Content marketing doesn’t really sound that difficult, right? You’ve done a little bit of reading on the subject matter – and it’s obvious that all you really have to do is set up a blog and then write a couple of posts every week, making sure to throw in some keywords and links. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as simple as this.

Content marketing is a much more involved process, from the generation of content ideas to the promotion of published content, and it takes up a lot of time and resources in order to do properly and successfully. Fortunately, for all of you bloggers and marketers out there, there are plenty of proven methods as well as tools available – many of them free – that can help make this process go a little smoother.

The following is a basic breakdown of the entire content marketing process along with a number of methods and tools to help you succeed:

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1. Idea and Title Generation

Coming up with things to write sounds easy until you are required to churn out tens of topics each week.

You may have in-depth knowledge on the process of content marketing to the point where you’re convinced your strategy will help you to accomplish all of your online marketing goals. However, if you can’t come up with ideas for your blog posts on a regular basis, then you’re basically stumbling out of the starting gate.

Having to keep on finding new ideas to write can be very hard, even if you’re knowledgeable about your respective industry. The following are a few ways that you can begin generating more ideas so that you’ll always have something to write about:

• Use the Blog Title Generator – We develop this incredibly helpful tool to help generate potential subject matter by recommending blog titles for specific keywords. Just type in a keyword that you want to write about, and the Blog Title Generator will pump out a list of potential titles including that keyword. For example, type in “content marketing” and you’ll be fed a list of possible blog titles that include gems like “How To Master Content Marketing In Only 5 Days” and “15 Common Misconceptions About Content Marketing”. Even if you don’t end up using the exact titles suggested, they are usually enough to get your creative juice going on.



Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer grades your title and give suggestions on further improving them.

• Use the Headline Analyzer – CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is the tool I use to transform titles from “okay” to “ridiculously awesome”. Simply type your title in and the tool will break it down by grading the structure, grammar and readability. It will give you an overall grade as well as a few tips for improving it. For example, when I type in “Content Marketing Tips” I received a C- with an explanation that states that the title is missing important words that will help it be more shareable and readable. Followed the suggestions given and I ended up with an A+!



Take a peek into SEOPressor’s top secret Content Marketing plan!

• Use Trello – Trello is a very helpful planning tool. It’s basically a bulletin board on which you can post cards filled with images and notes, all of which you can share and comment on with whoever you want. The way our content marketing team here at SEOPressor use it is we pitch our title ideas along with its outline into an Idea Pool. From there onwards good titles will be passed to the Greenlight stage and allocated to be published. It’s a great way of getting feedback among team members as well as avoiding clashes.

• Look at other blogs for ideas – What better way to get ideas for your blog than by checking out what other companies are writing about within your industry? While we certainly don’t recommend stealing their blog posts and simply rewording them – this will only hurt your reputation – we do recommend seeing what blog posts attract the most engagement from their readers. You can do this by checking to see how often a post is being shared or liked on social media. This should give you some idea about what types of topics are popular within your industry.

• Identify current trends – To write content that is fresh, meaning current and relevant, you need to identify what topics are trending. Just check Google Trends to see what readers are searching for and which topics are hot. You may stumble on a few relevant topics that you can write about for your blog.

2. Writing Your Content

Once you’ve got ideas for your content, you’re going to have to actually write it. This is actually a lot tougher than you might think. Just because you are an authority on the subject matter does not make you a good writer. Besides having to worry about spelling and grammar, you’ll also have to create a personable voice behind your blog that readers can relate too. You don’t want your blog posts to sound like generic Wikipedia entries, after all. Use the following two resources that can help you with content writing:

Zerys’ system and UI is among the best when it comes to finding freelance writers.

• Use Zerys – Who said you need to write all of your contents yourself? You can always outsource them and Zerys is a great way of doing it. It’s a content platform that connects clients to freelance writers. All you need is a title, a basic outline and the keywords you want included and you can find a freelancer writer to write the content for you. Platforms like Zerys are perfect for marketers that simply don’t have the time that’s required in order to regularly write content to post throughout the week. Writing can be very time consuming, after all, and you probably have a full plate as it is, what with running an entire online marketing campaign and all. You might not get 100% of the things you want from the writers but polishing a complete article is way easier and faster than writing them from scratch.



Using Grammarly can dramatically reduce the likelihood of being ambushed by Grammar Nazis.

• Use Grammarly – While you can run your blog posts through a spell and grammar check on your word processor, it won’t always be 100 percent effective at picking up mistakes. Grammarly is a grammar tool that is ten times as effective at pointing out spelling errors and picking up easy-to-miss grammar errors. This is important because poor spelling and bad grammar are going to make you look unprofessional.

