When your audience reads your blog content you want them to click away thinking, “Wow, that was awesome!” – after they share it with their friends, of course. There are tried and true ways to create wow-worthy content for your blog that you should consider if you want your blog to be truly successful.

* Know Your Audience – Remember, just because you know who your audience is today doesn’t mean that in a couple of years your audience hasn’t evolved. Keep your ears to the ground, studying your audience as they grow so that you stay ahead of trends. A great example to look at is a company like Ivory Soap, which has been around for so long. Their audience consists of the same demographics, but the morals and ideas of the demographic have changed a great deal.

* Keep Up-to-Date on Industry Trends – The more you know about your industry, the more you’ll have to share with your audience. Being aware of what is going on will make you the go-to person for the right information on the niche you’re involved with. Not only that, reading and studying your industry will also make you better at doing what you do and it will show in the effect your content has on your audience.

* URL Structure and Tags Matter – Some bloggers underestimate the power of the right URL structure and the tags they use on their blog posts. These factors still matter. The best URL consists of a unique keyword-rich title. The best tags consist of keywords that are within the content. Don’t forget the tags on your images. Make it count.

* Know Your Numbers – Do you know what kind of blog posts get the most traction on your blog? If you don’t, you should know. Once you figure out which type of blog posts get the most shares, views, engagement and conversions you can create more of that type that works, and make the most of the ones that are working by promoting them harder.

* Create Shareable Content – Content that has a reason for being along with great images, or content in video form, is shared more than other types of blog posts. Pay attention to what your audience shares and create more of that.

* Link Internally – A great way to cause more impact and up the wow factor in your blog posts is to practice good linking practices by linking internally to other blog posts that relate to the current blog post your audience is reading.

* Understand How Keywords Work – There are many types of keywords, from short tail to long tail and all in between. The more you can understand how keywords work and which keywords are important within your niche, the better you can use them to your advantage.

* Use Many Forms of Content – Don’t skimp on using different forms of content such as video, images, podcasts, text and more. Your blog will be much more dynamic and interesting with all types of content used. For example, some “how to” blogs might be best presented via video rather than a text only post.

* Engage Your Readers – Don’t leave out your call to action and reader engagement ideas such as asking them to buy, click, read, comment or other actions you want them to take. By talking to them as if they’re real people, you’ll get a lot more conversions than if you just leave it up to chance.

Creating wow-worthy content for your blog will come naturally the more you understand your niche, and how your audience engages with the internet. If you’re unsure about how to proceed, consider polling your audience to find out what types of content they prefer and what products and services they need most.

Finding people who are good at content marketing can sometimes be difficult. You can take several approaches such as looking for “content marketers” on Google or on professionally-oriented social media like LinkedIn. Follow these tips to better understand that sometimes the title is less important than the results of the work.

1. Know What Type of Content You Need – No writer or marketer can be an expert in everything. Therefore, it’s imperative that you understand exactly what type of writing you need before you begin trying to market any content that has been created.

2. Understand Who Your Audience Is – Knowing the audience is important because that helps you to identify the type of content that you need. It is essential to have a clear understanding of your audience and the various segments involved in order to create and market excellent content that gets results.

3. Look for Subject Matter Experts – If you can find subject matter experts to be on your team, even if they’re not the writers, you can use their knowledge to develop excellent content. Most college courses for example are created by a team consisting of a technical writer and a subject matter expert.

4. Find Industry Experts – Use the resources at your fingertips to find industry experts that might be willing to help develop your content strategy and work with your writing team. Without an expert, your content may often be inaccurate or just “keyword” articles that are written for search engines instead of people.

5. Be Willing to Pay a Fair Rate – If you truly want to hire trained content marketing professionals who have experience as well as even college degrees, then you must be willing to pay them a professional and fair rate for the work they will do at the quality level you expect. When it comes to content marketing, you most certainly get what you pay for.

6. Ask Colleagues for Recommendations – Usually, the people you work with and around know people who are expert content marketers that you can trust. Ask for recommendations from these groups. If you’re a member of an industry forum, that’s a great place to ask.

7. Search on LinkedIn – You can find a lot of people who are experts with recommendations right on LinkedIn by doing a search. You may need to join groups and communicate that way at first, unless you can find someone to introduce you.

8. Search Twitter for Experts – Twitter is an excellent way to find experts on any subject using the keywords that are common in your industry as well as “content marketing.” However, you’re going to get better results by hiring a good technical writer, a copywriter, and subject matter experts.

Working with content marketing experts requires you and them to have knowledge and skill in the industry that you want to market and not just general content marketing and writing skills. Only people on the inside are going to know what will work best for your particular audience.

When you create a blog about any topic or niche, the first thing you’ll need is an abundance of content. You’ll need copy for each page of your blog such as the about page and other pages of the blog. You also need blog posts to keep content and newly updated information flowing through the blog, so that search engines will keep ranking you at the top.

* Study Your Audience – It’s imperative that before you start creating content, you understand who your audience is. Know them down to their income, sex, desires, wants, needs, and more. This is how you’ll know what content to create, as well as how they like to consume it.

* Understand Your Niche – In addition, you need to truly understand your niche so that you can write and educate your audience about it. You’ll need to create content that is engaging, informative, educational and that encourages your audience to interact with them.

* Know What You Want to Promote – It helps to also know what you are trying to accomplish with each blog post. Do you want to promote a product or service? And is it your own or someone else’s? How does this product or service solve problems that your audience has? Can you educate them on the problem as you promote the solution?

* Decide What Forms of Content You’ll Need – Your audience may need beginning information or they may be advanced at your niche; you know them best. Knowing this, you’ll be able to choose the forms of content – whether they are educational, or conversational and interactive, or focused in another way.

* Choose Which Types of Content You Want to Use – You’ll need to use many types of content, such as text, video, images, and more to keep your audience’s interest. Not only that, you need to use the type of content that search engines like, such as video, long-form text posts and more.

* Create an Editorial Calendar – Don’t go forward without a plan of action. Create an editorial calendar to help you keep your content development more organized. You can always add more content as news develops and issues occur, but at least have an outline of the type and forms of content you’ll use for promoting the products and services that you have.

* Find Help – If you’re not sure how to go forward, you can contract with a content strategist, writers, and others to help you get things done. Having a plan and then implementing that plan will ensure your success with creating content for your blog.

* Repeat – Once you set things up and create momentum, keep it going. Blogging is a long-term marketing strategy that you must keep doing to continue your success.

Creating content for your blog needs to be something you do on a regular and ongoing basis. Shoot for three to five times a week at first. Once you become popular, you can slow it down to once a week if you include authoritative long-form content. The thing is to keep your blog at the top of the search results as well as keep your audience engaged, informed, and interacting with you.

When you want to be effective with your content marketing efforts, it’s important to develop a content calendar. A content calendar will help you plan out the content you will need to create. It will help you publish your content at the right time, in order to promote the events, products, services and information that your audience needs.

The point of creating a content calendar is to ensure that you, as well as those with whom you work, can all be on the same page in regards to content creation for your business. This may include content for your blogs, social media accounts and more. Plus, all of the content needs to go together to get the marketing results that you want.

* Identify the Topics You Need to Cover – Before you get started creating a calendar, you need to know what type of topics you need to cover. It’s important to identify a specific niche and then work from there.

* Know Who Your Audience Is – Understanding your audience is one of the most important things you can do. This will help you with content creation, because you will know what your audience needs to know about your niche in order to decide to make a purchase from you.

* Determine What You Already Have in Terms of Content – Check the inventory you already have regarding content. Update anything that needs updating, and practice good internal linking to bring attention to other content to your audience.

