Inbound marketing is an attractive way to get your target customers to find you online, rather than fighting tooth and nail to distribute flyers door to door. As billions of people start with an online search to look for what they need, this marketing technique is a staple in most businesses’ marketing strategies.
Blogging is one of the most powerful ways to boost your inbound marketing efforts and get more customers. With blogging, addressing questions that your target customers ask regarding your business is all plain sailing. It’s an excellent way to provide truly relevant and useful information based on what they are looking for.
In this case, all the high-performing blogs share one common characteristic: content quality.
Here are handy ways to optimize blog content for successful inbound marketing.
#1. Know your audience
Just because you like the content doesn’t mean other people want to read it. That’s why apart from delivering well-written content, you must also understand who exactly it is that you are writing to in the first place. You can’t get your message delivered without defining your target audience in the first place.
In other words, knowing your audience is an excellent start to elevate your blogging efforts. If you can define your audience well, it’d be much easier for you to reach them out with relevant content that they actually care about.
#2. Choose a relevant topic with care
Choosing a content topic obviously isn’t the most straightforward task. But, solid knowledge and understanding of your audiences can help. So, instead of relying on your taste, you need to let your audiences’ behaviors and preferences drive your blog topic ideas– or else, you could post irrelevant topics for nothing.
The bottom line here is choosing topics and writing about those topics in a way that your audiences know and are familiar with. A relevant subject will spark your audience’s curiosity, get them interested and give them a reason to listen. With that said, you’d be able to engage and connect with your audience seamlessly in the long-haul.
However, if you’re hungry for some new content ideas, you can check out these cool places.
#3. Get into visuals
There’s a wise saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. It proves that a wall of text isn’t enough to keep your audiences interested. That’s mostly because the human brain processes visuals at least 60,000 times faster than text.
Adding some visual content to your blog post can help your audience retain and convey the information much better and quicker. It also enhances the audiences’ experience, keeps them around longer, and gets them more engaged. There are various types of visual content that you add to improve your blog performance, such as images, infographics, videos, graphs, and charts.
#4. Consider long-form content
Long-form content tends to perform well as it provides more in-depth information and gives more value about the topic. The minimum length for long-form content should range anywhere between 1,200 to 1,500 words. It’s believed that any content piece with more than 4,000 words in length can be considered as long-form content.
Writing such content surely takes more time and energy. But, the results will be well worth any bumps in the road you face early on. It makes your blog seem more authoritative, which helps you increase your ranking on the search result. Not to mention that the audience can get more comprehensive information as well.
#5. Apply simple language
Flowery writing can be great for poetry or novels, but painful for your blog marketing content. Using a casual, conversational language as your writing style is key to making your audience understand what you are talking about.
Remember, your blog content is supposed to draw the audiences’ attention and develop a strong connection to increase their engagement. Make sure you create your content as though you’re communicating with your best friends.
Most of the time, your audience tends to skim your content to find what they’re looking for. They like to read content that is kept simple and is straightforward. Offering them a complicated, highfalutin language is a death knell that makes them zone out and quickly click away.
#6. Use bullet points whenever possible
Content with bulky text is most likely to make your audiences shudder and think, “It’s going to take a lot of time to understand this”– it risks becoming a chore for them to read. To avoid this kind of situation, you can use bullet points to break up dense pools of text.
Bullet points allow you to effortlessly highlight digestible bits of critical information, which keeps your audiences’ attention focused and make it easier to take information in. It can also create a more informal, easy-going, and friendly feel for the audience.
#7. Make it SEO-friendly hands down
Most content bloggers bury their heads in the sand when it comes to SEO practices. It might need some extra effort to create SEO-friendly content, but it’s not the hardest thing to do. Things like the keyword-based title, text formatting, paragraphs, headlines, and the structure of a blog are easy to fix and yet play a crucial role in your blog ranking in search engine results.
The better your ranking, the more it’ll show up on the top pages of the search results. That way, it increases your chances to get seen by new potential customers. And that’s a good start for winning inbound marketing.
#8. Catch their attention with compelling Titles
Most of your audiences read the title before they decide to click on blog content. It gives your audiences the first impression of your content. No matter how brilliant your content is, without a catchy title, it will fall flat. Click To Tweet That’s why you need to put some extra efforts to create eye-popping titles to grab their attention and quickly click on the content and read it.
Make sure that you have the most well-researched and search engine optimized title before you start to craft a piece of content. Also, keep it relevant, clear, and engaging to attract the audiences even more.
#9. Bleed in the first line
Intro or the first couple lines of your content is probably the first thing after the title that the audiences read once they land on your blog. It sets the tone for the rest of the content, catching the audience’s eyes, one step at a time. If you have a dull, long-winded intro, they won’t even bother to keep reading your content.
