Who else wants to convert normal website visitors into buyers?

If you are looking for proven ways to turn visitors into repeated buyers, you need to master the art of “content marketing”.

It is the art of turning random visitors into loyal customers. Not only content marketing helps you with your website sales but it will also provide you a solid platform for making your blog a passive income source without sounding like a sales guy!

Getting results from a blog is really hard especially when you don’t have prior online reputation and most bloggers quit because they don’t see enough results in terms of traffic or sales from their blogs.

That’s the reason why we’ve created an advanced guide to content marketing to solve all your needs. Are you curious to know how to use it to get the best results from blogging? Let’s jump into the details.

Content Marketing Guide: Everything You Need to Know About

What is content marketing?

It is all about creating problem solving content and sharing it for FREE to attract and convert website visitors into buyers.

In simple terms, content marketing is a strategy that uses your content to build awareness and trust with your target audience before turning them into customers to increase your sales.

In traditional marketing, you’ll make money by showing ads, publishing paid reviews, using paid membership sites etc. Whereas in content marketing, instead of showing ads to interrupt your website visitors (to make money), you’re giving away lots of valuable articles, videos, Infographics for free. The more value you create with your content, the more people will listen to you. This builds trust overtime.

Later, once you build trust, you can sell or promote the products they are looking for. Usually in content marketing, people use their email lists to make money. So the email list is the key to successful content marketing strategy.

Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them!

The benefits of content marketing

Most of you are already aware of the term called “content marketing” but if you are still unsure of the advantages that content marketing provides, here are a few amazing benefits.

It is the surefire way to turn visitors into buyers

It educates your readers

It helps you understand better about your audience

It boosts your sales without being pushy

It helps you attract quality links from other blogs

Enough said! Let’s now talk about how you can use content marketing to build trust and increase your sales online.

How to Use Content Marketing to Build Trust And Increase Sales?

Start A Blog

According to HubSpot, B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those that do not.

The blog you’re currently reading now i.e Bloggers Passion makes $10,000+ every single month in passive income. In the last year alone we made around $106,000 (you can read all the income and traffic stats for the blog from here).

Hands down, blogging is one of the best ways to increase sales online.

If you’re still wondering about why you need to start a blog to create a perfect content marketing strategy, here are a few interesting blogging statistics for 2020 that you must know.

Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to achieve a positive ROI on their efforts

Blogs have been rated as the 5th most trusted source for accurate online information

Websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages

More importantly, nearly 50% of buyers view 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative.

Those are shocking yet interesting stats, right?

If you REALLY want to get amazing results with content marketing, you must start a blog.

So how do you start a blog? There are a ton of blogging platforms out there including WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr and so on.

Honestly speaking, if you’re serious about building an online business, WordPress works great as it’s also the #1 CMS (Content Management System) in the world used by millions of sites worldwide.

If you want to start a self-hosted blog on WordPress, you need reliable web hosting and we recommend you to give a try to Bluehost as it offers affordable hosting plans and it’s also the official hosting recommendation by WordPress itself.

If you’re interested to launch a WordPress site on Bluehost, here’s a simple step by step tutorial for you.

Step 1: Use this exclusive link to sign up for Bluehost hosting. Once you click on the link, you’ll be taken to their homepage (we’ve tied up with Bluehost to give you best hosting offer of $2.95 per month, so you’ll see our branding at their home page) which looks like this;

Step 2: Click on the Get Started Now button and you’ll be provided with 3 of their shared hosting plans including basic, plus, choice plus (we recommend you choice plus as it costs you $5.45 per month but you can host unlimited sites whereas, with basic plan i.e $2.95 plan, you can install only 1 site).

Here are the Bluehost discounted pricing details for Bloggers Passion audience (in case if you’re curious)

36 Months: $2.95/Month

24 Months: $3.95/Month

12 Months: $4.95/Month

Step 3: Once you’ve picked your desired hosting plan from Bluehost, you’ll now need to set up a domain (Bluehost provides a free domain for 1 year or you can also enter if you’ve bought a domain from elsewhere).

Step 4: In this final step, you need to create your account and enter your payment information to finish the process. Upon the successful payment, you’ll get a welcome email from Bluehost and then you can install WordPress to start blogging.

