#064 Content Marketing Newsletter
“Pausing SEO efforts to save money is like turning OFF the air conditioning to save energy bills.” – Eli Schwartz.
💡 Sponsored by Marketing Examined, a newsletter guaranteed to optimize your marketing performance.
5-minute reads that make you a better marketer, scale your startup, and are straight to the point.
👉 Subscribe to Marketing Examined (it’s free)
🎯 Actionable Insights
💡 1. How to improve conversion from your blog articles?
Every blog article has a purpose, more than just traffic. Usually, it could be any one of the following:
Getting email subscribers or leads
Driving traffic to the eCommerce store
Acquiring natural links over time, etc.
Therefore, you must be clear about the purpose before designing the right CTA for an article.
Here are some examples of adding CTAs within the article that boosts conversion.
Type 1. Add Related Product Buttons
Text button CTAs are often used in listicle articles (link to individual product pages) and eCommerce blogs (link to category pages).
Example from Wayfair
Some tips:
Consider using text buttons when there are multiple products mentioned in the article
Make the CTA text descriptive (e.g. Buy corporate gift vouchers, Start Notion’s free trial, etc.)
Use high contrast text colour against the button background
Type 2. Image CTAs For Service Businesses
Image-based CTAs also work for service businesses. Make sure the CTA is relevant to the specific article.
Mistake to avoid: Never use the same CTA for all articles. Personalize CTA message by blog topic.
Type 3. Product-Led Content (my personal favourite)
What it means:
“Content where the product is woven into the narrative to illustrate a point, solve a problem, and/or help accomplish a goal.” – Dr Fio Dossetto.
Here’s an example from Shopify:
Shopify published an article about “How to Start Dropshipping in India.”
Users’ goal: To learn the benefits of dropshipping and its process.
Here, Shopify didn’t just share the process to start dropshipping.
Instead, they have turned their product (eCommerce platform) into a solution to teach about the dropshipping process.
Another example from Notion:
Notion publishes a lot of helpful articles for startups.
One of them is about “How to improve knowledge sharing within your startup", where they have presented Notion as a solution by adding:
Product screenshots
Gifs
Product features, etc.
This is what it looks like:
The goal here should be to turn your product/service into an important part of the content.
👉 Insights from Content Marketing VIP
👉 Liked this so far? Please consider sharing this episode with others on social media.
💡 2. How to structure your content For Better UX?
If you’re not giving enough importance to the structure of articles, then you should re-think.
Well-structured articles help readers to easily pull out the required information from the article (improves UX) and Google to understand the context and relevance of the page (higher ranking).
Now, let’s understand how you can structure your articles.
The goal should be to reduce the time-to-value as much as possible. That means helping readers to find the important information faster.
Here’s a content structure example of a ‘How-to’ informative article:
In the above example, the most important part of the content is the step-by-step process of performing the content audit.
So, readers shouldn’t waste time trying to find that step-by-step process.
Key lesson: While creating the content structure, think of the most important information/section for the users. Make that section closer to the beginning and easy to access.
Here’s another example by Siegemedia:
“These structures make it easy for users to pull out the answers they want instead of having to dig for them.
They also make it easy for a robot to confidently understand your post satisfies the query.
Complex structures bury the lead, adding subheaders that distract for the core need for the user for the sake of building word count.” – Ross Hudgens.
👉 Insight from Ross Hudgens from SiegeMedia
[Main Sponsor]
💡 Struggling to increase your affiliate income? Lasso is the plugin for you.
Lasso makes it easy to manage links, create product displays and tables, and increase your affiliate revenue.
With Lasso's displays, you can increase conversions by over 30%.
Lasso will also notify you if your links break or if Amazon products are out of stock, so you won't lose commissions.
If that's not enough, Lasso is offering CMVIP readers 35% off their first 3 months of Lasso.
👉 Click here to learn more and take advantage of this amazing offer.
💬 Bite-sized Insights
💡 1. Answer brand-related questions on your website
“If your company has a branding problem – Google doesn’t know who you are?
Or has trouble distinguishing you from similarly named entities?
Leverage tools like People Also Ask or AlsoAsked and export all questions related to your brand.
Make sure they’re all answered clearly on your site…
Usually, one "About” page should serve as a sufficient home for all branded FAQ content, but if there’s something that requires a long explanation and has its own unique search volume, you may want a dedicated page.”
👉 Insight from Lily Ray (Follow her for more SEO insights)
💡 2. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs In SEO
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs In SEO [by Pedro Dias]
Make sure you have a value proposition
Make sure your value proposition is understood, and your website reflects that.
Make sure your website has a coherent and logical architecture
Make sure your website is crawl-able
Make sure your pages are indexable
Make sure your content is relevant
Make sure the whole experience on your website provides value
Make sure people want and are proud to share your content
👉 Insights from Pedro Dias (SEO Consultant and Usability Expert)
🗓️ Learning Resources and Tools
💡 1. Content Distribution Checklist [Free Template]
The content cycle of many online brands:
Find content Ideas 🧐
Create & Publish the content 🥳
Share it on social media 📢
Send it to the email subscribers 📩
Again, start with Step 1.
If you’re prioritizing content creation over content distribution, then you’re wasting a lot of opportunity in content marketing.
Better solution?
Content distribution.
Start here: Find 100+ strategic content distribution tactics to strategically distribute your content on 12 different channels.
👉 Download the checklist & start distributing your content (by Foundationinc)
💡 2. Sistrix's free keyword research tool is underrated
If you're looking for free tools to perform basic keyword research, then you should try this one.
Sistrix has a free keyword research tool with many useful features.
With this free tool, you can:
Find branded search queries
Get real user questions
See related keywords/ subtopics
Understanding search demand of related keywords
Export your entire keyword list
👉 Start performing keyword research (free to try)
🆕 What’s New
💡 1. New in Structured Data – Pros and Cons
Google has released a new structured data type where you can now tell Google about the pros and cons of a product with markup.
This is relevant for product review websites – if you're publishing product reviews, you might want to try this.
Here's what it will look like:
👉 Learn more about the new structured data feature update (by Google)
😄 Have Some Fun
If HTTP status codes were restaurant signs: