3 Content Marketing Lessons from 3 World-Class Content Marketers

Have a minute? Good.

Because that may be all it takes to save the life of a blog—your company blog.

Fifty-one percent of B2B marketers indicate they will increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months, according to Content Marketing Institute. Yet most of the today’s content marketing teams lack content creation skills, content marketing strategy, and subject matter expertise.

Despite all these, some content marketers are creating impressive content strategies, writing a powerful blog post that turns readers into buyers, and raking millions in sales. And they do it simply like a writer scribing social media post on a sunny afternoon.

Take a minute to learn how from the online marketing masters:

1. Neil Patel: Visual blog content rocks the Internet show.

The digital planet known as the World Wide Web is changing…

A simple 500-word content sans image post doesn’t get many eyeballs these days. People are tired of reading a block of words that just tell the reader about events and not actually show them the events in graphical, visual forms. Visual content is what works online today.

We love visuals not just because they’re appealing to our senses, but because our brains process visuals 60, 000 times faster than text. That’s why 74 percent of marketers use visual assets these days in their social media marketing, up from 71 percent in 2015, according to a 2016 research by Social Media Examiner. If you want to capture your audience’s attention, you must use visual assets in your blog posts, whitepapers, and videos.

“Visual content is the future,” Neil Patel, one of the top content marketers in the world says. “And it’s time we jumped on board.”

2. Brian Clark: Publish valuable posts…for free.

The secret of content marketing lies in its generous art of giving.

Teaching valuable lessons to your readers.

Giving out free resources to online users.

Writing and publishing super valuable posts…always – for free consumption.

Giving builds trust. Trust builds a blogger’s credibility. Credibility generates sales. That’s how a small blog can grow into a large company. For example, Brian Clark started Copyblogger on a small scale, publishing his Cornerstone Content and giving out his Copywriting 101 for free.

And then grow it big with time. “I’ve been giving away free, valuable content for 19 years, and all eight successful businesses I’ve started were powered by it,” Clark said in his recent post. Once you started giving out valuable posts to your readers, they’ll begin to know you more, trust you, and even began to like you.

And don’t forget: You’ll reap your reward in the future. They’ll buy from you, and even tell their peers to do the same, especially if your content has some emotional stories to take home.

3. Jon Morrow: Emotional stories inspire action.

Content marketing is not about spending thousands of dollars on a blog design.

It’s not about publishing 100 in-depth blog posts.

It’s not about getting torrents of comments and email subscriptions from your readers.

It’s simply about converting your readers into buyers. Successful bloggers and marketers know that tool well, and they deploy every resource—at their disposal—to ensure that they convert that cold prospect into a repeat customer. They do that simply: By incorporating emotional storylines in their content, inspiring their readers to take action.

Jon Morrow of Smart Blogger is an expert in that. His watershed post, “How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World” published on Problogger, actually save a reader from committing suicide.

Want to write such powerful, emotional posts?

Jon advises that you start with:

• Imagining the emotion you want to create in your reader.
• Cultivating that emotion in yourself.
• Letting the emotion lose.

“You do so by letting it flow through you and into your words,” Jon says.

That’s how you write emotional stories in your blog posts, inspiring your cold prospect to take action.