Find out what kind of content your audience are craving for

Building a strong foundation is the key to content marketing. Find out what your audience are looking for. Before diving into content marketing, you need to understand your audience.

Answer the following important questions before you begin;

What’s the biggest problem your target audience are facing?

What does he need to solve his problem?

Where is he going to find answers for his problems? (list your competition)

Once you have convincing answers to the above questions, it becomes easier for you to create a content marketing strategy that helps you create what your audience want.

Create a content plan

Once you know who your audience are and what type of content they are looking for, you need to create a content creation plan to turn visitors into buyers with your content. Here are 3 simple steps to launch a solid content marketing plan.

Posting frequency: You need to find out your ideal posting frequency. Although you don’t have to post daily but you need to be consistent with your posting schedule.If your readers are aware of your posting frequency, they will come back to your sites frequently. That’s a great strategy for keeping your visitors coming back and making them stick to your sites.

You need to find out your ideal posting frequency. Although you don’t have to post daily but you need to be consistent with your posting schedule.If your readers are aware of your posting frequency, they will come back to your sites frequently. That’s a great strategy for keeping your visitors coming back and making them stick to your sites. Posting length: We all know, quality content beats everything. Also make sure to find out how many words you need to create a quality post for your readers. It’s always better to write detailed articles with around 2000 to 3000 words.This will not only make your audience think that you know what you’re talking about but it will also help you boost your search rankings as Google loves detailed content over short articles.

We all know, quality content beats everything. Also make sure to find out how many words you need to create a quality post for your readers. It’s always better to write detailed articles with around 2000 to 3000 words.This will not only make your audience think that you know what you’re talking about but it will also help you boost your search rankings as Google loves detailed content over short articles. Competitor analysis: When creating a content strategy for your blog, it’s important to analyze your competition. Find out their posting frequency, word count, social shares, headlines etc to better understand their content creation plan.If you can do better than them, you will go ahead with them in attracting quality buyers to your sites.

5 High Performing Types of Advanced Content Marketing

When you’re creating an advanced content strategy, it’s so important for you to pick the RIGHT types of content. There are a ton of types of content you can produce starting from blog posts to webinars to podcasts and so on.

If you’re looking for high performing types of advanced content marketing, the following 5 are great for most industries as they can produce high ROI for every dollar you spend.

1. Blog posts (including guest posts, long form of articles)

We’re running Bloggers Passion since 2010 and since then we’re dependent mostly on blog posts. Did you know that we made over $100k in the last year alone? Blog posts definitely work like a charm and you must include them within your content strategy if you want to get better results.

Blog posts can help you with the following things;

They help you generate more traffic from search engines (as you can do keyword research, on page optimization, building links and what not)

They create awareness about the products and services you recommend

They attract more social shares, comments and so on

Above all, blog posts can be repurposed anytime as you can turn them into eBooks, PDFs, videos and so on. They can also be reoptimized by tweaking titles, updating new content, building links and so to get better search results.

Make sure to also include guest posts and long form of articles while creating a content strategy as guest posting helps you with building links and relationships with other bloggers. Long form content helps you get higher rankings in the search engines as Google mostly prefer long form of content over short articles.

2. Videos

Whether you know it or not, YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine after Google as it has more than 1.9 billion monthly active users.

Not just that, your video could have 50 times more chances to rank well in organic output than text content and videos get higher CTR rate of 41% which is higher than text CTR.

Since the beginning of 2020, we are actively creating videos and doing video marketing on YouTube. Although the growth is not so huge but we’re getting new subscribers on YouTube regularly along with the increased watch time on our videos.

You can watch our latest videoes from here. And don’t miss to Like, Share and Subscribe to our YouTube Channel if you like our videos.

Do you know why we’re spending more time on YouTube marketing although we’re already actively publishing (or updating) posts on Bloggers Passion. The reason is, we’re looking to diversify our traffic sources as we can’t solely depend on one traffic source such as Google to get more traffic or sales.

You never know when Google rolls out a funky algorithm as recent Google core update affected a lot of websites which resulted in a huge traffic drop for most sites.

While creating videos on YouTube, make sure to focus on creating longer duration videos as a YouTube ranking factors study found that longer videos (more than 15 minutes) outperformed shorter videos in YouTube search.

