12 Easy Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing Skills
12 E-Commerce Podcasts That Will Elevate Your Skills
February 4, 2023
12 Creative Packaging Ideas for Online Sellers
February 7, 2023You’ve got a blog, an email-subscriber list a mile long, and you UTM all of your social media content because this ain’t your first content marketing rodeo. But this isn’t enough for you anymore.
No, now you’re ready to refine your strategy, stay current on new tools and trends, and analyze your results with a more discerning eye. We applaud your initiative and present you with 12 ways you can easily improve your content marketing skills to stay at the top of your game.
How to Improve Your Content Marketing Skills
So, content has to be high-quality, engaging, authoritative, trustworthy, and SEO-friendly? Phew. That’s a tall order. But don’t worry — you can improve your content marketing skills one step at a time. Choose one or two of the items below each month to help boost your knowledge and results.
1. Subscribe to This Free Magazine
Content Marketing Institute offers an awesome (and free) subscription to their magazine: CCO — Chief Content Officer.
It’s filled with current and upcoming trends in content marketing you’ll want to know about. But it’s also got interviews with key players in the industry too. It’s available in a digital edition and is published a few times a year. Subscribing to this complimentary mag is a great way to gain a deeper understanding of content marketing and how you can make it work for your business.
2. Listen to Content Marketing Webinars
Want to continually improve your content marketing skills? Sign up for free webinars that cover everything from new tools to A/B testing email subject lines.
Because most webinars are recorded, you’ll be able to work them into your schedule even if you can’t make the scheduled time.
To find out about upcoming webinars, sign up for emails from a few top CM sites. (Yeah, I know… no one wants more emails… but these ones will be beneficial to your growth.)
3. Become a Podcast Addict
If webinars aren’t your thing, check out small business podcasts instead. They’re great because they’re easy to insert into a busy routine by listening during your morning/evening commute, while you’re doing the dishes, having coffee, taking a bath, and so on.
Give these marketing podcasts a whirl — they’re perfect for the content marketer on the go:
- The Inbound Success Podcast
- Marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield
- This Old Marketing Podcast with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose
Looking for social media podcasts or e-commerce podcasts? Click the links for our top picks.
4. Give Interactive Content a Try
Sites like Apester and WooBox let you create polls and quizzes to keep your audience entertained and coming back for more. You can also use interactive content to get valuable information about your audience and as a method for crowdsourcing. These affordable tools integrate easily with your CMS and can be a fun, new way to reach your target audience.
5. Analyze Your Content Marketing Efforts
In order to improve your content marketing skills, it’s important to try new things. And that’s why the best content marketers are always experimenting. (Not unlike a mad scientist, but with words, not potions.) Sumo can help you do this with their suite of (mostly free!) tools. From a heat map that tells you where people are clicking to customizable pop-ups that collect email addresses, Sumo has a lot to offer the savvy content marketer. (But no coding or tech skills are needed to use their tools.)
Hot tip: Don’t keep all of their tools running at once, as it can drag down your page load times, and ain’t nobody got time for that.
6. Stop Relying Solely on Spell-Check
Put your content into Hemingway App or Grammarly (in addition to using spell check) if you want to give your readers a better experience.
Both tools show you where you’ve used passive voice, point out weak sentences, and give you simpler alternatives when you try to use buzzwords. However, Grammarly’s tool is more in-depth and will help you improve your sentence structure and catch errors before they go live.
7. Try Publishing Your Content on Linkedin
If you have a blog, consider republishing your posts on Linkedin or creating unique content specifically for the platform. You’ll broaden your professional network this way and help to establish yourself as an industry leader. Keep in mind that business/marketing/social media/work-related topics do best on this platform.
8. Fine-Tune Your SEO Efforts
If you have a WordPress blog, Yoast or RankMath will help boost your content marketing skills by letting you easily optimize your posts. These wonderful plug-ins make it simple for you to optimize each page of your site. They will alert you when your keyword density is low, when you’ve forgotten to use your keyword in your meta description, and when you’re linking to the phrase you’re trying to rank for.
They’ll even let you specify the headline and image you want your readers to see when each blog post is shared on social media — all for free.
9. Try Your Hand at Graphic Creation
As a content marketer, you know it can be hard to get your content noticed. Jazz things up a bit by creating your own images.
- Try PicMonkey for super-fast image editing and resizing, overlays, and fun photo effects. It’s $72 for an annual subscription, but the ease of use and bountiful features make it worth it.
- Check out Canva‘s free photo editor to create images from scratch for your social posts, email marketing, and blogging efforts. They have a ton of free icons, templates, overlays, fonts, and photos for you to play around with.
- Want to create a text-based image? Try Pablo — it’s super fast, and your images will look great.
10. Consider Buying a Stock-Image Subscription
If you use images often enough, buying a subscription from iStock or another site might be beneficial for you. Or, try the free sites Unsplash and Burst, which have beautiful photos you can use for free for your email newsletters, blog posts, an more.
11. Analyze Your Headlines and Email Subject Lines
Want to improve your content marketing skills? CoSchedule has a pretty cool tool that will analyze your headlines (and subject lines) based on length and word choice. Did you forget to use a power word? Is your headline too long? Are you using too many common words? This tool will tell it like it is.
12. Automate Your Emails
MailChimp is an affordable way to ramp up your email marketing efforts. At $13 per month, you can create welcome emails and a lead-nurture series to help keep your subscribers interested in your business.
Go Forth and Market
Well, there you have it! 12 tools that’ll turn you into an insanely good content marketer. From interactive content to better headlines, it takes time to improve your content marketing skills — and a lot of trial and error. The most important thing is to try, and luckily, there are many blogs, webinars, and podcasts where experts are willing to share their advice.
Read More
