28 Expert Bloggers Reveal Their #1 Content Marketing Technique

Are you a blogger looking to get more traffic to your web sites but not sure which method works best? Would you like to build a growing “tribe” of loyal fans and spread your message across, but you seem to get stuck?

I believe things always tend to be foggy and daunting when we embark on the “NEW”. And it’s no different with blogging.

First of all, you have to ensure your content is not just relevant but also practical and up to date, otherwise why should we stick with your blog and more importantly, return?

Secondly, the blogging industry is competitive, so you’ll have to look up for new content to share and write about, regularly, or your effort won’t benefit you long-term. You also need to know which are the best ways to promote your blog so that you can generate more traffic and tap into new audiences. And you have to do such often!

So, how can you access the right information then? Ask the experts! That’s why I’ve got my partner (Codrut Turcanu) to scour the web, and look up people who are already running successful blogs and know how to promote it. They had to be open and honest about their answers, and they had to explain their methods in simple terms… so that anyone (including you) reading this could understand and implement what they are recommending.

The million-dollar question we asked these bloggers was:

“How do you incorporate Content marketing and SEO when promoting your blog, and what is your number #1 content marketing technique”

It made them think differently and share insights you’d probably never thought possible.

Enjoy the ride and take these gold nuggets to the bank.

Onto this note, I’d like to send a BIG THANK YOU to all participants
and everyone else involved to help spread the word about this unique post!

1) Bill Gassett – MaxRealEstateExposure.com – Twitter

Having exceptional content today is now more important than ever. Google is constantly tinkering with their search engine algorithms to surface the best content. The days of being able to game the system by linking back in numerous spammy places to your articles is over. You need a solid writing plan with exceptionally crafted content published in a way that not only is enjoyable to readers but also the search engine spiders. This means having a post that is written well with proper H tags, meta descriptions and not stuffed with keywords you are attempting to rank for.

While creating great content is important if nobody sees it then you will be missing a great opportunity. The key to being successful today is to be highly visible online. Once an article is published on Massachusetts real estate exposure (my real estate blog), the wheels are set in motion to get the content out to as many eyes as possible. This is done by publishing the article to numerous social channels including Google Plus, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin, Stumblupon and Facebook among others. Keep in mind the value in using these channels as a means of exposing your content will not be effective unless you have  built solid relationships with people in these networks! Social media is about being social first. Dropping links to your content without building relationships and engaging with others will not get you very far. Nobody likes a link dropper who never reciprocates. Typically those who do this that are not social media moguls hear the sound of crickets on their profiles.

One of my secret weapons in powering more online visibility for my content is Viral Content Buzz. What viral content buzz does is getting additional people of influence sharing my content for me. The basic premise behind Viral Content Buzz is you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. You share great articles you like and in return get points for doing so. Those points are then cashed to get others to share your articles. At the present time the site supports getting your content shared via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Stumbleupon. This is a great place to get your posts seen by eyes that otherwise would not. When using a site such as Viral Content Buzz the chances of your post going viral increase exponentially.

2) Christopher Antoni – TheTrafficBlogger.com – Twitter

Content marketing has to begin with flagship articles. These are posts which you can point people to for answering an important question, telling a funny joke, or doing whatever it is your website proclaims that you can do. From this article you can move forward with your SEO strategy.

First off, link back to this article in as many parts of your blog or website as you can, provided that the information in both places is related. When I create new flagship content, I work my way back through my blog finding popular posts which can be linked forward to the new article.

Next, I use social media to bring attention to the post. When doing this, try not to just post the link and say “go here.” Instead, bring up the purpose of the article and pose a related question. Then you can include the link as a reference. This goes a long way in driving up interest as well as traffic. Remember, social media works best when people are discussing a topic rather than just clicking on the link and commenting on your site. Create conversation; don’t just regurgitate links!

