To achieve their content marketing goals, most businesses focus on creating new blog posts. According to a survey by Statista, 22% of online bloggers stated that they published blog posts weekly, while 2% did so daily. While this approach to new content can bring in new traffic, it’s also important to analyze and update your existing blog content.

Conducting content audits can come in handy in helping you identify blog posts that can be improved and updated. Investing in a content audit is key in developing a plan for blog growth.

If you want to revamp your old content and give your blog posts a breath of fresh air, here are some tips on how to do so.

What Is A Blog Content Audit?

A blog content audit involves collecting and analyzing content on your website to identify which blog posts need to be updated, re-written, or deleted to improve user experiences and boost traffic. 

Conducting an audit helps you identify your content strategy’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as adapt your editorial plan to your marketing goals. Doing a content audit can help you understand what’s working and what’s not, helping you make more informed content marketing decisions. This process allows you to fix issues such as outdated data, broken links, or focusing on wrong keywords which could be affecting the performance of your content.

5 Tips to Audit Your Existing Blog Content

Auditing your existing blog content will take a significant amount of time; however, it’s worth the effort. Here are some ways to refresh the content to be relevant to your audience, whether you are using Blogger, WordPress, or Medium.

Identify Your Goals

You need to start with clear and defined objectives to allow you to focus on what’s important. Consider the goals for the audit – do you want to improve SEO, the conversion rate, or audience engagement? 

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With goals in mind, you can plan the audit better. For example, if your company objective is to increase your quarterly sales, your content audit should be focused on boosting SEO to reach more customers. To do so, you need to identify which keywords are worth ranking for, analyze the quality of the content, and optimize it.

Put Your Content Together

Image source: Unsplash

Gather all the content that needs to be audited. Putting together the blog posts that need to be improved makes it easier to focus on important areas, especially during the content development process. If you have a small website, you can put all the content on a spreadsheet. 

However, if you have a lot of content, there are online tools such as SEMrush, HubSpot, or Google Search Console that you can use to pull together all the information. These tools can audit your blog content based on sitemap data, which consists of all the information on your website.

When gathering content, you don’t have to use all the blog posts; choose a time frame according to your current marketing strategy. To make the audit faster, categorize and organize the content by author, number of words, and topics. 

Collect Your Blog Metrics

Part of starting a successful blog involves creating a detailed plan on how to promote your blog to get traffic. One way to measure your blog’s success is by looking at the metrics. 

Statistics show that 32% of bloggers always check their blog analytics. This is essential because it enables them to see the most viewed blog posts and the value they have for the readers.

A content audit comes in handy when you need to collect data about targeted keywords, backlinks, page views, bounce rate, readability, and more. You can use tools such as Google Analytics or Ahrefs if you need the metrics to gauge the performance of your blog.

Collecting and analyzing metrics helps you create better content for your audience. It improves overall user experience, and boosts content search rankings. You can also tailor your content to specific customer segments and make it appeal to more targeted audiences.

Assess The Content

Once you’ve collected the data, you need to analyze it based on the goals set. Blog posts are a key component of content marketing; therefore, they need to be updated. You can assess the blog posts by identifying content that’s missing, underperforming, or outdated, as well as content that needs to be removed.

Keep the relevant blog content if it’s still performing well and is relevant to your audience. For blog posts that have statistics, you can revise them, remove old information and include the latest data. 

On the other hand, if you are unable to improve a piece of content and believe that it doesn’t bring any value to the reader, you can remove it from the website. You can do this with content that is related to products that are out-of-stock, old seasonal campaigns, or with duplicate content.

Adjust Your Content Marketing Strategy

Once you track your blog content failures and successes, you can align the new changes with your content marketing strategy. This involves reviewing what works and what doesn’t, and keeping it in-line with the company goals and industry trends.

One of the ways to do this is to scale your content production process by hiring a new content team, changing the style, and creating a new content calendar. This will play a key role in improving the quality of your blog posts and increasing organic traffic, conversion rate, and audience engagement.

In addition, you should conduct a content gap analysis against your competitors. Compare your content with your competitors’ to identify which blog posts you need to improve. It helps you identify which keywords you should be focusing on, what type of posts are preforming best, and if there is room for you to try to compete with them. If you want your content marketing strategy to be successful, you should perform regular content audits to adjust your content to the market needs.

Summary

Crafting blog content is a key element in online marketing. Businesses use the content to reach more customers and boost their sales. Although a blog content audit takes time and effort, it’s necessary to conduct it regularly because it’s an important measure of your content’s efficiency.

You can conduct monthly or quarterly audits to assess whether your blog posts are performing as intended. To make the process easier, invest in blog content audit tools such as Google Search Console, SEMrush, or HubSpot. This tactic can help save your company time and money, and improve the accuracy of your results.

The post Out With The Old, In With The New – How To Audit Your Existing Blog Content appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

If you’ve ever gotten stuck in a blog rut—you’re not alone.

Coming up with weekly blog post ideas starts to get hard, especially if you have a small team. We’ve all hit that content brick wall and thought to ourselves—“there’s just nothing left to post about.”

At DigitalMarketer, we face the same struggle. Publishing content is our thing, but that doesn’t mean every now and then we don’t sit down and think, now what?

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So to make sure this happens as infrequently as possible, we’ve created the The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas. You can check out the infographic linked below, or read on to get more explanation and curated examples of many of these post ideas.

We’ve grouped the ideas based on 8 goals for a blog post. This way you are writing posts that best fit your needs, rather than just churning out posts.

1. Useful Posts
2. Generous Posts
3. Entertaining Posts
4. Timely Posts
5. Human Posts
6. Promotional Posts
7. Controversial Posts
8. Engaging Posts

Here is the ultimate list of blog post ideas so you never face blog writers block again.

