As a business owner, you know your employees are vital to your company’s success. That doesn’t mean they always feel appreciated, however.
Regular recognition at company meetings is essential, but so is making your appreciation public. Employee spotlights let you tell the world about top employees and explore their contributions to your company.
Employee spotlights aren’t just a way to recognize and reward loyal, hardworking employees. They are an uber-effective (and perennially underused) marketing tactic. They can help humanize your brand and, ultimately, boost sales.
It’s time to stop taking our employees for granted. Here’s how to use employee spotlights to give your staff the recognition they deserve while growing your business.
6 Benefits of Employee Spotlights
First and foremost, employee spotlights are about recognizing the wonderful people who work for your company, but that’s not the only benefit.
They also make for incredibly effective marketing collateral. There’s no corporate sales message with an employee spotlight. Just authentic brand storytelling that shares what makes your company stand out.
That kind of message comes with some significant benefits—the kind that can send revenues soaring.
Boost Your Recruitment Strategy
Employee spotlights are a fantastic tool to help your company attract the very best talent. The kind of talent that takes your company’s sales to the next level.
It’s a huge commitment for someone to take on a new role. Even more so if it’s senior management or an executive position. When all job adverts look similar, potential employees look for as much inside information as possible.
They want to know what it’s like to work at your company, who their colleagues might be, and what perks they can expect.
Employee spotlights highlight the day-to-day experience at your company and could be the deciding factor that sways a candidate’s decision in your favor. If you are hiring, you can run ad campaigns about job positions featuring real employees.
Foster Meaningful Connections Between Employees
There are few better ways to create meaningful connections between your employees than a series of articles and interviews that shine a light on individual employees.
Employee spotlights can be particularly powerful in large enterprise companies where it can be hard for employees to get to know people in different departments.
They break down barriers and silos that separate departments and give employees a nifty way of striking up a conversation between teams. This can increase productivity, communication, and your bottom line.
Increase Engagement and Reach on Social Media
Employee spotlights are usually incredibly popular when shared on social media. Employees, their friends, and families love to share posts about people they know. While corporate sales messages might only pick up a handful of shares, this kind of social media engagement can be transformational.
Each comment, like and share, gets your company in front of a much bigger audience. That could lead to new applicants and even new clients. Potential clients feel good about working with a company with incredibly engaged, connected, and happy employees.
As you can see, Twitch’s employee spotlight got over 250 likes and shares and showed off their company branding.
Win Over Potential Clients
Employee spotlights are a fantastic tool to win over new clients. When there’s not much difference between firms in terms of price or previous work, the decision can often come down to which company the client thinks will be more enjoyable to work with.
Think about which company you would choose to work with: a faceless corporation that doesn’t even have a team page on its website or a company that is proud of every single employee and goes out of its way to show them off?
Grow Existing Client Relationships
Employee spotlights aren’t just great for winning new clients. They can also improve the relationship with your existing clients. When you send out employee spotlights in your email newsletter, you give your existing clients another opportunity to engage with your brand and reaffirm their choice to work with you.
They can follow up on services that employee offers or learn more about their contacts at your company.
This may give you more business as a result of something mentioned in your spotlights.
Improve Your Company’s Reputation
Glassdoor and other job review websites have made it all too easy to dig up dirt on companies. Employee spotlights give you the chance to bolster your company’s image.
The time and money invested in creating employee spotlights show your company cares about its employees. The content of each spotlight can further bolster your reputation.
What gets said by employees can prove your company is committed to creating a rewarding and challenging working environment. That tells possible recruits there is a great company culture, and you have nothing to hide.
How to Create an Employee Spotlight
Now that you understand the many benefits of creating an employee spotlight let’s cover how to create them.
Before creating the content, ask yourself these three questions:
Who are you going to highlight?
What are you going to include in your spotlight?
Where are you going to post it?
Who to Highlight
No one should be off-limits when it comes to creating employee spotlights—unless they don’t want to participate, of course. (Don’t force employees to take part against their will.)
For those who are willing, however, make sure you highlight a broad cross-section of your team. Everyone from the executive leadership team down to the new intern deserves the opportunity to be recognized.
What to Include in an Employee Spotlight
While you can include whatever you like in your employee spotlight, there’s a common format that most employers tend to take.
The Essentials of an Employee Spotlight
There are several elements no employee spotlight should be without. These are:
employee name
employee picture
job title
direct quote
An employee spotlight doesn’t have to be as comprehensive as you might think. This information alone can be enough to achieve some of the benefits we covered above.
The Optional (but Recommended) Extras:
If you want to make your spotlights shine, consider adding a lot more detail to help readers get the full picture. For example:
a detailed description of their role
the length of their employment
a question-and-answer session
their hobbies outside of work
anything else interesting about the employee
What to Ask Employees in a Spotlight Feature
A video interview or a written Q&A session can bring your employee spotlight to life. Make sure to ask questions that will make it easy for employees to talk favorably about your company and give readers and viewers a good idea of what working there actually looks like.
Here are some topics to cover:
employee perks
company culture
company leadership
the job role, and why it’s enjoyable
why the employee took the job
Civis Analytics uses a Q&A style spotlight that helps readers get to know their employees.
However, be careful not to get too hung up in the minutiae of their roles or trying to get the perfect soundbite. Canned questions can result in stale answers. Instead, trust your interviewer instincts and delve deeper into anything interesting the employees share.
The more unusual and different each of your employee spotlights, the more likely people will be to read every one. That also means mixing up the format of different spotlights can work well.
Short-Form Spotlights Vs. Long-Form Spotlights
Your employee spotlights can be long-form written pieces of short-form snippets, videos, or social media posts. There are benefits to both short-form and long-form spotlights.
So, why choose?
If you’re going to the effort of creating employee spotlights, consider doing both. Start the employee spotlight with a short-form executive summary or introductory video so readers can learn everything at a glance.
Then go into more detail for those who want to spend time getting to know your employees. You could post the full-length video interview or transcribe your entire Q&A session. You could even have employees write an in-depth blog post.
Don’t be afraid to chop up long-form spotlights into short, digestible chunks that can be shared on social media platforms, either. The more ways you can repurpose the content, the more valuable they become.
Where to Post Employee Spotlights
Post your employee spotlights anywhere and everywhere. Your brand blog is a great starting place. Create a new post for every employee spotlight and have a dedicated section of your blog where readers can easily browse past spotlights.
Use social media to get the word out and link back to your blog posts. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are a great way to significantly increase the number of people who will read your spotlights.
It’s also worth including every new spotlight in your corporate newsletter. We’ve already discussed the benefit of showing potential and current clients your spotlights, and this is a great way to make sure everyone knows about them.
If you’ve filmed your employee spotlight, you should upload it to YouTube, too. Not only is YouTube a great way to host your videos, but these types of videos are also incredibly share-worthy and can increase exposure on the platform.
Finally, don’t forget to share your employee spotlights on your company’s intranet or instant messaging app. Spotlights are great for boosting employee morale and helping employees get to know their colleagues better.
What to Do After Publishing Employee Spotlights
Once you’ve completed the first few employee spotlights, spend time gathering feedback from your team and your audience. Ask them what they liked about the interviews, what they didn’t like, and anything they thought was missing. You can even ask who should be highlighted next.
Armed with this information, you can make your next batch of employee spotlights even better. Collect more feedback after and then optimize them again. Whatever you do, don’t stop creating them. The more spotlights you create, the more chance your business will benefit from them.
It won’t take long before employee spotlights become ingrained in your company culture. You’ll wonder how you ever did without them.
Conclusion
It’s not an over-exaggeration to say employee spotlights can transform your company for the better. You can use them to:
attract better talent
improve employee morale
expand your reach
win new clients
build stronger relationships with existing clients
improve your company’s reputation
It’s not hard to create them, either. A simple Q&A or a short video is all you need to start changing your company culture for the better and improving sales as a result. What’s stopping you from getting started today?
Who will be the star of your next employee spotlight? Share in the comments!
According to Demand Metric, businesses that utilize a blogging strategy get 97 percent more links to their website and are 13x more likely to see positive returns. What’s more, blogging results in a 434 percent increase in indexed pages and a 93 percent increase in indexed links.
This means more inbound traffic and more repeat customers for your brand.
That said, there are over 31 million active bloggers in the U.S. posting once per month, and that talent pool is only growing. To keep up and stay competitive, you need to be on top of the latest blogging trends and go after the best blog talent.
Here are some of the biggest blogging trends to look out for this year, along with quick and easy ways to implement them into your blogging strategy.
Blogging Trend #1: Highly Visual Content
No blogging trends list would be complete without reminding you of the importance of visual content.
That’s a big boost for your brand’s visibility and retention. As blogs become longer and more detailed, design and interactivity grow in importance. Visual content can offer readers a way to scan content without reading it all the way through.
HubSpot found that only 16 percent of online readers take in content word-by-word. The rest are scanning, looking for quick and efficient information.
If you want readers to stay on your page, be engaged, and promote your content on other platforms, make your information easy to scan by using visuals.
How to Incorporate Visual Content in Your Blog
Adding images and videos to your content breaks up heavy chunks of text and offers a new, responsive way for your audience to engage with your content.
It’s always preferable to use original content in your blogs, but stock imagery can still be useful when designing an engaging blog. For example, an infographic offers readers a way to easily consume your information without wading through the entirety of your post.
Likewise, video content is another one of this year’s hottest blogging trends that offers readers a more engaging way of interacting with your posts.
Surveys from Wyzowl have found that people watch an average of 2.5 hours of video content per day, so integrating video content into your blog is a great way to improve time spent on your pages.
Blogging Trend #2: More Affiliate Marketing
Another important factor in today’s blogging trends is the implementation of affiliate marketing links in your blog content.
Affiliate marketing allows you to create an ongoing sales funnel outside your website.
For example, if you’re running a B2C business, you might hire a blogger to write a review post about your product. From there, you could offer their followers a discount if they buy it from that post.
Not only does this improve your sales reach, but it also introduces you to new audiences.
It’s no wonder affiliate marketing is one of the hottest blogging trends of the year. Now, how can you take advantage of this technique?
How to Incorporate Affiliate Marketing in Your Blog
When creating a blog, think about affiliate marketing techniques you could employ.
If you’re mentioning a product or service, reach out to that company and see if they have any affiliate programs you could join. You can do this with a simple Google search for: product + “affiliate program.”
It’s always best to choose a product you know and love, as your results depend on how well you sell it.
That said, no one wants to read a sales pitch. A successful affiliate blog should be educational and informative and should employ other blogging techniques such as SEO and visual content.
It’s also important to note that the FTC requires you to disclose any affiliate programs, which you can do with a simple byline in your post.
Blogging Trend #3: More Critical Readers
One of the more relevant blogging trends today is the inclusion of critical readers in your audience pool.
Public perception of online content is changing.
With terms like “fake news” and increased competition for content, readers are less willing to trust content that isn’t reputable.
Today’s reader needs reassurance that your content is accurate and fair. They expect citations, sources, and statistics to back up your claims. Likewise, you need to keep in mind the scope of content that’s readily available online.
Every year, more people and more brands enter the blogging scene.
To stay competitive and harness your SEO, you need to write content that is verified and well-sourced.
How to Write for Critical Readers
It’s important to write logical, truthful, and high-quality content that uses authoritative sources and consistent citations.
Making baseless, unverified claims is a good way to lose your readers. Not only that, but bad sources can actually negatively affect your SEO and overall page authority.
Here are a few easy tips to follow when writing for critical readers:
Write honest content that is backed by reputable sources.
Use backlinks to cite sources or include them as footnotes.
Do not make any claims you cannot prove.
Do not promise anything you can’t deliver.
The biggest takeaway here is to avoid writing anything that isn’t true or that can’t be verified with accurate sources.
Losing credibility can be a big hit to your business. Stay informed and improve your brand integrity.
Blogging Trend #4: Mobile-First Format
Blogging trends often come and go, but mobile-first formatting is here to stay. These days, everyone uses their phone to read online.
From news articles in your Facebook feed to swipe-up blogs on Instagram, your consumers are constantly surfing the web from their phones.
It’s crucial that your website, blog, and any other digital content you create is optimized for mobile. No one wants to click on an article only to have it pixelated or cut off on their screen.
If you don’t have mobile optimization set up, you risk readers logging off before they have a chance to read your content. Studies from Google show that 40 percent of mobile consumers turned to a competitor’s website after a negative mobile web experience.
How to Write in a Mobile-First Format
When creating mobile-friendly content, it’s important to consider how your content will look on a mobile screen.
One sentence on a desktop screen can look like a paragraph on mobile.
Therefore, breaking up your paragraphs, using short sentences, and ensuring your website is optimized for mobile are very important.
Here are a few other points to consider:
Make navigation as easy as possible.
Make your content easy to scan.
Ensure the on-page loading time is fast.
Use a mobile responsive web theme.
Don’t use text wrapping for images.
As always, writing content that is simple, accurate, and concise can improve your overall mobile accessibility.
Blogging Trend #5: Estimated Reading Time
Another recurring theme in modern blogging trends is estimated reading times.
Estimated reading time can improve reader engagement by setting up their expectations from the start.
If you know a blog takes 15 minutes to read, but you only have 10 minutes before your next meeting, you might save that blog for another day. Likewise, if a blog takes two minutes to read, you may get excited about the convenient length of the article and open it right away.
Tempesta found that readers were 40 percent more engaged with blogs that included an estimated reading time. What’s more, search engines factor in estimated reading times when determining your rank. The longer your users dwell on your page, the better your chances are of looking authoritative to search engines.
How to Incorporate Estimated Reading Times in Your Blog
To estimate your blog’s reading time, divide the number of words in your article by 200 or 250.
Always round up your number when estimating reading times. For example, if your blog takes 1.7 minutes to read, estimate 2 minutes. This ensures your reader’s expectations are met and increases the likelihood that they read your entire blog.
You can also use online calculators, such as Read-O-Meter or Decimal to Time Calculator, to help you. Some web hosting services, such as WordPress, have plugins available to estimate the reading time for you.