Unless you are already a large site, you’re going to need to do a little more for SEO than these initial two steps. I would recommend getting on websites where people are asking for you content. Not you specifically, but for whatever answer you can provide with your article. Spark conversations on forums and leave your link in your signature. Discuss on social media and mention your site as the source of your information. Last but not least, get guest posts for similar topics on other websites and link back to your flagship article.

All these links and branching out to others sites will tell google that this is how people “move” online to get to their final answer (your content). Google has robotic systems but it reacts to how people use them. An example of my flagship content is the “10 Crazy Stupid Things” video tutorial detailing how I made $100,000 with my first website.

3) Dan Shure – EvolvingSeo.com – Twitter

Content marketing starts with values.

First, a company, brand or individual needs to clearly establish why they are blogging.

This might be several things, but they should be well defined. I would suggest all entities whom embark on blogging write these out as goals. Some examples would be “to build relationships” or “to generate brand awareness”. And then try to boil them down into simple metrics you can track. Try to avoid short sighted goals like “to rank in Google”.

Once the goals and values are known, they should be communicated in something like a style guide if there are multiple writers or guest contributors. This is so everyone contributing content understands the brand ‘voice’. When it comes to execution of blog posts you can use plugins like Edit Flow to streamline the editorial process.

SEO starts at an architectural level. This means having a solid category structure. Generally a blog will have 5-7 top level categories, and then maybe sub-categories nested. WordPress Custom Categories Plugin will let you customize these category archives with static content.

My best overall content tip is listening. Your most successful posts will come from listening to what your audiences wants and then creating exceptional content to fulfill those needs. For example a pretty successful post I wrote comparing Yoast SEO with

All In One was because I was listening on Twitter. I noticed many people asking for a quality, up to date comparison. To date that post continues to drive lots of traffic – even a few client requests here and there.

You can listen in so many places now. Some good places to start are;

• Twitter Search
• Quora
• LinkedIn Groups
• Niche Forums
• Google Plus

The trick is to just find where communities in your niche are talking, dig in, and find those questions people keep asking because the answers are hard to find. Answer them on your blog!

4) Daniel Cuttridge – SeoSaves.co.uk – Twitter

Honestly Jason, prior to getting into SEO to the degree I do it now, I spent a lot of time driving traffic by doing what is now called content marketing… This may not be the most intense groundbreaking of answers, but it’s all about the headline and nothing works better than trying to split opinion in the headline.

I also think it’s extremely important to have a content strategy in place e.g. mapping out the objectives of each piece of content. Is this content purely to bring as many people as possible into the funnel? Something outrageous may do the trick – craft the headline around it.

I always make sure that I know I’m promoting my content where my audience are… One example is how I used to drive visitors to my blog with the aim of getting clients for consulting; what I did was identified a topic that someone interested in business loves and then created some amazing content for that subject. I then put the content on a relevant and active sub-reddit and this would draw in over a thousand visitors a week every time I published, who were interested in the primary topic of my blog as well, they were lured into the funnel and they converted very well.

Tying that in with SEO though isn’t as simple as we’d like to think… It’s harder to tie the two together if you don’t have that all important strategy in place. I really love using webmaster tools to find search queries that are getting me impressions for content ideas. After this you just need to create a piece of content that’s unique enough to still provide value to your audience, the plus is that you know you’re creating a piece of content that’s going to be better optimized for a keyword you’re already ranking for. Then all you have to do is link out from the old piece of content to the new one, to let Google know definitively which piece of content is the authority on this topic.

This helps your entire domain by making you an authority on a specific subject by creating relevant pieces of content that tie together and each help rank the next.

So to conclude I think you need a strategy where you know the objectives for each post, use headlines to drive click-throughs and promote these where you know your audience is (so do your due-diligence) and use webmaster tools to help fuel content ideas that also benefit your overall SEO strategy by building your blog as a hub / authority for a specific set of subjects.