* Make a List of the Products and Services You Want to Promote – What are the products and services you want to promote right now? From that list you should be able to create at least five to ten pieces of content for each product or service.

* Know the Objective of Every Piece of Content – When you create any piece of content, you need to know what the ultimate point is. Is it to get newsletter subscribers? Is it to make a sale? Is it to educate before pitching the product or service?

* Note Launch Dates for New Products, Events or Services – Within the calendar, note the launch dates of any new products or services that you plan to promote. This will enable you to work backwards into the calendar to push out content at the right time.

* Make a Spreadsheet with Logical Headings – You’re going to want your spreadsheet to make sense and include logical headings like article title, assigned to, draft due date, objective, promotion, keywords, CTA and so forth. Leave a space for anything you want to track, including social media networks and so on.

* Track Everything – Within your spreadsheet, leave a space for tracking the results of your content marketing efforts. What you track will be what is successful.

There are some awesome tools that you can use such as Google Drive’s Google Docs to set up the spreadsheet that everyone works from. If you want to take that a step further, you can use something like Kapost.com if you have a high volume of content needs.

When you are guest blogging, the first thing to understand is what your goals are for doing so. Some typical goals are gaining credibility, spreading awareness and building backlinks. But, in order to know whether or not you’re effective in reaching your goals, you’ll need to know how to track the effectiveness.

* Tracking Traffic – To know if the backlinks are working to gain traffic, you’ll need to get advanced about using Google Analytics. You can set up inside analytics to track traffic coming from certain domains. Set up one for each domain you’ve guest blogged at. If a particular blog isn’t working to get traffic, stop guest blogging there and move on. If one is working well, pitch more blog posts to them.

* Tracking Blogs – When you publish a guest blog post you should put the blog name into a spreadsheet, with a link to your guest post. Make a copy of the landing page link in the spreadsheet and a note of whatever freebies or discounts you offered those website visitors.

* Tracking Comments – Using the spreadsheet, you want to periodically click through to the post so you can see if there are comments on your post. That way you can respond to them. Being responsive to comments is an important component of successful guest blogging.

* Tracking Sales – If you have set up specific landing pages for each place you put a guest blog, it will be super simple to determine which guest blog posts are getting the most sales. This is another reason to set up special links and special landing pages, as well as special affiliate accounts for the bloggers who let you guest post.

* Tracking Newsletter Sign-Ups – If you’ve used some of your blog posts to get more newsletter sign-ups then you should have no trouble knowing where sign-ups came from, since they should go to a special list designed to collect these names.

* Tracking Social Media – When you guest post you should also put social media links in your bio box. But, it can be hard to know where the links came from. So, you can build something in to help you track such as asking them a question in the blog post and asking them to go answer that question at your Facebook group, or to tweet with a certain hashtag. Plus, you can use the native analytics to find out where visitors are originating from.

* Tracking Your Ranking – While Google is not focused on page rank anymore, the fact is you still want your search results to appear on the first or second page for keywords that you are trying to rank for, right? Therefore you still want to know how and where Google has ranked your site.

* Use the Tools of the Trade – There are software and tools that you can use to help you track your guest blogging, such as Link Assistant. Using this software you can find out how you rank for specific keywords, visitors and more.

Link to Link Assistant – http://www.link-assistant.com/

Some things are easier to track than others, such as traffic. Other things you may have to think about a little harder. But, you can be sure that if there is a will there is a way to track what you need to know, to ensure that your guest blogging adventures are a success.

When it comes to building traffic to your website, the thing to remember the most is that quality matters more than quantity. You’ve likely heard before that “less is more,” and that’s definitely true when it comes to building traffic to your website using methods like blogging, social media marketing and more. But, in some ways the idea of quality over quantity is not even a real choice.

The Importance of Quality

The real questions you should answer are:

* What is your purpose? – Explain the reasons behind doing what you’re doing in one to three sentences.

* Who is your audience? – Explain who you’re doing it for by creating a persona of your ideal client or customer.

