Content Strategy Archives | Bourn Creative

Create An Effective Content Marketing Plan At Content Camp

March 29, 2021 Jennifer Bourn

What do blogging, podcasting, attracting clients, acquiring customers, growing a YouTube channel, building an email list, and establishing a social following have in common?

Content.

No matter what your goal is, if you want to grow your business, gain visibility, and expand your brand:

You need to create high-quality, strategic content on a regular basis. Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%) according to Aberdeen.
You need to market that content to gain as much visibility and website traffic as possible. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads according to DemandMetric.
You need people who engage and interact with your content to take action. Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%) shares Aberdeen.

Content Camp: A Content Marketing Workshop For Small Business

July 2, 2019 Jennifer Bourn

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of content marketing and how it can bring a flood of new clients to your business and new customers in the door. You’ve probably also heard that blogging is the fastest way to improve your search rankings and attract new clients. You may have even thought, “I really need to be doing that and leverage the free and low cost tools available to grow my business.”

So you decided to look into it — you did online research, read blog posts, watched YouTube videos, and downloaded a white paper or ebook. But there is so much information out there, so much to learn, so many people with opinions, and so many different options, it’s hard to know what is right for your business and where to start to get the most bang for your buck.

You might have also invested in attending networking events and conferences (or sending your staff to these events) to learn about blogging, content marketing, and the tools available. Unfortunately, all you walked away with is a few tips and a giant to do list of things you should be doing. The problem is that you still haven’t made progress.

I get it. I’ve been there.

I see it happening to small business owners time and time again, and it needs to stop.

How To Create An Ideal Client Profile And Use It To Make Your Marketing More Effective

November 7, 2016 Jennifer Bourn

Last week I shared some thoughts on the gut of surface-level blog posts about defining an ideal client and why it is helpful in business. My article on Defining Your Client Persona To Create Targeted Marketing Messages walks you through what an ideal client profile is, why you need one, and how it helps your marketing efforts. I even provided some tips on how to identify who your ideal client is.

The feedback on the article so far has been amazing, so I wanted to take it a step further and really dig in deeper to share exactly how to create an ideal client profile, in another article I wrote for GoDaddy, Narrow Your Focus: Tips For Creating An Ideal Client Profile And Putting It To Work, including:

9 Ways evaluate data to create an ideal client profile
How to get the data needed to create an ideal client profile
How to use an ideal client profile

Here is the full article:

Define Your Client Persona To Create Targeted Marketing Messages

October 31, 2016 Jennifer Bourn

There is a lot of talk about defining an ideal client profile or ideal client persona online and throughout social media, especially in the entrepreneurial, freelance, solopreneur, online business, and internet marketing arenas. Some of it is good, some of it is okay but a bit misguided, and some of it is downright incorrect — yikes!

The problem is the same for anything that becomes a marketing buzz-word or assumed magic pill for success: everyone, even non-experts, jump on the hype bandwagon and start writing blog posts to earn extra traffic and capitalize on the buzzword. This means that many of the blog posts attempting to teach you about ideal client profiles and how to use a client persona aren’t teaching from first-hand experience and wild success, but from mere regurgitation of what they themselves have read online.

If you’re not quite sure what an ideal client profile or client persona is, or even how to use it, this article I recently wrote for GoDaddy, Cast a narrower net: Define your client persona to easily create targeted marketing messages, will get you started in the right direction:

A WordPress Blog Is A Filing Cabinet For Your Website

March 28, 2016 Jennifer Bourn

I’m guilty of it. Almost every blogger I know is guilty of it —, well, at least the bloggers who have been blogging for years. It’s a problem we caused that has haunted us for the life of our blog and now is either a huge task we know we need to tackle, or a huge task we’re just going to ignore and push to the side.

Category and Tag Abuse

WordPress category and tag abuse is a real struggle. It’s how this blog at one point, ballooned to more than 30 categories and 800 tags that I then had to clean up.

Now you may be thinking, “So what? What’s the big deal”

The big deal is that not only does category and tag abuse split and fracture your content, it creates a poor experience for your website visitors, making it harder to find similar or related content about the topic they are interested in on your website.

Categories and Tags Used As Keywords

The problem of category and tag abuse stems from the belief that categories and tags are similar to keywords, and that when assigned a category or tag to a blog post, it is the same as assigning a keyword to the post. This action is further perpetuated by the belief that assigning a post to a specific category or tag like a keyword somehow will help their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

How To Plan A Blog Post In 10 Minutes

April 20, 2015 Jennifer Bourn

Every website owner loves the idea of a blog. They love hearing about how adding a blog to your website is one of the fastest and easiest ways to increase traffic, improve search engine rankings, build a big email list, gain expert positioning, and attract new clients.