5) Christoph Cemper –  LinkResearchTools.com – Twitter

If there is an interesting topic which I want to be promoted on my website or blog, your first step should be searching for websites where competitors have also placed an article. You can easily do this via the LRT Competitive Link Detox Tool or the Link Alerts.

The Link Alerts are a monitoring tool for backlinks. If you set this Link Alert for a certain domain (for instance your competitor), you will be notified whenever they receive new backlinks. In case they get an article on a news page or an important blog, you can easily reach out to them in order to get in contact with the journalists.

Thanks to our Pitchbox integration you can take advantage of an automated outreach within the LinkResearchTools toolkit to contact journalists quickly and easily, but of course you can also do that manually. In such cases, we usually offer journalists to contribute an article or ask if they are interested to hear our view about a certain topic.

High-quality content marketing is all about creating unique content, providing readers with high-value, new information and an interesting topic. If you invest time to find the right domains to place your articles, you’ll see even better results.

6) Dave Schneider – SelfmadeBusinessMan.com  – Twitter

I always spend time promoting my posts and getting them out there. One thing I do is submit them to websites like Kingged, Inbound, Klinkk, and place like that where they can get more exposure.

Additionally, while not for every article, for my best ones I will do direct email outreach and let people know about the article. Brian Dean refers to this as the SkyScraper technique.

This is really the only “SEO” I do, nothing fancy, just writing great content and letting people know about it!

7) David Leonhardt – Seo-Writer.com – Twitter

My challenge in answering this question is that promoting a blog, at least for me, is content marketing. The five parts of blogging that I follow are:

1. Aha!

2. Scribble, scribble scribble.

3. Erase, rewrite, erase, cut and paste, erase some more, spell-check, edit, scribble, format, erase, insert, rewrite

4. Say “cheese”. Nice pic!

5. Hey Twitterland, wanna share?

My number one content marketing technique is adding images to blog posts. I can see the huge difference on Google Plus and Pinterest when there is a great pic with a good text message on it, compared to when the pic is lame. I have noticed that tweets with pics tend to get shared more than tweets without. And of course, the pic makes a difference on FaceBook, too. My how-to guide on “Picture-perfect Pinnable Pics” is at http://www.seo-writer.com/blog/2014/04/22/picture-perfect-pinnable-pics/

Of the ten content marketing tips at http://www.seo-writer.com/reprint/top-content-marketing-tips.html , the one I provide the most detail for is about the pics. Follow these guidelines and you should get more interest in social media, which should lead to more shares, likes and click-throughs.

Click-throughs are a tricky thing, though; you not only have to arouse their interest in the pic, but also their curiosity about what lies at the other end of the hyperlink.

8) Deb Briggs – PolePositionMarketing.com – Twitter

The first rule of effective content marketing is to know thy audience. If you don’t, how can you be sure the content you publish on your blog will be effective? Delving into your buyer personas will help you qualify which types of posts you produce—i.e., instructional how-to posts, infographic-based visual posts, entertaining posts—will resonate with your audience. If you discover that your main buyer persona consists of engineers who like to know how things work, then highly technical, how-to posts will be of interest.

That being said, you also want to keep your blog posts fresh. A customer solution post allows you to tell not only a story, but one that solves a problem—maybe even the reader’s problem. Businesses are often afraid of taking chances on their blogs, but when they do, those chances can spark more engagement. A perfect example is creating an infographic on a blog that usually sticks to more traditional types of posts. Making content visual also makes it more likely to be shared on social media, which positively impacts branding and site visits.

“Write it and they will come” just doesn’t cut it online. Many businesses don’t understand how important it is to share their posts on social media. While keyword-rich title tags and enticing meta descriptions for search results are still necessary, Moz’s Jen Lopez perhaps said it best: Silly Marketer, Title Tags Are for Robots! Potential customers won’t find your content through SERPs alone.