As you can see above, longer duration videos which have a length of more than 15 minutes are performing well on YouTube.

Above all, according to Tubular insights, 68% of YouTube users come to the platform for help in making a purchase decision. So if you want to increase your website sales along with getting attention from new audience, YouTube marketing is definitely for you.

Quick note: We also have written an exclusive post around YouTube SEO which can help you find lots of interesting insights and techniques around increasing the visibility of your videos.

3. Case studies

If you want to build a money making blog, you need to build trust and awareness with your target audience. How can you build trust with your audience? The simplest way is to write excellent case studies.

Yes, case studies on blogs work like a charm. You can also use case studies on the products you promote to generate more sales. You can check out our SEO case study as an example so you’ll get an idea of how it looks like;

As you can see above, a case study is where you’ll be sharing all the details along with the results on a particular topic (or task). These case studies establish yourself as an authority in your industry as you’re not just publishing another posts but you’re rather creating “exclusive content” which provide insights mostly along with the results.

4. Images (including platforms like Instagram, Pinterest)

Did you know that Foundr magazine went from zero to over 1.8 million followers ONLY using Instagram marketing? That’s insane, right?

They are literally making millions of dollars a year through their Instagram marketing campaigns and they post amazing stuff which mostly include images.

So if you’re also looking for some rapid growth hacking techniques, focus on creating appealing images and use platforms like Instagram, Pinterest etc to grow from scratch.

Find out how other top marketers and brands are using sites like Instagram to promote their content through images and you can repeat the same (including how many times they are posting in a day to how they are promoting their brand and so on).

5. Email newsletters

Did you know that email marketing has the BIGGEST ROI with an average expected ROI of $32 for every $1 you spend on email marketing? Yes, that’s true, 81% of small businesses rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel and 80% for retention.

If you want to build trust, awareness and brand through content marketing, make sure to start building an email list and use autoresponders, drip email campaigns and email newsletters to grow your traffic, leads and sales.

Make sure to use the right email marketing solution (you can check out our AWeber vs MailChimp review) as it helps you easily design and customize your email newsletters with ease.

Be everywhere

One of the simplest ways to promote your content to wider audience is to be everywhere. We know it’s really hard to be everywhere if you’ve zero online connections, but we’ll lay out few simple strategies to get more exposure to your content by being everywhere.

SEO: Whether you agree it or not, search engine optimization is the sole element in creating a profitable blog that makes money. Without getting traffic from search engines, it’s impossible to attract readers who want to buy what you sell. So focus on increasing your overall SEO traffic to lay out an effective content marketing strategy.

Blog comments and guest posts: Everyone thinks that guest blogging is dead, but really it’s not. In fact, guest blogging is still one of the most epic ways to reach out to more people with your content. You need to focus on creating high quality guest posts to attract potential customers to your sites instead of focusing on building backlinks.

Blog commenting is another evergreen strategy to make new connections with other bloggers. By leaving thoughtful comments on other blogs, you will not only build strong relationships but it will persuade others to leave comments on your blog posts as well.

Social: Social media shares are one of the crucial factors that decide your search rankings. Google gives more importance to the sites that get more social shares (whether it is from Facebook, twitter or Pinterest). So spend your time actively on social media sites to explore others and interact with the influencers in your industry to boost your online reputation.

Email: If you don’t have an email list, you’re losing a lot of money and traffic on the table. Observe any successful marketer, you will find out that majority of his income comes from the email list. Do you know why? Because email list is permission marketing, that means people are giving you permission to you. If you build trust and promote the right kind of products that will solve their problems – they will buy from you no matter what! So start building an email list as soon as possible, also focus on giving a free incentive to quickly boost your email subscribers.

Interviews: Conduct interviews with the industry experts. Find out the most popular topics in your niche by using tools like SEMrush, Moz, Buzzsumo etc. Then ask relevant questions and contact most popular bloggers in your niche. Then promote the interviews and ask for a tweet from the influencers whom you interviewed to quickly increase your blog exposure.

Assess your analytics

Once you’re doing the above steps perfectly, it’s time for you to spy on your analytics. Creating engaging content is not enough, you also need to find out whether your content is getting good results or not.

You can evaluate the following stats to make sure your content is doing well.

