will work best.

Jane shares cutting-edge, practical blogging tips at her blog Savvy Blogging Tips. If you want to get a head start with blogging or want guidance to make progress, check out the FREE resource at this page.

Trying to be an efficient blogger is no easy task but there is a way to do it. All you have to is apply the 80/20 rule of writing.

What is the 80/20 Rule?

The 80/20 rule is actually a principle discovered by Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto.

It was based on a study he conducted back in 1895 where he discovered that society will naturally divide the bulk of the money and influence to the “vital few” or the top 20 percent, while the “trivial many”, or the bottom 80 percent, receives the rest.

Joseph M. Juran, a management consultant, stumbled upon Pareto’s research in 1941 and reintroduced it as the Pareto Principle and applied it as a management principle. The idea behind the Pareto Principle, as Juran puts it, is that “80 percent of an effect is caused by 20 percent of its causes.”

How does that apply to a blogger? Well, here are some great examples:

1. 80 percent of your site’s traffic comes from 20 percent of your audience.
2. 80 percent of an article is research while 20 percent is the actual writing process.
3. 80 percent is marketing while 20 percent is content creation.

There are some caveats to this, in that the numbers can skew to 70/30 or even 99/1, but generally the balance will always fall within the 80/20 range.

The Practicality of Pareto Principle

While the principle was founded on economic values, the 80/20 rule can generally be applied to all aspects of life.

From businesses to time management and even technical issues, you will find that knowing what to focus on will greatly enhances your productivity, efficiency, and even in life.

Supermodel Miranda Kerr and actresses Olivia Munn and Cameron uses the 80/20 rule when it comes to dieting and keeping their body healthy. By focusing 80 percent of their diets on healthy foods while the remaining 20 percent on indulgences, they managed to maintained their slim figures.

But how does that apply to you? Well, the 80/20 rule can help you determine how to efficiently work on the things you need to do and get results that you want.

Finding out that Vital 20 Percent

Before we take the 80/20 rule and use it in your writing, let’s break it down first and see how it can be applied to you as a person.

Generally, for most people, we waste 80 percent of our time on menial or unimportant tasks while only 20 percent of it is when we actually do something productive.

The key here is to identify what is it that you’re wasting 80 percent of your effort on and divert it to the important or “vital” 20 percent of your work.

This could mean spending less time in your office doing the trivial tasks, i.e. checking emails regularly, writing down memos, mulling over unimportant decisions, etc; and focus on the 20 percent of your job that actually gets you noticed by superiors.

When it comes to creating content, instead of broad topics that are covered by 80 percent for bloggers, focus on the niche 20 percent that you’re passionate about and be an authoritative voice on that topic.

Blogging the 80/20 Way

So now that you’re familiar with how the system works as a whole, how do you apply it to your writing?

1- Focus on the winners

First off, you need to find out what topics or articles is generating the most traffic and engagement on your blog and focus on creating more of them.

In order to do that, there are a few tools that you as a writer and content creator should be familiar with.

Google Analytics is Your Best Friend

One of the most important tools that every blogger should have is Google Analytics. From tracking the numbers of visitors to your website, to knowing what demographics you’re attracting, Google Analytics is a powerful tool that is easy to set up and implement to your website.

Google Analytics is an absolute boon for bloggers as it can help you narrow down to what content you’re creating that users are responding to.

Which part of your site delivers 80 percent of the traffic? Which 20 percent of your blog is the highest performing content? How can you improve the top 20 percent of your content? These are the questions you need to answer by understanding the data from your website.

2- Content ideas from social media

Using web analytics is great way to find out what are generating traffic on your website, but don’t be bogged down with just your own stats. Social media is a great space to discover content ideas and to research what content is engaging audiences through shares and likes.

With over 2 billion social media users, generating your content that’s relevant to the mass market is a sure-fire way of getting eyes on your website. Facebook generates around 3.2 billion likes and comments. For a content creator, that’s a data goldmine and finding out what the top 20 percent content that’s being shared and liked can help with your content.

3- Engaging with the right influencers

A game-changer for today’s blogging and content creation landscape is the influencers. Influence are public figures who are the authoritative voices of their respective field and for a blogger, networking with influencers is key to a successful brand.

