Author: Monish Vora

Let’s admit that we, as content writers, have faced innumerable occasions when we have been at a loss of words and ideas to stay engaged with our blog audience. Even the most seasoned bloggers have felt the writer’s block and there have been times when they even start questioning their ability to generate quality ideas.

The good news is that you could overcome this block as there are several ways to generate ideas that were always there. There is no need to sabotage yourself as a result of the loss of ideas. You could get yourself out of the wicked circle and generate an idea that will engage your audience and help you in achieving the business goals through your blogs.

Leverage The Power of Your Customer’s Queries

When you want to communicate with your audience, the best way to do that is by knowing what kind of information do they need. This is one of the convenient methods, however, most marketers tend to overlook it. If more and more blog owners leveraged this, there will never be a dearth of blog posts on the Internet and what your prospects will get is only relevant information.

The process is quite simple. Figure out which one of the most asked questions. Turn the answer to this question into a blog post. One of the major goals of any content marketing strategy, including blogging, is to establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry. This is possible when you address the concerns of your targeted audience.

Write About What’s Buzzing

Choose a topic that the rest of the bloggers in the industry and influential people are talking about on their social media pages, blogs, or communities. Of course, you want to make your voice heard by giving your own point of view on the currently trending matter. Try analyzing what your counterparts are talking about, and observe which key points have been left out by them in their version of the discussion. When you give a holistic approach to a particular update that has taken place in the industry, the audience realizes that you are agile, analytical, and looking forward to engaging them with fresh content instead of just telling them what has happened and that they already know.

Absorb the new mediums and experiences to make a better version of what you are. You could look for fresh ideas at different industry-relevant news sites and following the people from your industry.

Welcome To The World Of Mind-Mapping

Check out all the blog posts that were most liked by your audience. Now you could create a series of themes that establish a relationship with all the best topics that have already been published on your blog. This is where you could depend on the mind-mapping strategies to let the brain go to its full potential and let you stay inspired.

Mind maps could also result in positive actions that could support your blogging objectives, like building a vast knowledge bank, setting up new objectives and even create summaries of the books. There are also mind mapping software available, like the MindJet and XMind

Reverse Engineer From Competitors’ Blogs

In order to stay updated in your niche, it is inevitable to subscribe to multiple industry-relevant blogs. This will help you stay on terms with your industry, let you become more creative and also come across a lot of interesting topics for which you might have better ideas than what has been already spoken about them on various other blogs. Your counterparts could become your unknown collaborators in the trade of blogging, so stay agile with the industry news and trends by reading what the competitors are saying.

Team Up With Fellow Industry Bloggers

It is a great idea to have a healthy bond with fellow bloggers. If you are sceptical about this and feel that it might be harmful for your position in the industry, it will work in sharp contrast to this. It will help in creating solid ties with the opinions of those people who matter the most in the niche and could help you stay in the minds of your targeted audience.

Collaboration for blog posts could also help you in getting the other bloggers audience to know about you as well, thus expanding your reach. Also, the collaboration process could land you up on an influencer who could help your content in becoming an overnight phenomenon.

Conclusion: Only You Could Write Your Blogging Success

Irrespective of which way are you selecting to reach your blogging success destination, it should always be kept in mind that in order to taste success you have to be persistent and put adequate time and energy into research and creativity to keep the audience hooked up.

The various nuances involved in content marketing make it a very broad channel, and all the mediums in the online marketing nutshell have to work collectively to achieve the targeted results. When a union of various parts is observed, the intersection is right at the point that shows you the vital outcome.

Brands that understand the significance of online marketing will strive to incorporate all the vital elements of online marketing including SEO, social media marketing, online reputation management and more. However, the most notable overlap of marketing efforts that could drive ROI to an all-time high is that of SEO and content. If you consider search as the primary component to target for achieving online marketing success, you need to work with SEO and content in unison. Search is all about how relevant you could be to the users’ needs, and to be relevant you need to provide compelling information that the reader would like to consume till the last word. This particular characteristic is liked by the search engine that notices your expertise through your articles, the main reason why the Hummingbird algorithm came into existence.

