Content Marketing for Your Business Blog

 

Today many companies have a blog, but does every business achieve its goals with blogging? I bet this is far from reality. Creating content for a business blog requires a specific approach that differs from writing to amuse readers and provide fun. Blogging will be beneficial for your company only if you can develop a clear plan, define the major goals of your content marketing campaign and create and publish blog posts effectively.

Let’s find out how to write a blog for strategic business purposes and become a more productive content marketer with our #SEOcafe chat participants and special guest James Norquay, founder of Prosperity Media, SEO and content marketing consulting director, speaker and author of numerous search publications.

What Are Your Five Most Indispensable Blogging Tools?

The right tools can make your content creation process easier and help you improve your blogging. Here are 16 powerful tools that our chat participants use for effective blogging. We divided them by several categories, based on each tool’s purpose.

Searching content ideas

1. Quora. A question-and-answer website helps you get new ideas and inspiration for brainstorming. By looking through Q&As, you can get an overview of what people are talking about, what they want to know and which problems they face. This is a rich source of fresh and relevant topics that you can develop into blog posts.

2. BuzzSumo. When you enter a topic or a URL into its search box, BuzzSumo gives you information about what content performs best for social media sharing in your niche.

3. Feedly. A free service that you can use for tracking posts from the blogs that you’re following in your niche and picking up brand-new ideas.

4.AnswerThePublic.com. This is a relatively new service providing users with content ideas. Enter your keyword, and it will suggest you results in visual form. You’ll see a “wheel” of questions that are related to your topic and contain your keyword. All the results are divided into questions that start with what, where, when, who, which, why, how and are.

5.Google Trends. Use this tool to discover volume of different keywords. It will show you a relative level of interest for a certain keyword phrase over time, and will compare the level of interest among your target terms. The tool doesn’t give you actual numbers, so it’s worth using it in combination with services like the Keyword Planner.

6. Google Keyword Planner. All you need to do is enter your target keyword, and the tool will give you a traffic estimation for it and help you find relevant and related terms in your niche.

7. KeywordTool.io. This is a good alternative to the previous one and provides users with a great amount of keyword ideas – up to 750 suggestions. Also, it’s good for generating long-tail keyword ideas.

8. SEMrush. The recently launched SEO Keyword Magic Tool is an all-in-one tool for keyword research, allowing to estimate potential of your targeted words, group them into niches and export up to a million keywords in a single file.

9. Editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is crucially important for your content marketing campaign. It helps you define and visualize your plans for content, manage the content production and approval process, archive blog consistency and content balance across your topics.

10. Trello. This tool provides you with a flexible and simple way to organize your content ideas. Each of your ideas is turned into a card with notes that can be easily moved within lists as you progress through your writing process.

Improving your writing experience

11. Google Docs. With this free and very easy-to-use service you can create and edit web-based documents and store them online. Also, if you write directly in Google Docs you can integrate other services with it, for example, some spelling and grammar tools.

12. Grammarly. The writing-enhancement platform is a great proofreading and plagiarism-detection resource. Grammarly checks for spelling, punctuation, style and many other elements.  

13. Hemingway App. This free unique tool analyzes your text and highlights common errors and long, complex sentences, helping you improve its readability.

14. Canva. Canva is probably the most popular visual content tool that makes the whole process of image creation very easy and smooth. With its multiple templates even non-designers can create nice looking images for their blogs.

15. SnappaIO. Another visual content tool, which probably is not that rich in terms of functionality, but has awesome collection of backgrounds and free images, as well as some really cool and handy features.

16. Landscape by Sprout Social. Recently Sprout Social has launched a free tool for resizing images for seven social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube. The process is easy as pie: upload your image and choose the network for which you’d like to resize your image. When you finish cropping, Landscape will export you a ZIP file.

Anastasia Sidko

Affiliate Marketing

Clients have been asking me whether affiliate marketing is a good strategy for startups and other businesses trying to grow. They often sound sceptical but my answer is always Yes. If I had to point out any disadvanteges of starting an affiliate program in an early stage of growth, only very few would come to my mind, if any. I will get to these later, let's focus on the advantages first.

The Pros of running an affiliate program

To make sure that we're all on the same page, let's see Wikipedia's definition of affiliate marketing:

"Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer."

For those of you, who prefer visualisation over text, here's a short video on what affiliate marketing is and how Post Affiliate Pro works:

Why is affiliate marketing a good option for Startups?

According to eMarketer, 46% of marketers consider affiliate marketing to be “very cost effective” as it relates to customer acquisition, second only to email.

1. You only pay for results – unlike traditional advertising methods, affiliate marketing is the most cost effective one. If your affiliates don't perform and bring leads, they simply don't get paid. Have you ever received a check from Google saying that your AdWords didn't bring enough revenue so they're giving you your money back? Me neither.
2. You don't spend time on advertising – let others do the work for you so you can worry about other, more important issues, or issues that you have skills for. You don't need to be a marketing expert, neither you have to learn any marketing methods to run an affiliate program. Simply setup your affiliate program and then payout your affiliates once a month. That's where your job ends.
3. Get lots of traffic and improved SEO – lots of affiliates generate lots of backlinks. In addition Post Affiliate Pro makse sure that all of your links are SEO friendly.
4. Find Super affiliates and you're golden – you don't need hundreds of affiliates to succesfully run an affiliate program. In general, most of businesses have 3-5 Super affiliates who generate more than 50% of the revenue from their whole affiliate program.

David Cacik

Teacher adds one more Language Leveraging Microsoft's Virtual Academy

Learning to code educational apps with UWP

Whether it’s learning C# or French, developing fluency in a new language is challenging.  

French teacher and Windows developer Cyprien Marie shows with his memory-improvement app Memorize It! that the Universal Windows Platform and its online resources can help simplify and accelerate the language-learning process – for spoken and programming languages. 

He created Memorize it! based on an in-class memorization exercise in which students used hand-held whiteboards to write their answers in French. Similarly, with Memorize It!, students enter text, select a memorization technique like fill-in-the-blank or word jumble, and then test themselves out loud. 

He developed the memorization-learning app in Windows Phone 8. By making the switch to Windows 10 and the UWP, his audience has gotten much larger: In the last three months, Memorize It! on Windows 10 was downloaded almost twice as many times compared with its Windows Phone 8.1 version.  

Microsoft