A key partnership with the right influencer can net you double the leads and client retention than a normal paid advertising would.

Finding the right influencers might take a little bit of digging. A few tips would be to search for key figures within your industry or by searching in various social media platforms (i.e. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) with keywords related to your field.

Use tools such as Klout to measure an influencer’s score and determine the top 20 percent in your industry and reach out to them. Of course, it should be noted that the scores are merely guidelines and you should ultimately form relationships with influencers who you feel can benefit your blog.

Stop Wasting Your 80 Percent

The hardest part of being a blogger is often not the writing, it’s the distraction that keeps us away from writing. This is why a lot of the times, bloggers and writers tend to waste 80 percent of their focus on unnecessary or unimportant tasks.

It’s all too easy to fall into a routine of running endless errands or jumping into a rabbit hole of researching. Being an efficient blogger means you shouldn’t be spending more than 20 percent of your time on the “time-wasters”.

Keep the Menial Tasks to a Minimum

80 percent of your time should be devoted to creating and marketing your content efficiently. But, in order to do that, you’ll need to cut out all the unimportant distractions which can take a toll on your concentration.

For starters, for the entire duration of your writing, ignore unimportant emails. Newsletters or emails that are not relevant to your work should be off-limits until you’ve reached about 80 percent of your work done.

Spend Your Time Wisely on Social Media

I’ve mentioned the power of social media before, but social media can also be a major distraction to bloggers. The best practice is to lay off any social media engagement (posting, liking, etc.,) and keep it strictly for research and communication with key influencers within social media. Remember, the idea is to have as little distraction as you can to focus on your writing.

Once you’re done with your writing, get back on social media and use it to promote your content on all the major platforms and through influencers that you’ve established connections with.

Create Content That Matters

A major pitfall that writers and blogger often fall into is researching and writing on topics that are not relevant or engaging to their audiences. This happens a lot with new writers who feel that they need more content to counterbalance their lack of experience in creating quality content.

While content is king, quality content is what audiences will come back to. So, before you start writing, always know whether what you’re writing is what people want. Use tools such as Google, audience engagement on social media, web traffic to zero-in on what content your audiences are reacting to.

Plan your content properly by researching on topics beforehand and setting up a schedule for when to roll out articles on your blog. This will not only streamline your output, but will make you more efficient in planning content releases.

Pareto’s Principle is Great, But Not Perfect

It’s evident by now that the 80/20 rule can be an immensely helpful system for writers and bloggers to be more efficient. Sure, the simplicity of it means that you could apply it beyond writing, but not all of life can be fitted into the 80/20 way. It’s important to remember that the Pareto Principle is not exact science, rather, think of it as a tool that can help you improve your productivity and become a better writer.

For bloggers, the 80/20 rule is a useful tool to have in your arsenal. Knowing which audiences to focus on (the 20 percent that keeps you in business) or which content to improve upon (the 20 percent that drives traffic) will be a tremendous asset in growing your blog and brand.

Ultimately, it’s up to you how you should apply the 80/20 rule because at the end day, a tool is only as useful as its user.

But, are you aware that Google is much more than just a search engine?

In fact, Google has a ton of free tools in addition to its search engine that can be very valuable to you as a content marketer.

Here’s the thing, whether you love or hate Google, you must admit one thing, you’ve used one of the free tools it offers at one point in time – and the good thing is that you have the convenience of being able to access all these tools with one login.

Content marketers, in particular, should take advantage of these Google’s free tools to maximize and get more out of their content marketing campaigns.

With all these out of the way, below are the five free tools from Google that you should start using right now as a content marketer.

1. Google Trends

Most time, content marketers find it hard to come up good blog post idea for their website, especially when they desire to always sound relevant and current – I’m sure you can relate to that feeling, I mean…you certainly would not deny it.

Keyword research tools like the popular “Google Keyword Planner” helps you to figure out the profitability of keywords in your industry, but it is necessary to have another tool that will help you know the popularity of those keywords, and if the topic is actually trending on the web…

…That is where Google Trends comes in. It will help you to get newer ideas to write content on.

Google Trends can be used to check the trending topics together with the “trending stories” to ascertain if there is something relevant to your industry. For example, any topics that relate to politics and in some cases, celebrity lifestyles are sure to be trending.