Since the term content marketing started buzzing in the online marketing fraternity, there have been a lot of talks about SEO being dead. It is an accepted fact that online marketers and agencies have rebranded or are emphasizing content expertise. However, it doesn’t mean that SEO has completely been deserted. Both the components have to work together. The use of SEO will always require content and vice versa.

The Distinguishing Points between SEO & Content

Though they work together, there is some points of difference between SEO and content

SEO tends to be more technical: This includes the use of correct URLs, title and ALT tags, sitemaps and more. This is the term that reinforces the content marketing strategy.

Content is broader and is not necessarily limited to SEO: Even if you don’t SEO some content that is highly valuable for the audience, it could even gain traction with viral marketing that is initiated by your prospects.

How Could SEO & Content Work Together

Keywords

If you are looking to target prospects to your website to satiate their need for information or to generate conversions and revenue, you need to understand their search behaviour. Keyword research is the primary activity that will let you know what your ideal personas are looking for and how you could optimize your content with those words to gain more visibility on search (fulfils SEO) and provide value (content marketing goal)

Optimize Content In The Forms Of Image & Content

The search engines are only able to comprehend plain simple text. They can’t interpret what’s being said in a video, what an image is saying. So, if you have created the content in the form of video, images, or any other multimedia format, you will need to release them with words that could be comprehended by the search engines. File names should be descriptive, target the keywords and match exactly what the multimedia file is meant for. The ALT tag, also an important part of the SEO process, will let the search engines know the motive and the message of your file.

Evergreen Content

Creating epic content is one of the greatest strategies to enhance your search rankings and also for showing your website as the authoritative name in the industry. A piece of news will always do well on Google while it is fresh topical, however with the emergence of new articles on the same topic your content will start losing lustre very soon. In a matter of few weeks, it will cease to deliver traffic. In sharp contrast, a more useful article has more valuable advice and has deep insights that will attract more users, tend to get shared more and increase the chances of sustained rankings on Google.

Link Building

Yes, you might be wondering how this particular feature of SEO got the space here when everyone is talking about the end of link building. However, you can’t stop good content from being shared. Create linkable content that would get naturally shared or linked to in other content. Ensure that you are not building links just for the sake of it as the ever-evolving algorithms of Google are always on the watch out for spammy link builders and demote the rankings or even penalize your website and that’s going to be quite painful.

Internal Linking

These are great signals to prove that you consider your content and other pages as the source of valuable information and thus are providing the same as a useful resources. Internal linking is also one of the vital components of all the SEO methodologies that pass the authority of a page to the other and also enhance the user experience. It also helps Google in crawling your website with ease and help the internal pages to rank for certain search phrases.

Scaling

All the SEO analytics that you are going to use will show you the effectiveness of a particular piece of content. If you want to know how many visitors came on a particular page that has the content, their demographics, engagement rate, bounce rate, you will need to use SEO tools that gives you perfect insights into these KPIs (key performance indicators). These metrics will also let you know what is effective and what is not, helping you to decide on how the future content marketing strategy should look like.

Wrap Up

Online marketing is at its best when there are teams that collaboratively work towards the same goal. If your mindset is “Content vs. SEO”, you should at once remove it from your vocabulary. In order to get traffic to your website, you need a strong reason. And if you want that strong reason to reach your prospects you could do that by merging content and SEO into your efforts.

*image courtesy: pinterest.com

When you look at internet marketing, there is perhaps no single area that evolves faster or changes more frequently than content. From what you write and where you publish to how you disseminate that content and engage with readers, the ideology behind what’s effective and what isn’t is continually changing – and usually for the better. Throughout 2015, your content marketing success will depend on how well you can stick with the trends.

