Content Marketing Blogs: The Ultimate List

The amount of information available to marketers is vast, diverse and sometimes overwhelming. Because it can be difficult to find high quality content, I have put together a list of some of the top content marketing blogs out there. This list is intended to help content marketers find the information, education and value they’re seeking to improve their strategies and business as a whole.

Before we dive into the topics, let me first define a blog on how it’s interpreted in this post. A blog is an online publication that seeks to inform its readers with high quality, ethical and valuable insights that are published on a consistent basis by authors qualified to communicate them.

The topics covered in the list below include content marketing tactics, advice from experts, content marketing tools, content statistics and content curation – among others.

This list is by no means finished. With millions of blogs being published each day and the overwhelming amount of quality information on the Internet surrounding content marketing, I am sure to have missed more than a few first-class blogs. (If you don’t believe me, check out Worldometer’s blog counter.) If your favorite blog is not listed, or if you know of any other great source of content marketing information, leave me a comment below.

Here’s a list of content marketing blogs that I love; sorted by their focus. Thanks to Curata.com !

Social Media

Social Media Examiner – Their blog provides daily original content for readers on how to navigate the social media “jungle” through social networking, blogs and podcast best practices.

Social Media Today - This online community provides daily insight to PR, marketing and other professionals in disciplines that require information on social media.

Social Fresh – The goal of their blog is to inspire businesses to improve their marketing strategies through social media education.

Jeff Bullas’s Blog – Jeff Bullas is an author, blogger and strategist whose aim is to provide insight on aspects of social media marketing, content marketing and digital marketing.

Razor Social – This blog offers their independent advice on the latest in social media tools and social media technology.

Social Media Explorer – Their blog is a leading publisher of insights and opinions on social media marketing written internally and by a roster of marketing thought leaders.

Social Media Impact – The mission of this blog is to provide diversity of social media information to any and all who want to leverage social networking; for personal or business use.

Socialnomics – This online journal presents social media stories, trends, studies and statistics. The double interpretation of Socialnomics means that as the success of the site grows, the more social good they hope to give back.

SEO

Quick Sprout – Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and Hello Bar writes on how businesses can improve their search engine optimization and content marketing strategy.

Search Engine Watch – This site’s content revolves around tips and information on search, analysis of the search industry and support for site owners who want to improve their SEO.

Search Engine Land – This is a news and information blog on global trends and insights into search engine marketing, and the search engine industry as a whole.

Search Engine Journal – With a unique community-based approach to search marketing content, this blog obtains virtually all its content from real experts (in-house and independent Internet marketers).

SEO Copywriting – This blog aims to educate online marketers on optimizing their content for SEO with tips, training and writing advice.

Content Marketing & Strategy

Duct Tape Marketing – This blog provides advice for small businesses on how they can improve their marketing strategy through content marketing tactics.

Marketing Pilgrim – Covering all the latest news, insights and information related to online marketing, this blog helps readers implement content marketing processes.

Copyblogger – Copyblogger’s goal is to educate readers on how to “create killer online content” by providing information on all aspects of content marketing; from copywriting to SEO to social media.

Occam’s Razor – Author and digital marketing expert Avinash Kaushik writes on an array of digital marketing topics, giving readers actionable insights for their content strategies. He also provides great insight into marketing metrics.

Problogger – Professional blogger, Darren Rowse, writes on blogging tips and advice that marketers can implement into their content strategy.

Sparksheet – Sparksheet explores how various brands are using tools and platforms to distribute relevant content to the right audience.

Boost Blog Traffic – Started by Jon Morrow, Associate Editor of Copyblogger, Boost Blog Traffic aims to teach readers how to expand their audiences, build email lists and become thought leaders through content.

ClickZ – As the largest resource of interactive marketing news & information from search to social to technology, ClickZ offers advice to help content marketers do their jobs better.

Spin Sucks – This blog supports professional development of PR and marketing professionals through their daily publishing of content advice.

Seth Godin’s Blog – Seth Godin, best-selling author and marketing expert, writes on marketing, leadership, change and spreading new ideas.

Heidi Cohen’s Actionable Marketing Guide – Marketing expert, educator and writer, Heidi Cohen, provides actionable tips and advice for digital marketers on her blog.

Enchanting Marketing – This blog teaches readers how to gain followers, utilize SEO and create engaging content for target audiences.

B2B Marketing Insider – Michael Brenner, VP of Global Marketing at SAP, writes about marketing ideas and strategies that help marketers drive leads and engagement.

CMS Wire – This online publication provides content marketers with information on digital marketing, social business and enterprise information management, daily.