You can always figure out good ways to connect these things to your content marketing concepts if you’re in such niches, and want to create a viral post. For instance, whenever you write something about politics, you already know there is a lot of information available.

In this case, “Google Trends” will help you to delve into the creative side of your story. Using the above example, you could choose to write a content titled:

“How Donald Trump is Leveraging Content Marketing To Better Serve Americans.”

If you haven’t tried Google trends before, now is the time to do so.

2. Google Analytics

Let me start by asking you few questions:

• How many of your website visitors are coming for the first time?
• How many are returning visitors?
• Where are they coming from?
• How long are visitors spending on your site?
• How’s your bounce rate (High or normal)?

If you give me a solid answer to these questions, then you don’t know what you’re doing, and your content marketing campaign will suffer tremendously. If you need a great tool to be checking and monitoring your website traffic, Google Analytics is dope.

Good enough, Google Analytics provides valuable answers to all of these critical analytical questions. This tool can give you great insight into your site’s overall performance and help you to fully understand how people are discovering and navigating your website.

With Google Analytics, you can quickly learn about your site:

• Traffic sources
• Social engagement
• Technology used in accessing your site
• Your visitor’s demographics
• Mobile information
• Top and underperforming content
• Conversions triggers
• And so much more

These are just a piece of the iceberg to what you can do with this tool; it is arguably the most powerful tool offered by Google to content marketers. And the most interesting thing like I stated earlier is that…It’s completely free.

However, I want you to understand something here – website analytics is certainly not a replacement for marketing analytics (the difference can be found here).

3. Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console)

Want a great insight into your site’s overall health, and how Google sees it? Just create a Google Webmaster account.

Google Webmaster Tools is an excellent free product from Google; it gives you an enormous amount of valuable data about your website and content marketing campaigns – It’s surely a must-use tool for webmasters.

Interestingly, if you’ve already created a Google Analytics account for your site, you can quickly and effortlessly add it to Google Webmaster Tools to start monitoring the following.

• Site Health: In this section, you’ll see your site’s stats, crawl errors, malware alerts, and blocked URLs.
• Site Configuration: This section monitors your website’s settings on the internet, including preferred domain canonicalization, change of address, site links, users who have access, and URL parameters.
• Site Traffic: This section includes internal links, search queries, and +1 reports.
• Site Optimization: This section contains your content keywords, sitemaps, HTML improvement suggestions, and other resources.

Another interesting thing about the Google Webmaster Tool is that it will notify you to any red flags that could hinder your website from getting found in Google search results, and also help you to accurately analyze your existing search traffic so you can better understand how visitors are currently discovering you.

Apart from that, Google Webmaster Tools also gives you an option to view reports to find broken links and to de-index the pages that were accidentally indexed in Google.

4. Google Keyword Planner

Although there are a lot of great keyword research tools available in the market which can give you excellent results, Google Keyword Planner remains one of the best. As far as keyword research is concerned, the popular Google Keyword Planner is one of the most suited tools for the job, no doubt about it.

There are lots of wonderful stuff to be liked about this tool including its user-friendliness. As a serious content marketer, it’s your job to always search for those kinds of keywords needed to significantly boost the performance of your content in Google SERPs.

However, the only requirement needed to use this tool would be to experiment with it thoroughly. You need to run some number of searches to understand better how it functions. You can also run multiple searches so as to get a different perspective on how it works.

For example, “content marketing” could be one of your target keyword, but you certainly know how difficult it is to rank on the first spot with such “short tale” keyword. But with the Google Keyword Planner, you can come up with some interesting, long-tail, and easy to rank keyword variations that are closely related to that target keyword of yours (content marketing).

However, you must understand that “Google Keyword Planner” is just a basic tool, but it is one of the most powerful “Free Content Marketing Tools” for serious content marketers who would like to research their keyword strategy to increase their search results.

Finally, this tool is incredibly easy to use, but bear in mind that you have to create an AdWords account to use the Google Keyword Planner as it’s meant for Google’s AdWord advertisers, but that doesn’t mean you definitely have to create an ad. Just a simple Google account will do.

5. Google Docs

As you know, content creation is a big part of content marketing. If your business/job involves a lot of writing, ensure you’re 100% comfortable with the tool that you’re using.