Blogging Trend #6: TL;DR Summary
One of the latest blogging trends you shouldn’t miss is the “too long; didn’t read” summary.
Commonly referred to as TL;DR, these summaries act as an abstract of your blog, giving readers the most important information without making them skim, scan, or read through the entire piece.
This point is important in blogging trends as we continue to see global attention spans drop.
A study by Microsoft found that global attention spans have been declining since 2000, with the average person’s attention span now resting at a mere eight seconds.
By including a TL;DR summary at the start of your blog, you can appeal to the new generation of online readers.
TL;DR summaries can also have a positive impact on your SEO, as they answer questions for readers clearly and distinctly. For example, if a customer is looking for consulting services, they don’t want to read an entire post just to get to the recommendations at the bottom.
If you include your TL;DR at the top of your post, search engines can use that as the summary in search results as well (but there’s no guarantee that they will).
Answering user questions right off the bat can improve your ranking and get you more clicks.
How to Incorporate TL;DR in Your Blog
Your TL;DR should be the first thing your users see.
You can include this as a bulleted list or a paragraphed summary at the top of your blog post. Always have a catchy headline in your TL;DR to engage your reader and draw attention to your piece.
Similarly, your points should be succinct, clear, and short. Don’t write an entire essay in this space.
If you find a TL;DR formula that works for you, keep using it. Having a standardized format throughout your blogs will make your content consistent and reliable.
There are also online tools now offering TL;DR services. For example, TLDR This claims to help you summarize an article in one click. You can also use TL;DR-ify for similar services.
Conclusion
Now that you know some of the latest and greatest blogging trends, how will you implement them?
If your goal is to create a better content marketing strategy, you should be including most, if not all, of these blogging trends.
If your goal is to improve your SEO, you may want to focus on mobile-first formats or visual content.
Ultimately, tapping into each of these blogging trends can open up opportunities for new success.
What blogging trend are you most excited to use for your business?
In its most basic form, Quora is a social media platform for asking and answering questions.
You can play on either side of the coin. You can ask questions you would like an expert to answer or you can answer questions that other people have posted.
For lead generation, you’ll play the part of the expert more than the asker.
Starting to see why the platform is so effective for driving traffic and leads to your website?
It allows you to interact with your customers and prospects, answer their questions, and communicate with them in a way that no other social media site does.
But those are just a few reasons.
Here are a few more.
Why is Quora Good For Lead Gen?
Yes, Quora allows you to communicate with your customers.
But it’s more than that.
After all, you can communicate with your customers in a lot of different places.
Email, Facebook, and Twitter are just a few ways the Internet allows you to contact your prospects.
However, there’s something that Quora offers that helps it stand apart from the other platforms.
Namely, it’s the ability to interact with prospects and customers in a place where they are asking the questions.
While email, Facebook, and Twitter all have notoriously low click-through, open, and response rates, Quora doesn’t.
On Quora, the consumer starts the interaction rather than your business, which means that they are already invested in the conversation.
On Quora, your prospects and customers are already asking questions — questions that you have the answers to.
If that’s your target audience, then Quora is a good place to be.
If you join the platform and play the part of the expert, you’ll quickly enhance your brand’s image in the eyes of your target audience and drive leads to your website.
How, exactly, can you do that?
Specifically, here are 11 ways to make the most of Quora.
1. Create a Compelling Profile
The very first thing you need to do on Quora is to enhance your profile.
When someone sees that you’ve answered one of their questions, what’s the first thing they’re going to do?
That’s right. They’re going to click on your profile to see who you are, where you work, and what you’re an expert at.
If a user clicks through to your profile and sees something unoptimized, they won’t trust your opinion, even if you answer a question with detail and expertise.
In other words, the answers you provide for people are only as good as your profile’s optimization.
For the most part, Quora will walk you through all of the optimizations you need to create a trustworthy profile.
But let me point out three important aspects of my own.
First, notice the part that says “Forbes Top 10 Marketer and NY Times Best Selling Author.” That immediately establishes a lot of authority.
People think, “Wow! This guy really knows what he’s talking about.”
You want to do the same thing with your profile. Include a few noteworthy accomplishments in this section.
Second, look at the credentials and highlights on the right side of the screen. Be sure to include your location and your business title to add some personality.
And lastly, choose your profile image carefully.
When someone sees your profile image, they form an opinion of you.
They could assume that you’re friendly, arrogant, approachable, or lazy all based on that little photo.
So, you need to make sure that you include an image that expresses how you want to be perceived.
Ideally, your profile picture will make you look professional, approachable, and smart.
Once you optimize your profile for visitors’ eyes, you can move on to these next tips.
2. Follow Relevant Quora Topics
Setting up your profile to communicate your expertise is the first step in your Quora lead gen journey.
The next thing you need to do is follow any topics that apply directly to your target industry.
This will allow Quora to consistently update you on relevant questions that people are asking.
That means that you won’t have to go searching for them. You can simply look at your home dashboard.
To follow different topics, type into the search bar any subjects within your industry that you want to engage in.
Then, click on the result with the word “Topic:” next to it.
This will take you to the topic page of your selected result. All you have to do now is click on “Follow Topic” on the right side.
Now, Quora will notify you about conversations going on under this topic.
Do the same thing with any other topics that you want to follow. Remember that you want to choose as many subjects within your industry as you can.
The more you follow, the more opportunities you’ll get to engage with customers and prospects and drive leads to your website.
3. Show Your Expertise on Quora
When you’re answering other people’s questions on Quora, you need to be sure to establish yourself as the expert.
You might answer a lot of questions, but you also need to give people a reason to trust those answers.
Unfortunately, they aren’t going to do it just out of the kindness of their hearts.
There are several ways to build expertise when answering a question.
The first way is to make sure you have a professional looking profile picture. Something like this, for example.
Also, you should write like you’re a professional who knows what they’re talking about.
If you write like you deserve attention, more people will listen.
But if you write timidly, then more people will be nervous about trusting you. Here’s what writing professionally might look like for you.
The final ways to establish expertise with your answers is by starting off with a brief explanation of why you’re an expert.
Quickly explain why you know a lot about the topic or why people should trust you.
You do something similar to what Da Zheng does with the beginning of his answer.
Regardless of which tactic you use to establish yourself as the expert, make sure that you take the extra time to explain why you know a lot about the given topic.
Then, when people are upvoting answers, yours will be at the top.
4. Be Genuinely Helpful
Before you get carried away with establishing yourself as an expert, remember that you also need to be genuinely helpful.
The people who gain the largest followings on Quora are the same people who provide authentically meaningful answers about topics they are actually familiar with.
The last thing you want to do is talk about why you’re an expert and then have a cruddy answer to the person’s question.
You’re the expert, so be the expert.
Answer questions in a way that will actually help the people on the other side.
Otherwise, you’ll waste your time.
Consider the value that Tanya Russell gives in her answer to a question about social media.
Her response is remarkably long, and I couldn’t capture the whole thing in a screenshot.
But here is the introduction.
She goes on like that for quite some time, providing true value with each new point.
Your answers should do the same thing.
Consider this response from Joyce del Rosario.
Again, this is just the introduction.
Joyce includes lots of images, bolded text, and helpful advice to guide her reader.
If you do the same thing, it won’t just help your readers, though. It will also establish trust with your prospects, build brand awareness, and even drive traffic to your website.
5. Contact Your Quora Followers
On Quora, you can only direct message people who have their settings adjusted accordingly.
Unfortunately, that’s going to severely limit how many people you can get in touch with privately.
However, you have another option as well.
Instead of direct messaging your prospects and customers to learn about their questions, desires, and pains, you can ask them a question publically.
Doing so is quite simple, and it’s a great way to learn about your target market.
All you have to do is click on “Followers” on your profile page.
Then, you’ll see a list that looks something like this.
Decide who you want to ask a question and click on their name.
This will take you to their profile. From there, you can click the “Ask Question” prompt and start engaging with them.
You could ask them about what they think of your business, what their favorite online tools are, or how they would rate your customer service.
And the best part is that, since the question is public, other people can comment and engage in the thread as well.
6. Track Your Quora Analytics
Unlike most social media platforms, Quora also has an analytics dashboard for all of its users.
You can see your number of upvotes, views, and shares all in one place.
And checking this dashboard regularly is critical to your Quora lead-generation strategy.
After all, if you don’t know how well your current tactics are working, then you won’t be able to learn, adapt, or iterate.
So make sure that you check your stats dashboard at least once per week.
Doing so is simple.
Just click on your profile image at the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Then, click on “Stats.”
You’ll see a dashboard like this that is full of valuable information for you to digest.
When numbers are good, try to identify what you’re doing right and replicate your actions.
When numbers are low, identify what you’re doing wrong and learn how to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
Either way, you can learn and iterate your marketing strategy.
7. Leverage Trackback Links
To leverage all of the benefits that Quora has to offer, you need to understand what trackback links are.
Basically, they are Quora’s version of backlink, or links that go from an external website to your website.
When this happens, that link tells Google that an external website trusts your URL, which can massively influence your SEO.
In fact, generally speaking, the more backlinks a website has, the better they’re going to rank on Google.
Now, let me clarify.
I’m not telling you to constantly stuff backlinks into your answers so that it becomes annoying.
I simply want you to be aware of trackback links so that you can include backlinks to your website tactfully in your Quora answers.
Remember, the whole point of answering questions on Quora is to provide genuine value. If you stuff hyperlinks into your answers, that will hurt any trust you’ve built up with prospects and customers.
Here’s what a trackback link looks like on my profile.
Here’s what it looks like in an answer to a question.
Include these links to win some SEO benefit, but don’t go over the top. You want to insert links where it will be genuinely valuable for other users. Otherwise, leave them out.
8. Create Content Around Quora Questions on Your Website
One of the greatest benefits of Quora is that it tells you what your target market is looking for.
Often, marketers have a difficult time discovering the true desires, concerns, pains, and knowledge-lacking areas of their ideal customer.
With Quora, you can discover those things instantly.
All you have to do is type your target industry or topic into the search bar.
Then click on the result you want with the word “Topic:” next to it.
This screen will show up.
You can repurpose all of those questions into titles on your own website’s blog.
Since these are the questions that people are asking regarding your industry, you’ll attract a lot of people by answering them.
Simply take a title, alter it a bit, and create a piece of content around it.
9. Share Your Most Popular Quora Answers
As you engage more and more on Quora, some of your answers will perform better than others.
Every once in a while, you’ll hit a goldmine of attention. Users will view, upvote, and share your answer more than any of your others.
The last thing you want to do is let all of that potential go to waste.
While your Quora followers will pay plenty of attention to the answer, you can gain even more attention by sharing the answer on your social media channels.
Go to your profile and click on “Answers” on the left side of the screen.
Then, find an answer that is particularly lucrative and click on the share buttons in the lower right-hand corner.
From there, you’ll be able to share your answer, generating more traffic to it, and even drive traffic to your website if you include a backlink.
10. Automate Your Quora Process
After you spend some time on Quora, you may find yourself buried under piles of strenuous and monotonous work. There’s no way around having to spend hours researching relevant topics and keeping track of answers.
Although Quora is relatively easy to navigate and has some impressive build-in analytics features, you may want to try ad hoc tools for streamlining the workflow.
There’re not many tools that feature necessary tracking and question-research capabilities. One of the few working solutions is QuestionsPro, a software that aims to automate lead generation on Quora.
The best thing about QuestionsPro is that find questions relevant to your website, Quora profile, or even a YouTube channel. This tool also incorporates several valuable metrics, that will help you estimate the traffic you get by answering this or that question on Quora.
11. Use Quora Ads
Most of the strategies I’ve included here are organic–you answer questions and drive traffic over time by offering value.
However, there is a quicker Quora lead gen strategy: Quora ads.
Just like other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, Quora also lets you pay to reach their audience by paying.
The platform allows you to create ads based on objective, including conversions, traffic, and, yes, lead gen. Then you define your budget, audience, and select your bids.
Quora uses native ads, which disrupts the user experience less.
Quora ads can be used as a stand-alone strategy, or you can supplement some of the organic lead gen strategies above with a few ads.
Conclusion
Quora is a fantastic platform to grow your business’s bottom line.
You can generate the leads that your business requires to survive and thrive.
Start by creating a compelling profile and following relevant topics.
Then, answer questions while showing your expertise and being genuinely helpful.
Finally, ask your followers public questions, track your analytics, leverage trackback links, create similar content on your website, and share your most popular answers on social media.
Don’t forget about Quora ads — they can be incredibly helpful at driving targeted leads to your site.
Do all of that, and few competitors will be able to keep up with your lead-generating Quora activity.
How do you use Quora to generate leads? Have you tried Quora ads? What results have you seen?
How confident do you feel about your digital marketing strategy? If you aren’t seeing the results you hoped for, this guide will walk you through a 21 day digital marketing challenge that will help you reach your digital marketing goals.
A Digital Marketing 21 Day Challenge
Whether you are a hardened digital marketing veteran or a complete newbie, we all need a bit of help from time to time. That’s why I created this day-by-day challenge to help you create a marketing strategy from scratch in just 21 days.
These steps aren’t necessarily in sequential order, and, in truth, it doesn’t really matter what order you complete them in. The point is to break down something kind of overwhelming, like creating a marketing strategy, into small and manageable bite-sized chunks.
You’ll only need to complete one marketing task each day. Although, don’t let me stop you from skipping ahead and checking off several tasks a day. I’ve just provided the framework. How you complete the challenge is up to you.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 1: Competitor Research
There’s a lot you can learn from studying your competitors. From working out why they are outranking you and developing new blog post ideas to coming up with new product offers and marketing ideas for your social and PPC ads, spying on competitors can lead to some big wins.
If you want to outrank your competitors, I highly recommend using Ubersuggest (and the accompanying free Chrome extension). When you enter a competitor’s domain name into the search bar, you’ll immediately be able to see important information like their top-performing keywords, best pages, and backlinks.
You can dig deeper into this data, too, so you can see precisely where their backlinks came from and what you need to do to start competing for their keywords.
