I HAVE absolutely learned tons of amazing content marketing tactics and strategies from brilliant marketers like Ryan Deiss, Jimmy Daly, and Aja Frost. But, bear with me, my pal Kim is actually a pretty brilliant marketer herself, and I don’t think she gets the credit she deserves for the impact she’s made on the content marketing industry. 

Needless to say, Kim and I both think that it’s super important for any business to invest in content marketing. I’ll explain. 

Nickelodeon’s Journey into Content Marketing

To start, we have to go way back in time to the good ole’ days when Kim was palling around the chic streets of Beverly Hills with Paris Hilton, and I was living an equally glamorous life clad in a knock-off Patagonia sweatshirt carrying my newborn around Central Park in a spit-up covered Baby Bjorn. Picture below for proof of my utter chicness.

The baby in that picture is now a 6’1 high school cornerback who drinks a gallon of milk every day and says things like “that’s so fresh” and “totally fire” in true Paris and Kim style. Back in 2005 when this picture was taken, I had just been offered a job writing a blog for Nickelodeon. After Yahoo-ing (we didn’t Google back then), “what is a blog” and then parsing out what the word “web-log” meant, I accepted the offer.

My new blog was about spit-up, night feedings, dirty diapers, and naptime (See: Glamorous) and my blog articles were posted on Nick’s parenting site, Parents Connect.

Think back to the way most websites looked in 2005. There were no sleek white layouts with simple search bars, no Buzzfeed style article feed, no gifs or memes or videos. Instead, websites were like the Las Vegas strip on steroids. Fully lit up, amped, and ready to Sell. You. All. The. Things.

To help you picture it, I used the Wayback Machine to take a screenshot of the Nick site that I worked for at that time. The image files have all disappeared but imagine all of the question marks replaced by big, bright, flashy ads.

Kind of makes you want to go buy some diaper genies, doesn’t it?

Regardless, because it was a Nickelodeon property and the site content was so dang interesting (See: Diapers), we sold tons of ads. Companies were clamouring to get on our ad platform and post pictures of the latest and greatest parenting gear all over our website.

One problem:  The ads didn’t really work.

Turns out that people don’t like to be sold to in a flashy, sleezy, “buy this from me right now” sort of way. Simply put, shoving a product in someone’s face when they are trying to catch up on the latest diapering techniques or find out what happened on Survivor does not work… ever.

Ragu Spaghetti Wasn’t Happy

Fast forward a few more Las-Vegas-y months and the team at Ragu Spaghetti sauce came to our sales team and said they weren’t sure about the ROI from their ads. They weren’t getting many clicks or sales. They were spending a whole lot of cash, and not getting much for it.

But they had an idea: they had seen this thing on another site where bloggers were sharing their favorite recipes and there were ads or coupons in the articles. They were wondering if they could try something similar where the Nickelodoen bloggers wrote articles that mentioned how they used Ragu products in a natural, organic way.

And that my friends, was the day that content marketing was born… for me at least.

Enter Kim Kardashian, an Unlikely Pioneer of Content Marketing

Across the country on the Pacific coast, my pal Kim Kardashian was making some content marketing discoveries of her own. Kim started to realize that by sharing tons of little details about her own personal life using her own favorite products on her blog and on Twitter, she could really sell things, so she began creating content marketing campaigns of her own.

Kim shared stories of workouts in her snazzy new Sketchers Shape-Ups and raved about how wearing the shoes made her rear-end even sexier. Guess what?  Sketchers sold a ton of shoes. So many, in fact, that Complex said that Kim’s endorsement of sketchers is the most defining sneaker moment of all time (shocking considering the fact that Michael Jordan endorsed, well, Jordans).

So, back to Nickelodeon.

Back in New City I was working on some endorsements of my own. I don’t want to brag but I made spaghetti, lasagna, and tiny fairy lights using Ragu sauce jars and glow sticks.

And while Complex hasn’t declared (yet at least) that my endorsement of spaghetti sauce was the most defining spaghetti moment of all time, I can definitely say that Ragu got quite a few coupon clicks from the recipe page for my souped-up spaghetti sauce recipe that had tiny chunks of broccoli in it. 

Content marketing worked. People wanted the recipes and the crafts and the how-to-hide-veggies-in-sauce ideas. When they got those ideas, they were much more likely to click on a coupon or promo than they were if we just spammed them with spaghetti sauce jar photos.

