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