Enter Open Graph protocol and Twitter Cards. Use WordPress SEO by Yoast or other open graph specific plugins on your WordPress blog, and suddenly you have much more control over how your updates appear on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.—which in turn can lead to more shares and more traffic to your site. Choose which image gets pulled into a social status update, as well as a unique title tag. In the same way, Twitter Cards allow you to customize tweets of content from your website—helpful if you want to include a large image in the tweet with the link to your content for example. Remember how much visual content entices people?

So blog promotion starts with knowing your audience and ends with making your published content enticing on social media.

9) Dennis Seymour – LeapFroggr.com – Twitter

The other interviewees will definitely mention blogger outreach, authority relationship building using social media, Backlinko’s skyscraper strategy, etc. so, I’ll go with a twist and let the other experts handle those above.

I’ll go with link baits.

For one of the blogs we run in the movie industry, we basically look for smaller blogs that we could submit a controversial piece of content to, anonymously or not.

The content can be snippets of interviews, a leak, a controversial image that was planned and on purpose. This might be ethical or not, depending on the niche.

The big blogs, they get a lot of good stories/topics from medium to small bloggers. So track down the source.

You can usually find it easily using Google’s advanced search functions to sort out the specific date, sometimes the big blog article already has the link to the smaller blog.

Once you have your targets, you have a target blogger that can make your content go viral and get you backlinks.

My number 1 go-to technique is still blogger outreach. The content used varies from niche to niche. Images and videos tend to work well, but my fav is still long form case studies or tutorials. They have historically given the better results.

10) Harris Schachter – Optimizepri.me – Twitter

To me, SEO is the result of good content marketing (besides the technical aspects of course). My number 1 content marketing technique isn’t a specific tactic; it’s about taking the time to learn who your customers are and what they care about. Start small, maybe with just one segment and one product/service. Learn each segment carefully and meticulously. Once successful, move on to the next segment and rinse and repeat. Once you know your audience, everything you do from there on out will be consistent and on-point. It doesn’t matter if you’re making an infographic, a blog post, or a print magazine; none of these will be successful if you don’t learn the informational needs of your audience.

11) James Parsons – JamesParsons.com – Twitter

Writing great quality content for your blog is key. If you’re going to write an article on something, cover all of your bases and make sure it’s better than another article on the same topic. Include images and support your facts and claims with links to relevant sources.

My number one content marketing technique is regular blogging. Good content attracts links and shares, and I’m a firm believer a site can grow simply by blogging often and creating great content.

12) Jimmie Lanley – JimmieLanley.com – Twitter

Your question is a bit hard for me to wrap my head around. The blog is a method of content marketing. So to ask how do I incorporate content marketing into promoting my blog seems like asking how do I incorporate cooking when I stir fry.

But I’ll try the second part which is more straightforward.

My number one content marketing technique is YouTube video, specifically G+ Hangouts on Air (HoA). Video content is strong in the SERPS, and hangouts seem to do even better. I created a series of articles to attract clients who are searching for certain keyword phrases. But I didn’t stop there; for each article I also created a short talking head video using G+ HoA technology. Those videos perform well in search and help me get found by potential customers.

13) Jock Purtle – DigitalExits.com – Twitter

Our content marketing strategy is purely based around either driving viral visitors or purely driving search engine traffic. We will build a post based around a medium level keyphrase, make it exceptional (i.e. more than 2000 words) and then do outreach for that post to drive links and therefore sales.

We do content marketing around the blog post to also drive links. Our goal is to increase awareness for the post so we get natural visitors and to also increase the link equity and page authority to that page so that it increase SEO rankings.

Our current main number one content marketing technique is using infographic for link building purposes. We create an awesome infographic and then we outreach to the people that are related to the topic of that infographic.