CMO.com – This blog publishes information on executive level strategies and marketing information for Chief Marketing Officers.

The Content Wrangler – The Content Wrangler offers insights and advice for content marketers on strategy, content management and best practices.

Web Ink Now – This blog, managed by author David Meerman Scott, provides content marketing strategy advice, as well as general leadership insights.

eContent – eContent features articles on digital marketing, publishing and media for businesses; targeting executive-level decision makers with strategic information.

Orbit Media Studios – The Orbit Media blog provides marketers with digestible information on management, content marketing, web design and various digital marketing tips.

Velocity –  The Velocity blog focuses on B2B content marketing and is a great information resource for marketers looking for a fresh take on content.

Marketing Technology

The Marketing Technology Blog – The Marketing Technology Blog provides daily updates from marketing professionals on the latest in marketing technology.

Chief Marketing Technologist Blog – Marketing technologist Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO at ion interactive, writes on marketing technology trends and insights.

Branding

Branding Strategy Insider – This blog’s goal is to provide insight for content marketers on how to build trust through strong branding and great content.

The Story of Telling – Author Bernadette Jiwa aims to help content marketers better sell their ideas to readers through great, engaging content.

Analysts & Research

Brian Solis’s Blog – Brian Solis, a principal analyst at Altimeter, anthropologist and futurist, writes about social business and how readers can use it to shape their organizations.

Jake Sorofman’s Blog – Jake Sorofman, Research Director at Gartner, writes about digital marketing strategy, trends and best practices for mobile, social and content marketing.

Ryan Skinner’s Blog – Ryan Skinner, Senior Analyst at Forrest, provides insight for marketing leadership professionals on content and experiences that drive customer engagement.

Rebecca Lieb’s Blog – As an analyst covering digital media and advertising at Altimeter, Rebecca Lieb offers expert insights on digital and content strategy for marketers.

Marketing Experiments Blog – This blog was the first Internet research lab to conduct and publish on experiments to optimize marketing and sales strategies.

Michael Fauscette’s Blog – Michael Fauscette, leader of IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group, offers advice and analysis on emerging software strategies for businesses.

eMarketer – This blog covers ecommerce, digital marketing and online media to offer insights and advice on the digital environment for marketers.

Econsultancy – This source of independent advice and insight offers content marketers a one-stop location to answer their digital marketing questions and improve their strategies.

Vendors/Consultants & News Sites

HubSpot – The HubSpot blog offers insights and advice for marketers on the topics of inbound marketing, sales and social media, as well as opinion articles.

Marketo – Marketo’s blog offers information in various key marketing areas including: marketing automation, social media, content marketing and email marketing.

ExactTarget – The blog at ExactTarget provides content marketers with daily insights on mobile, email, marketing automation and cross-channel strategy.

KISSmetrics – KISSmetrics offers content marketers information on SEO, online marketing and analytics to better shape their marketing processes.

Eloqua – Marketing technology, content marketing, email and social media are all touched upon in Eloqua’s blog to help educate marketers.

Buffer – Buffer’s blog focuses on UX, productivity, customer happiness, writing and life hacks to provide marketers with an all-encompassing view of business.

Curata – The Curata blog focuses on content marketing strategy insights, content curation best practices and everything marketers need to develop a successful content strategy, increase buyer engagement and improve their quality and quantity of leads.

Mashable – This news site has sections on social media, technology and business that contain insightful, fresh ideas for content marketers.

MarketingProfs – MarketingProfs provides consistent insights into the marketing world through a variety of topics: content, non-profit, customer behavior, ROI, PR, sales and more.

TopRank Online Marketing – The TopRank blog offers expert insights on new topics including content marketing, content tools, writing, SEO and social.

Inbound Marketing Agents – The expert writers at IMA focus on inbound marketing topics and provide a fresh take on these subjects for content marketers.

Content Marketing Institute – CMI writes daily engaging content for a wide audience on the topics of content, curation, ROI, social and many more topics with actionable value.

Convince and Convert - The Convince and Convert Blog aims to educate content marketers on their online strategies to improve their customer engagement and lead quality.

Moz – The Moz blog is a great asset for marketers and provides fresh ideas on content, SEO and providing value to buyers.

Unbounce – Online marketing insights, SEO, analytics and content are just some of the valuable insights the Unbounce blog covers for their audience.

Contentology – This blog focuses on everything content; from how to create a visual storytelling strategy, to social content to content marketing tools.

Bonus

Andy Crestodina's Orbit Media Blog. Andy simplifies content concepts so that they're easy to digest.