So I began working in content marketing. After I finished writing about spaghetti, I wrote about the life-changing properties of diaper bags. After diaper bags, I wrote about strollers, butt paste, baby food spoons, and nursing wraps. Later, as my kids grew, I wrote about books, music, crayons, and slime. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I made and then wrote about slime.

Kim and Me, Me and Kim. Together, we were reinventing marketing.  Ads were out. Blogs were in. Heavy sales were out. Marketing finesse was in. A few years later, our Nickelodeon site looked entirely different. Buh-bye flashy Vegas ads. Hello… content.

Take a peek and the wayback machine screenshot below from 2009.

• Take a Virtual Road Trip with Toyota was a content marketing campaign where all of us bloggers showed readers the cool places a Toyota could take families in our own hometowns.
• It’s Time to Play with Fruit Roll-Ups had article after article featuring fun games and activities that used, you guessed it, fruit roll ups.
• And perhaps my favorite, Date Night Ideas for Moms and Dads, featured date nights (obviously), but also highlighted great restaurants and products for date nights.

This may not come as a surprise to you, but these content marketing campaigns worked. Like, really worked.

There were plenty of “most defining moments” in diaper bag/fruit roll-up/slime history in those years. And those defining moments continue. Great content moves the marketing needle. Always.

Kim and I are here to proclaim once and for all that if you want to be a rockstar marketer, you should invest in content marketing. We believe it will help you grow your brand and scale your business and make sales. Lots of sales.

Okay, I have a confession to make: I don’t really know Kim. 

I do know one of the 650 people that was invited to her second wedding to Kris Humphreys, which means I could argue that we are friends via 650 degrees of separation, but since I’m not one for technicalities, I figured I should come clean.

Regardless, I think Kim would agree with me. She knows that if you want to sell things and build your brand and do all the things that good marketers do, you have to create great content. Really awesome content that demonstrates all the advantages of your products while showing your audience exactly why they need whatever it is you are selling now.

Trust me, nobody bought Sketchers Shape-Ups because they saw an ad and they looked slick. People bought Sketchers Shape-Ups because my pal Kim told them to… on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter 423 times.

So what about your business?  Are you spending thousands on ads and seeing numbers less than .1% when it comes to conversions?  The solution could be to create a content marketing strategy.

Invest time, money, writing power and every jar of spaghetti sauce in your pantry into creating a content marketing strategy designed to support, enhance, and maybe even outperform your email marketing and paid advertising strategies.

I am convinced that a strategic, focused content marketing strategy can and will have a huge impact on your business. If you don’t believe me, trust Kim. She’s made millions off of it.

I want to convince you that you need a good, solid content marketing strategy in order to launch your business’s organic into a sales-making, lead-driving, marketing machine.

Are you convinced? Good.

The post Everything I Know About Content Marketing I Learned From Kim Kardashian appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Content marketing is a curious beast. On the one hand you must have quality information that is both needed and wanted by your audience. On the other hand, you need LOTS of it. How can you affordably handle this dichotomy?

You need to create a river of content.

Creating a river means producing multiple supporting streams of content that reinforce the overall flow and volume of information online.

Each page of your website has value and search engine potential, including the primary categories, sub-categories, and individual pages; if you can connect each one, guiding the visitor from one element to the next, you can create a river of information that will keep them engaged and interested. Easy-peasy!

Not really that easy, at least at first. The goal is to create both basic and complex pieces of content that will allow you to backlink back and forth. This will help you create more information in a timely manner while also keeping people on your website AND helping you display your expertise of organization and intuitive interfaces.

A River in Action: Harvard Business Review

We analyzed the content flow of Harvard Business Review during the month of January 2021. The numbers of posts and content types were pretty staggering.

We then analyzed the top 100 ranked keywords for their website for average rank, estimated traffic, and potential traffic based on how many times each keyword was looked up per month. The numbers were equally staggering.

This is just for the top 100 keywords, and HBR ranks for thousands.

How do they create the volume and quality of information needed to perform like this? The time, effort, and creativity to make this much information requires more than human resources, it takes a refined database to manage and control. Considering this, we went through their website and analyzed their content structure.

We found that their content was broken down into 152 primary categories which we organized into 17 macro-categories. Here’s the list:

HBR doesn’t have a “blog,” it has a database of content. If you really want to commit to the amazing, long-term benefits of content marketing, you’ll need one too.

Databases Versus Blogs

You are not creating a “blog” if you’re content marketing. You’re creating a database of information that directly or indirectly supports your brand and your product/service.

The definition of the word “database” is pretty simple: a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access

The keyword in the definition is “related.” While a blog may have a bunch of information in regards to the broad subject of your business, they don’t usually break that information down into organized chunks.

