Your blog is a digital hub for the valuable, educational, and entertaining content you create for your target persona. Its goal is to increase awareness, drive traffic to your site, generate leads, and establish authority – leading to profitable customer action.  

But running a successful blog is a challenge for some businesses, and it requires constant analysis to ensure your current content strategy is effective. This can be done by reviewing the content you’ve created, assessing what worked or didn’t work, and creating a plan of action to improve going forward. Or in other words, conducting a blog audit.  

This process can help you uncover what content resonates most with your ideal prospects, and in turn, guide your content strategy and increase your awareness, engagement, and even conversions. It gives you a high-level view of how well your blog is (or isn’t) performing, and identifies gaps and opportunities in your blog strategy.  

The good news: it’s not as complicated as it sounds. And if you’re wondering where to start, what to evaluate or how to apply your findings, we’ve created a simple system to help you evaluate your own blog and begin seeing real results from your content. 

There was a time when writing a few good blog posts a month was enough to engage readers and keep them coming back. Today, however, there is much more at stake. User experience, or UX, plays a critical role in delivering quality blog content.

While it has its roots in design, UX - in this aspect - refers to how readers interact with or experience your content.

Are they able to understand the message you’re conveying? 
Can they find the information they’re looking for?
Is the content formatted in a way that captures - and holds - their attention?

When factoring in UX, quality content goes beyond the words on the page. It involves a number of considerations that can influence whether a reader bounces (leaves your website after viewing a single blog post) or stays to learn more about your business and what it offers - ultimately leading to a conversion. It’s not enough to have good content, you must also create an enjoyable experience for those reading it.

A few years ago you started to blog. It went well. Your brain was fresh, and ideas for new articles flowed. But then life happened. You got busy at work, and you got busier at home. Before you knew what happened, your once-a-week blog update slowed to once-a-month. And then it slowed further to one new update every few months. And then you woke up one day and realized that you haven’t posted an update to your blog in over nine months. 

Lack of time is an easy excuse. However, I guarantee you that if your blog was producing the results you thought, it would, then you would find the time. Let’s be honest. It’s not really the lack of time. It’s the lack of results.

Are you using content in the sales process? How do you use content in the sales process?

Likely, your marketing team has created a large amount of great content that's not only beneficial for lead generation, but is also helpful for lead nurturing. This content could range from informational blog posts to ebooks, checklists, or industry guides. 

In this video, I share one important way to utilize content in the sales process that many salespeople overlook. This one, simple tip can help improve a salesperson's sales performance.

As we kick off the new year, it's safe to say that content still reigns as king in the B2B world, and it seems that it's going to stay that way. With B2B marketers who use blogs saying that they get 67% more leads than those who don't, and companies who blog see 97% more links to their site than those who don't, it's clear that blogging should be a part of your B2B marketing strategy. 

So, do you really need to spend time to promote your blog? Isn’t the point of a blog to promote your website? Yes and yes. Your blog is, indeed, a big opportunity to drive traffic to your website and promote your business as well as your products and services, but it needs strategic guidance to be successful in driving traffic and converting leads. Many industry experts preach the 80/20 rule when it comes to content and promotion, saying that 20% of your time should be spent creating content, and 80% of your time should be spent promoting it. Think of your blog like a garden that's meant to feed your family. The whole purpose of the garden is to create food—but you need to feed it, water it, and tend to it to get the desired results. The same is true of your blog. 

When people ask us, "Where should I share my blog?" we suggest these eight free ways to distribute blog content. There are additional distribution channels that include paid promotion and advertising, but this list focuses on eight ways you can share you B2B blog content immediately that we've found successful for our clients and ourselves.

We hope you had a great Christmas and are enjoying this holiday season with family and friends. As we draw closer to the New Year, we are taking some time to reflect on 2018 and the success we've seen our clients achieve. 

Blogging is a mighty strategy when done correct, and it's a goal of ours to provide our clients and visitors top-notch, quality content to teach them and guide them to success. We've searched for the most popular blogs of 2018, and we've curated these lists that will publish each day this week to bring you some of the most educational and informative content from the year. Check out these top blogs on content strategy from 2018, and let them guide your content marketing efforts in 2019! 

Developing a solid inbound marketing and content strategy is something that most companies struggle with. In fact, a study from Ascend2 and its research partners revealed that 46% of the marketing, sales, and business professionals surveyed around the world said that the lack of an effective strategy and the creation of content are the most challenging obstacles to reaching the next level of inbound marketing performance. LeadG2 uses a 7-Step Lead Generation Process to help our clients navigate and embrace an inbound marketing culture.

Attempting to tackle your entire content marketing to-do list in one day could be overwhelming. Actually, it would be VERY overwhelming. But if you can commit to doing one thing each day over the next 12 days leading up to Christmas, you'll be on the road to improving your overall content marketing efforts that will have you ringing in the New Year on the right foot!

It's Thanksgiving week, which is a time to reflect on all of the things that make you happy, contribute to your success, and help you to grow. So in true Thanksgiving week fashion, we're reflecting on why we're thankful for inbound marketing. 

We believe that a solid inbound marketing strategy paired with sales performance is the key to results, and inbound marketing is the ideal approach to quality lead generation that aligns with a sales team's strategy to deliver the results a company needs for success. Below are just three reasons we're thankful for inbound marketing, and why we believe in, and stand behind, this methodology and the work that we do with our clients. 

Have you been churning out quality content for years for your business and industry? Does traffic to your blog still come from old posts? Are ebooks published three years ago still converting? You're not alone.