 
Moz's Blog. This site contains a wealth of search information that extends to content. Rand Fishkin has been a trailblazing SEO thought leader from the early days.

Why and How You Should Defy the Internet and Keep Original Content Alive

Samantha Shelley from Advanced Webranking

With Buzzfeed Inc. predicted to earn up to $120 million in revenue this year, it’s easy to understand why everyone and their pet guinea pigs are eager to jump on the blogging bandwagon. But with the bandwagon already jam-packed with similarly-minded content creators, how can we make sure our blogs are original and actually worth something to the people of the internet?

I’ve become increasingly frustrated at how “rehashed” content seems to be now, and a lot of so-called marketing blogs are some of the worst culprits. This is why I decided to write a plea of sorts, for writers everywhere to please keep original content alive! It’s not a call for you to toss SEO out of the window, but it is a case for well-written content that isn’t designed purely with SEO in mind.

“If you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.” – Matt Cutts, Google Webspam team

SEO is the bane of my existence sometimes – I can’t tell you how frustrating it can be having to write 35 city-specific landing pages for the same company, all of them 400 words long and all of them written differently!

We hear people self-righteously declaring the importance of “not writing for SEO” all the time, but how many of us have actually been taking that advice seriously? And how can we not consider such a huge player in the traffic generation game when writing?

But here’s the thing – if everyone just keeps on churning out utter crap in the name of SEO/link building/a deep need to prove themselves to their parents by making their herbal remedies blog wildly popular, then we’re all just losing. We’re saturating the internet with terrible to mediocre content, and wasting time that could be better spent writing genuinely good content that is naturally share-worthy because it’s actually valuable.

You might have to sacrifice quantity in the name of quality in order to improve your content, but you’re much more likely to cultivate a loyal following of engaged readers  blog, which will no doubt improve your ROI dramatically.

You would think this would be obvious, but apparently not. If you do research into a topic before forming your own ideas and original ways to explain something new to people, then fine. But don’t simply rephrase seven other articles you’ve read on the exact same topic.

I feel so cheated when I click on a link (complete with Buzzfeed-worthy catchy headline, of course) only to discover that the writer behind the post knows even less than me about the topic they’re claiming to be somehow superior in their knowledge of. It’s annoying! Have some integrity and write what you know. And if you don’t know it yet, then learn it and then write about it in a way that brings something new to the table. Readers will respect you a lot more, and their desire to read your next post will be around 34967% higher (ballpark statistics according to me).

Jargon isn’t ideal for any piece of writing, but neither is excessive summarizing. It’s important to make your posts appealing to the worse-than-a-goldfish attention span of the average 2014 human being, but you shouldn’t bullet point the crap (and substance) out of everything you write just to pander to people.

If you went to a conference by Mark Zuckerberg about using social media effectively, you wouldn’t demand that he speak for no longer than five minutes, would you? For people to respect writing more, we, as writers, should command respect! The problem with all these “5 Quick Ways to Find the Meaning of Life NOW” style articles is that they often fail to provide sufficient detail. (Um, hello – everyone knows it takes the 15-minute drive to Olive Garden and however long Waiter Jeff takes to provide you with bread-sticks to find the meaning of life.)

Everyone on the planet has different thoughts, feelings, and ways they express themselves. Therefore, there’s no reason your writing can’t be original. By cultivating your own personal style, and maintaining it in all your writing (while obviously being adaptable where necessary), you should be able to make everything you write distinctive, and at original in at least some ways.

Sometimes, everyone ever seems to have the same opinion, but you just don’t agree with it. Instead of shying away from arguing against seemingly well-informed gurus, voice your own thoughts! Maybe they’re wrong, but expressing them should at least open up some hearty discussion and enlighten all who get involved. Don’t be afraid of those who shout the loudest – if you have good reason to think your beliefs are valid, then share them.

You’ve probably heard people say that “there are no original ideas”. Whether or not that’s true, your content can certainly be original. You don’t have to be presenting some ground-breaking new discovery that no one knows about in order to ooze originality – you just have to give people a reason to want to read your writing, either because you presented an existing idea in a way that was better or different, or because you expounded on an idea in a way that no one had really thought about previously.

Most writing benefits when you’re able to write something, go away for a while and do something else, and return to it with a fresher perspective and the ability to make it better. The fast-paced world of blogging can certainly put the pressure on writers to bust out content faster than it takes to say “nobody will want to read it”, but you should try to avoid diminishing the value of what you write by taking sufficient time to refine it. Forget what the latest infographic is telling you about how posting 7 times a day increases ROI by however many percent – focus on quality.