Download the full infographic HERE!

Useful Posts

List Post

List posts are everywhere, and for good reason… they flat out work. Create a list of books, tools, resources, or any other thing that your market will find useful.

The DigitalMarketer blog gets a ton of traffic when we post list style articles about book recommendations. So, guess what we keep posting?

You guessed it. Here’s one of our book recommendation articles.

How-To Post

The How-To Post is another staple blog post idea. This post describes how to execute a process and uses images, video, or audio to enrich the post and make it as easy as possible for your visitor to take action.

An example of a How-To Post is our blog post, “How to Design Facebook Ad Images Like a Pro (…When You’re Really an Amateur).”

Case Study Post

Using “case study” in your headline makes your article sound like it has more value than a regular blog post. Case studies carry weight; you know you’ll learn something from a case study post because they always open the hood on something we’re curious to know more about. The firsthand experience makes these posts extra juicy.

Case study posts outline and unpack the details of a project, event, or process and show you how it turned out.

Molly Pittman wrote a case study post on the dog walking app Wag for the DigitalMarketer blog:

Problem/Solution Post

This type of post has an easy format:

1. Define a problem
2. Present the solution

This post can cross over into the territory of other blog post types such as the FAQ Post, How-To Post, or Checklist Post.

You’ll start to notice that a lot of the DigitalMarketer blogs are problem/solution posts because that’s our thing. Our goal is to help marketers solve their problems, so naturally we write a lot of solution-based posts.

If you attended the 2019 Traffic & Conversion Summit, you’ll know that one of the biggest problems our attendees have when they leave is that their heads are full of TOO much information. To help combat this symptom of T&C, we wrote a blog post that showed attendees what to do to organize themselves and start executing on all of the hot tips they got at the summit.

FAQ Post

If you get repeat questions from customers or prospects, there is a good chance they are typing these same questions into Google and other search engines. You can also use online tools to figure out what questions your customers have.

For example, we’re big fans of using Quora to figure out what content to create. On Quora, people ask questions and anybody can answer them. You can search for “digital marketing” (or any relevant keyword for your business) and see what the most commonly asked questions are around it. Then you just create content around these topics.

One question we get day after day is how do I write good headlines for my blog posts? We answered that question in this blog post.

Research Post

Conducting your own primary research around a topic in your niche is one of the best ways to build blog content that gets attention.

Not only will this frame you as the authority, but this post can also serve as a valuable resource and be linked to by other blogs referencing your research. And we all know what happens when another website backlinks yours—your SEO ranking goes up.

Checklist Post 

If the content you are delivering can be broken into a “checklist” it will often perform better. People like the checklist format because it’s easy to digest and act on when the content is itemized in this way.

For example, we wrote this blog post, “[Checklist] 5 Copywriting Elements to Test on Your Landing Page.”

The Ultimate Guide Post

The ultimate guide post is just what it sounds like—a detailed, comprehensive post on a topic in your niche. The most important part of this post is that you’re staying true to your word. If you promise the ultimate guide, you better deliver.

For example, our blog post, “The Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce Email Marketing (Online Retailers, this One’s for You…)” is 16,000 words long and uses over 70 pictures to make the content as clear as possible.

Definition Post

In niches where there might be complicated ideas or confusing terms, the definition post is an absolute must. Consider creating a series of posts that define aspects of your niche. The DigitalMarketer blog is full of these types of posts, even including one titled “What Is Digital Marketing?” Don’t forget—just because you know a lot about your industry doesn’t mean your customer does.

What basic knowledge does your customer need to know that you’re overlooking?

For example, we published the post, “What is Email Marketing? A Quick Guide to Getting it Right.”

Series Post 

Look for opportunities to break a topic into a series that can be released each day over the course of a week or month. Link these articles together as you publish them.

For example, our “What Is Digital Marketing” blog post is the first in a series of definition posts, the second being our “What is Email Marketing?” post, and so on.

Stats Post

This post (like the Research Post) works best when you can use statistics that you have produced. That said, consider curating and pulling together stats from multiple locations to create a good statistics post. These posts are also great reference points for other blogs to use and can help your SEO.

Pillar Post

A Pillar Post uses evergreen content that is core to your company to create a content pillar that you can link back to often. This helps create a consistent source of traffic for you and your business.

This can be a really helpful if you are just starting out with your blog and need a foundation of good content. And remember, you can always have more than 1 pillar post.

Learn more about creating a Pillar Post here! This post—yes, about pillar posts—serves as a great pillar post for DM.

Video Review Post

With a Video Review Post, just review a video that’s related to your audience. This can be done as either a review of the whole video, or you can take screenshots, add explanations, and embed the video into your post.

Tips Post

Here is a super easy way to create a blog post. Just compile a list of tips for your audience. These can be tips on how to do something better, tips for getting a good deal on something, or any other relevant subject for your audience.

We created a post for tips on how to make PowerPoint less boring, that way our audience could create better presentations.

SAQ Post

The Should Ask Question Post is a variation of the FAQ post. This is a question that customers or prospects don’t ask—but they should.

What are your customers always overlooking that you can shine a light on?

For example, marketers overlooking retargeting campaigns are missing out on a huge conversion opportunity. We shined the light on retargeting and gave 3 easy steps to set up a retargeting campaign.

Tools Post

Like the Tips Post, this is an easy way to stay useful with your audience. Just post a list of tools that you think your audience will find helpful. You can rate them, review them, or just make it a simple list.

For example, we created a list of our favorite keyword research tools.