Check your social shares per each post

Check the number of comments you get

Find out if people are sending you emails for thanking you (after creating a great post)

Spy on your Google analytics report

Use Google analytics to your advantage, it’s not only a free tool but it’s perfect tool for finding out your top pages and high performing keywords. If few keywords are generating you more traffic from search engines, then you need to consider using the relevant keywords on your upcoming posts to bring more traffic from Google.

Refine and repeat

Once the above steps are done correctly, you need to refine the results of what strategies are performing well and which type of contents sending more results.

Repeat the strategies that are working well for you and refine the things that are not giving you the better results. Also remember that, traffic from search engines take time especially if you’ve a fairly new blog.

Any blog that generates a lot of traffic from search engines is because of one factor: they get a lot of incoming links from other blogs. So you need to focus on building quality backlinks in order to ensure that your blog is performing well on Google search results.

Try guest posts, create Infographics and videos to attract natural backlinks to your blogs. If you want to find out the creative strategies to build quality links, try “blogger outreach strategy”.

In a nutshell, blogger outreach strategy is all about grabbing others attention to linking to your content. Blogger outreach strategy is one of the most critical ingredients in your advanced content marketing strategy. Without the help of other bloggers in your niche, your blog won’t perform well in social media sites or Google search results.

Before seeking for help, always help others, frequently link out to the posts that are of high quality. Overtime, you will see a lot of good results using blogger outreach strategy.

Top 3 Content Marketing Examples [What to Learn From Them]

Creating a content marketing strategy is NOT easy especially when you are just getting started online. You need to carefully read and analyse few of the top websites which are effectively using content marketing to generate more traffic, leads and sales.

That’s why we’ve created this exclusive section where you’ll discover a few of the best content marketing examples so you can learn something and probably tweak your content strategy accordingly.

1. Buffer

Buffer is one of the best social media management software tools that’s used by millions of people schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin, as well as analyze their results.

It also has an exclusive blog which is run by Leo Widrich and Joel Gascoigne. Buffer is definitely one of the best examples of how to leverage the power of content marketing to build a million dollar business online.

Here’s how it uses content marketing to generate leads and sales.

Buffer uses a tremendous call to actions on their homepage. You’ll see a huge call to action with “Get Started Now” text on their homepage, once you click on it, you’ll be immediately taken to their pricing plans which look like this;

As you can see above, Buffer website’s main motive with first-time website visitors is to try their 7 day free trial on all the plans (at the bottom, they are also providing a free plan).

Once you start using their 7 free trials, you’re most likely to convert into their paid customer because of their awesome features which help you easily schedule posts and automate all your social media campaigns easily.

Even their blog posts are often filled with excellent content around social media (so they are attracting a specific audience to their website who are actually interested in social media related stuff).

That’s why we think their website conversion rates will be higher because they are turning random website visitors into customers by providing free trials and excellent content.

2. Smart Passive Income

Pat Flynn runs this amazing marketing blog called Smart Passive Income where he earns an average of $100,000 every single month. Yes, you heard it right. Thanks to his amazing content marketing skills.

Here’s how Pat Flynn uses content marketing to generate leads and sales through his site.

Let’s first have a look at the homepage where he uses an email opt-in form along with a ton of social proof to persuade first-time visitors on his site to email subscribers.

His blog also has a ton of resources including email newsletters, special eBooks, cheat sheets and so on to turn visitors into email subscribers. Then, he slowly introduces his paid courses, promotes affiliate products like Bluehost along with his eBooks (and printed books) to make money from the email list.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the top SEO tools used by a ton of people including SEOs and marketers all around the world as it helps you with everything from keyword research to competitor analysis to backlink audits and so on.

Here’s how Ahrefs uses content marketing to generate more sales to their #1 SEO tool.

Here’s what you’re welcomed with when you’re on the Ahrefs website homepage.

As you can see above, they have ONLY one big call to action which gives a 7 day trial for $7 (not a free trial though) along with how many users have joined in the last 7 days.

Besides that, Ahrefs has an incredible blog that mostly covers SEO related stuff and they mostly use Ahrefs tool for a lot of tutorials such as keyword research, competitor analysis, content audits and so on.

So the people who are reading their tutorials should get access to their tool to be able to fully understand. They also have a huge email list along with strong social media presence which all come in handy when it comes to turning them into customers.