Google Docs is an easy file sharing platform used for sharing spreadsheets, drawings, documents, tables, and presentations with others to download or edit, view online, or just to grant access to a “read-only version” of a document.

Furthermore, you can also create forms and send them directly in an email or via a link to collect crowdsourced post information, survey answers, and other valuable data.

Below are some of the things you can do with Google Docs as you’re creating a blog post:

• Allows you to insert screenshots easily
• Checks for spelling errors
• Enables you to easily collaborate with multiple users thereby sharing the document with them
• Gives you an accurate word count

I know there are many other options out there like the modern Microsoft Word, but right now, Google Docs seems to be a perfect choice.

Conclusion

These are some of the free Google tools for content marketers that you really need to start using right now. Although there many other excellent free tools offered by Google, the five I mentioned here will be most useful to you.

Now, for the fact that less than 50% of B2B marketers are claiming to be effective at content marketing this year, it means that there’s still room for improvement, you just have to start using these tools immediately to know your competitors off the ladder.

Personally, I love all the tools developed by Google, and will also use as many of them as I found valuable and needed. I’ll also urge you to do the same because you will never go wrong with these tools.

In this post, I’m going to introduce you BoostContent, the marketplace you want to visit to boost your content marketing or to leverage your freelance services.

Sign Up To BoostContent as Contributor

If you want to make money with your writing skills, sign up to BoostContent as a contributor.

Fill up the form:

Just enter your email address, country of residence and a password. Click on “I’m a writer or translator” and “I agree to the Terms of Service“, then “Sign Up“.

On the following page, just fill up the required fields:

Such as:

• username;
• the languages that you know very well (good enough to write an article in);
• the language pairs that you can translate to and from;
• your topic of interest.

Once you click on finish, you are ready to go to your dashboard. Here you will see a menu:

You want to visit your Profile settings and decide if you want to make your profile public or anonymous (the advertiser will just see your I.D.).

If you don’t have any specific reasons, I suggest to opt for the public profile, so that customers can order directly from you (which also helps to build your brand and online visibility). Feel free to decide an username, add a profile picture and write a description (which will be visible to clients).

You want to set how much you want to charge customers for each order (price based on 100 words). Also, decide the minimum price to see tasks and receive emails (based on 100 words).

The Tasks section of your dashboard is where you can find job opportunities. The first task you want to complete is to write an article on one of the topics below:

The purpose of this article is to show your writing skill, both for the site staff and also for potential customers. If your content is really good, it can be showcased on the blog. Additionally, the article will also be attached to your public profile on BoostContent.com. You can choose any suitable title, it does not have to be the topic specified above.

The Contributions tab will show all your completed jobs, while you may want to use the Contact tab to send a message and request any kind of information or help.

Finally, the FAQ section will give you some useful insights. Payments are made by the end of each month, via PayPal.

Important to know! You will get 70%+ percent of the advertiser money for each work (to achieve that, BoostContent has developed a streamlined system where articles move seamlessly from writers via Copyscape, proofreaders and their quality assurance team). Just think that sites like Textbroker only give 54% percent of the money to the freelancers.

Sign Up To BoostContent as Advertiser

If you want to buy content or translations, sign up to BoostContent as a customer.

Fill up the form. The dashboard will look like this:

The first thing you want to do here is to set a budget, by clicking on the “Add Funds” button.

Pay with PayPal or with a credit card and enter your billing information.

Pay attention: BoostContent is based in Sweden and if you represent a company in a non-Swedish EU country, just add the VAT number to get rid of the VAT.

Now, you are able to make your first order!

You can decide for:

• Content Writing. Order a text or product description, you can order texts in over 20 languages.
• Translation. A translation is more than just translating word by word, it’s an art. Using this order for you can order a translation from English to over 20 languages.

Once you have made your first order, you can visit the “Orders” tab to keep track of everything.

Translations

Making good translations seems easy, but it’s not. You want to aim for the right balance between the original text and the target language, which may have a very different structure.

There are different types of translations available, such as translations of product descriptions, blog posts, general articles and much more.

Product Descriptions

To increase conversion and attract more new customers to your online store you need to have good product descriptions for your inventory! eCommerce needs the proper work to become a successful business.