Human Posts

Inspirational Post

Some of the most effective content on the web is neither informational or entertaining—it simply inspires. This kind of post can work well as a Story Post, Profile Post, or Quote Post among others.

At the 2019 Traffic & Conversion Summit, Ryan Deiss dropped major knowledge on the crowd during his Opening Keynote Speech. He talked about the current state of marketing and how everything is poop. Seriously, that is exactly what he said (there were also many poop emojis involved).

In true Ryan Deiss fashion, he made us cry and then he made us laugh. By the end of his speech, everyone at T&C was hungry to be one of the marketers who makes it through the next disruption in the industry.

Here’s the blog article we wrote off of his keynote.

Holiday Post 

Some blogs go dormant on popular holidays while others use the opportunity to deliver well-wishes to their audience and display their humanity. For example, you can write articles about holidays and how they affect your industry.

Guard-Down Post

When a content creator lets their guard down by delivering a deeply personal experience that the audience to relate to, the audience is going to feel way more connected to you and your company. So go ahead and get vulnerable.

Behind the Scenes Post

If you have a loyal following, they will want to see what goes on behind the scenes of the content that you can create. Transparency creates a stronger connection between you and your customer.

If you’ve noticed, DigitalMarketer is really transparent. We’ll talk about our views, our numbers, and our strategy. During one of Roland Frasier’s presentations at T&C, he explained exactly how we make money off of our events and how we’re going to keep making more money despite having sold T&C this year.

Behind the scenes post connect us to you. It shows you guys that we’re not bigger or better, we’re playing the same game and we want to be your teammate, not your competitor.

Off-Topic Post

This can be risky, but if you have a loyal following that has become accustomed to you covering a specific set of topics—this kind of post can shock them and receive a great response.

Rant Post

The rant post shows your human side by revealing your passion and anger about a topic that is relevant to your audience. This type of post is for a specific brand whose customers aren’t going to be appalled by their anger. We don’t have any DigitalMarketer examples to show you for this type of post because that’s not our brand.

For some brands, this type of post is going to go viral in your community. 

Home Runs Post

It’s human to celebrate the wins (and it’s also one of our core values!) and talk about when things go right. Share your company’s home runs in a blog post so that your audience can see what you are doing that is working (and hopefully use that knowledge themselves).

This post works as well as a yearly reflection, or as an event wrap-up. We at DM do a yearly home run post that includes home runs from our partners as well as our internal employees.

Bloopers/Mess-Ups Post

Just like it’s human to celebrate the wins, it is human to mess up and learn from it. Showing your customers that you mess up will help them see you as human, and they will feel more connected to you.

This can be a reflection post about the mistakes your company has made, or it can be a video blooper reel, like our yearly blooper reel on the DM blog.

Generous Posts

Profile Post

The Profile Posts profiles an influential person in your niche. The most important part of this post is not to publish it and forget it. Don’t expect the person to telepathically know that you just wrote a killer blog post highlighting them.

Tweet them, tag them on your Instagram story promoting the article, tag them on Facebook, email them, and if you can, call them. What you’re aiming for is that they see your profile and share it with their audience (so you both get more traffic).

Crowdsourced Post

Crowdsourcing is a great way to get as many experts and influencers as possible in one place at a time. Have each influencer talk about a single topic and then put it together in a blog post.

For example, we had 14 digital marketing experts tell us about their best campaigns and marketing strategies in 2018 (this is also an example of a Home Run Post). Then, we threw it in a blog post and published it so everyone could get the scoop.

Interview Post

It’s surprising how willing even the most influential people are to give you an interview—even if you have a small audience on your blog. Remember that an easy way for an influencer to give you an interview is through audio—all they have to do is call you and start talking.

For even more content, you can record this interview through video and post it to YouTube and Facebook, and then transcribe it into a blog post. If you’re feeling really spicy, you can splice up some key talking points (30–60 second videos) and share them on your socials to promote the blog post/full video.

We did this for an interview with Dennis Yu, to great success.

Link Roundup Post

This type of post can work well as a series that publishes once a month or once a week. Curate, link to and provide a description of multiple pieces of content that your audience will find valuable.

Find content that is relevant to your customer and put it in one place for them. You don’t have to necessarily provide the content, you just need to create the place where it’s all conveniently organized.

Quote Post 

People love quotes from influential people. They. Love. Them.

Pull together quotes from multiple influencers across a specific topic to create a Quote Post.

Again, if applicable—be sure to notify the people that you’ve quoted to see if you can get a retweet mention, or share.

Best of the Web Post

The Best of the Web Post often includes content, tools, and other resources that you have curated, linked to, and described. For example, you could have a Friday blog post that rounds up the 5 best most important things that happened in your niche that week.

Pick of the Week Post

This is a popular type of series post and is usually a relatively short blog post that describes a single piece of content, tool, or other resource that you have curated, linked to and described.

People to Follow Post

Curate a list of influential people, describe them, and provide links for your audience to connect with them through their website, social media channels, events, books, etc.

DigitalMarketer, for example, wrote a blog post on, “7 Women in Marketing to Watch Out For.”

We highlighted what their specialty is, where to find them, the things they’ve achieved that make us say, “woaaaahhhh” and what they’re focusing on right now.

Content Aggregator

This is a hybrid form of the list post that uses other people’s content. Find the most socially viral content on a given topic and aggregate it into one post.

DigitalMarketer does this often when we publish posts like the one below. We’ll pull different Instagram video ads from other companies to show you what they’re doing right and in some cases, what they’re doing wrong.

Promotional Posts

Comparison Post

Create a post that compares the features and benefits of your product to competitive solutions. This is the perfect opportunity to:

1. Highlight what your product does really well
2. Highlight what your product does poorly

If you feel hesitant to talk about what your product doesn’t do—it’s normal. But, this transparency builds trust. If you’re honest about what you can and can’t give your customers, you’ll find the right customers who only need what you can provide and will become raving fans of your product.

