“In content marketing, the quality of your content either makes or breaks you online” – Julia McCoy.
Hey👋, Rafiqul here. Welcome to Content Marketing VIP that delivers actionable insights, the latest updates, & free resources every Monday, for free.
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Table of Contents
Actionable insights
💡 1. Mini-course on starting and growing a newsletter
Soon the content marketing VIP will become 1,000 members strong (Thanks to you) 🥳.
Here are the top 10 lessons I’ve learned along the way →
📙 Lesson 1: Conversion > Traffic
Make sure your newsletter sign-up page answers these three questions.
- Who’s this for?
- What’s their benefit?
- How often (once a week/ Twice a month/etc.)?
📙 Lesson 2: Make it Exclusive.
Don’t just share the same content that you add on other channels. It should be exclusive.
Otherwise, why’d someone join the newsletter to get the same content?
📙 Lesson 3: Shareability
The real growth happens when you get the word of mouth benefits.
- Try adding share buttons within the content.
- Test placing the share button in different places.
📙 Lesson 4: Content distribution
Share the newsletter content on different platforms with a CTA to your landing page. Platforms worked for me:
- Indiehackers
- FB/ LinkedIn groups
- Blog
- Product Hunt
📙 Lesson 5: Curate
Feature expert tips, strategies in your newsletter.
Benefits?
- Your audience gets high-quality content.
- It saves your time.
- Tag contributors while promoting. Maybe they’ll share it too.
📙 Lesson 6: Get feedback
Don’t assume that your newsletter is subscribe-worthy.
Always test before the change.
- Add feedback form.
- Measure NPS score.
📙 Lesson 7: Save readers’ time
Your goal should be to make your copy as short as possible and as actionable as possible.
Include:
- Short sentence
- Easy words
- Visuals (if needed)
- To-the point content
- Practical tips
Lesson 8: Unique
What makes your newsletter different from others in your niche?
Areas you can focus on:
- Content format (Mine is custom visuals heavy)
- Subject line (e.g., thehustle, Morning brew)
- The tone of writing (e.g., Backlinko’s to-the-point content), etc.…
📙 Lesson 9: Consistent
In my case, I am near 1000 subscribers after 20+ weeks of consistent content delivery.
Select the frequency and stay consistent with that for a long time.
📙 Lesson 10: Measure
- Open rate is good.
- CTR is better.
- Number of clicks on the share button is even better.
Mistake to avoid: Making major changes without having enough data.
💡 2. Types of content to create for bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) marketing?
Content helps you win traffic, engage the audience, and even convert the traffic into leads/sales.
Here are some of the content formats that will strengthen your BoFu marketing:
1. Brand alternative
‘[Your competitor brand] alternative‘ put this into Google, and you’ll see a list of pages where your product can fit into.
For example →
- [Notion] alternative
- [Dropbox] alternative
Make a list of competitors that offer the same product/service like yours.
Successful example: Appsumo
2. Case studies and report
Case studies or reports are common and effective ways of getting leads and converting them into paying customers.
Here’s what to do:
- If getting leads is your primary goal, it’s better to make your content gated.
- Focus on getting more details upfront for downloading the report/case study. Conversion might be low, but the quality of leads will be high.
- Send an immediate thank you email. Follow up with a free consultation or relevant CTA.
Successful example: Semrush
3. Comparison- [Your brand vs. competitor brand]
This is the kind of content format that the audience wants to know, but brands are afraid to talk about.
One great example is Ahrefs.
Instead of making a biased guide, they decided to make it as neutral as possible.
Find similar opportunities in your niche. If you find so, don’t be afraid to share the pros and cons of each brand (including yours)
One way or another, your audience is smart enough to get all the positives and drawbacks (even if you hide them).
Make their job easy.
Successful examples: Hubspot, Ahrefs
💡 3. Custom regex in Google search console (GSC) is a blessing for SEOs
With regex (also known as regular expressions), you can analyze the performance report of GSC in a better way.
Where to access this feature in GSC?
- First, go to the GSC dashboard.
- Next, select the page or query from the filter.
- Then select the custom regex.
One way of using the regex function is by understanding the search intent behind pages.
You can see the search queries that your pages (or any specific page) are getting impressions for.
This is helpful to optimize or update your content that fulfills the search intent.
For example, one variant you can use for informational queries is: who|what|when|how|why
As a result, you’ll get to see results like this:
Other variants that you can use to understand the search intent of pages are →
Commercial: .*(best|top|vs|review*).*
Transactional: .*(buy|cheap|price|purchase|order).*
Learn more about different variants and use cases of regex to use for SEO
Free resources
💡 1. Supercharge Your Content Performance with SEO
SEO is a key part of content marketing. Hence aligning your content strategy with SEO is important.
Join this 1-hour webinar to learn about →
- Content auditing to identify underperformed content
- What makes good content
- SEO best practices to supercharge content creation
- Measuring content performance
From: Content Marketing Institute
Date of the webinar: July 14, 2021
💡 2. Why Your First-Party Data Should Lead Your Organic Search Strategy
Impressions, CTR, rankings are all good.
But the most important metric for SEO folks should be the growth of traffic that converts to lead or sales.
In this webinar, you’ll learn:
- How to uncover the hidden opportunities from SEO metrics and website analytics
- Ways to prove the ROI of the website
- Why technical SEO is important to build a future-proof SEO strategy
From: Search Engine Journal
Date of the webinar: July 14, 2021
💡 3. Thought Leadership and SEO: The 3 Key Elements and Search Ranking Strategies
If you want to position yourself as a thought leader in the market, this session will help you.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
- How establishing yourself as a thought leader can impact search rank.
- Content strategy for thought leaders to attract links, authority, and qualified traffic
- Why and how to publish original research content
From: Similarweb
Date of the webinar: July 13, 2021
Latest happenings
💡 1. Now repurpose your podcast into blog articles with this free tool
GetWelder (Podcast & video interview recorder) made the podcast transcription feature free for everyone.
Just drag and drop your audio file and get the transcription ready.
How can you use this tool for content marketing?
Here are few ways you can use this tool:
- Repurpose your podcast episodes into blog articles
- Curating content? Get transcription from podcast interviews and highlight the key takeaways quickly.
But make sure that you’re optimizing the transcription for the platform.
If you’re repurposing the podcast episode into blog articles, don’t forget to add sub-headings, relevant keywords, visuals to make it work for SEO.
Try Getwelder and get podcast transcription for free
💡 2. Download and Get URL of images from Google Doc
If you find it difficult to quickly download images from Google docs, here’s a cool solution.
John Muller built a web app that will help you in:
- Downloading images from Google Docs
- Getting image URLs of images used in Google Docs
Try this tool and download images from Docs
Expert Quotes
💡 1. Create acquisition content strategically
“Every element in an advertisement must cause that slippery slide effect.
The headline must be so powerful and compelling that you must read the subheadline, and the subheadline must be so powerful that you are compelled to read the first sentence and so on, straight through the entire copy to the end.”
– Joseph Sugarman (legendary copywriter)
💡 2. Content repurposing is a serious need.
“I am convinced every marketing team should have someone 100% focussed on repurposing their content.”
– Jason Bradwell (B2B marketer)
Have Some Fun ↓
Well explained 👏