14) Joseph Ho – Joseph-Ho.com – Twitter

First I will do a “List” post type of content and internal link to other content within your website. The list has to be like top 5 or top 3 kind of content. You may ask me why not top 10 or to 20 which is better for seo, the reason is simple. For example your child came back to school and said he is in the top 20 in the class or you like to hear I am in the top 3 in the class. Which one sounds better? Most of the time my list post will setup a structure like below

Here is the Buzz strategy that I used to create natural backlinks

1) Make your list post live and wait for 1 day for google to index the post.

2) Post the list post at the best time on your most active social media channel that readers are most active.

3) Within that day blast the email to inform your readers that you had this list post

4) Pin the post on facebook fanpage, if you have the budget use $20 to advertise your list post.

Using this strategy I am to make the list post go viral and drive 52000 visitors within 3 days with lots of social sharing and backlinks.

Here is the screenshot on how many sharing on social media using buzzsumo

Using this strategy my list post went viral and a lot of social signals are given which is good for me because is free. Not only that, I was also get free natural backlinks from the readers which allow me to rank up the keyword in top 3 of Google. Not only you gain the search traffic when you rank up, you will also receive the traffic from the content marketing.

15) Julie Joyce – LinkFishMedia.com –  Twitter

My number one content marketing technique is to make sure that the content is actually marketable. It all starts there. If it’s not worth sharing, why write it and expect anything good to happen? You can socialize it all over the place but if it doesn’t speak to your audience in some way, it’s still going nowhere. Most of the content I write is for sites other than my own so I try to write something that people want to read, promote it myself, and thank goodness for their promotional efforts as they definitely are what’s driving traffic for me.

16) Kristi Hines – KristiHines.com – Twitter

I have a system in place for each featured piece of content I create. I start by writing the blog post, fully focused on creating content that people will love to read. Once the content is written, I go back and add the search optimization elements (keyword phrase in the SEO title, meta description, polished headlines, and optimized images). Once the post is live, it is automatically shared to my social networks through some automations setup using IFTTT and Zapier. Over the weekend, I’ll also add the post to my weekly newsletter, which is shared to my subscribers from my blog and my freelance business website.

17) Marko Saric – HowtoMakeMyBlog.com – Twitter

For my blogging everything starts with content marketing. Creating and publishing content that people want to spend time on and share with their friends is the first step towards a great blog. Thanks to the great content your reach will increase, you will start getting shares in social media and links from other sites and this whole package will contribute to you ranking in search engines too. My number one tip for those new in content marketing is that 50% of their time should be spent on the creation of content and the other 50% on marketing of that content. No matter how great your content is nobody will know about it unless you go out there, find them and tell them. I have a content marketing routine that I go through every time I publish a new post and this contributes to my blog getting new visitors.

18) Matthew Barby – MatthewBarby.com – Twitter

When it comes to SEO, I don’t look at SEO and content marketing as two separate entities. Every campaign that I run has these two marketing channels deeply embedded into each other.

The key approach that I often take is to build my SEO strategy around the content plan itself. At the start of every new campaign I will run a full content audit across all of my client’s competitors, the top niche publications and also the industry as a whole. Once I have an idea of this, I’ll look to identify key influencers within the niche as well as influential writers. Instead of producing some content and then looking for a way of promoting it to get some benefit within my SEO campaign, I’ll look at ways to develop content that have a clear SEO objective at the beginning.

An example of this could be through bringing in a writer that publishes across a number of top niche publications, working with them to produce content and then gaining coverage within those publications. This is the similar process that a PR agency would take, except with a deeper understanding of SEO, there are so many extra benefits that you can take advantage of.

19) Nauf Sid – AffPayDay.com – Twitter

SEO and Content Marketing make for a lethal combination when used effectively. You may have read tons of definitions, but here’s my definition of Content Marketing – Creating content and putting it in front of your target market. That’s pretty much it. No need to overcomplicate anything. But there are tons of ways you could twist Content Marketing to get the desired results.

