The Top Ten Content Marketing Lessons

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In today’s social media era, everyone is a publisher. They want to be awesome online. No one wants to be average.

Here are top ten lessons you can learn and apply to your content, blog and website:

1. Don’t expect to be successful all the time.

All marketers want their content to be successful every time. However, that’s not going to happen. A recent study revealed that only 0.3% of articles will reach the top level with over 1,000,000 views. The reality is that you will only have some of your content go viral.

So how to achieve success? Persistence is the key. A lot of trial and error experiments might be tiresome and frustrating, but that’s the only reason you will stay in the game longer than the others.

2. Write multiple headlines for each article.

David Ogilvy was famous for having written over 100 headlines for one advertisement. If you are serious about content marketing this is one of the “biggies”. Learn and keep learning to write the best headlines you can.

3. Make a large listicle of headlines.

In order to build a solid editorial, you need to master the art and science of large list headlines called “Listicles”. It is a short-form of writing that uses a list as its thematic structure, but is fleshed out with sufficient copy to be published as an article.

4. Test your headlines to find the best ones.

When you have written multiple headlines, you need to test them. In certain circumstances, one headline shines better than others.

5. Stack images in content.

Stacking images in articles can be very handy, especially for visual-oriented readers. This tactic becomes very effective, since you are giving your article the best chance to resonate with your audience, thus urging them to share it. Sometimes, less images would not have received that level of viral traffic.

6. Make it easy for readers to share.

The title says it all. You need to have a very clever technical tactic that makes it easy for your readers to share different parts of the article. You might want to include hovering share buttons that pop up as the user scrolls down the article. According to Upworthy’s research, the result of this “small update” is as big as 398% increase in traffic!

7. Curate the best content possible.

Don’t try and break the news. It would be better if you can give a constant lookout for what works and then curates it. On the other side, this technique can improve the framing on the site you’ve curated, so that more people see it.

Content curation is a mutual relationship. It should be an important part of your content marketing strategy. Watch what is trending and then add your own spin to it.

8. Make it easy for people to like your Facebook page.

You have to love the relentless pursuit of squeezing every piece of viral sharing capability out of readers. You can add a pop-up that appears after you have finished watching a video that politely inquires whether you want hang out with them on Facebook. This produced 419% more likes. You can also added a hover banner that asks the readers to “like” your Facebook page.

9. Target a niche, cause or issue.

As content marketers, we are often trying to reach a broad audience to get that mass appeal. However, it’s more important to tap into niches and cause, because readers are often much more passionate about the right topics.

10. Keep looking for “awesome content”.

Trying to be unique all the time can be an exhausting process. Sometimes, all you need to do is keep reading, hunting and seeing what sort of content works well on the web and your competitors sites.

You might want to look for content that contains:

  • A “hero”
  • A “villain”
  • An emotional story
  • An inspiring message