* How fast do you want to succeed? – What is the timeline of your success story?

The thing is, high quality should be a given. The next question is how much time you have to devote to producing the type of quality that you want to produce, and how quickly you want to experience success. It’s all a numbers game and easy to break down if you understand your niche and industry.

A Plan of Action

When you determine the type of traffic you want, it will dictate the type of content you create for your audience. Then, figure out how many visitors you need to get to your website to convert to a certain number of sales. Work out how each piece of content you use, and each pay per click you add, affects those goals, and from this you can create a plan of action.

That plan needs to include both quality and quantity, at least up to the point where you are generating the amount of traffic you need to generate in order to earn the amount of money you’ve planned to earn.

For example, suppose in your niche an average daily visitor total is 200 a day, your product costs 20 dollars and your conversion rate is 5%. This means that for every 200 visitors, you’ll make 10 sales. That would be, in this case, $200 dollars per day gross earnings for your efforts. If you want to have more results, you’ll need to produce above average traffic or increase the price of your product.

The best way to increase traffic is to increase the amount of activity on your website through blog posts and various other types of content that you offer your audience, but to keep the quality high. So, that’s why the idea of a choice between quality and quantity is really not a real choice. Depending on your goals, you may have to do both. You’re always going to need to produce high quality information or products – that’s expected. But, you may bring the quantity of the content you add to your website or the development of new products up faster or slower depending on your goals.

When you decide to engage in video blogging, you can start with the webcam on your computer, but after a little time you may want to try to make your videos more professional. Any tool that you can use to make your videos better is a great idea. But, it’s important to try different types of tools to ensure that you can find something that will work for you.

* An iPhone – Love them or hate them, Apple makes some really useful and great products. Apple iPhones have superb video quality and you can even find tutorials online that teach you how to use your iPhone to make professional quality video.

* A Good Camera – Many digital cameras today also allow you to take videos with them. You can purchase many different types of cameras in many price ranges.

Link – http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=digital%20cameras%20that%20take%20stills%20and%20video

* A Webcam – Most computers today come with webcams but you can also purchase HD webcams that take really good videos.

Link – http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Portable-1080p-Webcam-Autofocus/dp/B004YW7WCY/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1424760120&sr=8-3&keywords=HD+webcam

* Camtasia – The crème de la crème of video editing, with a price to match. But, if you really want to be serious, you should consider good editing software.

Link – http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html

* Lightworks – This editing software will rival Camtasia, and it’s in beta right now, so you may be able to try it out for free. Real movies have been edited with this software.

Link – http://www.lwks.com/

* YouTube Editor – YouTube offers an editor that is just for YouTube videos for free. You can use it in the cloud and make your videos perfect.

Link – https://www.youtube.com/editor

* Prezi – This cloud-based editing software helps you make videos look professional, to include easily added royalty free music and images. You can use it free if you want all videos public.

Link – http://prezi.com/pricing/

* Animoto – This cloud-based video editing software gives you access to the music you need for your videos and so much more. It can be pricy but it is worth it if you aren’t very technical.

Link – https://animoto.com/business/pricing

* Windows Live Essentials – This photo and video editing software is free. It might even already be on your computer.

Link – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/essentials

* iMovie for Mac – You can get this high-powered editor inexpensively, but you won’t skimp on features. It literally does everything.

Link – https://www.apple.com/mac/imovie/

* CyberLink Power Director – Choose between five choices and levels of functionality for this super-powerful video editor without the professional price.

Link – http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector-ultra/features_en_US.html?&r=1

* Adobe Creative Cloud – For a small monthly fee you can have access to some of the most powerful movie maker and video production software available.

Link – https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html

The tools available in all price ranges and skill levels are practically unlimited. Try out a few different choices to see which is easier for you. Don’t worry about price as much as ability to use it. If it costs a lot of money and does all kinds of amazing things, but you cannot use it, what’s it really worth?