A Week of Content: The Top Stories from the Web 1st Edition
A Week of Content is part of Content Heroes curation strategy. Here, we celebrate the best stories from around the web that talk about content marketing, writing, and anything in-between.
This week, it’s all about creating content that’s going to be a success.
Check out our picks below, or grab the entire list as a Readlist.
How to Grow Your Blog to 100,000 Visits a Month Within 1.5 Years
by Neil Patel of Quick Sprout.
I am continuously blown away by Neil Patel’s weekly blog posts. If you’re an entrepreneur and seek business advice backed up by real life case studies, Quick Sprout is a blog you should be following. The stand out article this week is “How to Grow Your Blog to 100,000 Visits a Month Within 1.5 Years”, where Patel talks about long-form content and how it can increase search engine traffic.
The article is great because it shows real Google Analytics snapshots and showcases different websites as examples – this post isn’t just somebody making an intelligent observation. Patel has increased the search engine traffic of several of his projects by integrating schema.org markup into pieces of content created. This markup is picked up by Google and one of the search engines latest innovations, the ‘In-depth Articles’ box, which displays articles at the top of its results page which are over 2,200 words in length.
Patel offers lots of tips for marketers to take advantage of this, and if you leave a comment, he’ll happily offer you advice on the subject. Awesome!
How to Hit the Headlines
by Jess Champion of Distilled.
The Distilled Blog offers excellent insight into content marketing and it always has an article worth reading. This week, the stand out blog post was “How to Hit the Headlines”, by Jess Champion. The article covers a topic that many marketers struggle to get right – creating news that it going to get found and shared. Champion talks though key aspects of hitting the headlines; timeliness, impact, prominence, proximity, bizareness, conflict, uniqueness, human interest; and delivers a story that’s extremely valuable.
Hitting the headlines and being the source for news is something that marketers dream of – it can result in lots of traffic, lots of links, and lots of customers.
Using plenty of examples for reference, the article on Distilled delves deep into what makes a piece of content headline worthy, and it even includes the most important aspect of all… an obligatory picture of a cat.
If you’re in need of a resource on PR and making it work for you, this is it. Thanks Jess!

Obligatory Cat
AwesomenessTV: Making YouTube A Place For Long-Form Content Success
Long-form content is an essential ingredient to a successful content marketing strategy – when I talk about long-form content, primarily, I’m referring to in-depth articles and storytelling. But, as Lori Kozlowski notes in her latest article as a contributor for Forbes, video can play a huge role too.
How much of a role? A rather large and successful one. The article discusses AwesomenessTV, a YouTube channel set up by Brian Robbins. His company was sold to DreamWorks for $33 million in cash just two years after coming to be.
Although AwesomenessTV’s story is incredible, the underlying point to this coverage is that YouTube, and video in general, can be long-form. We just have to think past our notepad.
Content Marketing: The Good, the Blog and the User
by Cheryl Ambruch of The VAR Guy.
Are you content marketing? Indeed, it’s a great question. We certainly are. But are you, dear reader?
If you’re not, you almost certainly should be, and Cheryl Ambruch agrees. Highlighting a study released by the Content Marketing Institute, Ambruch goes into what content marketing is, its overall effectiveness, and poses her own questions throughout:
How do you measure content effectiveness? Are you blogging? Ultimately, this article takes a single direction – if you aren’t focusing on creating content that is for your user, you’re doing it all wrong. Ambruch is right, of course.
Like the best of articles, Ambruch’s doesn’t lack substance – she answers each question posed by herself with tangible information, advice, injecting each with a little bit of personality. If you’re unfamiliar with content marketing and if you need a kick up the backside to get to know it a little better, this is a great place to start.