That’s not the only competitor outreach tool I recommend, however. Check out this list of 12 competitor analysis tools that you can use to improve your site.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 2: Audit the Content of Your Website
We all know that Google loves fresh, relevant content. That’s why it’s essential to run a content audit of your site every six months or so to identify articles or pages that need to be removed or updated.
Start by making a list of all of your site’s pages. You can do this by hand or use a tool like Ubersuggest or Screaming Frog to do it for you.
You can ignore core pages like your homepage and service pages, but you’ll want to go through every other page of your site in turn and look out for issues like:
Thin content
Out of date content
Duplicate content
Gaps in your content
Missing meta data
Next, prioritize pages to update. You won’t be able to do everything at once, so it’s important to focus on the most important pages first.
Check out my detailed guide for more information on how to run a content audit.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 3: Do Keyword Research
Good keyword research is the foundation of any successful online marketing campaign. You want to find out two things:
What your audience is searching for
How to rank for those terms
You probably already have a decent idea of the keywords you want to rank for. However, do you really know every keyword your audience is using? Probably not.
That’s why using a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest is super valuable to uncover EVERY keyword you can target. Start by entering a keyword to see a list of highly related keywords, their traffic, and how difficult it is to rank for them.
Find even more by clicking through the Related, Questions, Prepositions, and Comparisons tabs. Next, make a note of every relevant keyword.
Do this for every keyword, and you’ll get a list of hundreds or even thousands of keywords you can start targeting. If you’re a smaller site, make sure to start with less competitive terms and go from there.
If you need more help, check out my YouTube video below.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 4: Diagnose and Fix SEO Issues
When executing a killer marketing plan, the last thing you want is for rookie SEO mistakes to hold you back.
First, you’ll need to find them. The easiest way to find SEO issues is by using Screaming Frog. Simply download the tool and enter your website into the search bar.
Screaming Frog will then crawl every page of your site and report back on just about every important on-page metric there is. You’ll be able to find the following:
404 pages
Duplicate content
Thin content
Issues with meta data
H1 and H2 issues
Pages that don’t index
Much, much more
Go through each category, noting the offending pages, and then prioritize the repairs.
Screaming Frog won’t highlight everything you need to fix, however. Make sure to check out my guide on the most common SEO mistakes, too.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 5: Create a Backlink Strategy
Earning high-quality backlinks is one of the most effective things you can do to improve your SEO. That’s why it’s crucial to implement a clear and repeatable backlink strategy.
There are dozens of strategies for earning backlinks to your site, but I prefer to focus on specific, repeatable methods.
The first is creating skyscraper content. Coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko, skyscraper content is content that is measurably better than anything else found on the web. The idea is that you pick a reasonably competitive keyword and create the very best article on that given topic.
Once it’s published, reach out to websites that link to the content that currently ranks for your topic and ask them to link to your (much better) version instead.
The second is creating an infographic. Everyone loves sharing infographics because they’re an easy, visual way to understand pretty much any topic. Create your own infographic about something interesting in your niche and reach out to other blogs to share it.
Finally, you can sign up for HARO, which stands for Help a Reporter Out. Every day they’ll send a list of journalists looking for information on various topics. If you have something relevant to say, you can respond and get a backlink as recognition if a journalist picks you.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 6: Update Your Old Content
Now that you’ve done a content audit, it’s time to update all of the pages that were out of date. Outdated content is a big no-no in the eyes of Google and suggests that the content on your site may not best serve their users.
Fix this by making sure all of the content on your site is up-to-date and relevant. I recommend starting with content that is already ranking as Google has already indicated this content is relevant.
If any of the content is out of date, update it with the most relevant research in your niche. Next, do fresh keyword research for each post to ensure you are targeting the most relevant and searched-for keywords.
One word of caution: don’t get caught up updating content for the sake of it. If some pages on your site are no longer relevant, you’re better off deleting them and creating a 301 redirect to a more appropriate page.
Watch my video below for more information.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 7: Launch an Email Marketing Campaign
Did you know email marketing is one of the best ways to turn prospects into customers? All it takes is creating an effective campaign.
The first step is to get permission to email people. You can achieve this by giving a guide or resource away for free in return for a user’s email or simply by promising great content.
Once you build an email list, you need to follow up with regular, high-value emails that help your users solve their problems. Eventually, you can send one or two sales emails that point subscribers to one of your own products.
Don’t overdo it with the sales emails, however. Sending too many sales emails without providing value is a sure-fire way to drive people to unsubscribe.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 8: Hire Quality Writers, Editors, and Subject Matter Experts
Your time is valuable. You don’t want to spend it writing new blog posts when you also have a business to run. That’s why it’s essential to hire high-quality writers and editors sooner rather than later.
Two of my favorite ways to find writers and editors are Upwork and the Problogger job board. Make sure to vet each candidate thoroughly.
Signs of a good writer or editor include:
A portfolio of work
Client recommendations
A professional website
An articulate cover letter
I highly recommend having each writer complete a paid test article before working with them. It’s easy to make a resume look impressive; it’s much harder to follow through with great work.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 9: Optimize Your Social Media Accounts
Some people don’t think social media is important. They’re wrong.
Social media is one of the easiest ways to build a following and stay in touch with your fans. Al of that is only possible if you have well-optimized social media accounts.
First, choose the social media accounts you want to focus on. I recommend using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for starters.
Next, fill out your profile in full on each platform. Different platforms allow you to add different information. Where possible, include your:
Business name
URL
Address
Opening Hours
Description of your business
This is just for starters. To nail your social media presence, you’re going to want to read my complete guide to social media marketing.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 10: Write a Guest Blog
Guest blogging is a fantastic way to build your authority and get backlinks naturally. You should make this a regular habit, but for now, let’s just start with one post.
The first step is to find guest posting opportunities. Specifically, you want to look for sites that are in your industry, have engaged readership, and accept guest posts.
A good way to find these sites is to use Google searches with your keyword followed by “guest post” or “submit a guest post.”
Read each website’s guest posting guidelines carefully, then pitch three ideas to each. Make sure to clarify the benefits to their readers—not just what you get out of it.
Only start writing once your pitch is accepted. That way, you don’t have to worry about wasting your time.
Check out my guide for more information on guest blogging.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 11: Join an Affiliate Network
If you want to start making money from your blog, affiliate marketing is the way to go. You don’t have to worry about creating your own info product, SaaS tool, or eCommerce store. You earn money by promoting someone else’s products.
Don’t be afraid to approach companies directly, either, especially if you work in a small niche.
If you’re serious about making money from affiliate marketing, then my advanced affiliate tips are a must-read.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 12: Create a Content Calendar
What do you do when it comes time to write a blog post?
Do you stress about what to write, or do you open up your content calendar, select the next topic and get to writing? Creating content becomes so much easier when you have a well-planned editorial calendar.
A content calendar is super easy to create, too. All you need is a spreadsheet and some ideas. Open up Excel or Google Sheets and create a simple calendar for the next six months based on how often you want to post.
For instance, if you only plan on posting content once a week, you only need 26 rows.
Next, go back to your keyword research, select the highest priority topics, and add them to the spreadsheet. If you outsource the writing, add your writer’s name next to each post. That’s all you need to do to create a simple content calendar.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 13: Choose a Project Management Tool
By now, your marketing strategy is getting pretty complex. It’s time to make things easier with a project management tool. A project management tool helps you get clear on what you need to do—and when.
Keep in mind, you don’t need a team to get value from a project management tool. They are great for one-person shows, too.
There are plenty of tools to choose from, including:
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 14: Build a Chatbot
You must make the most of every person who visits your website. That means making your site a lead-generating machine. One of the best ways to do so is by building a chatbot.
Chatbots can help with more than leads. A well-scripted chatbot can also provide exceptional customer service.
Here are a few other ways chatbots can help with your marketing plan:
Gather feedback on customers
Improve the customer experience
Upsell and cross-sell products
Creating a chatbot isn’t easy, however. That’s why I wrote an in-depth guide to building a chatbot.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 15: Optimize Your CTAs
Another way to increase leads and sales is to improve your Call to Actions (CTAs). There’s a lot written about changing the color and copy of your CTAs to make it “perfect.”
The truth is there’s no such thing as the perfect CTA. The trick is to keep tweaking and testing your CTAs forever.
There are several strategies you should try to improve your CTAs:
Personalize the copy
Change the size of your CTA
Change the location
Make your CTA more appealing
Don’t do everything at once, however. The secret is to make one tweak at a time, test the results, and then optimize again from there.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 16: Carry Out Audience Research
Do you know exactly who you’re speaking to? Okay, you know they are interested in your niche, but do you know anything else about them?
If not, then it’s time to perform audience research. In-depth audience research will tell you:
Who they are
What their pain points and desires are
What other sites they visit
How your product serves them
When you really understand your audience, you can start creating content they care about. The better you serve your audience, the more likely they’ll be to convert.
Find out how to carry out your own audience research and get started.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 17: Subscribe to Newsletters and Podcasts from SEO Industry Websites
As good as I think this marketing challenge is, you’re going to need ongoing advice to keep your marketing strategy going. There are plenty of great newsletters and podcasts about the SEO and marketing industries.
However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the two I create.
Marketing School is a daily podcast hosted by myself and Single Grain’s Eric Siu. We deliver short snippets of hard-hitting marketing advice from the trenches.
If podcasts aren’t your thing, my own newsletter will keep your inbox packed with the freshest marketing advice to help you beat the competition.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 18: Create a Podcast or Video Series
I can’t overstate the power a podcast or video series can have on your brand. Both have helped me to grow my audience significantly.
Whether you start a podcast or a video series will depend on your skillset. Most people will probably find it easier to start a podcast.
Check it out and see what a podcast can do for your brand. If podcasts aren’t your style, create a video marketing plan—even if it’s just posting a few videos a month.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 19: Promote Your Content
There’s no point putting content out into the world if you aren’t willing to promote it. Even the world’s best content won’t get many views without someone promoting it.
That’s why you need a plan to promote every piece of content you publish.
At the very least, send out notifications to your audience via social media and email marketing when you publish a new post. Let’s not do the bare minimum though.
To get the most out of your content, I recommend repurposing content into images, infographics, and presentations to maximize reach.
The more forms your content can take and the more ways you put it out in the world, the more people will see it.
I also recommend reaching out personally to influencers and anyone you mention in the post to encourage them to share it, too.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 20: Set Up a Process for Tracking Content Performance
Congratulations, you’ve made it to the last two days of the challenge.
Remember when I said there’s no point in creating content if you don’t promote it? There’s also no point in promoting content if you aren’t going to track its performance.
First things first, you need to be clear on your content’s goals. Next, set up Google Analytics to track where your traffic comes from. Finally, you’ll need to set up advanced conversion tracking within the GA dashboard to calculate how many conversions your content drives.
Digital Marketing Challenge Day 21: Find Tools to Automate Your Processes
It’s the final day, and now it’s time to put your marketing on autopilot.
The secret is picking the best marketing automation tool. The problem is, there’s a ton of options. That means there’s a tool for everyone, from enterprise teams to bootstrapped startups, but it can make it difficult to choose the right tool.
That’s why I’ve shortlisted a few tools for you to check out. They are:
Creating a winning marketing strategy is no easy feat, but now you have a successful foundation to build one.
Next, revisit some of the tasks on this list, like writing a guest post and building backlinks to make sure your marketing strategy grows and evolves.
If you need a little help, don’t hesitate to reach out. My team can implement these strategies so you can focus on what you do best—running your business.
How did you get on with the 21-day marketing challenge? What was your favorite or least favorite task?
About two-thirds of companies find it tough to produce engaging content. If you’re one of them, there’s a good chance your problems stem from the ideation phase. In other words, you’re struggling to come up with enough engaging blog post ideas.
Now, if you’re a regular visitor to my blog, you’ll know I write a lot of content (also, thanks for reading!). I’ve been doing this for a long time now. But I still sometimes struggle to come up with new blog post ideas.
Of those methodologies, one of the most consistently useful is to raid YouTube for blog post ideas. I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it in this article.
Why Should You Use YouTube for Inspiration?
It might seem counterintuitive to use a streaming video site to find blog post ideas. Wouldn’t it make more sense just to look at other blogs?
Sure, that can be a super effective tactic, too, but you can’t learn everything from reading your competitors’ blogs. If you keep relying on the same old sources to find content inspiration, you’ll inevitably keep producing the same sort of content, time and again.
If you want to keep pushing the boundaries and creating fantastic content that makes a real impact, you need to cast the net wider. Here are a few reasons why YouTube can help you do that.
It’s Easier to Differentiate Yourself
When you use other blogs to inspire your blog post ideas, you might find yourself wondering: “How can I do this better?”
Sometimes, you’ll be lucky. You’ll stumble across a super engaging title, but the actual article will be poor quality. Maybe it’s several years old and the information hasn’t been updated. Or perhaps it only scratches the topic’s surface, rather than going in-depth.
Other times, there’s no obvious way to improve on the original. But because you’re so convinced it’s a great blog post idea, you end up effectively rewriting your competitor’s article and adding a ton of extra information that doesn’t add any real value. Congratulations, you’ve written a worse post than your rival!
This is far less of a problem when you use YouTube to find new ideas. Why? Because with a lot of videos, there simply won’t be a decent written version available. There might be a transcript of the video, but nothing that’s been created with readability in mind.
That makes it much easier for you to go out and create something better.
There’s So Much Content to Draw Inspiration From
An astonishing 500 hours of content gets uploaded to YouTube every minute, and that number is growing every year:
To put that into context, the major six movie studios released 87 pictures in 2019, at an average length of just over 96 minutes. That means it takes YouTubers around 16 seconds to upload the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of Hollywood content!
With such a wealth of content available, even super niche businesses are pretty much guaranteed to find something relevant to inspire them. And you don’t even need to navigate multiple platforms to find it.
People Interact With Videos & Blogs in Completely Different Ways
This is a subtle point, but an interesting one. Say you find a YouTube title that sounds like a perfect blog post idea, but it has not generated many views or engagement. Well, that’s not necessarily a problem.