One of my biggest pet peeves with marketing-related articles is the tendency for people to overstate their skills in a certain area. Sometimes it’s ok to not be an expert in something – no one really knows perfectly how to improve Page Rank, for example.

The goal of writing a post is to help people, so don’t make generalized, sweeping claims that you can’t really back up. We’re all guilty of it, because we want to seem confident in our writing. But opening up a topic for discussion may be better than simply acting like the expert in it. And don’t discount the value of quoting those who really do know about your topic – even if your post is just a solid compilation of the useful advice of others, people will still want to read it.

We’ve all heard that great storytelling equals great writing, but how often do we actively try to include stories in our posts? Science shows that the effect storytelling has on our brains makes writing more engaging, as we become more emotionally involved in what we’re reading.

While you may not be able to come up with 100% original ideas, you can certainly come up with 100% original stories, whether they’re from your own experiences or fictional. This will give your posts a fresh edge, while encouraging people to keep reading.

One thing that will always help your content stay original is keeping your creative juices flowing. There are numerous ways you can do this, and it’s really down to you how you choose to stay energized creatively, but just make sure you do. Don’t stay in a rut.

I hope this encouraged you to not sell out by rehashing existing online content. Above all, keep writing – it’s what will keep you good, and you’re much more likely to come up with original ideas when you’re constantly using your skills. Don’t let the tsunami of online content drown you – choose to surf the wave rather than swim with it! (Solid metaphor right there… minus the danger aspect.)

Google’s Recent Webmaster Guideline Changes: What You Need to Know

Les derniers changements dans Google Webmaster Tools, ce que vous avez besoin de savoir;

The brains at Google are always working to make the web a place where users produce content for each other, not just for web crawlers. They recently changed their Link Schemes section to include advertorials, large scale article and guest blog campaigns, and optimized anchor text in articles and press releases. This is hardly surprising, since the changes coincide with Google’s ongoing aim to discourage the manipulation of their search algorithms.

Large Scale Article and Blog Campaigns

What is considered a “large scale” blog or article campaign? As Matt Cutts said when he addressed this issue last year, the question is actually in what your intention is behind yourguest blogging. If you intend to build lots of back links with your guest blogging, then you probably intend to do a lot of guest blogging for that purpose. If your intent is to establish credibility or add value to another person’s blog, then you’re probably not aiming for volume.

Advertorials

Cutts also addressed advertorials in a video earlier this year. An advertorial, also known as native advertising, is a piece of editorial content that a company pays to have published. This content usually contains back links to the company’s website. In essence, this is paying for back links, a practice that search engines have never been fond of. Earlier in the year Google penalized UK flower company Interflora for the use of advertorials to artificially boost their search rankings. Advertorials can be misleading to the reader, who is reading the content with the idea that the site owner is promoting the company for reasons other than monetary. Cutts advises that webmasters “clearly and conspicuously” disclose when a piece of content is an advertorial by using the words “advertisement” or “sponsored” to describe it.

Optimized Anchor Text

Optimizing anchor text is when you use target keywords as anchor text for a link back to your website. Google uses the following example:

There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.

Using keyword optimized anchor text is still a common practice in the SEO world, but here’s the thing: When Google’s web crawlers see this link leading back to your site, they assume that someone aside from you is in effect recommending your website by associating it with the keyword and a backlink. Since that isn’t the case, Google considers this to be a manipulative tactic.

How To Handle These Links

It’s still okay to publish content online that contains links back to your website. Google recommends that you use the “rel=nofollow” attribute to prevent these links from passing PageRank. You can also redirect the link to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines using a robots.txt file.

The Case for Organic SEO

These updates to the Link Scheme document are meant to encourage people to use links for the original reason they were intended: To get people to click on them. Once upon a time, in the early days of the web, a webmaster would create a website and submit the URL to a search engine for indexing. The search engine would dispatch a web crawler to the URL, which would crawl the website for relevant links and keywords. The crawler would then send this information back to the search engine, which would give the website a place in the search results based on how relevant it judge the website to be.

It wasn’t long before people began to see the advantage in having a website rank higher than the next guy’s for relevance. There were no measures in place at the time to prevent people from taking advantage of search engines, so it wasn’t long before webmasters and internet marketers began to freely exploit weaknesses in search algorithms for their own gain. If you remember the internet of just three or four years ago, you remember that spammy websites and irrelevant search results abounded. Developers began creating more sophisticated search algorithms to bring order to the chaos. Over time, they made updates to the algorithms to make them even more bullet proof (think Panda and Penguin). Years of experience and accumulated technical savvy have made Google a much smarter search engine than it once was.