Although there are 90% organizations that feel that use content marketing, there are still some marketers who are skeptical about the effectiveness of content marketing. This infographic shares some stats on how content marketing proves to be effective and how marketers could leverage more from the power of this impactful element of inbound marketing.

Conclusion:

Content marketing, we believe, is the emerging face of digital marketing and content will be at the core of all meaningful consumer engagements. Companies need to address the challenges and opportunities that this will throw up. The key to success is making content meaningful and relevant to the consumer. Understanding the consumer journey and mapping content to the different stages of that journey is a task that companies need to undertake.

 

Prospects could become clients from any phase. It is important that the buyer cycle is understood in order to devise a content strategy for each cycle so that it successfully transforms into a conversion vehicle.

1) Attract:

We don’t want any traffic on our site. We want intent to traffic. We want those customers who are looking for the products that are available on our eCommerce website. Here are some of the effective strategy to attract the right customers.

Blogging: 

When talking about inbound marketing, the first thing that we talk about will be blogging. Attracting customers to an eCommerce site could prove to be a difficult task as one might wonder about the topics that could be used to blog about.

Social Media: 

Social media is getting important day by day. Almost a third of Americans are used to checking their accounts many times a day. Be strategic in selecting the social media channel to develop an online presence and more visibility for your business. Keyword research will enable you to know what your customers are hungry for. Social media effectively supports the website and blog content and attract leads to convert them.

Keyword Research: 

Nothing is happening until and unless your customer performs a search. These are the keywords and a part of your content strategy to attract customers and get found online. Before writing content for your eCommerce site, make sure that you have the potential keywords to optimize the content accordingly.

Attracting through webpages:

Just like adding a blog to your website helps get more traffic, you could also enhance the chances of getting intent traffic if more pages are added to your website. Ensure that the web pages are optimized with the right set of keywords to get the right kind of visitors landing on your website.

2) Convert:

Getting visitors to the website is not enough. The next step involves converting visitors into potential leads by generating interest with the help of the attracting steps given above. You will need their email addresses. Contact information from your visitors is the most valuable thing. Firstly, you get to know that they are interested. Secondly, you get to promote your latest offerings every time there is a new launch.

Calls-to-action: 

These are the links or buttons that call out your visitors to take action desired by you. A simple call to action like “Talk to our buying consultant”, “Download our buying guide” are great calls to action that will propel the customers to click and enter their information.

Landing Pages: 

When a website visitor clicks on a CTA, they are sent to a landing page, a place where the promise of the call-to-action is fulfilled. This is where the visitor will fill up the required information, thus becoming your leads.

Forms: 

Optimize the form to make it the easiest process, as the visitors will become your potential leads once they fill-up the form.

Contacts: 

Keep track of the leads that are being converted in your database. This information will help you in designing your future interactions with your customers. The data collected could also be an effective means to develop buyer personas.

3) Close:

Once you have attracted the customers and converted them into leads, the next step involves pushing the customer into the sales funnel and closes the sale with some additional strategies.

Email: 

Your visitors have downloaded your content; however, they are unwilling to become your customers. This is where email marketing comes in. Develop a series of sales emails focused on useful, relevant content to build trust with the prospects and help them close the deal.

Lead Scoring: 

Based on the information entered by the visitor, the sales team will determine the willingness of the prospect to communicate with the sales department by assigning a numerical representation to them.

Closed-loop reporting: 

Determine what marketing efforts are attracting the best leads. Is the sales team successful in closing those leads into customers? Have a Customer Relationship Management – CRM Software that will help analyse the effectiveness of the marketing and the sales team together.

4) Delight:

Just because someone has closed the deal doesn’t mean that you have all the right to forgetting them. Instead, continue to engage with them, delight, up sell, and create happy customers for your company. The only way to do this is by providing high-quality content to your customers, regardless of their being leads, visitors, or existing customers.

