content marketing – MOJO Marketplace Blog

5 Ways Editorial Calendars Make for Better Blogging

Darius Carrick — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 16:00:00 +0000

Since its initial rise in popularity, blogging has remained a key aspect of many business plans, from corporations to solo entrepreneurs. Yet consistently posting fresh, engaging content can be a challenge, whether you are a new or veteran blogger.

An editorial calendar will improve your blogging strategy and simplify the work of running an effective blog. The most basic editorial calendar will include content topics of each piece and a publish date.

More detailed calendars can include intended audience, keywords, team member responsibilities and the promotion schedule. This organization provides consistency, content arcs, future flexibility, tracking and analysis, and meeting business objectives.

An editorial calendar will improve your blogging strategy and simplify the work of running an effective blog.
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1. Consistency

Consistency is one of the most important qualities that your blog needs to develop that engaged following. Consistent publishing not only drives more traffic but also increases leads.

A recent HubSpot study found small businesses posting content more than 11 times each month had three times the visitors of sites publishing once monthly — and twice as many leads as businesses posting 6-10 times. An editorial calendar helps build a consistent publishing schedule and motivates you to stay on track.

2. Content Arcs

Compared to posting on whichever topic comes to mind, an editorial calendar is far more strategic. By planning out your content in advance, you can build a sense of progression that walks with customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey, while telling the story of your brand.

An editorial calendar will also allow you to build smaller content arcs into your strategy, such as a weekly interview or current events roundup. This kind of connected content will keep your readers returning so that they don’t miss an installment.

3. Future Flexibility

Along with structure, an editorial calendar also provides flexibility to your blog strategy. A content plan lets you see the larger picture, from now into the future, allowing you to more easily refine next week and next month’s content based on the results of past content.

You’ll quickly discover the topics that drive the most traffic and that most resonate with your followers. You can then adjust your future content pieces based on the content proven to be the most popular.

4. Tracking and Analysis

Naturally, in order to take advantage of insights from your content and your audience, you need to be tracking the performance of your content pieces. The specific metrics you track for your content should be based on your overall business goals, but in general, you should be paying attention to the content themes and individual posts that drive the most traffic.

Some editorial calendars also include built-in tools for promoting content on social media and tracking that engagement as well. An organized content and promotion schedule makes it easier to track and analyze your results.

5. Meeting Business Objectives

An editorial calendar also makes it easier to ensure that your blog content and practices are focused on meeting overall business goals. Digital marketing specialist Stacy Jackson suggests ranking each content idea for alignment with specific business goals. At the very least, you should be evaluating each topic for whether or not it will contribute to your marketing and organizational objectives.

Resources to Get Started

There are great benefits in adding an editorial calendar to your blogging strategy — and there are many tools available to help you get started with an effective calendar. HubSpot offers free digital editorial calendar templates that you can adapt for the specific needs of your blog or business, while CoSchedule provides a series of free printable worksheets for strategic planning, along with their flagship digital calendar.

To help you out further in building out your content base, check out our article on planning a year’s worth of content in just one day. These resources will help you quickly develop an effective blog and blogging process that will grow your audience.

How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content for Your Blog in a Day

Darius Carrick — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:53:50 +0000

Content is an essential part of an inbound marketing strategy which helps draw readers to your website. In order to be effective—to build a loyal customer base that drives sales—content must be relevant, helpful and consistent. Content that uses a regular voice, timing and distribution strategy can make inbound marketing work for your brand. This consistency lets you meet your customers’ needs at every stage of their buying journey, building a relationship through engaging, dependable information.

Consistency in timing—how often you post new content to your website—is especially important in building that loyal following of enthusiastic, qualified leads. Regular production of new, high-quality content is also one of the most challenging aspects of inbound marketing. But developing a consistent content schedule using the following tips can ensure that you’re prepared. Follow these steps to create a content plan for this year in just one day.

1. Start with Quarterly Themes

The four quarters of the year provide the perfect framework for building a more detailed content strategy, while also refreshing every three months. Choosing four main themes for the year will also focus your content efforts, providing the consistency in post topics that will build an audience.

The themes that you choose should reflect both your business goals and the needs of your potential customers that you’ve found through customer research. They should be broad enough that individual topics within them address the interests of customers at the awareness, consideration and decision stages of the purchase process.

2. Break it Down into a Monthly Calendar

From your quarterly themes, you can begin to plan out a more detailed content plan for each month. Start by deciding how frequently you will post new content, based on the capabilities of your team and the number of content topics. This could be one new post each day, one every other weekday or even a much more in-depth piece per week.

There are many tools you can use to build out your content calendar, starting with a basic calendar in Google Sheets. CoSchedule and HubSpot also offer free calendar templates for planning out your content campaigns. You can also use task management systems like Trello to organize the content process.

The key is to plan out a consistent schedule of content that covers all customer needs and uses a variety of content types, including long-form posts, infographics and even video. You’ll also want to incorporate holidays and other special events in your calendar when they align with your audience’s interest.

3. Plan to Promote Your Content

Another key aspect of a successful content strategy is effective promotion of that content—which again needs to be consistent in order to draw the audience of customers that you want. If you are just starting out or making new efforts to expand your audience, social media is the key to drawing new attention to your content.