1. Brand Awareness
2. More Traffic
3. Lead Generation
4. Community Building
5. Conversions

Here’s how my content marketing strategy looks like –

My blog promotion strategy consists of –

1. SEO – Getting links and securing SERPs
2. Content Marketing – Brand/Community Building

It’s as simple as that. But there are tons of ways you could twist Content Marketing to get the desired results. Especially, if you have a business/agency, get your content marketing in order.

My number 1 Content Marketing Technique – Creating infographics.

I create relevant high quality infographics to earn backlinks and for brand awareness. I highly recommend you start doing the same too.

20) Nicholas Scalice – EarnWorthy.com – Twitter

Content marketing and SEO go together like peas and carrots. But to make your content marketing efforts most effective and still get a nice SEO boost, you need to make sure it doesn’t look forced. What I like to do is use a tool such as Buzzsumo to find out what people are talking about and sharing in a given niche. Just pop in a few keywords and see which articles are performing well all across the web. Then, you can use this info as ammunition and inspiration for a blog post of your own. But just make sure your post is original and adds a little something extra. It’s all about going above and beyond and making your content stand out. So in a nutshell, you’d use a tool to see what people are talking about and searching for and then create compelling content around that topic. That’s how I incorporate content marketing and SEO together as one.

As for my #1 content marketing technique, I’d say that has to be “repurposing your content effectively.” What I mean by this is that if I create a blog post, I can easily turn that post into a slide deck and share it on SlideShare. I can easily narrate it and turn it into audio. I can make a short video out of it. I can use some of the main points as tweets or Facebook posts. Essentially, I can chop that blog post up into a whole number of different formats and really get it out there. This can help you expand the reach of your content in ways you wouldn’t believe.

21) Ryan Biddulph – BloggingFromParadise.com – Twitter

I do little SEO save adding a specific keyword or 2 to my blog post. As for content marketing I use a pay it forward approach. I aggressively promote other bloggers from my niche through sites like Triberr, Twitter and Google Plus, and as I form stronger bonds with my blogging buddies many of my friends promote me in return.

Give. Receive. Works so incredibly well, paying it forward, and it’s one reason why I blog from paradise. I really believe that if you’ll just share other folk’s content, and comment on their blogs, creating personalized, in-depth, authentic comments, so much goodness will flow your way.

By promoting other bloggers and by commenting freely on blog posts I’ve had 2 of my blogging eBooks endorsed by a New York Times Best Selling Author and I’ve also been asked to speak at NYU. If that’s not an overwhelming advertisement for promoting others freely, I don’t know what is.

My #1 content marketing technique is….well, it’s 2 fold. Promoting other bloggers freely, as mentioned above, and creating something worthy. By “worthy” I mean creating blog posts that make people take a step back and say, “Darn, that was really helpful.” This type of worthy content comes from writing, writing and writing some more. I write 6,000 words or more daily, between writing my eBooks, my blog posts, writing articles for clients, and writing in-depth comments on authority blogs.

By writing, and by telling stories – mind, blogging from paradise, style – through my blog posts, my blog becomes a bunch more marketable because the content is valuable. Some bloggers mistakenly do a wonderful job promoting their content, but since the content is of poor quality, they gain little traction. Put more time into creating something worthy, something eye-catching, and you’ll be spending less and less time marketing, because folks will gladly share something that over delivers.

22) Sean Si – Seo-Hacker.com – Twitter

To put it simply, the best content marketing technique I’ve used over the years is creating what people in my industry would usually call “Evergreen content”.

It’s the pieces of content that would always be useful. Then I optimize it like there’s no tomorrow. Here are some examples from my blog:

How does 301 and 302 Redirect affect SEO?

The Ultimate Youtube SEO Guide

Optimizing Site Speed: Asynchronous and Deferred Javascript

These three articles account for roughly 30% of my entire traffic each month. The people who enter from these articles usually read 2 more blog entries and share them out via Twitter or Google+. We get more traffic, more exposure – consequently, that leads to links and user activity which is a positive signal for SEO.