Project Showcase Post 

Use your blog to outline a specific project you or your organization is working on currently or has completed and show the process. Even better—share the results if possible. This post is similar to a case study.

For example, DigitalMarketer posted “BIG MONEY from Small Marketing Events: How I made $500k+ in New Revenue from Running Live Events on a Shoestring Budget.”

Income Report Post

Open the books and show your audience a breakdown of the money you and your organization are making. People love to see the backend of your business and again—we know we’re a broken record—transparency is a big part of the customer-company relationship. If you’re showing your customers the books, they’re going to trust you.

Company Update Post

Use your blog to let your customers and prospects know of new employee hires, acquisitions, or major contracts. This is a good time to update them to what’s happening and has a similar format to the behind the scenes blog posts.

For example, DigitalMarketer made a major company update when we announced that we had sold the Traffic & Conversion Summit. We wrote a blog post to help T&C attendees understand why and to make sure they knew that it was only going to make the summit bigger and better next year.

Presentation Post

Publishing presentations given by employees is a great way to create more content without doing a lot of extra work. Presentations can easily be turned into blog posts and you didn’t have to do much extra work.

We took a stellar agency training from Brad Martineau and wrote the article, “Re-align Your Business Purpose with 4 Takeaways from Brad Martineau’s Agency Training.”

Best-of Post

Create a blog post that pulls together the most popular blog posts you have published over a period of time. This is a great opportunity to drive more traffic to your highest performing blog posts. When something works, keep pushing it—that’s what this strategy is all about.

We found the blog articles we published in 2018 that accumulated the most views and put them in one place in our post, “DigitalMarketer’s 21 Best Articles for Organic Traffic in 2018.”

Year-in-Review Post

You can showcase all the things your company has done or made during the year in this reflection post. It not only serves to show your current customers what you have done, but it can also give prospects a snapshot of who you are. And the more your audience knows you, but more they will trust you.

For example, we post the DigitalMarketer Year in Review every year to show all of our blog readers what’s going on behind the scenes at DM.

Product Update Post 

If you have rabid fans of your products and services, you might be surprised at how well a post on new product/new feature announcements will do on your blog. For example, you could announce your new dark mode feature and how your customers can access it.

Product Tips Post 

This post type is both promotional and useful and is very powerful for the right blog and audience. Create content that helps your customers be more successful with your product or services.

We create several pieces of content that promote T&C. This year, we created an entire podcast episode on it and published this article to help T&C attendees prepare for the summit.

Controversial Posts

What If Posts

This type of blog post speculates on “What would happen if….”

The success of this type of post rests on your ability to choose a “what if” that is interesting and debatable. Use these questions to get the gears moving:

• What big changes are happening in my industry that I can speculate on?
• What big change could happen in my industry that would make a massive disruption?
• What would happen if my entire industry vanished overnight?

Debate Post

Use your blog to present one side of the debatable argument or find someone that disagrees with you and present both sides in the same post.

Attack Post 

Disclaimer: Be very careful with this one

Now that we’ve taken all responsibility off of ourselves, here’s what you need to know about attack posts. Picking a fight with the right person/organization/event, etc., will force your audience to choose sides and draw lots of attention.

This type of post, when done right, will create enemies of some and die-hard fans of others.

Prediction Post 

If you take a debatable and speculative approach, a prediction post can get a great response.

For example, we published, “How Digital Marketing Will Change: 17 Predictions for 2019.”

Reaction Post

Use your blog to react to content created by someone else. For example, the content might be a blog post, book, presentation, interview, or podcast episode. 

Embed Reactor 

Find an embeddable video (think Youtube), Slideshare presentation, or infographic that is going viral in your niche right now. Then, embed it in your blog post and post your reaction under it. It can help to use a title that is a variation of the resource you are embedding.

Entertaining Posts 

Story Post

Create content that tells a story that would be entertaining to your market. Some blogs only produce this type of content and others create a series around it. 

Satire Post

Be humorous through the use of irony or extreme exaggeration—this kind of post works well where there are timely issues such as politics or sports.

Cartoon Post

This type of post works well as a series. Create weekly or monthly cartoon posts that make your audience laugh and think about issues and events in your niche.

Meme Post

Memes are humorous pieces of content that spread virally across the web. You can create your own memes or find relevant memes on the web through a Google search. 

Parody Post

Create a post that imitates a well-known person or media property in your niche—be sure to exaggerate their strengths and shortcomings in your content.

Timely Posts 

Review Post

Review a product, event, or anything else you have access to. The key to a review post is that it has to be published while the product, event, etc., is trending. For example, reviewing a Snuggie in 2019 isn’t going to be a viral sensation.

For best results, be as honest as possible in your review rather than painting everything you review in a positive light.

Survey Post

Choose a newsworthy/trending topic and survey your audience about it using email, social media, or in-person events. Then, pull the results together into a blog post. You can title it, “We Surveyed 100 People: Here’s What They Think About the Impossible Burger.”

News Post

Create content on your blog about events as they are happening. You don’t need to “break” the story but you want to offer your own insights around the trending topic.

Trend Post

Some content creators are able to predict trends as they are happening. If you’re a trendsetter, create content on your blog that rides that trend as it becomes popular.

If you’re in an industry where there are always new features or changes happening, use this post style to create pillar content around the topic.

For example, DigitalMarketer published, “Facebook’s Comment-to-Messenger Feature: Everything You Need to Know” when the feature first went live.