Why? Because people engage with different content types in different ways.
As this HubSpot graphic shows us, people prefer to thoroughly consume videos rather than skim through them to find the information they’re looking for. That makes sense; videos are designed for watching from start to finish. There’s often no easy way to jump to a specific section.
Blogs are different. Only 29 percent of people read them from top to bottom, with 43 percent preferring to skip through. That’s because blogs are fantastic for skimming. Subheadings, bullet points, numbered lists, tables, and various visual elements make it simple to find the most relevant information.
So what does this tell us?
A piece of content could perform poorly on YouTube because it’s just not a good topic for a video. Yet it could still make for a fantastic blog post. So you don’t necessarily need to worry about how many views a video has racked up; you can just focus on finding good titles.
4 Ways to Find Blog Post Ideas From YouTube
YouTube is a gold mine of potential blog post ideas! Now here are four ways to find them.
1. Stalk Your Competition
If your competitors are on YouTube, they’ll have done a lot of the hard work for you. Chances are their content will be highly relevant to your audience, too. Go check it out, pick the best titles, and turn them into high-quality blog posts.
Start by drawing up a list of your competitors. Not sure who they are? Try the following:
Speak to your sales team: They’re the people selling your product, so they’ll know which companies they come up against regularly during the sales process.
Ask your customers: They likely considered a couple of different products before purchasing yours, so find out which other options they evaluated.
Do some social listening: Your audience might use forums and social platforms to seek out advice about your product and compare it to your competitors, so go find those conversations! Not sure how? Check out this article on my four favorite social listening tools.
Now you’ve got your competitor list, simply visit their YouTube channels and browse their existing content. In the “Videos” tab, you can use the drop-down “Sort By” menu to segment their content by:
Most popular
Oldest
Newest
So let’s imagine I’m one of your competitors. Checking out my most popular videos feels like a good place to start.
Straight away, you’ll see a bunch of titles that you know have resonated with my audience. Most, if not all, of those titles could also be written up as blog posts, like:
SEO for Beginners: 3 Powerful SEO Tips to Rank #1 on Google in 2020
How to Promote Your YouTube Video When You Have ZERO Subscribers
How to Create a Digital Product That Generates (AT LEAST) $100,000 Per Month
How to Write a Blog Post From Start to Finish
1 Simple Hack to Getting 1,000 Likes on Facebook
You don’t even need to watch the videos (although you should, they’re great). Take the titles, switch them up, do your research on the topic, then turn them into new blogs.
2. Read the Comments
YouTube comments get a bad rap, but they can be a surprisingly rich source of content inspiration. Commenters are rarely short of advice on how videos could be improved or expanded, and those suggestions can help you formulate new blog post ideas.
Again, let’s use my YouTube channel as an example. Currently, this is my most-viewed video:
As well as clocking up more than 1.7 million views, it has received thousands of comments. A lot of those comments are essentially just people telling me they like the video, which is always nice to hear but not super helpful for finding new blog titles. But some of them give me (and my competitors, if they’re paying attention) a useful steer on future content ideas. Here’s a good example:
Wendy wants to know how I use keyword information from Google Search Console to optimize my content.
As you can see, I’ve already left a short response. But I could go further and create a whole blog post explaining how to use Google Search Console to improve your existing content and create new articles.
Here’s another useful comment on that same video:
Manav asks me if I have any content on Google AdWords certifications. As it happens, this isn’t something I cover, but it could make an excellent blog post idea for some of my competitors.
3. Take Advantage of Predictive Search
You probably think of YouTube as a video-sharing platform, but it’s also a search engine. In fact, it’s the second-largest search engine in the world.
With over two billion logged-in users visiting YouTube every month and watching more than a billion hours of content a day, the platform generates a ton of search activity. Thanks to its built-in predictive search functionality, you can use all that activity to track down potential blog post ideas.
This is a really simple process. Just enter a topic into the search box, and you’ll see a bunch of predicted searches:
Now, it’s a case of exploring the options that sound most relevant. “Marketing degree UK” probably isn’t right for me, but I like the sound of “marketing strategies for small business,” so I’ll take a closer look.
Just from viewing this tiny subsection of results, it seems that “how-to” content resonates with people looking for small business marketing strategies. So do listicles. In other words, we’re not only getting insight on blog post ideas; we’re also learning how our blogs should be structured.
But there’s more. Scroll down the page, and you’ll find a section on related searches:
Each one of those could potentially give me a bunch of additional titles and reveal yet more related searches. The deeper you vanish into the rabbit hole, the more blog post ideas you’ll find!
4. See What’s Trending
It’s important to remember that there’s a whole world of content outside your specific niche. What’s going on out there will naturally affect you and your audience, so it might make sense to write about it.
But what if you don’t know what everyone’s searching for?
Fortunately, YouTube can help here, too. Just visit the “Trending” tab in the left-hand homepage menu to find the content YouTube deems to be most relevant and topical:
Sure, not all of it will be relevant to your audience or brand. Chances are, most of it won’t be. However, I make sure to check in with the Trending section at least once a day to be sure I don’t miss any opportunities to piggyback on viral topics.
Conclusion
Once you start thinking of YouTube as a search engine rather than a video platform, its role in finding new blog post ideas makes a lot more sense.
Just like Google, it’s effectively a huge directory of content on every subject you could ever imagine. But unlike Google, the vast majority of that content exists to engage audiences; the search results aren’t crammed full of product descriptions and category pages. That’s why it’s such a treasure trove for marketers seeking the inspiration they need to create superb content.
What tactics do you use to come up with new blog post ideas?
Whether you care to admit it or not, the decisions you make today will be driven by your emotions. In emotional marketing, we talk a lot about using psychological triggers to get customers to click, convert, engage, etc.
“By leveraging common psychological triggers all people have,” you might hear, “you can drive more sales.”
While it may feel like we make decisions with our minds, using logic and reasoning, the “mental triggers” we hear about are tied more to emotion than anything else.
Case in point, Antonio Damasio spent time studying individuals with damage to the area of the brain where emotions were generated and processed.
While these subjects functioned just like anyone else, they couldn’t feel emotion.
The other thing they had in common was they all had trouble with making decisions.
Even simple decisions about what to eat proved difficult.
While they could describe what they should be doing using logic and reason, most decisions couldn’t be settled with simple rationale.
Without emotion, they weren’t able to make a choice.
This is supported by data from Gerard Zaltman, author of “How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market.”
Zaltman found that95% of cognition happens beyond our conscious brain, instead coming from our subconscious, emotional brain.
Emotions are an X factor you can’t control, but you can’t afford to ignore them in your content marketing.
Why is Emotion Marketing so Effective?
When you make an emotional connection with your audience, it’s incredibly easy to steer them to the desired outcome.
You’ve formed an emotional bond, however brief and fleeting, that makes them open to ideas and suggestions. It creates a certain level of trust that’s virtually impossible to artificially manifest.
Rob Walker and Joshua Glen found firsthand what an emotional connection can do.
In one experiment, they bought hundreds of items from thrift stores and similar locations — all cheaply priced.
The duo wanted to see if they could sell the products using an emotional connection through the power of stories alone.
With 200 writers on board, they generated fictional stories for the products and used those stories to sell the thrift store items at auction on eBay.
And they did it all using that emotional connection through storytelling.
That’s not to say there isn’t a place for the logical or the rational in decision making.
This is where marketers often leverage the theory of dual processing in psychological marketing.
The theory holds that the brain processes thoughts and decisions on two levels.
The first level is that of emotion, which processes automatically, unconsciously, and provides a rapid response when we need it with virtually no effort.
The second level is the more deliberate and conscious thought process, where we handle decisions with reason and logic. It happens far slower than the emotional response.
In most cases, we fire back with a ready response from our emotions and then try to consciously rationalize it.
Think about some big-brand rivalries and preferences will surface in your mind.
How do you feel when you look at this major brand comparison?
Here’s another common one that has people divided, sometimes within the same family:
And then there’s this brand rivalry we know all too well.
In each of these, you likely have an opinion almost instantly about which you prefer, but it’s not because you have a logical reason.
It’s typically tied to emotion and/or experience; how you feel using their products, or how the brands left you feeling after an experience or reading a news article.
The brain then tries to rationalize that emotional response.
For example, your emotional response goes straight to Coke and then your brain works to rationalize the decision by deciding that it tastes better in a can, it’s fizzier, has a stronger bite than Pepsi, etc.
So, while you might feel like you’re making a rational choice about your beverage, it’s really just an emotional one.
The most successful marketers know how to lean on the emotional over logic in order to make their content draw in the audience.
That’s whynearly a third of marketers report significant profit gains when running emotional campaigns, but the number of successful campaigns dips if you introduce logic into the marketing.
And those results get sliced in half when marketers switch to logic over emotion.
We experience a laundry list of emotions every day.
Is it really as simple as leveraging some emotion to make content more effective?
Yes and no.
Emotion is certainly important, but there are also other factors like timing, exposure, the format of the content, how it’s presented, who produced or shared it, etc.
Despite understanding the role emotion plays in content, we still haven’t quite perfected a formula for what makes content go viral.
Though we’ve gotten pretty close.
Brands have long tried to inflate the consumer’s emotional response through manufactured content; some met with great success.
The videos profile a person around the world who uses Intel’s technology to create new experiences and build new technology that makes a difference in the world.
Like 13-year-old Shubham Banerrjee, who used Intel’s technology to build an affordable Braille printer.
And of course, some companies try to leverage emotion and create viral campaigns that just don’t take off.
CIO reported a number of failed viral marketing campaigns, such as “Walmarting Across America.”
In this blog, two average Americans travel across the country visiting Walmart locations, reporting their interactions on a blog along the way.
After countless upbeat entries about how people loved working for the company, it was discovered that the trip was paid for by Walmart and the entire thing was a campaign created and managed by the company’s PR firm.
That didn’t receive a warm reception from the blogosphere, which deemed the content to be a “flog” or fake blog.
Which Emotions Attract the Most Marketing Engagement in Content?
Many emotions fuel our behaviors and our decisions, especially our purchase decisions.
Some more than others — especially when they’re authentic.
A study wasdone by Buzzsumo analyzing the top 10,000 most-shared articles on the web. Those articles were then mapped to emotions to see which emotions had the greatest influence on content.
The most popular:
Awe (25%)
Laughter (17%)
Amusement (15%)
Conversely, the least popular were sadness and anger, totaling just 7% of the content that was most shared.
Two researchers at Wharton also wanted to dig deeper into virally shared content to find commonalities and better understand what makes that content spread.
What they found was the emotional element, and some very specific results tied to emotions.
Content is far more likely to be shared when it makes people feel good or it creates positive feelings such as leaving them entertained.
Facts or data that shock people or leave them in awe were more likely to be shared.
Instilling fear or anxiety pushes engagement higher, from comments being posted to content being shared.
People most commonly shared content that incited anger, leaving comments as well.
While some emotions are more likely to engage than others, every audience is different. What drives one to action may do very little for another.
This modern adaptation of Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion,illustrated by CopyPress, shows the range under eight primary emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.
For content to be widely shared and have an impact on your audience, it needs to leverage one or more of these emotions.
The proof is on the web, not only in the statistics I shared above, but also in the popularity of user communities that regularly share content.
Just look at Reddit and some ofthe most popular subreddits by subscriber count. Each can be tied back to emotions (some more obviously than others) like anticipation, awe, joy, and more.
Here’s how some of those emotions can play into the engagement with your audience:
Anxiety May Cause Uncertainty For Customers
You don’t want your audience to make bad decisions. Bad decisions can lead to buyer’s remorse, which can paint your brand and the overall experience in a negative light.
But it can be helpful if you leave the audience a bit more open to influence.
A Berkeley study revealed that anxiety can be linked to difficulty in using information around us to make decisions. When we experience uncertainty, it becomes harder to make decisions and our judgment is clouded.
Still, anxiety can also spur people to act as a result of that uncertainty.
Take a two-year study by Wharton Ph.D. student Alison Wood Brooks and a Harvard Business School professor.
They found that upon increasing the anxiety of certain subjects with video footage, 90% of the “anxious” participants opted to seek advice and were more likely to take it.
Only 72% of the participants in a neutral state, who viewed a different video, sought advice.
Capture the Focus of Your Emotional Marketing Audience With Awe
Awe is comparable to wonder, but it doesn’t always fall under the umbrella of joy or humor.
It’s intended to captivate the audience and keep them riveted.
You often see this kind of hook in headlines that seem so earth-shatteringly significant that no one in their right mind would want to miss it.
Co-founder Drew Houston submitted his product to the website Digg, hoping to get some visibility from the social bookmarking site. That headline helped significantly.
Another great example of using Awe to capture attention is a video produced by Texas Armoring Corporation.
To emphasize the quality of the company’s bullet-resistant glass, the CEO crouched behind one of TAC’s glass panels while several rounds were fired at it from an AK-47.
Awe can impact decision making as much as anxiety.
A study from Stanford University found that people experiencing awe are more focused on the present and less distracted by other things in life. They also tend to be more giving of their time.
When you have their attention and their focus, they’re more likely to have time to rationalize a decision.
Drive People to Action With Laughter and Joy Through Emotional Marketing
While joy and laughter can have their lines blurred, they’re really two different emotions when it comes to your content.
Because while laughter often leads to joy, not everything that is joyful is laugh-out-loud funny.
Still, next to awe, joy, laughter, and amusement were the highest contributors to social sharing and engagement in the above studies.
That influence goes all the way back to early childhood.
Per psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, joy and amusement are hardwired into us from birth.
His studies tell us that our innate desire for joy increases when it’s shared. That’s the nature of the “social smile.”
That explains why these feelings or emotions are such huge drivers behind the virality of content. Happiness, overall, is a huge driver for content sharing.
In fact,Jonah Berger’s study of the most-shared articles in the New York Times (around 7,000 articles) revealed the same kind of results around emotion.
The more positive the article, the more likely it was to go viral.
Brands have worked “joy marketing” into their strategies for decades, aiming to make their audience feel warm, comfortable, and happy.