With BoostContent, you can order a large amount of product descriptions, with single clicks. Simply write the general instructions once and then copy and paste your list of products from Excel.

You can also decide the assigned writers and specify things such as, title, keywords, additional fields and more.

Articles from BoostContent

Whether you want to order a single article or more than one, you have it covered with BoostContent.

For example, you may want to decide just a keyword and leave the rest to the writer (of course, you can give more specific requirements, if needed). Relevant and powerful tools are used to ensure each article will meet your goals.

The best situation if when you give to the content writers everything they need to accomplish the mission, including certain parameters to make sure that each article follows your set instructions, even if it’s a big order fulfilled by many different writers.

API Keys

There’s an API key feature you can use to integrate BoostContent into your custom solution.

For example, if you have a big eCommerce with several products and more coming every month, then you can use the API key feature to automatically order content when is needed. Once it’s delivered, you can automatically get it and publish it within your system.

To get started, simply download the API php library.

Final Words

Whether you are looking for boosting your content marketing or making money with your language skills, give BoostContent a try.

As a customer, proofreading is always included and the site is available in more languages. You will get unique content, as the completed tasks by writers are checked for plagiarism.

I’ve found the freelance dashboard easy to navigate, with good opportunities to earn.

Now, it’s up to you.

What do you think?

Have you ever heard about BoostContent.com?

What’s your experience?

Please share your feedback in the comments below, thanks!

Blogging, affiliate marketing, freelance services are all valid ways to generate revenue, based on your skills.

But another interesting way to make money with the internet is creating and selling online courses.

The post will help you on this venture.

1. The Idea

This is really a crucial step. To make sure your idea is winning, pay attention to the following points.

• There is already a market (and an audience) that is interested in the topic you want to cover. To be original, you do not need to talk about unique arguments, it’s enough to be authentic in the way you do it, choosing your own style and form.
• There is a strong niche. You can check it out by creating a survey of some ideas for your online course and see which one is the most appreciated.
• Talk about something you’re already familiar with. The ideal thing is that you already have a reputation as an expert or leader in your industry and that your ideal customers want to learn something from you. If you are a neophyte, you better want to start out with an info product, like an eBook, for example.
• You are passionate about the subject you want to teach: this is crucial. No Passion, No Party!

2. Trace the Content

Once the topic has been chosen, it is time to think about the content to include and how to structure them.

This is also a critical phase, because even if you think about it as well, you want to really help those who are participating, making them appreciate the quality of what you offer, achieving great results once they’ve completed your online program.

Here’s what you have to keep in mind at this stage:

• Who is your ideal participant? For whom do you plan the course? Choose a well-defined and not too wide niche.
• What does your ideal participant need to learn to achieve his goals? Remember that the course is built to help the user.
• What are the concrete goals of your online course? It’s about the real results you think you can guarantee to those attending your course when it’s over.
• What is the desired user experience? How do you want to interact with them? Remember that your style can make a difference: if you talk about business the same way of the others, you will probably struggle to be successful. Choose a clear mood, with emotions and values ​​that represent you and a model that suits you and your character. Video, audio, group calls, Facebook group: choose the way that best suits you.
• How long should the course be? It’s not a race for those who “do it longer”! Optimizing is the key, finding a balance between content to be given and needs to be met.

To better achieve this step, just imagine your course participants as travelers, who want to reach their destination in the least number of stages and with the best possible experience. Each stage represents a major topic, which will then should be divided into well-developed and designed sub-categories . This way, you can create a real map, from the beginning of the course to the end.

There are 3 fun ways you can literally extract ideas from your head:

• Have a nice brainstorming with a big blackboard. Write a few topics and move them back and forth to decide which sequence to deal with the content you want to include in your course. Visualizing this step really helps.
• Use mental maps. This is very gratifying for those who like to see concepts take form as files in your mind.
• Write text in words or pages. Simpler, but more rigorous. Very practical.

3. Create the Content

This is the stage where you need to start creating and organizing PDF files, spreadsheets, video lessons, and so on.

This process is very demanding, because creating all the material is very important and requires a lot of energy and concentration. Be prepared to avoid procrastination and slowdowns!