Issue Post 

Choose issues that affect your audience and create content around it while it’s relevant to them. This doesn’t necessarily have to always be a new topic, but it has to be new information.

For example, social media marketing is always evolving. We can keep writing posts like this one.

Because our customers always need to know how to get more followers depending on how the algorithm has changed this quarter. The topic stays the same, but the information changes.

Takeaways Post

For the Takeaways Post, you will want to react to an event, presentation, or experience, and then list out your top takeaways from it. This should be done pretty soon after the event, since you want to remain timely and capitalize on that event’s popularity.

We posted a takeaways post right after the end of Traffic and Conversion Summit 2019.

Engaging Posts

Question Post 

Question posts are created from an interaction with your audience. Ask them on social media or forums to ask questions that will be answered in a blog post. You can also have them comment on another blog post to submit their questions.

Answer Post

The Answer Post is the sister of the Question Post. In this post type, you will simply ask a question and allow your audience to answer it in your comments section. This type of post is generally very short, allowing your audience to create the bulk of the content. 

Challenge Post

Use a blog post to pose a challenge to your audience. This post can work well as a series with updates being made that feature audience members who are participating in a challenge. 

Customer Showcase Post

This blog post type is partly promotional but also builds engagement. Use your blog to feature a customer or a project you have worked on with the customer. You can use a similar strategy to a case study to showcase the benefits of your product or service. 

Freebie Post

Use a blog post to allow your audience to get access to a relevant giveaway.

DigitalMarketer gave away free T&C tickets to anyone who subscribed to the DigitalMarketer podcast, left a rating and review on iTunes and shared the podcast on Facebook or Twitter.

We wrote this blog post to promote the giveaway.

Contest Post

Announce a contest on your blog. This post can work well as a series or with updates being made featuring contest results.

This is your ultimate guide to writing blog posts, so you never have to hit the content brick wall of writers block again. Steal our ideas and use them to make your own content go viral.

The post The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

You just wrote a brand spanking new blog post! And it’s a doozy!

Now what?

What processes are in place to distribute this wonderful new resource on social media to maximize its impact? And, more importantly, what processes are in place to get LONG TERM impact out of this wonderful new resource?

The truth is that most blog posts have the lifespan of a mayfly.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

With the 6-step social sharing process I’m covering in this case study—your blog post will live a long and fruitful life.  

Our process not only notifies social connections as soon as a post is published, our strategy ensures that the post will continue to cycle through our social feeds days, weeks, and months after it’s been published.

We’ve got an infographic version of this post as well as a text version and video! You can download a PDF version of the infographic here, check out the video at the end of this post!

View the text steps of this article by clicking on one of the links below to view the explanation for that step:

• Step 1: Splinter
• Step 2: Visualize
• Step 3: Broadcast
• Step 4: Tag
• Step 5: Monitor
• Step 6: Schedule

Let’s start with the infographic… (Click the image to enlarge or download the PDF version)

And here is the text version…

Step 1: Splinter

As you know…

Product Splintering is the process of breaking off bits and pieces of your core product and selling them a la carte.

But splintering isn’t only for core products—the same process can be applied to any piece of content you create.

When your piece of content is published and ready for sharing, you have all the source material needed to splinter shareable content for social media posts.

Look to splinter the following from your blog post…

• headlines
• quotes
• images
• questions
• statistics

(It’s not necessary to use all 5 for every post, but if the opportunity presents itself, take it.)

For example, this is a recent article (written by CRO expert Justin Rondeau) with the headline “[Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing on Your Landing Page“…

Here are 4 splinters we pulled from this blog post for use on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc:

1. [Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing On Your Landing Page >> LINK
2. “An image is only as powerful as the value it communicates.” – Justin Rondeau >> LINK
3. Is Justin Rondeau spitting in the face of best practices? Find out now >> LINK
4. The elements on your website need to do 3 things. What are they? >> LINK

Ok, now that we have some text content to share on social media, it’s time for…

Step 2: Visualize

If you don’t know, now you know—visual content is necessary to drive engagement and clicks on social media (Buffer saw an increase of 18% in clicks, 89% in favorites, 150% in retweets using images!).

We’d be leaving a lot of distribution reach on the table if we didn’t incorporate images into our social strategy.

The feature image (which appears at the top of our blog posts) is always the first guaranteed visual asset to share on social media channels.

But one image isn’t enough. Create a visual asset for every possible splinter.

We use quote images on sites like Facebook and Twitter…

We created our own branded quote boxes for organic content distribution (and gave you the templates to make some of your own), but don’t think you’re hindered by a lack of graphic designer or templates.

Canva.com is one of our favorite tools for creating images you can share on social networks. Check out this same quote from above created using all standard options from Canva…

The beauty here is that we’re able to share content and engage with our audience… all for free.

If you plan to use the “Boost Post” function in Facebook to throw some paid traffic at your post, create the images with the 20% text rule in mind.  You can check your text % using this tool.

Ok, now we have our visuals locked and loaded.  Time for…

Step 3: Broadcast

Now that you have your splinters and visual assets, you need to create your social sharing links, and share the post on social platforms.

How to Create Your Social Sharing Links

You cannot optimize what you don’t measure, right?

UTM parameters are simply tags you add to a URL — when your link is clicked, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics and tracked.

Creating UTM parameters to track your post performance will give you great insight to how your post performs with different audiences and the journey they take once they read your post.

These are the UTM parameters we use on every post we share—you’ll notice there’s a different UTM link for each platform and distribution method.