It’s a very simple process, really. Just try to find out holes and gaps in topics/tutorials in your niche, create one awesome piece of content to fill that gap, publish it, market it and optimize it thoroughly. It’ll do wonders.

23) Sophie Lizard – LizardCreativeChaos.com – Twitter

To be honest, I pay little attention to SEO when I’m promoting my blog. Google and the other search engines have the job of figuring out what content should rank highest for a search term; my job is to create content that meets my audience’s needs. I know my readers well, so the Google gods have been kind to me.

I tailor my media and marketing tactics to my audience – my readers are writers, so most of my content is written and I favour long, detailed posts, but I include images and occasional videos to support the text. I also accept guest posts and run a regular guest posting contest, so incoming guest posts are a major element in my content marketing.

My top content marketing technique is to create content that moves people. Then they do a big chunk of the marketing for me through social sharing and personal recommendation.

24) Steve Brodsky – TheWorldIsMyOffice.com/ – Twitter

I have a very natural approach when it comes to SEO, I don’t worry about SEO. Might sound stupid at first but I have seen some absolutely amazing results from not worrying at all about SEO and simply creating incredible content on my blog as well as others within my niche.

I would have to say my number 1 best content marketing technique is guest posting. Now some of you might be yelling, “Matt Cutts said guest posting is dead you idiot!”.

For purely SEO reasons yes guest posting doesn’t have the same amazing effect it used to.

However, if you think about guest posting as marketing and don’t worry about SEO then it will bring in some amazing results for you. I use guest posting in order to get in front of a very specific audience directly on my competitors own website! There is no other marketing method that will do the same thing for you.

Guest posting is without a doubt my favorite content marketing method.

25) Steve Corona – http://stevecorona.com – Twitter

I simply don’t. I incorporate content marketing and SEO by writing amazing content. When you write compelling, value driven content the SEO works itself out. If you write stuff that people want to read, you won’t have to worry about search engines indexing it. The thing is, people think you need write some super optimized, barely readable nonesense to get people to visit your site, especially when you’re just starting out.

Maybe this works. Maybe it gets people to your site. But what then? They read some nonsense article, get zero value out of it, and browse away.

If you write amazing content, the search engines will come. So it’s just a matter of getting interested people to see your content. Reach out to bloggers, share on Twitter, do some grass-roots guerrila marketing style work— get yourself on Reddit, Hacker News, Stumbleupon. It takes work. But it all starts with writing things that are worth reading.

26) Stuart Walker – NicheHacks.com – Twitter

Content marketing I do a lot of. SEO not so much these days but I do pick up natural links from other bloggers in my niche.

I have barely even done any keyword research for the blog and when I have it’s been done AFTER I’ve written the post just to see if there’s a keyword or longtail I can slip into the article a few times without disrupting the flow of it.

Probably my #1 most effective content marketing technique so far has been to source out popular content in my niche using BuzzSumo.com

Then create something bigger, better and more beautiful.

Two examples on my blog are….

http://nichehacks.com/promote-blog-posts-blog-traffic/

http://nichehacks.com/increase-email-list/

I had found similar topics on BuzzSumo that had a lot of shares (and most had quite a few links too) and then I set out to create something even better.

It was easy as the original articles were things like 12 ways to promote blog posts or 10 ways to grow your email list. I set out to include a lot more ways + also go more in-depth and make the article look better.

I added images, gave the page a nice layout, added data and facts, got quotes from authorities in the niche.

So I was already creating a proven popular topic that already had got lots of shares / links then I was going on to make something even bigger, better, and more beautiful.

Then when up I’d contact people who had linked and shared the originals (using Ahrefs and Topsy.com mostly) and tell them about my new article – most shared it. I also let the people who I’d featured in the post know about it through Twitter or email.

It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time. And when hitting ‘publish’ on the post you’ve only just got started as you’ve to do all the manual outreach which is mind numbing and time consuming but the results are worth it.