Smart Calls-to-Action: 

Offer various discounts, first-come-first-serves and more to enhance the overall experience of your customer with your eCommerce site.

Social Media: 

Engaging with your prospects with attractive images, videos and posts will help you generate interest amongst them.

Email marketing and automation: 

Help your customers achieve their desired information by giving amazing content in various forms. Keep on introducing new products and features that would keep them engaged.

There was once a time when writing content and copywriting were the same. However, with the evolution in the digital marketing industry, especially in the content marketing sector, the gap between the two has been widening notably.

The Purpose

The main difference between copywriting and content writing lies in the motive behind the writing. Any text written for promotional, advertising or marketing purposes is copywriting. The purpose behind content writing is to keep the visitors hooked and entice them to stay longer on the website and engage with your brand.

Content writing is incorporated into copywriting. However, it is done in an attractive form to grab the audience’s eyeballs. The importance of copywriting is greater as it throws light on the worth of a brand, and its products or services.

Other than the purpose, what are the major points of differences between copywriting and content writing? How beneficial are they in terms of their usefulness on the web?

Content Writing

When you are composing content that provides value to your visitors so that they stay more on your website and recommend it to others, it is content writing. Generally, content writing tends to attract customers and give them valuable information on a product or a service. The most common ways of content writing are articles, blogs, press releases, and more.

Content Marketing Is Carried Out With The Help Of Content Writing

The whole purpose of content writing is to attract an audience towards your brand and educate them with valuable information. Well-crafted content finds its target audience and achieves main objectives.

In content writing, the following points are inevitable.

1) All the elements of the content, i.e. the form, the purpose, the structure, and more, should be well defined.
2) Overall the content should provide a rich experience to the audience.
3) Be clear and succinct.
4) Always have reliable sources to back up your arguments.
5) The content should establish thought leadership and authority among the audience.

If you make statements about your brand, use clear language. This helps the audience connect with you immediately. If there is a need to elaborate, give details. Don’t assume people will understand you automatically, but don’t talk down to them, either.

Copywriting

Copywriting is purely meant to pitch your brand that is created keeping high-quality standards in focus. The copy has to be compelling, and high in value. The main motive of copywriting is to sell an idea, unlike content writing where the main motive is not selling, but to help the audience understand a concept and your brand to generate interest.

Copywriting used to be a part of advertising. However, the evolution in the internet marketing industry is changing the way web content is used, using it to engage and sell effectively to the audience. Copywriting helps in targeting search terms and optimize the content on the basis of those terms. This enables better performance on search engines.

Copywriting Supplements Branding

Your copy has to be created for branding. It means explaining to your audience the characteristics of your brand and why it matters to go with your brand.

Just like content writing, your copy should attract an audience. However, copywriting is an advanced level of content writing. You are required to make the audience respond to your call to action with your copy.

Characteristics of a great copy

Copywriting has the power to attract the audience and keep them engaged. That is the reason that it is gaining popularity.

There is a great experience associated with your content. Copywriting should take the experience to the next level.

The following are the most important characteristics of a copy:

1) Write attractive headlines
2) Use clear, and direct words
3) Converse with your audience
4) Propel your audience to take action
5) Establish authority and trust for your brand
6) Avoid boasting
7) Avoid local slang, jargon, etc.
8) Use simple words. Make it simple and do not baffle your audience

Can content writing and copywriting overlap?

In this debate, many experts believe that the two could manage to overlap. In some content, there are traces of a copy, as a quick call-to-action at the end. This is very commonly found in blog posts. This is perhaps the main reason many online marketers are not able to differentiate between the two. At times, it is a good practice to blur the lines between content writing and copywriting, as generating both in equal proportions could hugely benefit the brand.

Conclusion

Copywriting and content writing could prove to be a great pair if worked together. If you are promoting your brand online, there is nothing that beats the use of effective text. For this purpose, it is vital that you incorporate content writing into copywriting.