Each social platform has different best practices in order to get the most out of your shares—Social Media Examiner breaks this down in more detail. In order to keep track of your promotion schedule for new content, these social media posts should be included in your content calendar. You’ll also want to consider setting a budget for social media in order to increase your reach.

4. Build Your Content Team

For smaller marketing teams—or even solo ones—the amount of planning and actual content writing needed to be consistent can be overwhelming. This is where freelance content writers can help, though you’ll want to ensure that the freelancers you hire have a thorough understanding of your industry and your audience. Services like Scripted make it easy to find qualified writers and to set up a consistent schedule of content creation.

Once you’ve established a consistent schedule of content, the next step is refining your strategy and your processes to be better and more efficient. Google Analytics is a wonderful, free tool that enables you to measure interaction with your content and promotion channels.

Get going on your new content plan today and start providing extra value for your audience.

Content Marketing Insight from Scripted

Small Business Partners — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 02:23:57 +0000

How Content Marketing Makes Every Other Marketing Channel More Effective

Sponsored by MOJO Small Business Partner: Scripted

It’s a digital world and today’s marketing professionals know that if you don’t make an impact online, you don’t exist. Staying relevant is more difficult than ever. The search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that worked last year are obsolete. Social media strategies that once brought in the crowds now barely register a blip. Search engine marketing is getting more expensive and less efficient as more competitors learn how to use it well.

Fortunately, there are still great tools to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Content marketing is one of those force multipliers that unleashes the potential of the rest of your marketing operation, making it cheaper and more effective – if you do it right.

Good Content Naturally Improves Organic Traffic

The key word here is “good”. If you are still filling your site with bold, underlined keywords that are completely out of context, you can be sure your site’s rankings are negatively impacted. Today’s search engine robots can spot keyword stuffing at a glance.

Adding useless links to your page is another antiquated digital marketing method. You will no longer get credit for quantity over quality. Search engines are interested in your ability to add value for web users, which means your links must guide visitors to relevant, useful information.

When you do it right – by creating useful and interesting content – those pages will rank well on search engines for relevant keywords, which is the best way to create reliable organic traffic. As you collect pages that rank well, you’ll also see better SEO performance for your website’s main pages. Congrats! You’re collecting “Domain Authority”, which means that Google and similar services see you as an authority in your field and are more likely to rank any page on your site higher.

Higher Domain Authority Equals Cheaper SEM

Improving your domain authority is great for bringing in organic traffic, but it also has other fantastic benefits. One of the biggest benefits is cheaper SEM.

Google uses a wide range of factors to decide whose ads will appear for certain keywords, and whoseads will appear at the top. These factors are summed up in the quality score of your ad, and one of the most important contributors to your quality score is domain authority.

Think of it this way: Even if I purchase ads for a quick blog post on Medium about the latest events in Iraq, Google doesn’t want my little blog post to outrank a recent article on the same subject from the New York Times.

When you use content to establish higher domain authority for keywords that you’re targeting in ads, your quality score will go up, which means that you’ll pay less for higher placement and more clicks. More traffic, less cost – what’s not to love!

Good Content Makes Great Social Media Marketing Collateral

You put out your content and everyone loved it. After a few days of praise, your great post settles in for a long life of bringing in a continuous trickle of leads through organic traffic. It’s a good retirement.

Except that’s not the end of the story, or at least it shouldn’t be. Once you create a piece of content that people respond to, it’s time to find ways to repurpose it.

Whether it’s a blog post, video, infographic, or even just a nice image, good social media strategists know that if it’s worth posting once, it’s worth posting again. They’ll also tell you that posting to social media isn’t just about courting existing followers. Good content can be converted into ads and promoted posts that will attract new visitors to your profile and website.

Turning social media into an effective marketing channel requires good collateral anyway so you’ll hit two birds with one stone by investing in good content

Strengthening Your Brand Through Content Marketing

Content that people love doesn’t just drive traffic to your website, it inspires the people who enjoy it to share with their friends and colleagues. Innovative content marketers know that the likelihood of social media shares increases dramatically with the quality and variety of content. For example, a useful video, a funny image or a well-written blog post is far more likely to gain traction than an amateur attempt at content creation.

There are some striking statistics that SEM experts are incorporating into new content creation:

When a colorful visual aid accompanies text, the likelihood of users reading the text increases 80 percent.
Content published with accompanying images typically gets 94 percent more views that text-only content.
According to 51.9 percent of digital marketing experts, video content enjoys the best return on investment.

The vast majority of those people won’t turn into customers right away. In fact, you might not see even a blip in sales the day after a post gets 10,000 unique views.

But now there are 10,000 people who know the name of your company who didn’t before, and they associate you with an expert piece in a relevant industry. That’s brand strengthening in action.

Large companies pay millions of dollars for television and billboard ads to do the same thing that you just did with a blog post. You’ve seeded those 10,000 people so that, when they see your next post or ad, they’ll already trust in your brand and be more likely to click.

Investing in content marketing isn’t just about making a cool blog, it’s an essential tool in the modern digital marketer’s arsenal for increasing efficiency across a range of marketing channels. And remember, the sooner you get started, the quicker you’ll see an effect. So what’s stopping you?

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