Hundreds of social shares and dozens of links were gained (ignore the social media counter on those posts as it’s not accurate, hundreds of my social shares got lost when I switched plugins somehow).

When creating topics like that is when I’ve had the most success with content marketing. Ideally EVERY post we created for our blogs would be like that but it’s very time consuming so not practical to do every week.

Linkbait / egobait posts have also been a very effective content marketing strategy for me, like this world cup themed one I did..

http://nichehacks.com/linkbait-brazil-world-cup-2014/

If you do it round a big event, feature a ton of people in your niche, and have something funny and different about it you can generate a real buzz and get a load of links and shares.

I even managed to get Matt Cutts to look at it and Tweet me about it (he was part of the funny element of the post)

Overall though people still prefer SOLID actionable content like the 2 posts I mentioned above over the ego-bait stuff. Those got far more links and shares than the World Cup post.

So to summarize – the bigger, better, and more beautiful method of improving on existing content. It was something I picked up from Brian Dean’s “skyscraper method” but he’s more focused on getting links when this method is more focused on social shares.

And the cool thing is ANYONE can do this. There’s no guessing. There’s no working out what topics to cover. There’s no hoping people like your post. You’re picking something that’s already proved it’s popular and just making it better.

27) Takeshi Young – KeshKesh.com – Twitter

Content marketing is something that happens before content promotion, and even before content creation. It starts with having a clearly defined marketing strategy for your content, and setting goals for marketing objectives you want your content to achieve.

Some goals for your content could include things such as increasing brand awareness, setting cookies for retargeting, getting pageviews for ads, increasing e-mail sign-ups, etc. Whatever your goal is, make sure that it is clear and measurable. Then you can go about planning content and creating a marketing plan that will help achieve those goals.

In terms of SEO, the goal for content is primarily to build backlinks. One of the most effective ways for creating content that drives links is to look at content that has already amassed a lot of links in your niche, and see if you can create something similar or better.

As far as my number 1 content marketing technique, I would say that it is relationship building. We have been successful in our content marketing because we have spent time building relationships with other bloggers in our niche by sending them free products, engaging with them on social media, and sharing their content on our social media properties. All this builds up social capital that we can then “cash-in” on when we release a new piece of killer content. By building relationships ahead of time, it makes it a lot easier to get other bloggers to share our content, vs just reaching out to them cold when we want them to do something for us. Take the time to build relationships first, and always do more for them than you ask of them.

28) Tom Demers – CornerstoneContent.com/ – Twitter

I try to bake SEO and content marketing into every aspect of the content being created on blogs that I run and client projects we work on. As we’re determining topics we want to focus both on things that will be searched on, as well as on topics that we know will be shared (the questions “who will share this content” and “how will people find / visit this content” are things you should have answers to before you start to write). Additionally as we’re formatting content and building out the body of the content we’re always thinking about specific things we can do to get more leverage from SEO and content marketing like including different variations of relevant, targeted terms in the content, including useful resources on other sites (and letting those folks know that you’ve highlighted them) and making your content really easy to read (by making it scannable) and easy to share (by adding sharing icons, using tools like SumoMe’s highlighter and image sharer).

In terms of the most important technique you do need to execute on multiple facets of content creation and promotion to be successful, but I think the single most overlooked and most valuable aspects of successful content creation is making sure to design something that’s built to be distributed (shared, linked to, and visited) so don’t just build something that’s great that you think people will like, but really understand how you’re going to get your content asset shared – who will distribute it, how much traction its likely to get, and why those folks will share it (what’s your hook?).

This post shows it’s not rocket science to promote your blog through content marketing. What counts is to know your audience and create content that rocks. Plus, you have to do it with a passion.

If you’ve found this blog post practical, then please help spread the love about it: share it, vote for it, and tell your friends and contacts to check it out.

Thank you very much for reading so far and stay tuned for other expert round ups soon!

Jason Chesters