Question: Is guest blogging one of the best inbound marketing strategies for your brand?
Answer: Yes.
At first, this might make little sense. You might ask yourself, "Why should I spend time writing for someone else? I'd rather spend that time promoting my blog on social media".
Guest blogging on websites and blogs within your niche gives your content some much-needed exposure to a broader relevant audience, attracts traffic to your website, and builds up your backlink profile. In other words, guest blogging is a tried and tested strategy for building the authority of your brand, and one that you would be smart not to ignore.
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So everyone's doing content marketing these days. Whether you call it content marketing, inbound marketing or native advertising is irrelevant. Because all of you are doing the same thing; creating content (instead of ads) to sell your product or service.
So acknowledging that, every bit of content you create should be killer content, right? Well here's the secret to creating killer content. At least according to this infographic. It's not a click-bait headline (hello Business Insider, Buzzfeed, Upworthy). It's not a link to Wikipedia. It's not the use of images. It's not listicles. It's references. Yes, references. Again, at least according to this infographic.
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There are millions of blogs on the Internet and countless sites that offer tips, tricks, and tutorials for optimizing your site and taking advantage of content marketing. The problem though is that there are so many of these sites that what's being recommended on one is being advocated against on another--there seems to be little to no consistency when it comes to best practices for blogging.
To combat this, VigLink, a content monetization company, and Netpop, a market research firm, have teamed to launch a new platform which aims to bring content producers together to share their personal insights and experiences to help fellow publishers get the most out of their site.
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There's only one surefire way to reach the heart of your Facebook fans: the newsfeed. This tip sheet from social relationship management company Spredfast will provide you the pointers you need to insure your newsfeed content properly resonates with your customers and prospects and gets them to engage with your brand.
Download the tip sheet now and learn how to spruce up your facebook posts.
A little over a decade ago, blogging was something done by individuals, certainly not big brands - or brands of any size, for that matter. Flash forward to today; everyone's blogging. Yes, individuals and upstarts are still hard at work sharing their opinions, but major news organizations and brands have jumped on board, realizing the many benefits of blogging.
While brand blogging grew in popularity, traditional online advertising has been waning in both popularity and effectiveness. Oh yes, we have programmatic buying and DSPs, but that's a bit like one computer speaking algorithm to another. The net result is still an ad banner and, barring a few exceptions, that approach simply does not work any more.
Adrants Editor Steve Hall, writing for Central Desktop, has put together the top seven reasons a blog post is beneficial to marketers and why brand blogging is a vast improvement over traditional online ad units.
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There's a simple truth about blogs--readers rarely, if ever, come to one to be marketed to. Advertising runs counter to the raison d'etre of the blogosphere. Ads are an interruption, a betrayal of the natural purpose and flow individuals expect of a well-written, informative blog.
Yet blogging and revenue-generation don't have to be at cross purposes. What many bloggers, online forums, product review sites and other "independent" sources of online content haven't yet embraced, is that the very thing people come for--credibility--is a trait that has economic value.
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Apparently constricted by budgets that don't allow for original photography, two Vancouver art directors faced with using stock photography, Andrew and Bart, have launched Getty Critics, a blog on which they gleefully poke fun at the idiocy of staged stock photos. From poor framing to forgotten details to confusing messages to things that make absolutely no sense, Getty Critics has its way with the unrealistic world of stock photography.
Buzzfeed has launched a Social Storytelling Creator Program which aims to train agencies on the art of creating native advertising. Agencies that participate will receive official accreditation from Buzzfeed along with a badge they can place on their website and the ability to post stories to Buzzfeed. The program will be free to agencies that agree to spend a set minimum with Buzzfeed.
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Writing on the HubSpot blog, I take a look at why the blog post is displacing typical online advertising. With recent interest in content creation, the rise of inbound marketing, and the latest trend, native advertising, the lowly blog post has, once again, risen to prominence in the eyes of marketers who now see it as a powerful method to connect with prospects and customers by delivering valuable, educational, and useful information.
And that is why the blog post is the new online ad unit. While clickthrough rates (CTR) are not the only metric by which you can measure a banner ad's performance, typical online banner ad units achieve a CTR of 0.10% according to MediaMind's Global Benchmarks Report, and that figure is on a downward spiral due to banner blindness, among other things. Couple that with "blind" network ad buys that prevent a marketer from knowing exactly where their ads appear and limited ad real estate on which to place messaging, and you've got an online advertising system that is very, very broken. But all is not lost! Here's why the blog post is so beneficial to marketers -- and why the typical ad unit just won't cut it any longer.
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Like a moderns day Million Dollar Homepage, a Tumblr blog called Blogrtising has launched. As described on the site, the concept is simple, "Blogrtising is a viral concept where advertisers pay $100 to become permanent contributors on this blog. Once payment is made, they can post what they want (advertising links/videos/photos/...), when they want and as often as they want."
Likely, this will go nowhere but it's amusing to see there are still people out there who can milk an original idea to death.
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