For example, here are the UTM parameters for Twitter organic traffic…

Twitter Organic

• utm_source= the social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
• utm_medium= the distribution method (is this organic/free distribution or paid?)
• utm_content= We add the “slug” or extension here to differentiate the performance from post to post
• utm_campaign= This is the largest bucket and remains constant for all organic and paid traffic respectively

The slug is the extension on the post…

So, for example, this is what some of our other UTM links look like…

Facebook Organic

LinkedIn Organic

Facebook Promoted (These are the links we use when we use ads to send traffic to our content)…

Using UTM parameters allows us to track the performance of our campaigns in Google Analytics…

To build links with UTM parameters, use Google’s URL builder tool.

Once we have all our tracking links created, we put them through…

Bit.ly

Once each link is set up with its UTM parameters, they can be posted into Bit.ly to make shortened sharing links. These don’t give us the same information that Google Analytics will, but they’re a speedier method for regularly tracking performance based on clicks and sharing—more on that in just a minute.

Label your links by platform to make it easier when scanning through bit.ly’s reporting…

Create a document (whether it be a Word document, Google Sheet, or—DM’s personal favorite—a .txt doc) easily referenced and keep all of your content links in it.

Broadcasting on Facebook

When we have all social sharing links ready, we broadcast our content.

We create our Facebook content copy based on the benefits and point of the article, and we close with a hook or curiosity based question. Maintain a consistent personality and tone on your pages—where possible.

If you’re usually fun and address them with banter, appeal to them with your content the same way.

If you’re usually more serious and to the point, don’t waste their time being wordy—give them the goods straight up.

During your first broadcasting of the content, utilize the feature image:

Do you have other pages or handles?  If so, share wherever it is appropriate.

For example, we utilize the Ryan Deiss Facebook page and Twitter account to distribute DigitalMarketer’s content. He’s a personality associated with our brand and it makes sense for him to distribute our content to his followers.

We create different sets of copy for the DigitalMarketer and Ryan Deiss page, even if it’s just a small variation, so that people don’t become accustomed to just scrolling by one of our updates because they think they’ve seen what we have to say in an update from the other page.

For the second broadcast, we use a different visual asset to distribute the content.

When sharing for a second time, make sure to change copy to remove any “today’s” or “new on the blog” and condense copy to make for a shorter, more direct post.

(NOTE: If you’re a DigitalMarketer Lab member, you can learn more about how we do Social Media Scheduling on this Office Hours call.)

Broadcasting on Twitter

We use Hootsuite Pro as one of our social media management systems so that our entire content team can be logged into all social accounts, publishing, monitoring, and networking throughout the day.

(We don’t use Hootsuite to broadcast to our Facebook pages because we’ve found that there’s much more control for specific time scheduling, monitoring, and formatting directly on the Facebook platform.)

On the day of publishing, we create 3 tweets that will be published every couple hours:

1. Headline >> LINK
2. Quote >> LINK
3. Question the post answers >> LINKS

Tweets are scheduled to publish from the DigitalMarketer account and Ryan Deiss account at different times. We currently only schedule the headline tweet to go out from Ryan, and once #2 and #3 publish from DM, we retweet them from his account.

Broadcasting on LinkedIn

The beauty of LinkedIn is that posts shared on LinkedIn have a habit of continuing to be shared long after after they’re posted (even if they’re not using the link you provided). When you share with your connections, you’re sharing with a smaller audience of people that have already indicated they’re interested in your happenings.

We also tag the author in our LinkedIn status update to give them the nudge to share it on their stream as well. It’s a free and low-effort way of saying, “Here’s what I’ve been up to, here’s the content I just created.”

But how do you keep your content on your audience’s mind once you’ve broadcasted it the first time? We’ll be talking automated scheduling in just a bit.

For now, you need a good way to people’s attention with your post, especially if they’re mentioned in it…

Step 4: Tag

When we’re broadcasting a post, we tag people and brands wherever it makes sense.

For example, Justin Rondeau doesn’t have a Facebook fan page, so we didn’t tag him there – however, he has a Twitter account so we tag him in the tweets, giving him an opportunity to retweet and share the link.

But check out another post by Justin that gave us ample opportunity to tag others — and without having to ask them to contribute anything!

We were able to tag the owners of these blogs (and automate this distribution so that we’re driving traffic to the post, while continuing to drive traffic the owners’ blogs).

Step 5: Monitor

Most of the social media action will occur in the first 48-72 hours.

This is where Bit.ly comes in.

Monitoring campaigns (using UTM parameters) are the key to tracking long term performance, but Bit.ly is our favorite tool for immediate performance tracking.

• Who’s clicking?
• Where are they clicking?
• Who’s sharing?
• Where are they sharing?
• Which broadcast performed the best?
• Which platform performed the best?

Bit.ly tells us all of that.

During the initial 24-48 hours broadcasting of links, you can use Bit.ly….

• To see how many people are clicking your link from each platform.
• To see what time your post performed best.

• To figure out where in the world your content is reaching (and % of clicks they contribute to the total) — you want your content to broadcast when the people who are reading it are awake and active.

• To see which of your tweets performed best (helping you determine which copy speaks well to your audience and giving you ideas to test).

• And to see which platform it performed best on.

However, Bit.ly is only good for short term tracking here. People tend to click Bit.ly to read posts, but then share the post with either a basic URL, or directly from a sharing plugin — especially on LinkedIn.

So while it’s good to track who’s clicking your link on different platforms, don’t count your post as a loss if you don’t see tons of clicks on your shortened link.

Engagement

After the first 24 hours a post has been broadcast, one of the best ways to increase engagement is to check and regulate comments. Whether that be…

• On your blog post on your site.

• Comments on the Facebook posts you broadcasted the post on.
• Tweets sent out SHARING your post.

• Tweets sent in reply to your post.
• Comments on your LinkedIn update.

