My Recipe for Success: How to Launch a Successful Blog:
Learn what steps Matthew Barby took to plan and then launch a successful food blog.
What Content Should I Consider Creating?:
Stuck for blogging ideas? Rand Fishkin expands the idea of what a blog post can be. Find inspiration here.
How To Blog Successfully About Anything:
Tanner Christensen helps you harness your curiosity to defeat writers' block.
When Is a Blog the Right Form of Content Marketing?:
Sometimes blogging isn't the right answer. Isla McKetta suggests some questions to ask yourself when blogging just doesn't seem to be paying off.
Time for Guest Blogging With a Purpose:
You don't have to confine your blogging to your own site. Jennifer Sable Lopez shows you how to navigate the sometimes tricky landscape of guest blogging (and avoid SEO penalties)
The perfect blog post length or publishing frequency doesn't actually exist. "Perfect" isn't universal — your content's success depends on tons of personalized factors. It's all explained in this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday.
It happens to the best of us. Sometimes it is hard to find that inspiration for writing even though we feel a drive to produce more and better content to push marketing numbers. Sometimes we should stand back and let the numbers do the writing for us.
A blog is only as effective as its posts. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers six paths you can take to make sure your posts resonate with your audiences.
Are you wasting time with inefficient outreach emails that get ignored? By testing three tweaks to an existing template, the folks at Directive Consulting were able to more than triple their reply rate and win more guest posting opportunities.
When we noticed that comment quality was rapidly declining on the blog, we decided to do something about it. And that something didn't involve closing comments, but improving them.
Engagement is a huge but often ignored opportunity, and may be an important aspect of Google's machine learning algorithms. Larry Kim shares new findings to support the theory that these algorithms reward high user engagement.
Brands hoping to find lasting, consistent success at content marketing should adopt a "shorter content/less content" mindset.
Pitching a guest post on hoverboards to a B2B marketing blog is, unsurprisingly, a bad idea. Find out why Bop Design rejects 9 out of every 10 pitches and what you can do to increase your own chances of pitching success.
With the right process and a dose of patience, SEO success is always within reach — even if you're running your own blog. Optimizing your blog posts begins as early as the inception of your idea, and from then on you'll want to consider your keyword targeting, on-page factors, your intended audience, and more. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out a step-by-step process you can adopt to help increase search traffic to your blog over time.
Sooner or later, you'll be faced with using WordPress to create blog posts. Sergey Stefoglo goes through the ins and outs of uploading and optimizing posts with the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, offering a downloadable checklist to help make sure you've hit all the marks.
If you're serious about readers seeing the strength of your ideas, writing shorter content must become a part of your repertoire.
Content marketing is big business, but are brands taking it far enough? Here Simon Penson argues that Brand as Publisher is the next step.
Content is meant to support your marketing efforts; it shouldn't define them. Ronell Smith talks about the goals you shouldn't be setting for your content marketing efforts, the ones you should focus on, and the best ways to get started on the road to brand loyalty.
Ever thought about what really sticks out in your audience's minds? Hint: it's not the hard facts alone. Combining data and storytelling can make your brand's content stick out in a meaningful way; Nichole DeMeré shows you how in today's post.