Your goal is to create a series of databases that somehow relate to your product or service, gently guiding people towards purchasing. In addition, you’re looking to become a go-to resource for a certain type of information.

We want people to come to our websites first, rather than going to a search engine to find the information.

Let’s say your business is local plumbing. Imagine a potential client is looking for information about fixing a leaky faucet. Rather than typing “how to fix a leaky sink” into a search engine, they know they can go directly to “bobs-local-plumbing.com” because he has so much useful content there. When they arrive at your SEO-targeted article, they’ll also find useful related content with potential categories being “common sink plumbing problems,” “quick plumbing fixes,” and “signs that you need a professional.”

Those categories do more than simply list other useful information, they show a breadth of knowledge and show evidence that the business doesn’t just post random stuff, they’ve considered the potential problems of their customers and addressed them. This all helps build Bob’s brand, traffic, and his customer’s perception of his expertise.

Better yet, when they can’t fix their leaky sink, they know that Bob will come do it for them (or refer them to someone who can).

Your Golden Goose is a Content Database

If you can structure your website in a content database you’ll have infinite content options without having to constantly answer the question, “what should I post today?” Once you create a short list of primary categories, your goal will simply be to fill them with useful articles, videos, and graphics on a regular basis.

The good news is that getting started is simple! I’ve used the following steps to help hundreds of businesses to start building their databases. Check it out.

STEP 1: List Your Top 20 Most Frequently Asked Questions

One of the biggest barriers to starting this process is thinking that it’s a waste of time. To combat that, I teach this step because the information you generate here will be useful for your customer service team and FAQ section of your website if nothing else. Simply write the questions and answers you here most frequently from your customers or talk to your sales team and ask them what their prospects are asking.

STEP 2: Categorize the Questions

Look at the questions you wrote and break them into 3-5 categories. These could be technical, feature-related, history-related, etc. Find a common thread for multiple questions and write it down.

STEP 3: Schedule the Creation of the Content

Time to get to work! Ideally you’ll create one piece per day, but realistically aim for one piece per week to get started. Ideally you’ll have at least three pieces per category.

STEP 4: Expansion

During the process of creating the content you’ll be required to innovate new ways of describing information. A particular point may need a chart, video, or graphic to expand on your topic. The creation of these elements will require templates that can later be used in future topics. Before you know it you’ll have a database of infographics, video tutorials, and industry-term definitions to explain your original posts. All of this can be categorized, optimized, and added on individual posts on your website.

This is a slight over-simplification, but the point is that turning content marketing into information database creation is not only possible, it’s required for long term development. Start now! Your competitors definitely are.

The post The Golden Goose of Content Marketing: Content Databases appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Queue content marketing tools.

These tools can make your content look like you’re an enterprise business (even if you’re a one-person team) and give you all the data you need to get the traffic and conversions that scale your business.

From graphic design tools, content ideation platforms, and analytics—check out the top 9 content marketing tools of 2021 below.

Canva

Free Plan with Paid Plans starting at $12.99/month

The first thing you’ll read after creating your Canva account are the two words you see above: Design Anything. Canva’s not kidding. With their full suite of graphic design tools, content marketers can make high-quality, on-brand graphics for their socials, paid ads, and articles. Canva also has templates for each type of deliverable so they can be brand-friendly with the click of a button. 

Content marketers need Canva to:

• Create high-quality graphics for their content
• Tap into hundreds of templates for each type of deliverable
• Easily add their branding to each graphic

AnswerThePublic

Free with Paid Plans starting at $79/month

AnswerThePublic is your look into what Google sees each time someone hits enter on a new search. You’ll get a huge (we’re not exaggerating at all) list of questions your audience has asked based on the keywords you search. For example, if you want to create content for ecommerce business owners that leads them to hire your agency to handle their marketing you’d search: ecommerce marketing. AnswerThePublic will show you everything people have searched around that term so you can have hundreds of content ideas proven to be of interest to your customer avatar.

Use AnswerThePublic to:

• See what questions your customer avatar is asking
• Figure out what the biggest pain points your customer avatar has
• Create content your customer avatar actually wants to read

Quora

Free

Similar to AnswerThePublic, Quora is your insight into the mind of your customer avatar. It’s a way around running focus groups if you don’t have access to your avatar yet. As a question and answer website, you’ll find hundreds of questions asked on each topic. For example, if your customer avatar is a SaaS business interested in running Facebook ads, you can use Quora to see what the questions people are asking about Facebook ads are. You can niche down even further and find what SaaS business owners are asking about Facebook ads.

