One of the biggest challenges with content marketing is creating content that stands out. Not only do people have to create standout content, but they have to do it repeatedly if they want to grow their influence.

I’ve had a few conversations with potential clients and it turns out that many of them are unsure about how to get results with blogging. Through the years, I’ve also stumbled across many blogs. A few of them were very successful with their content marketing, but other blogs struggled to gain an audience and some even gave up on content marketing altogether.

So why do some businesses succeed with blogging while other businesses struggle with it? In this guide, I’ll take a closer look at what successful content marketers and businesses do, explain why you need a content strategy and also point out a few common mistakes I see people making when doing content marketing.

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One popular format for blog posts is the expert roundup, where a blogger invites a lot of influencers to answer a question. These responses are then consolidated into a blog post and the influencers will often share the article on social media, which allows it to get a lot of social shares in a short amount of time.

The expert roundup was especially popular around 2014 and my first roundup article ended up getting over 7,000 social shares. In case you don’t know what an expert roundup is and why you might want to do one, you can check out the guide that I wrote on Smart Blogger.

However, expert roundups are not always effective and many roundup articles fail to even get over 100 shares. Low quality content, not having a good promotion plan (and yes, you should promote it yourself) and poor organization are just a few reasons that roundups can fail.

One expert roundup format that tends to produce more reliable results is what I call an expert infused roundup. This quick guide explains what an expert infused roundup is, as well as the pros and cons of using this format versus a traditional expert roundup.

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If you’ve been learning about content marketing, then you’ve probably wondered how well content actually converts readers into actual buyers of a product.

Content marketing blogs often talk about creating top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel content to attract potential customers who might be interested in purchasing your product.

While this idea makes sense, many people might be surprised to find that content doesn’t drive a lot of sales (at least not directly).

Oli Gardener (one of the co-founders of Unbounce and a well known authority in conversion optimization) recently shared that content from the Unbounce blog only converts at 0.3%. As an experiment, Oli decided to write 20 blog posts in 30 days. These articles were designed to create awareness for Unbounce’s newest products and drive trial signups.

The articles brought in 11,362 readers but only generated 37 signups (0.3%). He also compared the results to the past 9 months of content traffic and the conversion rate was about the same.

Does this mean that content marketing is a waste of time and resources?

Clearly, we know that it is not as evidenced by the fact that many businesses rely on it and a growing number of businesses are investing in their content marketing.

So what makes content marketing effective and how does it generates leads and sales for businesses? And how should we create content that is effective for actually generating revenue for our business?

Let’s take a closer look…

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