Joy can take a lot of forms, though, and it doesn’t have to be commercially intended to elicit a direct sale.
Look at what Beringer Vineyards did with influencer marketing.
Russian Instagram sensationsMurad and Nataly Osmann built a following of more than 4.5 million people with photos featuring them holding hands at locations around the globe during their world travels.
They attached the hashtag #FollowMeTo on those posts.
The couple teamed up with Beringer Vineyards to create some images meant to inspire joy, love, and of course the sense of adventure the couple already shared with their hashtag.
Immediate Gains in Emotional Marketing From Anger
Anger may be perceived as a negative emotion by some, but it can have positive influences as well as positive outcomes when leveraged in the right way.
A leading researcher in the study of anger, Dr. Carol Tavris, draws a parallel between anger and how it impacted society over the years.
Women’s suffrage, for example, developed from anger and frustration.
Anger can be empowering for the individual, bringing a sense of clarity and positive-forward momentum. It gives people a feeling of direction and control according toa study from Carnegie Mellon.
In fact, Berger’s study of the New York Times content found that content which incites feelings of frustration or anger is34% more likely to be featured on the Time’s most emailed list than the average article.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you deliberately create controversy by taking shots at readers or picking fights.
The key with using anger in content is to frame an issue that incites anger or frustration in a way that’s constructive.
This piece of content is simple, yet it provokes engagement as well as thought when results are revealed in comparison to what an individual perceives to be the truth.
Using the Right Emotional Marketing Words in Content
The difference between logic and emotion in content comes down to the words we use and how we position statements and information.
When creating copy and content, you have to be acutely aware of whether you’re taking a rational or emotional approach to the information you’re sharing.
You need to think about the response you want to elicit to help guide your content development to make the right kind ofpsychological and emotional connection with your audience.
The context of your copy can remain the same.
By changing the words you use, however, you can make content appeal more to the emotions of the audience and prospective customer.
The simplest approach to finding the right high-emotion words takes only three steps:
Think about the action you want your audience to take when they read your content.
Decide what kind of emotional state will drive that action. What would make them do what you want them to do?
Choose emotionally persuasive words appropriate to the action and the emotion.
What you’ll find in researching the right words is that emotionally persuasive and impactful words tend to be abrupt. It’s the short, concise, basic words that appeal most to our emotions over our intellect.
The majority of this emotionally weighted list (and there are over 350 items) is made up of shorter words.
The rational mind, on the other hand, tends to associate with longer and more complex words.
You Can’t Assume When it Comes to Emotional Marketing
It’s not easy to make that emotional connection with your audience. You have to know them.
Like anything else in marketing, your decisions and the content you create needs to be based on data. In this case, that data is your audience research.
That same research that tells you what topics to create, where your audience spends their time, and the content they prefer to view, can clue you into how to make that emotional connection.
In this case, you want to build up the psychological profile of your audience. You can achieve this by asking the right questions to help steer your content research and production.
What do they find humorous?
What are the pain points that frustrate them?
What topics make them angry?
What are common problems they speak about?
What kind of content is being shared that clearly pleases them or brings joy?
Your research could turn up a common topic or theme that appears frequently in the content they read and share.
For example, you might discover that a certain segment or demographic in your audience has a strong affinity to family values, or health and wellness.
Turn that into a content campaign that shares the feel-good side of your company.
Delve into the family life of your employees, how your company supports the work/life balance, or better health initiatives.
Google is well known for its company structure, promoting flexible schedules, support of family time, personal projects, and a focus on work/life balance.
The company often shares behind-the-scenes images (visual content) showing off employees enjoying what they do. Here’s an example from Google Sydney’s offices:
That can influence a positive emotional response toward the brand when targeted segments see that content.
Emotional Marketing Works in the B2B Process
Don’t get caught up with the dated idea that emotion is only applicable to consumer-focused businesses.
Emotional marketing has its place in the B2B world as well.
You may be dealing with a longer buying process between one or more organizations, but the decisions are still made (and fueled by) people who are absolutely driven by emotion.
That includes emotions like:
Awe: over what a solution is capable of and feeling empowered to bring that solution to the workplace.
Anticipation: in finding a piece of the puzzle in a product or service that will help the company achieve its next goal or milestone.
Fear: in purchase decisions that could reflect on the individual, resulting in a personal risk associated with a B2B purchase.
Joy: in knowing that a B2B purchase is likely to lead to a positive outcome that will reflect positively on the individual.
You hold a great deal of influence with your audience when you’re able to tap into their emotions.
Once you understand your audience, you can better determine their emotional state.
From there, make the decision about whether you need to influence and exploit emotions that are already present, or if you want to create or give rise to emotions the audience wasn’t initially expecting or experiencing.
Even the most (seemingly) rational decisions are influenced by emotion — and that applies to everyone.
When you learn how to leverage that emotion in your content, you will see increases in engagement, social action, and conversions within your funnel.
Case studies go beyond simple testimonials by providing real-life examples of how your brand satisfied your customer’s needs and helped them accomplish their goals.
An in-depth case study helps you highlight your successes in a way that will help your ideal potential customer become your next customer. They help you show rather than tell prospective customers how you can help them reach their goals.
But, creating a solid case study can be a challenge. Today, I’ll provide actionable tips to help you write a case study, provide background information, and identify key metrics that will help your case study drive conversions.
1. Write About Someone Your Ideal Customer Can Relate To
Do you know who your ideal customer is? If it’s someone in the education industry, then make your case studies about your university customers. If it’s someone in the automobile industry, then make your case studies about auto parts and accessories manufacturers.
The goal is to ensure that your case study will show prospective customers that you are:
Comfortable in their industry.
Undertand their industry’s specific needs.
Know how to give their industry targeted results.
Think about it on a smaller level, such as when you’re reading a how-to blog post. Most of of these posts are geared toward average readers.
But when you come across a post designed specifically for your needs (such as online marketing for the healthcare industry), you are more likely to understand and apply the information.
The same goes with case studies – people who read about results in their industry will feel like the same approach will work for them.
2. Tell the Story from Start to Finish
Storytelling is a powerful marketing strategy. A great case study will allow someone to really get to know the customer in the case study including:
Who is the sample customer and what do they do?
What were the customer’s goals?
What were the customer’s needs?
How did you satisfy those needs and help the customer meet their goals?
But don’t stop a month or two out. Follow up with the customer in the case study and update your case study a few months down the road to show how your solutions continue to provide long term benefits.
This gives readers the opportunity to see that your goal is not only to help with immediate needs, but also to ensure long term results.
3. Make Your Case Study Easy to Read
No one likes to read one huge chunk of text, no matter how interesting and informative it might be. Case studies, like blog posts, should be scannable and easy to read.
Be sure to use good content formatting elements as you would with articles, blog posts, and copywriting on your website, including:
Headers
Images
Bulleted lists
Bolded & italicized text
In addition to providing great SEO value for your case studies page, these formatting elements will help your readers (especially those that like to skim) find the most important parts of your case study and get a great impression about what your business could do for them.
Consider adding multi-media elements in addition to written content, such as videos, PDFs, and images to mix it up and make the content more engaging.
4. Include Real Numbers
Have you ever read case studies where a business states they “doubled traffic” for the customer in their case study and wondered if that meant they went from 100 to 200 visits or 10,000 to 20,000 visits?
Avoid using broad statements by using clear, direct numbers. This makes your case study more believable and helps build trust in your brand.
You want your case study to be as precise as possible. Instead of saying you doubled their traffic, provide specific, accurate numbers and (if possible) real proof in the form of charts, graphs, or analytics data.
Remember that not everyone is as familiar with analtyics technology as you are, so highlight the most importnat pieces of data and provide context to why it matters.
This way, the reader can see where the customer began and where the customer ended up with your help.
Plus having the picture proof can help the reader envision exactly what you might do for them, making your case study that much more powerful.
5. Talk About Specific Strategies in Your Case Study
So you doubled a website’s traffic or sales, right? How did you do it? This is where you sell your products or services simply by saying which ones you used and how they led to the desired result.
Don’t just say “our online marketing services led to these results.” Instead, say something like, ” A three-month social media campaign focusing on Facebook & YouTube and five-month of link building campaign led to an increase in rankings, plus brand exposure led to these results.”
Don’t worry about giving away your secrets — the goal is to establish your brand as an industry leader and you need to show you know your stuff.
6. Try Different Content Formats
Case studies do not have to be fit into a story form every time. Try different types of case studies, such as an interview format where you have your clients answer the same questions mentioned earlier about what they do, their needs, their goals, and how you met them.
Quoting your customer in their own words will make the case study even more relatable to your ideal customer than you telling the story.
Infographics, webinars, and even podcasts can also be used to highlight case studies. Don’t get stuck in the same old text-only format — get creative and see what type of content your users respond to.
Here’s a case study example from Venngage that uses a brochure-style case study to highlight how Vortex was able to grow conversion. (Notice the results section that highlights specific gains.)
7. Appeal to Different Types of Learners
While some people enjoy reading, others may prefer audio, video, or visual representation of your case study. So consider taking your text-based case studies and re-purposing the content as:
The bonus with YouTube videos and infographics is that they are easy to share. This means that your case study may go further than just your own site, leading to more of your potential customers finding out how they could benefit from your products or services.
Case studies can also be embeded in other types of content — such as an ebook, how-to blog post, or resource guide.
8. Make Your Case Studies Easy to Find
What’s the point of having great case studies if no one will ever read them? Be sure that your case studies are organized and easy to find.
Here’s a few examples of good case studies that are easy to find — and therefore, much more powerful.
AWS provides case studies right on their homepage. They also make it easy to look for an-industry specific case study in manufacturing, financial services, fitness, and more.
Drupal provides case studies right in their hero image. Users considering using their solution don’t have to look far at all to see how other brands are finding success with Drupal.
Conclusion
A great case study starts with case study research. Ask your customers to fill out a short form that highlights how you helped them reach their goals — be sure to ask for specific results.
If I told you that you could become a sucessful vlogger, would you believe me?
Or do you think that there is too much competition?
YouTube is saturated — 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There are dozens of million-dollar YouTubers creating thousands of hours of video a year.
How could you possibly break through the noise?
Well, I’m here to tell you that video blogging still has huge potential.
It might not be as easy as it was five or seven years ago to break onto the vlogging scene, video is more important than ever to build a successful online marketing strategy.
Why?
First, video remains one of the best and most effective ways for people to get to know you.
When they see you, their brain develops an impression of you that helps to build trust. You’re not just an anonymous content creator trying to drive your business. You’re a real person.
Second, video is a preferred method people have for gaining information. The stats don’t lie. People spend up to 2.6 times as long on web pages with video than without video.
Third, the cost of good equipment keeps on falling, and the cameras in our phones keep getting better.
Finally, video blogging can be lucrative in itself. The top YouTubers make between $14 and $22 million dollars a year.
The power of video is undeniable.
All of this brings up the question: how can you become a successful vlogger?
I’m going to explain the steps you need to take to become a successful vlogger, from starting a vlog and coming up with concepts for a video series to making a quality video and making sure people find your videos.
Let’s jump in.
How to Come up With a Concept for a Series of Videos
Many people follow the desire to make a video by coming up with one idea for one video.
That would be like starting a blog with an idea for only one article.
As you probably know, that wouldn’t get you very far.
I explain how long content marketing takes in this video:
Video, like any other form of content marketing, needs a long-term strategy defined by a subject, tone of voice, and approach.
Here’s a question to ask yourself:
“What am I trying to convey to my audience?”
Once you know what you’re trying to do, you can define your vlogging content concept:
What should the format be? Should I do screen capture demos of step-by-step instructions? Should I be out and about talking to people? Should I talk into the camera?
What can I do with video that I can’t do in other formats like the written word?
How often am I going to make videos? How much time can I dedicate to them?
You have to document your plan to determine if it’s going to be feasible for long enough to achieve your goals.
The reality is people need to see consistency in order to understand why they should subscribe to your channel.
If you are making random, sporadic videos, it’s going to be harder to convince people to follow you.
The content of your video will be what determines your success.
That is, of course, only if you make quality videos.
How to Create Quality Video Content for Your Vlog
Video making is a complicated profession. When you see all of the elements that go into shooting a television broadcast or feature film you can be forgiven for thinking that you could never make anything like that.
And you probably can’t.
That’s OK.
People who are going to watch your video on your blog are not expecting a Steven Spielberg production.
People understand what vlogging is.
But that doesn’t mean that you should not care about quality. Quality is still super important.
Luckily, the cost of creating quality video has been steadily dropping and continues to drop. There are more and more types of equipment available that can make your video go from amateur to professional-looking.
Step 1. Get a Camera and Tripod
You might be tempted to use your iPhone.
And honestly, cameras on smartphones have gotten amazing over the years. You have probably taken some great photos and videos on your phone already.
But smartphone cameras are difficult for serious video blogging for the following reasons:
They are hard to mount properly
They have very limited field of depth
They have very limited exposure options
Sound sucks
Selfie videos are best used for things like Instagram Stories.
They can be a part of your video strategy but shouldn’t be the foundation of it.
Cameras range in quality a lot, from basic models that run in the low hundreds to professional gear that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Most DSLR cameras also have video modes, though the options can be just as limited as on smartphones.
The good news is that if you’re not chasing snow leopards in the wild, you won’t need all of those fancy settings.
What you need is a camera with a good lens that’s can take high-quality video. Not 4K necessarily, but enough quality to be able to work with if you want to add any extras.
You could always place your camera on a table or shelf, but tripods are very affordable and give you 100% control of your filming.
Full-size tripods can go for less than $20, so there’s really no excuse not to have one.
Step 2. Get a Microphone
You can either get a camera with a mic-in jack to plug in an external microphone (something you can also do when filming with your smartphone), or you can buy a USB microphone and record the sound directly to your computer.
It depends on the type of conditions you’re filming in, but you usually don’t want to capture sound from directly from the camera.
Separating the recording between two devices adds the challenge of having to sync up sound and image later.
You can overcome this by creating a clap sound that spikes up your audio visualizer for each syncing, then you line that up with the audio from the video.
I can’t stress the importance of having great sound in your videos. Sound is one of our fundamental senses and it should be a part of your marketing strategy.
Here are a few ways to leverage the power of sound:
Simply put, poorly recorded audio can turn people off and get in the way of you getting your message across.
Step 3. Create Your Lighting Setup
Lighting videos is an art all unto itself. But it’s surprisingly easy to get a great effect since there are normally only three primary lights in a video setup.
The important thing is to separate yourself or your subject from the background. You can do this with the focus and depth of field, of course. But it really looks professional when there is a difference in lighting as well.
You don’t even need a professional lighting setup.
You can create a fairly decent lighting setup from lamps that you might have around the house.
You can also buy LED board lights that diffuse really well without getting hot — one of the drawbacks of using incandescent bulbs. You can buy versions that you can mount on your camera if you aren’t shooting in a controlled environment.
As a general rule, it’s better to be brighter. The image is clearer since the camera captures more light and therefore more detail.
Step 4. Get a Teleprompter
It’s great to be able to speak off the cuff effortlessly. There are some vloggers with a natural style that works really well. Take the beauty vlogger Freddy My Love. Her effortless and natural style has been honed from years of practice.
Chances are, you will need help to deliver content in a clear and structured way.
You could memorize talking points and do a couple of takes. Then you can splice together the best parts.
That’s a longer process, though, than using a teleprompter.
A teleprompter makes it easier to hit all of the important points without memorizing or awkwardly transitioning between them. You could even write a script to follow verbatim.
But it’s more than a time saver. It drastically improves the way that you interact with your viewers.
Having notes or something written off screen causes you to break eye contact when you’re addressing your audience directly.
According to a study by Cornell University, humans will naturally increase eye contact with people that we admire or like.
Conversely, we tend to break eye contact when talking about embarrassing or uncomfortable subjects.
Viewers will subscribe to vloggers they respect. You can look directly into the eyes of your viewers while still reading your script or bullet points.
A teleprompter might seem complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple.
Teleprompting uses a slanted piece of glass to reflect the words so you can read them.
As long as there is darkness between the glass and the camera lens, the camera won’t pick up the light reflecting from the text on the glass. The camera will only see you.
You, however, will be able to clearly read the text as it scrolls. It looks like this:
There are also more advanced models that hook up to pedals for your feet that control how quickly the text scrolls.
If all that sounds like way too much, you can always try to build one yourself with a CD case and your smartphone to see if you like it.
Step 5. Do Your Makeup
This might sound a bit controversial – and I’m OK with that because I want you to have all of the options available to becoming successful – but people like watching videos with people who are put together.
(This explains why so many movie stars can be bad at acting.)
You don’t need to be Brad Pitt, and you definitely shouldn’t go overboard, but make an effort.
You’ve got an HD camera and a lighting setup. People have never seen you as clearly as right now.
For example, when you light yourself there will almost certainly be shiny parts of your skin. That’s your natural skin oil.
If you are ever wondering how to do something, like shorten a transition or overlay an image, there are tons of tutorials on YouTube.
The bottom line is that you should be creating a lot of content. The majority of it you might not even use. But you get better and better each time you try something new.
And you should be careful to avoid oversharing. Instead, you should focus on a more qualitative approach.
Even if you think you did something great the first time through, force yourself to try it again.
You never know when you’re going to stumble onto something great.
OK, you’ve got the keys to actually making your videos to execute your strategy, now comes the hard part.
How to Get People to See Your Vlogs
When you make a video, you are in control of everything.
You decide how much you can invest time and money into creating your video. You decide who you work with and what you want the outcome to be.
Then, you decide when you put it online.
You don’t decide when other people watch it.
You can only try to grab their attention.
Getting people to watch your video can be difficult, but there are many steps that you can take to maximize your potential audience and get more people to click play.
Step 1. Create an Awesome Thumbnail
The first thing that many people will see is the thumbnail on the player before they start the video.
In fact, this is the piece of communication that reaches all the people that come across your video but don’t play it.
That digital real estate is your little promo box and can drive engagement. Take the time to make it great.
Here are two examples from Gary Vaynerchuk. He varies the style of the thumbnail from a photo collage with the title in a fun YouTube-style:
To a more elegant and serious tone when his subject matter is more inspirational:
There’s one thing you will always see in the thumbnail though: the title.
It’s crucial real estate that you can entirely personalize to get people to click.
You will have to abide by the brand values and guidelines, but you should create something custom to make sure you are putting your best foot forward.
To add a thumbnail to your video, click on the video in your video manager.
Then, in the middle of the screen next to the player, you will see a few images that come from your video that you can select as your thumbnail.
Click on upload image to add your own custom image. The best size is 1280 x 720 pixels. A 16:9 ratio works best since that’s the format of the layout.
To optimize for search, you need to work on your descriptions. YouTube can’t crawl through your videos like Googlebot crawls through your website.
You need to lend a helping hand to get YouTube SEO right. Here are a couple of things you can do:
Write a description of at least 250 words that outlines the subjects of the video
Get your keywords in the description in the first few sentences, and use it at least 3 or 4 times in the body of the description
Start the title of your video with your keywords
Add tags. Tags help you show up in the related videos column when people are watching other videos.
There are also a few of the advanced settings that are helpful to turn on.
If your video is focused on a local area, you should add a localization to the video.
Then, you want to drive as many views as possible so you should make sure that the two options are enabled: allow embedding and notify subscribers.
This way people can share your video on their websites, and you can benefit from their traffic to drive views.
And wouldn’t it be silly if your subscribers didn’t know you had a new video? It’s checked on by default but just double check.
Step 3. Use End Screens to Promote Other Videos
Anyone who has watched your video to its completion is probably very interested in what you have to say. That is the best time of all to catch them.
YouTube developed end screens to keep people’s attention at the end of your video.
20 seconds before the end of your video, and/or for a bit afterward, you can present related or featured videos to your viewers.
To do that, go to your YouTube account and click on the video manager in the menu on the left:
You’ll see a list of your videos. Click on one of them.
You’ll see all the options to edit your video, like enhancing it or adding audio. Select Editor, then Add an end screen.
The end screen adds extra time to the end of your video where you can do two key things: promote your other videos and get people to subscribe to your channel.
Click on the Add element button.
You’ll see a dropdown menu with a few of different options. All of them are great for driving traffic.
YouTube provides three options for promoting your other videos and playlists that are pretty great.
You can choose to feature your most recently uploaded videos, or you can choose a specific video that you want to promote.
Or you can let YouTube do the work and automatically recommend videos from your channel that would be the most relevant for each viewer.
You could even link out to other people’s videos if you want.
When you add a video, it will display the thumbnail plus the title and the duration of the video:
You can reposition and resize the video.
You can add up to four elements to expose people to as many of your videos as possible.
Step 4. Get People to Subscribe to Your YouTube Channel
Subscribers are more than people that happened to see your video.
They are people who were so happy with that video that they want to see more. They are anticipating that you will give them something great again.
What’s more, media outlets and brands looking to partner with vloggers will use subscribers as their key metric when evaluating opportunities.
The most important is adding the subscribe action. When you do you will see your channel’s avatar in a round circle.
You can position this button wherever you want on the screen.
You can also use the end screen we discussed above to increase subscribers.
Don’t forget to add a link to subscribe to your website, email signature, and Instagram bio. It’s not just enough to add the YouTube link. You should tell people something clear like “Subscribe to see more videos.”
Step 6. Go Live
Live video is the new wild west in digital marketing. It represents a lot of opportunities. It’s much easier to be featured on the Live home page than the regular YouTube homepage.
Live also gives you the opportunity to interact directly with people while they watch you.
You can instantaneously respond to people’s questions that come up in the chat. This creates a real-time relationship.
Conclusion
Video blogging is becoming more and more important for content marketing.
And there’s no time like right now to get started in video marketing.
Organize your thoughts, sit down, and create a concept for a video series.
Like all content marketing, your video needs to give the viewer something of value, whether that be informative or educational or entertainment.
Then, make that video with the highest quality that your time and budget allows.
If it’s helpful, read some books about cinematography. I recommend Gustavo Mercado’s The Filmmaker’s Eye. You can skim through to get the basics about things like shot composition.
Finally, whatever you do, don’t forget to get your video in front of people.
You could make the best video the world has ever seen, but that won’t make you a successful vlogger.
As a digital marketer, you know just how important the tone and message of your blog are to the overall success of your business. A cohesive approach to your digital content, especially the content on your blog, is critical to your brand.
The best way to ensure your site is editorially cohesive is with an editorial style guide.
This article will walk you through the basics of an editorial style guide. You’ll learn the steps you need to follow to create your own style guide whether from scratch, with the use of a template, or with help from a freelancer.
What is an Editorial Style Guide?
An editorial style guide is a set of guidelines for the writers and editors on your team. These guidelines will include standards for grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and image use.
The goal of a style guide is to ensure your content stays consistent and high quality no matter who is writing or editing the article.
Why Does Your Website Need an Editorial Style Guide?
More than just a preferred list of grammar rules, an editorial style guide provides your content team with guidelines for the creation of useful, on-brand content. An editorial style guide ensures a standard baseline for quality and consistency. This will become more critical as your in-house editorial team grows.
Perhaps you think your website is too small, or you can always create your content now and flesh out the details later. The truth is, the sooner you can get your editorial style and processes nailed down, the less work for you and your team.
Without clear guidelines in place, your inbox will soon be flooded with questions from your writers and editorial staff. Your editorial staff may think that lack of guidelines gives them free reign over content. This may result in inconsistent and maybe even poor quality work that has your brand name all over it.
Elements of a Style Guide
There are specific elements all style guides should include, such as:
Grammar
Do you expect your writers to use the Oxford comma? Are there instances where you prefer the semicolon over the em-dash? These are the grammatical rules to call out in your style guide.
Other grammatical elements to take a stand on include where punctuation falls in relation to quotation marks (inside or outside), prepositions at the end of a sentence, and starting sentences with conjunctions.
Spelling
A subscription to services like Grammarly takes care of the majority of misspellings. There may be times where a word can be spelled correctly in two or more ways, so which one should your writers choose?
The most common spelling differences are those with American English versus British English variations. Examples include:
Center vs. centre
Theater vs. theatre
Color vs. colour
Criticize vs. criticise
Program vs. programme
You should consider where the majority of your audience lives when deciding on a spelling “style.” But the most important thing is to choose one style and be consistent.
Voice and Tone
The voice is the overall expression of your brand, while the tone is how that message is delivered. The tone will vary depending on the medium (e.g. social media post, blog post, newsletter, press release), but the overall brand voice will be your writers’ guiding light.
Is your brand voice considerate and simple like Uber or functional and expressive like Starbucks? Once you have found your brand voice’s sweet spot, it’s time to determine what your tone is and when that may change depending on the medium or circumstances. Perhaps your tone is casual and conversational in blog posts, but witty in social media posts.
You’ll want to include relevant examples here as Uber does in the Applications section of their style guide. These will help to solidify your stance while also giving your writers a handy guide to refer to should they need it.
Sentence and Paragraph Length
From witty one-liners to groupings of five to six sentences, there are many valid ways to form a paragraph. Here you want to outline your general preference and when exceptions should be made.
On academic websites, for example, longer sentences and paragraphs are the norm. This is because there is a lot of high-level information that needs to be delivered at once. On recipe or hobby blogs, however, shorter sentences and paragraphs can help to drive a point home.
Links
This section of your style guide should discuss how links on your blog should be formatted, but also how often to use links and to where (e.g. external versus internal content).
If you’re a medical or academic marketer, for example, you may require that links to outside sources meet a minimum quality standard. If that’s the case, you should provide explicit examples of websites and sources that you trust.
Resources
Your editorial style guide should be in-depth, but if it’s too long it can be difficult for your writers and editors to use effectively. One way to reduce your style guide’s length without compromising content is with resources.
The resource section of your style guide should include links to guides that you have properly vetted. These may include:
Academic style guides (e.g. APA or MLA)
Grammatical rules and guidelines
How-to guides and documentation for platforms your writers and editors will use
Database links
You want to set up your writers to be self-sufficient. An expansive resource section within your editorial style guide is a great place to start.
Images and Other Media in an Editorial Style Guide
If you encourage the use of images and other media in your website content, you’ll need to be explicit about formatting, attribution, content, and more. What do these elements cover?
Formatting:Specify minimum and maximum dimensions, image size requirements, and placement within an article
Attribution: Outline your expectations for how your writers should attribute content to the creator. This will vary depending on the copyright license, but compliance with copyright laws is a must.
Content: You should call out any limitations or restrictions you have on certain activities within imagery, such as drinking alcohol. Or maybe you have a style preference for feature images, such as overlay shots. This information is useful for your writers and editors.
There are very real potential consequences to improperly attributed imagery, so this part of your style guide should be very specific. It’s best to provide examples and even templates for your writers and editors to use.
Creating Your Editorial Style Guide
Now you’re ready to create your own style guide. Where should you begin?
Before you become overwhelmed with the process, let’s discuss three ways you can go about creating your own style guide.
Hiring a Freelancer to Create Your Editorial Style Guide
You can hire a freelancer for just about any blog or website-related task, so why not consider hiring a freelancer to create your style guide? Freelancers with experience in writing industry-specific content, including style guides, do exist. If you can find a freelancer with experience creating a style guide in your field, then even better!
There are various freelance recruitment platforms, such as Freelancer and Upwork. You can also reach out to your personal and professional network for recommendations.
An experienced freelancer can walk you through the process of editorial style guide creation. You should come to the table with some information prepared, though. For example:
Brand voice and tone (Casual? Authoritative? Academic?)
Your preference for tense and point of view
Any strong preferences you have (e.g. oxford comma, text formatting, image formatting)
Industry or company requirements
You hired the freelancer for their knowledge and expertise, so don’t forget to utilize it. If your freelancer has created an editorial style guide in your niche, then ask them for recommendations based on their previous work.