3. Using Images

All of your blog posts should be accompanied by a relevant image. Images are vital to a successful content platform because we are just generally more attracted to visual content than text. Images, such as photos, give readers a chance to glance over your blog post and to get an idea of what it’s about without having to read much. They also help break up the text to make the format of your blog more appealing. Charts and infographics are also a great way to use images to help convey data in a more visual way.The following are a few tools that can help you find and use images for your blog:

Online design tools such as Canva allows you to effortlessly create stylish artworks to be used in your content.

• Design Tools – Even if you don’t have access to Photoshop, there are several design tools out there that can help you to prepare your images for use in your blog posts as well as to improve the overall aesthetic of your blog. One of the most popular of these design tools is Canva, which provides users with access to millions of stock photos, illustrations and vectors in addition to advanced photo editing tools, free icons and shapes, and hundreds of different fonts to choose from. Then there’s infogr.am, which provides templates that you can use to create charts and infographics and makes it easy to post to your blog. You don’t even need to be super artistic in order to produce great results using these tools.

• Stock photos – Odds are you don’t exactly have the time to pick up your camera and go out and capture whatever photos you need for your blog (not to mention the time it takes to learn how to capture professional quality photos). Fortunately, there are plenty of online resources that provide thousands of high resolution stock photos – many for free. Check out Unsplash, Picjumbo or Vectorportal, to name a few. You can even do a Google image search using the free-to-use filter.

4. Optimizing for Search Engine

Once you’ve written a blog post, you’re going to need to optimize it for SEO (search engine optimization). This can require a bit of effort as well since you’re going to need to use high quality keywords in addition to LSI keywords to make it easier for Google to identify what your content is about and how to rank it. Keep your keywords relevant and make sure you don’t overuse them to avoid penalties from Google.

On-page SEO can be quite a hassle, that’s why we come up with SEOPressor to simplify the process.

Keywords should be used in your blog titles, meta descriptions, H1 and H2 tags, anchor text, image ALT text and the actual body of your content. Be sure to use our SEOPressor tool to analyze your on-page SEO. The tool will scan your use of keywords and provide you with an overall SEO score, a keyword density number and suggestions for how to improve your optimization.

5. Promoting Your Content

No matter how awesome your contents are, it won’t attract readers just by existing. You need to promote your blog content in order to kickstart the first batch of traffic to your content. Only after your content gets a certain amount of traffic and backlinks are Google going to notice that it is actually good and rank it. The following are effective content promotion methods that you should implement into your content marketing strategy:

A “weekly digest” type of e-newsletter is a great way to promote contents to your own subscribers.

• Email marketing – You may be surprised to find out that email marketing is a great way to promote content – after all, aren’t the people on your email list already readers that you’ve captured as leads? Yes, they are. But just because they’ve opted in does not mean that they are regularly visiting your blog. You can use your email list to promote content that they might be interested, thereby redirecting your leads back to your blog, where they may like, comment or even share your content. There are a number of excellent email marketing platforms out there, including MailChimp, AWeber and iContact.

• Online community participation – Joining various online communities, such as public forums, is a great way to engage with your audience. Instead of straight up advertising your blog, make sure that you contribute in a meaningful way. If you have your blog linked to your user account, community members will eventually check it out if they find that you’ve offered insight into the community discussions. Of course, you can post new content to many of these communities as well in order to draw interest. Consider signing up to online communities like Reddit, Quora and Business 2 Community.



Sharing on your social media pages as well as online communities will send tons of traffic to your contents.

• Social media sharing – Just like your email list, just because people have followed you on various social media channels does not mean that they are regularly checking your blog. Post links to new blog content on your social media pages and encourage followers to comment. You should also embed social share buttons on each one of your blog pages to make it easy for readers to share directly to their social network of choice.

6. Analyzing Your Content’s Performance

The content marketing process doesn’t just end with promotion. You need to see how your content is performing so that you can adjust your strategy where needed. There are a number of analytics tools available that will help provide you with valuable data concerning how your content is performing.

Tracking the amount of traffic your contents are earning lets you know whether they are working or not.

Tools such as Google Analytics and Kissmetrics can provide you with all kinds of data, including page visits, bounce rates, dwell times, conversion rates, click-through rates and more. You should also use the RankReveal tool, which will provide you with a list of all the keywords you are ranking as well as if those keywords have risen or dropped in ranking.

Conclusion

As you can see, great content marketing can involve a lot of tedious processes. But with the right tools and techniques, you can blaze through to both make them more efficient as well as produce better results. All the tips listed in this post is something we gathered through our own experience. I’d love to hear yours as well so do share your own tips on how you zip your way through content marketing!

Content Marketing Made Easy:
The Seven Step Instant Content Plan

Now that you know how to make content marketing easy, learn how you can make it FAST!

Updated: 18 November 2024

About Winnie

Winnie is an aspiring copywriter & internet marketer in the vast world of digital marketing. She's as curious as she can be; constantly hunting for answers to her questions, never saying no to new experiences. When she's not spending her time typing up a storm, she is at home keeping up with her never-ending movie marathon & books.

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