A powerful intro for your blog content is supposed to spark the audiences’ interest in the first place. It’s meant to tempt them to read more, making them unable to pull their eyes away from the screen.
#10. Create clear call-to-action
You’ve spent all the sweat, blood, and tears to create content to achieve a specific goal for your inbound marketing strategy. In this case, you need to include a clearly defined and easily identifiable call-to-action to guide the audience to perform your desired effect. These could consist of sharing the content with friends, subscribing to your newsletter, following you on social media, purchasing your product, and more.
Without a clear call-to-action, your audience won’t know what to do next — and getting them confused means that you just lost your opportunity to get them to wander out of the conversion funnel.
#11. Start to care about meta description
A meta description is a brief snippet that shows up along with the title content in search results. Though most content bloggers don’t usually care about it. In fact, it can give your audience a sneak peek of your content right after they type keywords. So, it’s crucial in improving user click-through from Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Now is the time to start getting serious about this once “optional” content blogging move. This short paragraph (160 characters more or less) is your opportunity to promote content to the audience and let them know exactly what the material has and why it relates to what they’re looking for. If you have a sharp meta description, your audience will choose to click on your blog over other sites.
#12. Expand your media empire
Even your brilliant blog content will die on the table if you don’t promote it well enough. It means that you need to share it on other platforms to expand your reach. Sharing your content on social media is one of the most reliable ways to deliver a steady stream of visitors to your blog.
Instead of publishing content on your blog and begging for the audience to share it, you can post it on your social media to make it easier for your target audience to find you. However, to get the most of social network content sharing, make sure you tailor the message to fit each platform and audience.
#13. Optimize your content for mobile
Today, at least 4 billion users access the internet with their mobile devices. Also, mobile devices account for more than 48 percent of web page views worldwide. Those facts make it evident that everyone seems glued to their hand-held devices all the time.
Now, it’s essential to make your blog content mobile-friendly to remain competitive. By doing so, you allow mobile users to have the proper experience.
Mobile-friendly content makes it easier for your existing and potential customers to access your blog anywhere at any time. They can still easily access and enjoy your content while on the go– whether they’re on their commute to work or while sipping their morning coffee.
#14. Track the results
Tracking the results is another way to improve your content blogging efforts for inbound marketing. It informs you how well your content is performing. The data analytics will help you to not only identify awful-performing content but also to get a solid grasp on the best-performing ones.
In one way or another, tracking the blog content result makes it easier for you to understand what kind of content your audiences most and least enjoy. It can help you to find the ideal “formula” for your content blogging efforts, so you can rinse and repeat for ultimate inbound marketing success.
#15. Update your old content
Continuously creating new content day in and day out and coming up with the latest ideas are indeed a crucial part of having a successful blog. However, if you’ve been leveraging content blogging for a while, you must have some old posts saved up. As such, you’re practically sitting on a gold mine.
It’s very much to your advantage to revive and update your old content with recent trends and newest facts. It can be your traffic-generating machine considering that Google values freshness. The giant search engine prioritizes fresher, updated content to sit higher in the results.
In other words, updating your blog content frequently gives you a higher opportunity to rank better on organic search engine results and drive unique traffic to your blog.
#16. Repurpose your content again and again
Repurposing your content is one of the smartest ways to get the best of the content that you’ve already worked on. To find material worth repurposing, you need to check your blog analytics and see what content performs best in the last few months. Then, you can turn them into other mediums, such as infographics, ebooks, presentations, social media posts, or podcasts.
Some of your audiences prefer visual infographics over data-driven articles. Some others choose podcasts over presentations. It means that providing your blog content in various mediums helps you to get more new audiences and extend your reach.
#17. Rely on a content marketing company
Optimizing your blog content for inbound marketing needs a lot of time and patience. However, if you have some extra budget, using a content marketing company is probably one of the easiest and quickest ways to leverage your content blogging efforts.
A content marketing company like Effective Inbound Marketing has tons of resources or access to content strategy solutions and tools, so they can help you to create winning blog content for inbound marketing. They can be an end-to-end solution for you who don’t have enough time (and patience) to optimize blog content.
Create Winning Content for a Successful Inbound Marketing Today!
Bill Gates once said that “content is king.” That saying has now become the cornerstone of an inbound marketing strategy. In this matter, blogging is one of the most potent ways at your disposal. By creating out-of-the-box blog content, you have a higher chance to attract more audiences looking for this relevant information– whether it’s about your brand or other pertinent topics of your business niche.
The content should be useful and relevant to the audiences so it can drive them down your funnel and convert them into leads. Although the full results happen slowly, you’ll be able to reap all the rewards of your hard work for the inbound marketing strategy.
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