You may be surprised at the sections you didn’t even think to add, and others that you can cut. Using this previous experience can boost the quality of your style guide and prevent issues caused by ambiguity.
Creating an Editorial Style Guide From a Template
If a freelancer isn’t in your budget, you don’t have to go it alone. There are many style guide templates available for you to work with.
The best place to look for such templates is on marketing, branding, and design blogs.
TechWhirl offers a Word document template for download, and Lucidpress has its own template you can customize using their online editor. You may also have luck with template repositories like this one from Microsoft.
The important thing to remember is a template is a guide, not a rule book. You don’t need to include all of its sections, and you’re free to add any sections you feel necessary.
Creating Your Own Editorial Style Guide
If you prefer to create your own style guide from scratch, then consider the step-by-step process outlined below.
Start With a Solid Base
At this stage, it’s time to choose an established style guide as your base.
There are plenty of options as described below, including APA and MLA. By choosing one of these guides as your baseline, you make it easy to create the foundation of your style guide.
These established guides already include rules on grammar, structure, and formatting. You can then build upon those rules to create a robust editorial style guide for your website.
Establish Brand Voice and Set the Tone
Two critical elements of marketing content are often overlooked: brand voice, and tone. The reason these are so often overlooked isn’t because they’re unimportant, but because they can be difficult to distinguish.
Skittles, for example, has a playful and upbeat voice. Their marketing campaigns are slightly fantastical with an eye towards bright colors, loud sounds, and catchy quips.
The tone is the inflection on your brand voice that will change depending on the situation. Even if you have an army of writers, you can ensure your blog stays cohesive by setting a tone for your writers and editors to abide by.
Remember the Big Three: Tense, Voice, and Point of View
Now you know the tone of your content, it’s time to outline the “how-to.” How do you intend for your writers to speak to your audience? The answer will depend on the tense, voice, and point of view you prefer.
Writing tense refers to the three tenses: past, present, and future.
There may be reasons all three tenses are used on your website or blog. You should still pick a dominant tense for your writers to defer to in most circumstances.
Voice refers to active voice versus passive voice. That means putting the subject first (active) or putting the object first (passive). Active voice is the standard for most bloggers and marketers. It offers a more conversational tone readers find compelling.
Point of viewrefers to the perspective of the writer: first, second, or third person.
Bloggers and marketers will typically utilize first person (“I” statements) or second person (“You” statements). The point of view you choose will depend largely on your content niche and your overall tone.
It’s best to have a default recommendation for all three of the above. You may include exceptions to the rule, but be sure to provide specific examples if you do so.
Establish Standard Formatting
The way your content flows is largely dependent on its formatting. Some basic formatting guidelines to consider are headers and subheaders, bold and italic text, and hyperlinking text.
You may want to consider your content management system and any potential limitations when it comes to header tag guidelines.
If you are heavily relying on a style guide such as the APA, you can utilize their recommendations for text formatting. For example, italicizing terms that have a technical or special meaning.
Define Image Requirements
There are many good reasons to include imagery on your website. However, images can take up precious space, and they come with their own copyright risks. This is why you must define image requirements within your style guide.
On the technical side, you should define minimum and maximum image size. This will largely depend on your content platform, and it may vary by image type (featured image versus in-content image). With copyright infringement always being a risk, you also want to provide strict requirements when it comes to including images in content.
If you use a premium image repository, like Shutterstock, you may include account login details in this part of your style guide. You can also link to free image repositories such as Unsplash or Pexels.
Beyond that, you should clearly outline (with examples) the desired format for image references. What should be included, and how should it be formatted? Again, it may be helpful to fall back on your chosen style guide’s standard.
Incorporate Standards of Performance
How will your writers know when they hit the nail on the head or, conversely, miss the mark? This is where standards of performance come in handy.
Standards of performance are guidelines that your writers and editors can refer to when evaluating their content piece. The more objective your standards of performance, the better.
When it comes to establishing standards of performance, it helps to think of a grading rubric. For each standard, it’s possible to score anywhere from one to five points. What standards can you choose that will be easy to evaluate on a five-point scale? A few examples include:
The standards of performance will be beneficial to your writers, as well as your editorial staff.
Picking a Preexisting Editorial Style Guide as a Base
The likelihood is something will inadvertently be left out of your editorial style guide. This is why having a default style guide for your writers and editors to refer to is crucial.
These style guides have typical use cases, though they can be adapted for uses beyond the norm. Let’s look at the four most common style guides.
Associated Press (AP)
The Associated Press (AP) style guide is most commonly used by journalists. Its focus is on disseminating information clearly with simple formatting.
American Psychological Association (APA)
The American Psychological Association (APA) style guide is most commonly used in college in science and social science courses. It has a slightly more formal bent than the MLA, though not so formal as the Chicago Manual of Style.
This style guide is ideal for academic writing, including blogs or websites dedicated to discussing academic subjects.
Modern Language Association (MLA)
The Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide is most commonly used in college-level English courses, and it’s also the default for many bloggers, marketers, and content writers. This guide offers a more laid-back approach desirable to writers, editors, and readers alike.
Chicago Manual of Style
The Chicago Manual of Style is the most rigorous of the style guides. This style guide isn’t a popular choice for most bloggers due to its meticulous nature.
The key differences between the four style guides are largely related to formatting, though there are some grammatical and structural variations as well. There isn’t one style guide better than the other as they all have their strengths and weaknesses. The guide you choose will depend largely on preference, ease of use, and familiarity.
Picking a Platform to Host Your Editorial Style Guide
You’re ready to create your style guide, but where should you host it? You have a few options, and they each have their pros and cons.
Microsoft Word
A word documentis perhaps the simplest option. The most obvious limitation of word documents is the inability to automatically update the guidelines. You would need to send the updated document out to all writers and editors as additions or changes are made.
Google Docs
If you like the idea of a simple document, then consider Google Docs. You will still have access to the basic content tools offered by a word document, but updates will be reflected live. You can also collaborate with members of your editorial team.
Sharepoint
Perhaps you want a more secure platform than Google. If that’s the case, then Sharepoint may be for you. Sharepoint is compatible with the Microsoft Suite, including Word. Using Sharepoint, you can upload an already existing Word document or create your own within the platform.
Just like Google Docs, your changes are reflected immediately and you can collaborate with as many team members as needed.
Confluence
If more robust collaboration is needed, especially when you’re just beginning to create your editorial style guide, you may prefer a platform like Confluence. This is a wiki-style platform that enables you to create your style guide with your team.
Resources to Create a Quality Editorial Style Guide
As you create your style guide, you’ll find yourself going down many rabbit holes. With this in mind, we’ve compiled a list of helpful resources to get you started on your research.
To familiarize yourself with institutional style guides, check out these resources on the AP, APA, MLA, and Chicago Manual of Style style guides.
Are you finding yourself needing some inspiration? Take a look at the style guides created by institutions like Princeton and Rutgers. Your favorite companies and brands may also have their style guides publicly available, including Mailchimp, Google, and Atlassian.
You already know that WordPress is a popular CMS and that most content marketers love it for their business or personal blog. But there’s a question lingering: How do you choose the right free WordPress theme when there are so many out there?
Trust me; it’s not as easy as you think.
When I started blogging, one of the crazy activities that killed my productivity was checking out new personal blog themes. I just couldn’t find the right one for me. But I know better now.
The reality is you need to find one of the responsive WordPress themes for your personal blog launch’s success.
Did you know that your success as a content marketer goes beyond writing great content?
There are so many factors that will ensure that you’re always at the top of your game and getting the juice from any given search engine.
Your attitude to work, the way you market your content, and, most importantly, your blog’s look all play a key role. It must have a responsive design, not just be pretty.
Investing in a professionally-looking theme is important, but what if you’re just a beginner and you want a free WordPress theme that still looks gorgeous? Can you find one?
Sure you can. I decided to write this article because I get a lot of emails from readers who want to find the right WordPress themes that will aid in effective content marketing.
A free WordPress theme is great, but don’t forgo a responsive design for your personal blog when many themes have a very cost-effective, one-time fee.
Trust me, I’ve got you covered. Without much ado, here is a list of 32 professional, free WordPress themes that you can download:
It’s time to sparkle your personal blog. If you’re looking for a flat, clean, and professional-looking theme, Sparkling may just be the right one. It was developed using Bootstrap 3.
This modern theme has a front-end framework feature that optimizes it to display smartphones, desktops, tablets, and other devices well. This WordPress theme is unique from the millions out there because of its pixel-perfect design, full-screen slider, and widgets that you’ll fall in love with.
‘Sparkling’ is built to have a premium layout, and every content marketer who prides content above everything else will benefit from it. If you’re looking for one of the SEO-friendly responsive WordPress themes, you’re in luck.
It’s Schema compatible — which is great for SEO. Most of the free and paid plugins out there are supported, such as SEO by Yoast, W3 Total Cache, Quick AdSense, Akismet, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, and more.
For effective content marketing, you need a WordPress theme that hands control over to you so that you can add, modify, or delete any plugin, section, or even modify the layout as you see fit.
Whether you’re interested in using the Sparkling WordPress theme for your personal use or business, you’ve won the jackpot. This theme cuts across different industries such as education, business, web design, marketing, health and fitness, and many more.
Dazzling is an unrivaled responsive theme. It’s developed using Bootstrap 3 and comes with an optional full-screen slider. This is useful when you’re building your first corporate or portfolio site.
This flat theme has mint green accent colors and will inspire you to embrace the best side of content marketing. I’m fond of this theme because it’s clean, unbeatable, and will enhance your personal brand. What more could you want?
Startup entrepreneurs, CEOs, and public speakers will benefit from the full-screen slider because they’ll use it to showcase their keynote speeches or other key presentations.
Dazzling WordPress theme includes added optimization for a lot of the essential plugins and custom widget designs out there, such as All-in-one-SEO Pack, JetPack, Contact Form 7, and more.
OceanWP is a single theme, but it’s so customizable that it feels like getting multiple themes all at once. With more than 3 million downloads, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a few websites using this ultra-flexible theme.
What really stands out about OceanWP is its demos — these are essentially fully-build websites you can copy and then customize. The theme is fully responsive, offers fast load times, built-in SEO features, and is translation ready.
If your business sells physical or digital products, OceanWP has you covered with built-in WooCommerce functionality.
Travelify is another free WordPress theme. It has some premium functionalities that allow you to change the theme layout (full, no sidebar, or wide, for example).
This responsive WordPress theme is mobile responsive, modern, and can be used for virtually any subject or business objective. For example, if you’re a content marketer, Travelify puts value on your content and highlights your best work for your readers to enjoy.
It’s a pixel perfect design, with a featured slider which you can turn off with a single click. The flexibility that the theme offers enables you to alter its layout until it suits your objective. You can also use a background image to customize the theme to your brand.
Ascent WordPress theme is designed with responsiveness in mind. This means that it’ll appear well on tablets, smartphones, laptops, and desktop of all sizes. The innovative technology used is based on CSS3 and HTML5.
What I like about Ascent is the richness of the slider that appears above the header. It’s more than just a personal blog; it’s a visual blogger’s dream.
In other words, your pictures get an added optimization that would make them stand out from the rest. If you’re a photographer, digital marketer, or content marketer, you can use Ascent to improve user experience.
This theme has been downloaded over 30,000 times, making it one of the most popular responsive WordPress themes of both professional and free.
A right and left sidebar gives you added flexibility, and this theme is translation-ready. This is essential if you’ll be serving a wider audience in different languages.
Do you struggle to create the right content for your customers? You’re not alone. If you want to attract and nurture an audience with your personal blog, you need various content.
But, let’s assume that you’ve created a variety of content; how do you showcase all of them in the right manner? You need the right WordPress theme and Auberge may just be the right one.
This impressive WordPress theme is free, professionally-designed and it’s currently used by over 30,000 blogs. Auberge’s overwhelming quality and usefulness make it a one-stop theme for those who want to expand their content marketing reach.
Auberge is built around a mobile-first design concept, which makes it 100% mobile responsive. One vital reason why you probably should consider this theme is because the content can be easily showcased on retina displays that have high resolutions.
A challenge that most site owners face when showcasing their best content, is resizing and compatibility issues, which severely drops the value of the content.
The theme would suit every niche, but it’ll probably best serve restaurants and cafe pages. When constructing your pages, you can use the Beaver page builder plugin. You can download and use the lite version at no cost.
Hestia is a website builder that features a slick, fully customizable design. Don’t let their branding as a”one-page theme” make you think it will limit you — you can build a fully functional, multi-page site with this theme.
Top features include easy to use customizer, WooCommerce ready, page builder compatibility, and fast load times. It is also SEO friendly and provides clean, optimized code for fast loading times.
If you are looking for a highly flexible theme with e-commerce capabilities, Hestia is a solid choice.
Awaken WordPress theme is free and has a 4 out of 5-star rating. If you’re fond of a minimalist design, this theme is for you. It’s extra white spaces push your content to the forefront and eliminate distractions.
Awaken is a magazine theme that includes two widget areas. The posts are also showcased, using three distinct widgets.
The layout of this theme is constructed using the Bootstrap framework, with mobile responsiveness in mind. In particular, mobile users will benefit from your blog, if you use this theme.
Another essential feature of Awaken is the nifty slider. The theme options panel gives you added flexibility, which enables you to change the theme color, font attributes, and links.
Neve is a light, modern WordPress theme that will serve your content marketing needs because it has clean and validated code.
This means that no matter how minimal your technical skills, you can edit and structure your theme to display your content well.
With basic HTML/PHP knowledge, you can structure your content display area. If you’re not a skilled developer, you don’t have to worry, because the theme options panel enables you to update your settings, including custom header and footer designs and layout.
One other feature of Neve WordPress theme offers easy setup, reliable updates, fast load times, and it is compatible with AMP.
Neve is focused on being lightweight, fast, and easy to use, making it an ideal free WordPress theme for beginners or anyone who wants an easy-to-build site.
SSMAG is a mobile responsive, plug and play free WordPress theme that has a grid-based layout. Content creators will find this theme useful, because of its feature that positions your content to go viral– well-designed social share buttons.