My advice is not to worry about being perfect in every small part of the realization. Your goal is to create a quality product, but at the same time the most important thing is lessons should be easy to follow and implement to achieve a real result.

To begin with, simply try to build clear, effective, and useful content. This post may really help to boost productivity.

4. Price and Placement

It’s time to think about how you want to place this online course, which means better looking at the profile of your ideal participant and in what market segment – low, medium or high – you want to position yourself.

Although many say that is not the case, often the price is linked to the length of the course. For example, a 4-week course costs less than a 4-month course. However, this is true only in some cases.

If you are able to help users to achieve in less time what others can do in more, it does not matter if your course time is short. You have to consider the value of what you offer and your customer’s needs.

Needless to say that another factor to consider is your degree of experience and reputation. If you are a newbie, it’s likely that if your price is too high, no one or few will buy your course. If you have been working for many years in your field, offering your expertise, thus deciding to create your first online course, you can serenely place yourself in a high price range.

Still, the definition of the price is always a work in progress and must be tested in order to find the right balance.

5. Your Target + Sale Time

Last but not least in order of importance, it’s your goal.

Once you’ve set the sale price of your course, I strongly suggest you decide what revenue you want to achieve and how many people you wish to enroll in this course. Let’s say you want to make $5,000 and that the sale price of the course is $100, then you have to aim to have 50 subscribers.

Based on these numbers, you can study a valid action plan, with a marketing strategy. Social media, for example, is a powerful weapon. Promote your course all over your social accounts, maybe adding gamification principles to make the thing most interesting for the users. For social proof and added credibility, consider being the expert yourself with tons of online MBA, MHL, and other available programs offered nowadays. Also, you can send personalized invites to your contacts.

And now, it’s time to sell it!

There are several platforms to help you in selling your online course. I recommend:

• Udemy;
• Teachable;
• Thinkific;
• Kajabi;
• Skills CO.

Let me know in the comments below if you are planning on creating an online course and if you’ve already dropped a few ideas.

What do you think of the points mentioned in this post?

Please share your opinion and don’t forget to post on social media, if you liked it.

Which tactic will help them grow their online presence further, SEO or content marketing?

There are tons of surveys and research over the web that show the importance of both:

• Proper content marketing leads to 2000% increase in blog traffic and boosts revenue by 40%
• 70-80% of consumers ignore paid ads and focus on organic results
• Search traffic beats every other channel in acquiring visitors for a business

All of this information leads to one thing: businesses must use both SEO and content marketing strategies to improve their website traffic.

This has a lot to do with consumer habits and preferences shifting greatly during the last years:

• Consumers are smarter and more careful now when they buy products/services online
• You need high quality content to rank up on search engines
• Keywords are no longer enough to achieve higher ranks on SERPs

This is why the two tactics, while being separate things, need to merge together and be leveraged equally, to produce satisfying results.

Don’t Do SEO for SEO’s Sake

When you think about merging SEO and content marketing effectively, it’s important not to focus on older SEO tactics like keyword and link stuffing. Your main focus should be on creating relevant, valuable, high quality content for your audience, which will be backed up by SEO.

This is why you need to use keywords in your text naturally, without creating an impression that you just try to get people to your website. If you are ever faced with the choice of which one to compromise keywords or quality, quality has to win, every time.

Create Wikipedia Content

Depending on the industry, marketers can find tons of topics that will be a good fit for Wikipedia articles. Wiki articles are great because the website is focused on delivering the most accurate and relevant information to readers and thus, ranks higher (usually the first or second result) on SERPs.

If you struggle to find topics on what to write on, here is something to think about: Wikipedia deletes around 1000 articles each day (mostly because it’s old and irrelevant now). This means for that there is a ton of wiki content out there that is being left with “dead links” all over.

You can just find those dead links, see which ones are relevant to your industry, pick a topic and set things right.

Focus on Evergreen Content

Evergreen refers to a piece of content that doesn’t lose value overtime. This means that readers will find it useful today, and it will still be relevant in a few years from now. This way, your content won’t be losing search rankings on Google and your investments into producing high quality content will continue to generate more and more visitors overtime.