Quora helps content marketers:

• Figure out the problems their customer avatar has
• Make high-quality content that’s proven to answer their questions
• Get more eyes on their brand by posting answers to the questions to Quora

Google Trends

Free

Google Trends is a free tool that shows you what people care about right now. Specifically for your niche, you can ideate high-performing content ideas based on trends and industry news. For example, in the graph above we can see that the best time to write about the iOS 14 update. This is the update that asked iOS users if they wanted to be tracked across platforms for each app using tracking on their devices. Now that searches for iOS 14 have tapered down, we can tell the topic won’t perform as well.

Use Google Trends to:

• See what’s trending in your industry
• Plug that into AnswerThePublic or Quora to find out what questions are being asked
• Create content (and repurpose it across your platforms) that answers the main questions your customer avatar has

Hemingway Editor

Free

Copy and paste your written content (articles, emails, copy, etc.) into Hemingway Editor to make sure that it’s: readable for your audience, doesn’t use too many adverbs, avoids passive voice, and is easy to read. These are the types of edits that will make your content stand out as enjoyable and interesting to read while helping you avoid run-on sentences or the use of unnecessarily “big” words. 

Hemingway Editor helps content marketers:

• Write at the grade level best suited for their audience
• Keep their content interesting by avoiding too many adverbs or too much passive voice
• Become known for creating high-quality, enjoyable to read content

Grammarly

Free with Paid Plans starting at $25 per member/month

We want to personally thank Grammarly for making us look like a true wizard of words. The reality is, Grammarly is catching our silly grammar mistakes and sometimes even rewriting our sentences so they sound better (…AI is here). Our favorite part of Grammarly is the ability to set what type of edits you want to make based on the voice of your writing. They won’t try to make your writing overly professional if you don’t want it to be (like our articles). 

Use Grammarly to:

• Fix grammar and spelling mistakes in your writing
• Improve sentence structure
• Edit your content based on the person you’re writing it for

SEMRush

Free with Paid Plans starting at $99.95/month

Let’s talk about SEO. We know you’re not throwing spaghetti at the hypothetical content wall and hoping something sticks. You’re being strategic about the content you post and making sure that it can bring in the traffic, subscriptions, and conversions you’re looking for. That’s why SEMRush has continued to be such a popular tool among content marketers. With SEMRush, you can get more views on your content and track the data that helps you get even more views.

SEMRush is great for content marketing because:

• You can run SEO audits and track SERP positions daily
• Make your content SEO-friendly before hitting publish
• Check the traffic and analytics of your competitor’s websites

Google Analytics

Free

Google Analytics is a content marketing tool you need to start using before you actually need it. As soon as you set up your website (or if you’re reading this and haven’t set it up yet), add your Google Analytics pixel. Once you’re ready to start content marketing, you’ll have months of data to work off of and will be able to launch a solid strategy because of it. With Google Analytics, you can see how many page views you’re getting, the source of your traffic, conversions, demographics, and so much more.

Use Google Analytics to:

• See how much traffic your content is getting
• Analyze the click-through rate on different pieces of content
• Find out what your main traffic sources are

Monday

Paid Plans starting at $8 per seat/month

It’s time to talk about organization. The other tools mentioned above have helped you create great content that your audience cares about. Monday will help you make sure that you hit publish on all of those ideas. Organization is key to your content success because content marketing comes with a lot of moving parts. With Monday, you can build out your editorial calendar, assign tasks to each team member, and add updates to each task to make sure they’re moving along the pipeline. 

Content marketers love Monday because:

• They can create an editorial calendar that’s shared with their team
• Assigning tasks to team members avoid the need for extra communication in another platform (ahem, Slack or email)
• Adding updates to tasks helps keep the content lead in the know about the status of each assignment and the overall project

Content Marketing Tools That Are Worth The Money (Or Resources)

Don’t let your content dreams be dreams. You can tap into traffic and conversions, get qualified leads, and grow your business. All you need is the right set of tools to help you make your content look top-notch and the analytics to keep it answering your customer’s questions.

Here are the top 9 content marketing tools of 2021:

1. Canva
2. AnswerThePublic
3. Quora
4. Google Trends
5. Hemingway Editor
6. Grammarly
7. SEMRush
8. Google Analytics
9. Monday

Feel free to test out each tool with their free trial offers or by purchasing one month at a time to make sure it’s the right fit for your needs. And remember the most important part of content marketing…

A/B testing.

Forever and always.

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