Tweets have a short lifespan, once you’ve published them, they’re already being buried by someone else’s content. The perks of retweeting someone who shared your content, or replying back to them, is that it puts your content in front of your audience with the added social proof that other people in your audience like the content you’ve been sharing.

Finally, we take Step 6 — the step that ties all your efforts together and ensures that your content stays alive and kickin’ for days, weeks, months (and sometimes YEARS) to come.

Step 6: Schedule

This is the behavior of a normal piece of content on social media…

Big spike… then vanishes from the face of the social Earth.  

That’s why long term automated distribution (scheduling) is necessary.

This what a piece of content looks like in a 6 month snapshot with scheduling and automation built into it.

Scheduling your content into a social media management tool results in perpetual sharing and content distribution with no action needed from you after loading it into your library.

We use MeetEdgar for our scheduling and automation across Twitter and LinkedIn. We’re able to make categories, and choose what time content publishes using those categories — the library will randomize itself and post content in rotation so that you’er not bombarding people with the same tweets day after day.

When you’re broadcasting your content, you have everything you need to schedule your content. After we’ve loaded our three tweets into Hootsuite the first day our content is published, we take those same splinters and immediately load them into MeetEdgar.

The other feature that’s really helpful is similar to what Bit.ly does in short term monitoring. Using MeetEdgar, we can track tweets performance over time.

This tells us when copy is getting fatigued and if we should update it—it’s also where quote images come into play. Content blurbs get tiring and are easily ignored. Image based tweets will keep your followers on their toes and clicking your content.

And that’s that! Use this 6-step distribution system to keep your content in front of your audience and give your content everlasting longevity—and don’t forget to swipe the infographic for easy reference!

Want lifelong longevity for your content, but reading isn’t your thing? Get a quick run through of our 6-Step Distribution Plan in this video:

The post How to Splinter Long Form Content appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Smart marketers know that humans are creatures of habit.
Nowhere is this more evident than in our online search behavior (you know… the stuff we type into Google everyday).  Turns out that no matter what you’re selling — people tend to search in very similar ways.
As a result, some types of content (and some kinds of blog post headlines) attract more SEO traffic than others.
We’ve been hard at work testing five headline templates built specifically to get more traffic from Google.
In fact, every six months, we’ve seen our organic traffic 2X since we started using these templates that specifically speak to our Customer Avatars.

Not only does this build the right kind of SEO for our content, but it brings in the right kind of organic traffic for our inbound marketing agency and clients.
They’re working like gangbusters for all our clients. One in particular has seen their organic traffic almost 3X in six months…

Today, we’re sharing all five headline templates, why they work, and variations of the headlines that keep things fresh.
Let’s dive in.

1. The Comparison Headline

“[This] vs. [That]: Which is [Adverb/Adjective]?”

This is one of my favorite types of articles to write.
Not only is it great for SEO, but it’s also fun to pit multiple products or solutions against each other. And customers (cold, warm, or hot traffic) who are serious about buying love this type of information.
Two of the Top-3 articles on our blog right now are comparison articles.

The HubSpot vs. WordPress article is responsible for landing our (currently) biggest client. He wasn’t even considering hiring a marketing agency when he read the article – he was trying to decide if he should build a website on HubSpot or WordPress.
Another client’s top-performing articles feature comparison headlines.

Yale Appliance and their content marketing journey is a fun case study to read by Marcus Sheridan at TheSalesLion.com if you’re interested. In short, they are sold on the power of blogging, and they are intense about continuing to provide honest content on their blog.
I checked their top performing articles, and this is the one with the most LinkedIn shares:

More Examples

• [Getting Paid] How to Choose Between PayPal vs Stripe vs Merchant Accounts (DigitalMarketer)
• Citigroup vs. Wells Fargo: Value Beats Quality (Wall Street Journal)

2. The EST Headline

“The [Adjective] Way to [Goal] (optional qualifier to diminish effort/cost/etc.)”

This headline performs the best for new blogs, because it attaches to both human behavior and long-tail keywords with lower competition. The variations for EST are almost endless, and can be combined with other templates to double-up on the power of the headline.
We recently helped launch a new brand with a new website, new domain, and in March, a brand new blog. That month, we posted this article and with little-to-no domain authority, it found a foothold for some long-tail searches.

It’s currently the most popular blog post for The Water Scrooge.
Why?
Because The Water Scrooge is based in New York, where a good portion of multi-family buildings are older, which means installing big plumbing additions or systems to recycle gray water isn’t an option.
Since it is illegal to charge tenants for water, landlords are at a loss to pay for the skyrocketing water costs in an environment where tenants have no incentive to conserve.
If you were a landlord in that environment, how would you search Google to solve that problem?
This is how we work, psychologically. We rarely ask for any old way to solve a problem. But we routinely ask for the best way to solve a problem.
We don’t ask how to lose weight, we know how – go on a friggin’ diet. But we do want to know the fastest way to lose weight.

This is why these articles work very well for building up traffic to a new blog. It can rank for long-tail search terms with lower competition quickly, and begin to build an audience on your website. And, it fits with the way we do use search engines.
Also, when you combine this headline with one of the other four, you can get even more out of it. We’ll talk about combinations in a moment.

More Examples

• The best way to play Pokémon Go? In a group (USA Today)
• The Fastest Way to Level Up in Pokémon Go (Tom’s Guide)

3. The Cost/Price Headline

“How Much Does [item/service] cost (optional qualifier)?”

Yeah, that’s another one of our clients ranked #1. Yay!
We’ve been doing content marketing for Atlantech for 12 months in July. A lot of their content is based on these five headline templates. As we gobble up more and more long-tail searches, their organic (green) traffic is growing at 15-30% every month.