In an effort to find evergreen topics, here are two tactics that work well:

• Use google search for common keywords in your industry and look at the result pages. You are looking for content that has been published 3-5 years ago, but since it’s still relevant, it will be on the first page of search results. This is how you will identify evergreen content and get an idea on the topics you want to choose.
• Update your content if its statistics heavy. Whenever you create content that focuses on statistics like this one “Google’s 200 Ranking Factors”, update your content from time to time. These kind of topics evolve overtime and you can maintain higher search rankings if you constantly follow the latest trends and update your stuff.

Combining SEO and content marketing is one of the best ways to grow your website traffic and attract high quality (not just random!) visitors and leads.

Start with the tactics mentioned above and don’t forget that online marketing is an ever evolving thing: keep a constant lookout for tactics that will help advance your business even further.

This is a contribution by Charles Dearing.

In actuality, B2B marketers that blog generate 67 percent more leads than marketers that don’t.

At the same time, content marketing is expected to be the most commercially important digital marketing trend, according to Smart Insights.

If you want your business to thrive and drive significantly more traffic to your website, you need to devise a new, updated content marketing strategy.

Here are five content marketing trends that you shouldn’t ignore if you want to be successful.

1. Brands That Do Content Marketing Will Rank Higher in SERPs

Google is on an uncompromising mission: to offer users high-quality content that’s relevant and valuable.

By consistently producing good content, brands can deliver exactly the information that their target audience is interested in, and establish themselves as reliable product or service providers.

At the same time, good content can attract more backlinks and social media signals, which can both increase authority – a factor that will largely impact your website’s search engine ranking.

While taking note of other SEO elements such as keywords is still important, focusing on content is paramount, so brands that don’t currently have a content marketing strategy should certainly develop one.

Posting valuable content will help paint your brand in a positive light, thereby contributing to increased popularity for your business.

2. More Brands Will Learn About the Importance of Content Distribution

Most brands’ content marketing strategy is limited specifically to content creation and publication.

Effective distribution goes a long way towards helping brands put their content in front of their target audience.

In addition to letting brands reach their existing and prospect customers, content distribution gives them a competitive advantage over other companies trying to win their audience over.

But for this strategy to be efficient, brands should make sure their content is correctly optimized, mobile-friendly, and most importantly highly valuable for their readers.

If users access your content from mobile devices, and the page isn’t mobile-responsive, they will abandon it, no matter how good the information is.

Alternatively, if your content doesn’t bring any new information, or the information isn’t entirely accurate, there is a good chance that users will click the “back” button.

3. Content Marketing and Social Media Will Be Essential One to Another

Social media is one of the most powerful content distribution funnels, allowing brands to reach out to their target audience, drive more traffic and earn backlinks.

Due to the huge number of prospective customers spending more and more time on social networks, these platforms offer companies the opportunity to get their content read by more eyes.

As a result, paid social media advertising will become increasingly popular, and businesses will continue to spend massive budgets to promote their posts and get ahead of competitors.

4. Content Repurposing Will Become More Popular

According to a survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute in 2014, as much as 86 percent of marketers stated that one of their content marketing resolutions for the upcoming year would be finding ways to repurpose their content.

Brands will be seeking out the ability to create cost-effective, user-driven content in 2015, addressing not only multiple constituents in the buying ecosystem, but also multiple selling environments.

This helps minimize the resources needed to consistently create new and fresh content, allowing companies to leverage existing content that has had an impact on their audience in the past.

5. Guest Blogging Will Rise Again

After Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, has stated that guest blogging was “done,” it caused a mass exodus that led to writers moving away from this popular model.

Later on, Cutts came back and said he was misunderstood, and what he actually meant was that guest posting was “done” as a link building strategy – but this doesn’t make it less effective as part of brands’ content marketing efforts.

If done correctly, guest blogging can help you gain exposure, reach out to a wider audience, build a sense of community, and brand your business.

Guest blogging may help you get one or two backlinks, but its real value lies more in the ability to help brands establish themselves in the industry they operate in.

It’s no doubt that having the assistance of a digital search marketing agency can help you improve your content marketing efforts and stay in line with the biggest players of your industry.

Knowing what to focus on is critical to delivering good content and standing out in the sea of companies vying for attention.

But don’t forget that creation and publication are just the first steps of content marketing, and for the equation to be complete and correct, an adequate distribution plan is mandatory.