19 of My All-Time Favorite Articles About Content Marketing

I've been fortunate to come across many unique and useful articles about content marketing while I've been learning on the job at Buffer. And I'd love to share them here with you, in case they might be handy for you, too.

Here are the best content marketing posts I’ve starred and saved over the past five years. If you want to learn more about writing for the web, content marketing, and the most persuasive way to communicate online, I think you'll find a lot to like here.

1. Why Content Marketing Fails

by Rand Fishkin

It’s an article wrapped in a SlideShare with amazing takeaways for articles. If you work backward from the title (Why Content Marketing Fails), you’ll have a pretty awesome case for How Content Marketing Succeeds.

2. 12 Things You Should Be Using Your Blog For (Besides Blogging)

by Corey Eridon, Hubspot

My favorite tip: Go into your old blog posts and make them great.

3. Use this Hollywood Secret to Write Addicting Opt-In Copy

by Felicia Spahr, KISSmetrics

Spoiler alert: The secret is Open Loops, and they work like this (click through to the story for some cool examples, including one from Buffer):

Open Loops in TV shows are the equivalent of that cliffhanger that keeps you up at night, consuming your mind with thinking about what’s going to happen the next week, or that story line that was never quite explained. Those aren’t just “blips” in a script. They are put there so that it’s harder for people to get up off the couch than it is to stay and watch “just one more episode.”

4. 25 Lessons from 25 Months of Content Marketing

by Gregory Ciotti

One of my favorite lessons: Don’t forget about “solved” problems. In the case of Men’s Health, they’ve found that the market for fitness information is so great that their “solved” headlines can work over and over again.

5. 5 Breakthrough Techniques For Running A High-Traffic Blog

by Garrett Moon, CoSchedule

Cool, beautiful stuff from the CoSchedule blog:

6. How Stand-up Comedians Come Up With Content (and What It Means for You)

by Brian Clark, Copyblogger

Brian calls the big idea here Agile Marketing, with a key learning to optimize constantly based on feedback. Good stuff.

7. What I’ve Learned in 8 Years of Blogging

by Jessica Hagy, Medium

A short, two-minute read, this fun piece on Medium hits on some of the unspoken truths of content marketing.

You have to make time to make things.
And it’s worth it to find it and protect it.

8. The 6 Elements of a Powerful Blog Post

by Neil Patel, Quick Sprout

This beautiful infographic from Neil covers things like images, layout, voice, and social media.

9. How to Boost Your Blog Post Production Speed by 600%

by John O’Nolan, Ghost

If you’re looking for a new blogging method, give John’s a try. I was fortunate to stumble onto many of the techniques he mentions here (ideas, outlines, etc.) and I would have been better off for finding his post first.

10. 7 Marketing Diagrams That Explain Content Marketing

by Andy Crestodina, Orbit Media

Here’s one to blow your mind: Think of content as hubs. You can write on a single topic at different depths to come up with a huge number of individual articles: high-level list posts, overview of a topic in a list item, and in-depth post about an element of the topic.

There are six more insights from Andy in the article, each are just as good.

11. Publish Your Blog Post Without SEO, and 1000s of Visits Will Be Forever Lost

by Rand Fishkin

The best case you can make for focusing on SEO (even a little bit) with the content you produce.

12. 11 Common Blogging Mistakes That Are Wasting Your Audience’s Time

by Henneke, Copyblogger

I use this post to check in every so often to make sure I haven’t fallen into any of these bad habits. The need to publish daily is a constant one for me.

13. Guest Blogging Strategies that Helped Grow 36,733 Email Subscribers

by Gregory Ciotti

The article closing strategy alone is worth the price of admission.

14. From Ideas to Traffic Results: How We Run a Blog with 700,000 Readers Per Month

by Belle Beth Cooper, Buffer

This one first got me hooked into running and writing a blog of my own. Belle shares an incredibly deep and transparent look at how Buffer runs things.

15. How to Find More Content Ideas than You’ll Ever be Able to Create

by Peter Shallard, Copyblogger

Never be short on blogging ideas again.

16. 28 Ways to Write Moneymaking Headlines

by Noble Direct Marketing

There are tons of actionable insights here from ad legend John Caples—everything from the specific words to use (“Introducing” and “Finally!”) to the styles to try.

17. 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post with a Bang

by Brian Clark, Copyblogger

Simple but important.

18. The 3 Keys to Effective Guest Posting

by James Agate, Think Traffic

I started thinking about the possibilities of guest posting thanks to Think Traffic founder Corbett Barr’s blogposts and articles on the topic. This article (a guest post about guest posting—meta!) has some super advice.

19. It’s Not What You Say, It’s How You Present It

by A.J. Kohn, Blind Five-Year-Old

Here’s one that I failed to consider for a long time: the readability of what you write. Now I often picture what a post will look like as someone reads/scans, along with what I’ll actually be writing. How’d I do on this post by the way?

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Many thanks to all the amazing marketers and writers who are mentioned here! 

And if you're interested in 32 more of my favorite articles on creativity and inspiration, I have a complete list over at my website.