The design layout is optimized to engage readers and to cause them to explore your site further. SSMAG was created in 2015. It has custom widgets, to display text and HTML elements.
Apart from being browser compatible, the SSMAG theme supports embedded video, which will play a vital role in explaining what your blog is all about, instead of using your featured image on a post page.
Albar is a multipurpose WordPress theme that can be used to build a business website, portfolio, e-commerce store, or blogging site. It is responsive, which means it easily adapts to all types of devices including tablets, mobile phones, and desktop computers.
The theme features minimal settings to make it easier to use, but enough customizations to let you build exactly the site you need. It is lightweight, scalable, and offers security features so your site will be fast and secure.
Most beginners to blogging are looking for a WordPress theme that will showcase their portfolio or samples so that potential clients can find them easily. If that’s what you’re after, Esteem will be the right personal blog theme for you.
Esteem is a simple theme that offers unlimited theme color options so that you can change the feel and look of your site to stand out from the competition. The Esteem theme comes with two custom themes.
One of the themes is custom-built to display your products, portfolio or services. You can upload and set your custom logo and site title from the theme options panel.
If you want to gain traction, nurture a loyal audience, and establish your brand online, you should leverage the Esteem theme customizable header image.
Who says that you can’t find a modern WordPress theme with a premium look for your site?
Well, Accelerate is right here to fill that spot. Accelerate is a super flexible theme that’s suitable for portfolio, personal, travel, corporate, or business services sites.
If you’re an artist, like a photographer or illustrator, you can use the fullscreen slider to showcase your best work.
Accelerate theme sends a strong, clear message to your target audience, through its flat and straight-forward design that blends perfectly with your content (video, blog posts, audio, etc).
Accelerate is fully responsive and displays well on any type of mobile device. Moreover, the theme is retina-ready, to enhance your audience viewing experience and lower bounce rate.
It’s time to personalize your blog with this eye-catching and professional theme. Ample is a free minimalist and multipurpose WordPress theme that comes with feature-rich options for customizing your layout and setting the right metrics for your site. Mobile device responsiveness helps your search engine results.
Building your personal brand is an essential part of running a successful online business. So, it’s necessary to customize your site, by adding a professional logo and relevant header text that will appeal to your target audience.
Ample multipurpose WordPress theme is suitable for business or personal blog use and will play well in any industry, but it’s particularly useful for authors, freelance writers, and book review writers.
If you’re familiar with Copyblogger, you’ll agree with me that their first theme looked similar to this theme. I also know a few bloggers who started out with this theme, but later changed when their business grew.
Why am I saying this?
Well, it’s to let you know that WP Premium free WordPress theme provides a rich experience for the end-user, as well as premium functionality and a trendy look.
If you’re looking to start a serious blog, you should consider using WP Premium. It’s 100% responsive, which means that your texts and images will display smoothly on any device.
This theme is powered by Foundation – a front end framework that’s flexible, user-friendly, and professional.
WP Premium takes a content-first approach. The homepage widget areas let you manage your sidebar, header, navigation menu, and footer. Other functionalities are a wide selection of widgets, such as the author widget that displays relevant information about the author or blog owner.
You also have the advertisement widget, for monetizing your blog content with AdSense, ClickBank, CJ, and any third-party affiliate network that supports HTML code and CSS.
This is a free and professional theme from Gabfirethemes.com. What differentiates this theme from others is the fact that you can structure your personal blog layout as you want it to be.
Your category page doesn’t have to be a bland list of articles; you can now put the right content there and re-engage your audience. From the themes control panel, you can select alternative header templates quickly. No coding experience is required to effect this change in a highly responsive design.
Localization support is also enabled, because Quickstart was designed to appeal to international and local site owners. It supports multiple languages and it’s compatible with WPML’s multilingual plugin.
There is also another feature that makes this theme unique. The Gabfire module. This is an extended functionality that enables users to embed videos and default post images, so that the difficulty associated with embedding YouTube videos, for example, is eliminated.
Quickstart free WordPress theme is equipped with a single post image slider, category templates, page templates, and an advanced control panel. It’s search engine optimized and mobile one of the mobile responsive WordPress themes we like.
Astra has some amazing functionalities that you’ll love. This is a professional-looking theme that would have sold for $39 or more, but you can download and use it as a free WordPress design.
It has a clever ‘above-the-fold’ slider that displays your best and latest works. If you’re an author, you can use this to showcase your book. If you’re an artist, such as a photographer, illustrator, or web designer, this sleek slider will be very helpful for you.
Astra free WordPress theme displays your content using the default font face that’s clear and professional. If you’re an intermediate blogger or online entrepreneur and need a sophisticated theme that has all the modern functionalities intact, Astra may just be the right one for you.
As the name implies, Onesie is a flat and free WordPress theme. It’s a one page, responsive theme and can be used for business or personal blog purposes.
It adapts to different screen sizes, making it possible for your texts and images to display perfectly on iPads, iPhones, tablets, and other mobile devices, including smartwatches.
Onesie is easy to customize. You can change the background image to whatever you want. The header images can be customized to your taste. You can also create custom navigation menus, choose the right font, and alter the layout design for optimal user experience.
Onesie is browser compatible, which means that it displays perfectly on popular search engine platforms that your target audience will most likely be using, such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and more.
It also contains standard theme features, such as the theme options, automatic updates, and translation-reader functionality.
Note: Path is no longer free, but at just $14, it’s still incredibly affordable and may be worth the cost if you love the features!
You can use Path, a stylish WordPress theme, if you’re working on a multi-author or magazine-related site.
One powerful functionality of Path is that you can use the built-in WordPress custom header to manage your site’s feel, control the logo and other branding aspects of your site, as long as it’s in agreement with WordPress and Hybrid Core.
Several plugins, such as Gravity Forms, Social Path, SEO by Yoast, and more, are fully supported. No matter your industry, as long as you’re passionate about building a community, creating viral content, and generating leads for your business, you can use the Path theme.
If your theme looks professional, it’s going to give you a mindset that makes you think as if you’re on top of the world. You might be a personal blog beginner, but it wouldn’t make any difference – because you’re already on the right foot.
Sinatra is one of the most lightweight and easily customizable WordPress themes that you can download for free. It’s designed by sinatrateam.
This is one of those themes that could have been sold for $39 or more, but the company decided to give it away. While it’s still free, you can download it for your next blog.
It’s mobile responsive, SEO-friendly, and contains multiple layouts for customizing your blog so that your content gets attention. It’s also translatable and built with SEO best practices in mind.
Calenotis Magazine WordPress theme comes free of charge. It’s ideal for any type of project.
If you’ve just launched your book (whether ebook or hardcopy), or you want to create in-depth content that will generate organic traffic for you, this magazine theme will do the job right, from the very beginning.
Calenotis is a popular theme used in the health and fitness industry. The majority of the internet marketers out there aren’t aware of this theme. If they were, why would they not be using it?
The good news is that you’ve got the chance to use it while it’s free. The fullscreen slider will house your best works, latest pictures, upcoming programs, and more. This theme was designed using the minimalist principle – “omit needless things!”
The default font size for the body text may not be perfectly legible, but with HTML and CSS experience, you can always change your text’s size to suit your users.
Portum WordPress is free, responsive, and has a stylish front page slider where you can showcase your best work. This theme also supports modern web tools and plugins.
Site speed is one of the Google ranking factors that you’ve got to always consider. This theme is super fast. Your users will thank you for it.
The single post area is professionally designed, and the font style and size are carefully set to make maximum impact. This is a true, modern free WordPress theme that’s responsive, used by thousands of sites, and is absolutely free.
Typepress is a free and colorful WordPress theme. Colors drive people. In fact, in the psychology of colors, certain colors have proven to improve click rate on call-to-action as well as increase sales.
If you’re looking for a free theme that will be colorful, agile, and has all the powerful functionalities to build your business, Typepress could be your answer. It was developed by Arm Studio and released for free to the world.
Browser compatibility is one feature that makes this theme a resourceful one. No matter what browser that you or your visitors are using, they’ll not have issues reading your content, watching videos, or downloading your report. Even on mobile devices, mobile users will enjoy navigating your site because of it’s mobile-friendliness.
Not all content marketing sites are business blogs or news sites. If you’re looking to build a food or recipe-based website, consider Foodica.
Foodica fills the food-blog gap by providing a beautiful, easy to use theme for food or recipe-based websites. It features a beautiful slider, responsive layout, and featured slider support for posts.
Note that there are two versions of Foodica — the Lite version is free, while the Pro version costs $69 and comes with additional customizations, support, and a recipe index.
When you mean business (a site that will make you money), you’ve got to consider a theme that was designed for that. There are several ways to monetize and make money from a blog.
That said, do you know that the manner by which you place your affiliate links, promotional banners, and other calls-to-action plays a vital role in your conversion rate?
Absolutely. It does!
Business WordPress theme may be free, but it comes with premium functionalities that make it easier to advertise on your blog like a pro. Apart from the monetization aspect, the single post is given top priority, as well.
You can customize your logo, header image, background color, or other images. Its responsive design with the drag-and-drop slideshow interface gives you an added experience, and your site visitors will fall in love with it.
GreatMag is 100% free to use. It’s a magazine theme and has features that enable you to optimize your homepage and add important sections such as about us, our portfolio, products, and careers.
The front page image slider is ideal for showcasing your latest completed projects, clients you’ve worked with, testimonials, or some of the works you’re proud of.
When it comes to branding, GreatMag is flexible. You can upload your logo in the header section, and it’ll be seen clearly because the space provided is large. You can also use different themes to customize your site to your liking.
It also offers bundled widgets so you can easily (and quickly) get your site up and running, works with Google Fonts, features a page builder, and is 100% translation ready.
At some point in your blogging business, you’ll need to focus on getting the right content out, attracting a loyal audience, and answering their questions. You may not need a fancy theme at such points, except if you don’t have enough money to buy a premium theme. But, you can use this Basic theme.
You may think that there is nothing special about ‘Basic’ free WordPress theme, but that’s not true. Most successful marketing blogs are built on minimalist personal blog designs, with the primary focus on the content and user.
If you’re just starting out with WordPress, you need to start with a theme that you can learn from, not a sophisticated one that requires a high level of coding experience.
The layout of the Basic free WordPress theme is super simple, giving you the freedom to customize your site’s look and feel. You can achieve this through the Themify options panel.
This theme was designed with features that will take you from where you are in your content marketing career to a new level. The lightbox gallery, RSS, footer menu, 5 theme skins, social icons, child theme support, and more will enhance your blogging experience and that of your users.
Parallax is a free WordPress theme, and I’ve seen it at work on several industry blogs. It’s well designed and has modern features to bring your content to life. It features parallax scrolling to present beautiful images in an easy-to-navigate format.
One of the challenges of content marketing is producing engaging content. Even if you succeed at creating the right type of content, how do you present it to your audience? What format will be best for you? Parallax is one of the responsive WordPress themes that can help here.
What if you can cut through the chase, use the different widgets for the header, sidebar, footer, and single post to showcase different content types such as videos, slide presentations, blog posts, e-books, and continue to evolve your site based on real metrics?
Parallax offers a drag-and-drop editor, meets SEO best practices, and helps increases time on page with 3D animation effects. Just remember that these images are heavy, so they can slow page speed down.
Airi is the right WordPress theme to use for pretty much any type of business site. For example, if you run a digital camera reviews blog, you can use this theme to display your best shots, edited works, and more.
This theme is highly customizable, as it was built with the Elementor plugin that allows you to easily move all the elements around. It also supports Ecommerce if your business sells physical or digital products.
Airi also offers a bunch of demos you can import, edit, and publish. If you want a professional website done fast, this is an ideal theme to consider.
I like Live Wire WordPress theme because of two things: it’s free, and it’s clean. Any search engine will love its responsive design. It’s primarily designed with mobile in mind and includes an advanced options panel for structuring your layout. It supports Hybrid Tabs, post formats, Gravity Forms, and much more.
Live Wire has features that make it possible for you to customize several elements, such as your navigation menus, layouts, CSS, and even your background.
The theme also includes breadcrumbs, sticky posts, translation-ready capability, featured images, and more.
Note: LiveWire hasn’t been updated recently, but it still gets great reviews. Just keep in mind you could have issues with newer WP features and plugins.
Hemingway’s free WordPress theme is specifically made for bloggers who want to improve their blogs. This theme was designed to conform with the latest version of WordPress, it’s streamlined, and it has the parallax scrolling effect.
It features a two-column layout that was designed specifically with bloggers in mind. Other features include retina-ready assets, block-editor supports, and customizable styles.
As a high-quality theme, Hemingway is sleek, but the developers kept it minimalist design style that always puts content first compared to some other highly responsive WordPress themes. It’s mobile responsive, which means that any device can display this theme perfectly.
Fullby was inspired by Twenty Fourteen, one of the world’s most popular themes, with over 1 million downloads. At first glance, Fullby gives you that feeling of a professional site, because of its layout design.
The framework for this free WordPress theme is based on the latest Bootstrap framework. This is a grid style, lightweight, and fully responsive (displays well on any mobile or desktop device) theme.
You’ll also like the lightweight theme, which includes two customizable images, and the featured option for the posts can be structured exactly as you want it.
This is a good platform for your content, and the galleries and videos that are supported make this theme a favorite for most celebrities. If you’re a blogger, you’re a celebrity, too.
This Fullby free WordPress theme is fully optimized for search engines and has functionalities for your single post page and custom sidebar.
Conclusion
There, you’ve got it, the 32 professional, free WordPress themes to help make your content marketing more effective. Remember that it doesn’t matter which industry your working in because as much as content is king, design is the prime minister.
Getting one of the most responsive WordPress themes is important, even when starting. And there are so many to choose from.
When you give ample time to choosing the best theme for your blog, especially at the beginning, you’re establishing your foot in your industry. Your brand becomes noticeable to your target audience, and, trust me, that is priceless.
What is your favorite free WordPress theme, and why do you love it?