Top 3 Content Marketing Blogs to Follow

Did you know that 92% of marketers are using content marketing, but only 34% consider themselves to be really good at it? So if you’re someone who is looking for top content marketing blogs to read, follow and learn, here’s a list for you.

1. Convince And Convert

Convince And Convert which is run by the content marketing expert Jay Baer (who is also the New York Times best-selling author of four books including Youtility). This blog can be considered as an exclusive platform to learn content marketing as you can find all kinds of content optimization related stuff including:

Creating great content

Learning how to convert your content

Creating a content strategy that works

And so on

2. Copyblogger

Copyblogger is probably the world’s first dedicated content marketing blog which now became a HUGE blog for all kinds of marketers, publishers and bloggers.

Copyblogger was founded by Brian Clark has been building businesses with online content marketing skills since 1998 articles which we first started with just $1000 seed cash which now became an 8 figure business online.

All the articles on Copyblogger are written by experts like Sonia, Brian Clark and so on where you can find highly practical techniques and insights around content marketing. So if you want to understand all the facets of effective content marketing, Copyblogger is a must-read blog for you.

3. The Content Strategist (by Contently)

Contently was founded in 2011 by Joe Coleman, Dave Goldberg, and Shane Snow to help brands and marketers create engaging content that drives results. It also has an exclusive section called “The Content Strategist” which focuses only on content marketing related stuff.

Here’s where you will discover everything from creating brand awareness with your content to storytelling and generating solid results with your content.

All in all, if you’re looking for a platform to learn and hone your content marketing skills, this blog can be a great place for you.

FAQs

Here are a few of the common questions asked around content marketing which can help you understand more about it.

1. Does content marketing help with more business in 2020?

Absolutely yes. People these days are doing a lot of research (be it reading articles or watching videos) before buying anything online. That means, they are educating themselves about the products or services they are going to use before taking out their wallets to purchase.

Here’s where content marketing helps you by educating your target audience and customers with the right content which includes blog posts, videos, podcasts and so on. Having a better content marketing strategy in place can definitely increase your overall online sales.

2. What are the latest content marketing trends for 2020?

Here are a few content marketing trends that can help you dominate in 2020 and beyond.

Influencer marketing still works like a charm

Long form of articles always rank better and attract more backlinks along with social shares

Brand storytelling works great no matter what industry you are in

Be everywhere (on video platforms such as YouTube, content platforms like Medium & Quora, podcasts as it helps you engage with more people)

3. What is the future of video marketing?

It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, you should definitely consider video marketing if you want to see rapid growth as platforms like YouTube are growing rapidly.

That being said, here are a few interesting stats around YouTube video marketing which might give you a better idea about why should you get into video marketing in 2020.

YouTube has over 1.9 billion logged in monthly users (it’s also the 2nd biggest search engine after Google and 3rd most visited site after Google and Facebook)

By 2025, half of the viewers under 32 will not subscribe to a pay-TV service

In 2015, 18 to 49 year-olds spent 4% less time watching TV while time on YouTube went up 74% (that means, YouTube is growing at a rapid rate when compared to the traditional TV watching time)

Above all, people who complete TrueView ads on YouTube watched to completion or at least 30 seconds were 23 times more likely to visit or subscribe, watch or share that brand video.

4. Why content marketing is important?

Content marketing helps you turn website visitors into email subscribers into loyal customers. It is important because it helps you build trust and awareness with your prospects around the products and services you offer.

5. What are a few content marketing tools?

Here are few tools for content marketing you can use in 2020:

SEMrush (great for SEO)

Google Docs (great for writing articles)

Grammarly (improves your writing and editing)

Quora (great platform to connect and share your ideas online)

Rank Math (useful plugin to optimize your content)

Browse more Blogging Resources:

Final Thoughts

Creating sharable content is not easy unless you find out the already performing topic ideas in your niche. As a content marketing guy, you need to focus on creating high quality contents instead of focusing on solely increasing your traffic.

Always focus on creating problem solving contents, after all, your content is the lifeblood for making your blog successful. So are you ready to give content marketing a serious try?

Did you like this ultimate guide on content marketing strategy? If yes, share this post with others so they can get benefit from it. Let us know if you have any questions related to content marketing in the comments below.