No, this article doesn’t drive millions of visits a month. But it has attracted qualified leads in their service area.
Removing the qualifier might increase the traffic totals, but again, content marketing cannot be about vanity metrics alone. It must be about attracting, helping, and nurturing the right kind of traffic.

More Examples

• How Much Does Server Colocation Cost? (Atlantech)
• How Much Does an Inbound Marketing and HubSpot Consultant Cost? (The Sales Lion)

4. The Common Problem Headline

“[Number] [Negative] People Have With [Item/Service]: And How to [opposite result]”

This headline and close variations of it are found all over the internet, on many of the top blogs, and for good reason.
It works.
Here’s Why:

• Self-Preservation Instinct: The negative aspect of the title appeals to our “lizard brain” as Seth Godin calls it. We don’t want to be the one experiencing the negative – and reading this article will make us aware of the negative and provide insight to avoid the negative.
• Shopping Behavior: When shopping for a service or product, we want to stave off buyer’s remorse, especially when it’s a larger purchase. I can’t count how many times I have searched for “problems with” or “product scam” just to see if other people had regretted the purchase.

This article for our client StandDesk connects with the shopping behavior, delivering a 5% lead conversion rate, which is great for blog article footer CTAs, which we see hover around 1-3% across all industries.

More Examples

• Pokémon Go: Common problems and fixes! (Not Again! Stop it with the Pokemon Go references!)
• 5 Common Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid (DigitalMarketer)
• 21 Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid From 4 Split Testing Experts (DigitalMarketer)
• 5 Common Problems Marketing Managers Face (and How an Inbound Agency Can Help Fix Them) (HubSpot)

5. The Brand Interruptive Headline

“The [Adjective] [providers/products/competitors] in [geolocation] (Reviews and Pricing)”

This is one of my favorite headline templates to use, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. There are a lot of benefits to writing these types of articles:

They Build Trust With Readers

When you write about your competitors, you don’t want to slam them.
That’s counterproductive, and saying “I’m better” is going to work against you. But, when you talk about each competitor in a positive light, it gives the reader a signal that your content is about helping them, not selling to them.
If you’re willing to send them to a competitor, you’ll be willing to tell them the truth.

Related Articles

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 2

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 1

• Unlocking the Secrets to Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent in Your Agency

They Bring Your Brand Under Your Control

If you are writing about local businesses, and you include “reviews” you have a chance to outrank 3rd party websites like Yelp – where you have no control.
Someone (even a competitor) can trash you on Yelp, and you are almost powerless to do anything about it.
However, if you bring that discussion to your website, you can control the “feeling” searchers get of your brand.

They Capture Branded Searches

This is the real fun part.
If someone searches for a brand name other than yours, you probably won’t show up.
If they didn’t know about you before the search, you have zero chance to capture them. But, if they search a competitor and end up on your website… why not?
Marcus Sheridan, the River Pools and Spas guy, has a great story about these types of headlines. He decided to be courageous enough and talk openly about his competitors, something businesses comically shy away from.
“We don’t want our leads to find our competitors!” is a common response. Frustratingly so, I might ad.
Here’s a news flash: your target customers already know about your competitors.

So Marcus wrote articles like this, and two things happened:

1. His competitors contacted him thanking him for writing nice things about them.
2. His blog articles outranked those same competitors for branded terms. This means River Pools and Spas was attracting traffic that searched for things like “Acme Pools and Spas Reviews.” Thus, he attracted a lot of leads and customers from people who were going to buy from his competitor. But he got there first because he dared to provide helpful, trustworthy content.

More Examples

• The 12 Best HubSpot Partners of 2014: A Massive Review (The Sales Lion)
• 5 Best Data Center Colocation Providers in Virginia (Atlantech)
• 50 Of The Best Inbound Marketing Blogs And Influencers To Follow In 2016 (Lean Labs)

How to Use These Templates

If you haven’t noticed, not every title exactly matches the template.
And they shouldn’t for good reason. You don’t want to get too predictable or stale in your content – or your readers will get bored.
Yet, if you use the templates as a starting point, you can consistently create headlines that appeal to your audience.

Headline Variants that Work

Flip Them

• This vs. That: Which is Best?
• The Best [X]: This vs. That

Combine Them

• The Cheapest [providers/products/competitors] in [geolocation]: Which is Best?
• How Much Does [X] cost? This vs. That

Change Them

• This vs. That vs. That (Pricing and Reviews)
• How to [opposite result] [X] Mistakes People Make With [X]

These templates perform well for us, mostly to build organic traffic by capturing low-competition long-tail keywords.
Here’s the key to making them work well: focus on being helpful.
“How Much Does Ole Roy Dog Food Cost?” won’t go viral on social media. Neither will reviews, or comparison articles.
But they are helpful to those who are asking those questions.
If you are launching a new blog, or are having trouble driving traffic to your website, these headlines can work wonders to get you off the ground and building an audience of targeted readers.
Here’s a few more to tuck away into your arsenal…

• What If You Could Have [X] By Just [Doing X]?
• [Number] [Shocking/Terrifying] Facts About [X] You Need to Know
• [Number] Things [Industry Seller] Isn’t Telling You About [Something Important]
• Does [Product or Service] Really Work? [Number] of [Sources/Examples] That Say [Yes/No]
• What [Influential Person/People] Are Saying About [X] Will Surprise You
• What You [Need to/Should] Know About [X]
• How to [Get/Achieve/Do X] Without [Negative Possible Result]
• What [X (random well-known thing)] Taught Me About [Industry Specific Principle]

Put these to work and let us know how your SEO traffic grows!

The post 5 Blog Post Headline Templates for More Traffic From Google appeared first on DigitalMarketer.