What Does It Mean For You?

You don’t have to nofollow every link in your offpage content. If it’s a link that you’ve added with the intention of link building, then it’s best to drop that aspiration and nofollow it. If it’s a link that you’d include naturally whether the search engines would see it or not, then leave it as is. If you have links in past guest posts that you haven’t nofollowed, then it’s probably too late to change those. Just keep Google’s new link scheme policy in mind for future reference.

How To Use Time You Would’ve Spent Link-Building

Instead of focusing on building links, get on social media, into forums, and in blog comments to build awareness for your site. This doesn’t mean that you should start spamming people. Rather, demonstrate that you have something of value to offer. Find fresh and worthwhile ways to attract a readership, and keep offering content that’s worth reading. In other words, let others build back links for you. Natural shares and other social signals do more good for your website than links you’ve created yourself.

You can also use this time to further optimize your website. Add meta tags, update files names, transcribe video, and do all of the other SEO stuff you’ve been putting off.

While there’s nothing wrong with using online content as a promotional tool, you want to be promoting to humans, not web crawlers. After all, it’s humans who indicate to search engines which websites are most relevant. As it has been said many times before, building links purely for the sake of SEO could get your website penalized. Links were always meant for driving organic traffic, and if the reader likes what he sees, he will likely want to share it. According to Google, this is just the way things ought to be.

Original content by Sujan Patel Posted on August 27, 2013

Une Ptite vite - SEO Link Building 101

Despite the low sound quality and the fact that this video was released in 2008, the relevance of the basics of setting up a network of links of authority still relevant and good to understand.

From http://www.seobook.com Learn the types of links that help you rank better and help you make sales.

How Google plans to Control Negative SEO

Let’s get things straight – there is such as thing as Negative SEO (especially in adult web world). It exists. It works (on some websites). It happens. And it’s been happening more since the latest Penguin Update. Now, Google has just stated the ‘solution’ against Negative SEO.

Disavowing Links

Sounds like a marriage gone wrong, right? Disavowing links is simply telling Google that the incoming link is not wanted. It’s either a bad link, a spam link, a link with the intention of bringing your site down, etc…

The soon-to-come disavow tool is also a reinforcement to the fact that Negative SEO is becoming a bigger problem after the Penguin Update.

How do you know which Links to Disavow?

Well first of all, you need to know your backlinks. Use a Backlink Checking tool to see which links point to your website and where it comes from. I have compiled a list of Backlink Checking Tools for your convenience and perusal.

A good link will come from a website which linked to you because they have found value in you. This link will most probably have a good, relevant topic as its host content and will most probably have a relevant anchor text. So what links should you watch out for?

• Watch out for increasing number of links that have exact-match anchor text.
• Watch out for increasing number of links that come from  webpages that have nothing to do with you.
• Watch out for increasing number of links that come from low-quality webpages.

Track your backlinks and examine if any of these things are present. If they are, it’s time toreport it to Google through this form. I’m not so sure if you need to paste each and every URL there and tell Google that those are not yours. Perhaps Google has been receiving tons of link disavowment requests through this form. Thus they thought of coming up with a link disavowment tool.

Link Naturality

A Natural Link profile should consist of raw URLs such as http://seo-hacker.org or www.seo-hacker.org. It also consists of a lot of brand links. Without much of these two, it’s quite easy to conclude that there’s linkbuilding going on. Take a look at this picture (From Cognitive SEO’s Backlink Checking Tool)

There are tons of exact match anchor text and almost no raw URLs nor brand Links. I won’t be surprised if this site’s now gone from the SERPs. A more natural link profile would look like this:

Does your link profile look natural? If it doesn’t, well, I guess that’s another use of the up-coming link disavowment tool.

Anti-Negative SEO?

It’s been said that this link disavowment tool is to combat Negative SEO. If your website reputation isn’t as high and mighty as the big brands (like SEOMoz, Coca-Cola, Apple, etc…) then you’re always a susceptible target for negative SEO. Knowing this disavowment tool is under development should be a sigh of relief for SEO specialists.

We don’t want the SEO industry adopting the crab mentality with negative SEO. Do we?

Other SEO Hacks You Might Want to Read

SEO Company PhilippinesSEO Hacker Review of 2012How does the Google Penguin Update Affects SEO and Negative SEO?Youtube SEOPPC vs. SEO: The Culmination of The Showdown

Related posts:

1. How Google plans to Control Black Hat Spam of Google Plus One Button
2. How does the Google Penguin Update Affects SEO and Negative SEO?
3. Pengiun-monium: What Google’s new algorithm changes means for SEO