Noah Kagan says, “At the beginning of 2014, I set a goal to reach 50,000 email subscribers for OkDork.com, my personal blog about marketing. When the year began, there were about 12,250 subscribers and 35 new subscribers were joining each day. Like any good marketer will do, I sat down and did the math. To reach my goal of 50,000 subscribers I would need almost a 3X increase in the number of new, daily subscribers. Eeek! Where to even begin? Personally, I love posts and articles that share marketing tactics that and walk you through each step, so in this article, I’m going start... [...]

Rachel Sprung says, “When you’re first starting a blog for your business, it’s easy to forget about its homepage design. You’re focused on getting posts up on the blog so you can start ranking in search. You care about placing calls-to-action in your posts. You devote time to distributing your posts on social media to help bring in some more traffic.Your homepage design is something that gets set up with a “good enough” mentality … but it’s actually a key page to optimize on your website. To help you get your business blog off to the right start... [...]

Pamela Wilson says, “If you have kids — or if you’ve ever been around kids — you’ve heard the sound before. It’s a noise that’s somewhere between the cry of a lost wolf cub and the wail of a nearby car alarm. It’s one of the most annoying sounds you’ll ever hear. It’s the ear-piercing cry of a child who has been over-stimulated. The angelic child becomes a hot mess of whiny, clingy neediness. If you’re the adult in charge and you manage to keep a cool head, you say something like, “Calm down. I don’t understand what you need. Use your words.” And sometimes it... [...]

Kevin Lee says, “Syndicating your content to a third-party site or guest blogging for a respected publication can be a boost for your business. Here’s a deeper look at the benefits, and potential drawbacks, of this strategy. If your company is regularly publishing good content on your site, you might consider syndicating a portion of this content out to third parties, for example, to online publications in your business vertical. Why Syndicate or Guest Blog? More Visibility. Although you may have put a lot of SEO effort into your business domain, few B2B sites have the site authority... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “We’ve said it so often you’re probably sick of it. Content marketing doesn’t work unless the content is genuinely worth reading. Routine, phone-it-in content won’t get you the audience, the leads, the prospects, or the conversions you need. Andy Crestodina over at Orbit Media Studios is one of the content marketers who really gets it. When I found out that Andy had conducted a survey of more than 1,000 bloggers about the specifics of how they work, I knew that I wanted to get a post together to share our takeaways from the survey”. How to Be in the Top... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “We’ve said it so often you’re probably sick of it. Content marketing doesn’t work unless the content is genuinely worth reading. Routine, phone-it-in content won’t get you the audience, the leads, the prospects, or the conversions you need. Andy Crestodina over at Orbit Media Studios is one of the content marketers who really gets it. When I found out that Andy had conducted a survey of more than 1,000 bloggers about the specifics of how they work, I knew that I wanted to get a post together to share our takeaways from the survey. Good content takes time.... [...]

Stefanie Flaxman says, “What does a rough draft of a blog post have in common with all the other blog posts by all the other content creators in your niche? Too much. I’m sure you’re aware that there are countless other writers musing about the same ideas you are, and in similar ways. The goal of a typical first draft is to transform your scattered thoughts into a cohesive article that explains a topic to your target audience. But why should readers choose your content over another writer’s work?”. How to Spot the Weakest Part of Your Blog Post ‘Copyblogger’ Blog  [...]

Rachel Sprung says, “What is the first step you take as you begin writing a blog post? Lots of people just like to start from the beginning — they stare down the blinking cursor until they’re suddenly inspired to write a clever introduction. But that’s not always the best way to start a blog post. That cursor? It’s daunting. Instead, it can be much better to create the structure of the blog post before doing anything else. First, you write a few large headers as the main blog post sections and maybe add a few smaller tags as sub-sections. Then, all you’ve got... [...]

Dominic Hung says, “A few months back, I had written what I thoughtwas an excellent blog post. From the first round of internal feedback it seemed it was all but ready to go, but when a second round of feedback from another interested party was provided, it ended with a sentence pretty much anyone hates to hear. “Maybe we should rewrite this.” Cue tears and melancholy music. I ended up discarding the blog post in its entirety and rebuilding it from the ground-up. We ended up with a blog post of greater-than-usual quality, but it took a significantly greater-than-usual amount of time... [...]

Scott Yates says, “What is the future of blogging? Is it fading away, “dying” or even “dead”? Will it soon be just a trend of the past, replaced with some other medium? My business is based on blogs, so people ask me these kinds of questions all the time. My answer is always the same: “I sure hope not. My wife really wants a new couch.” But then I give them the real answer, which is: “No way. Not any time soon.” I don’t know what blogging will look like in a hundred years, or even 20 years. Who can imagine what inventions and developments will appear in the next two decades?... [...]