They love the impact it can have on their social media content strategy and they love that blogging for business is free — it doesn’t add another monthly bill. But blogging isn’t really free — it takes time, energy, focus, and commitment.

As a result, end though website owners love the idea of blogging for business, they are not using their blogs! Often nothing new has been published since the site originally went live, or it’s been three, six, or even twelve months since any new content has been added. Yikes!

In my latest article for CoSchedule, How To Plan A Blog Post In 10 Minutes So You Can Write It Better And Faster, I address the biggest hurdle business blogs face — creating content and planning posts.

In this article, I walk you through how to plan a blog post in 10 minutes or less so you can write it better and faster — without stress, frustration, or overwhelm. Plus, I know you don’t need another cookie cutter formula that doesn’t work, so I’m going to walk you through FIVE different approaches to planning and writing blog posts so you can choose the one that works best for you.

Here’s the entire article:

Free Tool to Discover Plagarism And Content Theft

March 23, 2015 Jennifer Bourn

Recently a friend reached out with some disconcerting information — Another web design company was using our content and images. At first she didn’t notice, but when she saw my photo on their website, she looked a little closer and sent me a link to check it out.

Unfortunately today owning a website and doing business online also means that if you’re any good or if your site ranks well with search engines, others will steal, rip off, and copy what you do, that you write, what you say, and even how you look. If you’ve never done the research, the blatant thievery and lack of integrity among content thieves online can be shocking and disheartening.

But how do you know if someone is stealing you hard work?

How to Optimize Blog Posts For Maximum Results And Visibility

August 28, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

Every time I speak to a group or organization at about blogging for business, I share the same simple, but often eye-opening statements:

Every time a new blog post is published, a new searchable URL is added to your website
Publishing a new blog post just once each week for a year, will add 52 new searchable URLs to your website
That action creates 52 new ways people can find you online — that’s 52 new chances you have to appear in the search engines results when someone is looking for what you do

If audience members were skeptical about blogging before, they usually then agree that it’s worth their time to take a second look about how blogging for business could help grow their business.

The Problem With Blogging For Business

I speak to a lot of people who think blogging for business is a waste of time, ether because they tried it and it didn’t work, or someone else told them that they tried it and it didn’t work.

How to Optimize Website Content For Search Engines And People

June 18, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

I know SEO can be overwhelming and I know it feels like A LOT of work — because it is. But, when you take time to understand individual elements and strategies, one at a time, it does get easier!

When talking about organic search engine optimization, I always start with optimizing your on page content because it’s the easiest and most natural thing to do. It’s as simple as formatting your content like you would in a word processing program — as long as you follow the best practices.

What You SHOULD Do When Optimizing Your Content for SEO:

First, you need to make sure your headlines and sub headlines are written clearly, and use your focus keywords naturally and in a normal context that makes sense. Be sure not to force it.

Second, use H tags or Heading tags in your content to mark which parts of your content are headlines and sub headlines. The H tags tell search robots that the content is more important than the body copy or paragraph copy — and provide visual cues to readers and scanners.

Content Tips For The WordPress Page And Post Content Area

April 29, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

WordPress began as a blogging platform and quickly expanded into a content management system that powers 22% of the entire internet.

In fact, according to Matt Mullenweg in his State of The Word 2013 address, 69% of those whom use WordPress use is only as a content management system for their website, not as a blog.

The primary content region on a WordPress site is referred to as the content area. It can contain all different types of content, from text and images, to video and audio. The content area is where the primary web page content or blog post content that you write is added and formatted.

NOTE: Even though content can also be put in a sidebar or in a footer, content in those areas are put into widgets, so they have different names such as, sidebar widget area, footer Widget area, Home page widget area, after-post widget area, etc.

A Website Footer Is For More Than Your Copyright Notice

February 21, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

I guarantee that if you browse the internet for any length of time, you’ll notice that while some websites put a lot of information in their website footer, most simply use it as a space to put their copyright notice and maybe, just maybe if you’re lucky their contact information.

Like your website sidebar, the footer of your website is a very powerful part of your site that can make a big difference in your search engine rankings and how your website visitors move through your website, yet it is one of the most under-utilized tools.

Before I share with you some ideas on how you can leverage your website footer to improve your website and search engine rankings, I want to cover some of the biggest mistakes website owners make when it comes to their website footer: