A dozen useful content marketing best practices worth reviewing

Take a look at these items and think about they have in common:

• Posting on your brand’s blog
• Updating your brand’s Facebook page
• Sharing an image on Pinterest
• Retweeting a fascinating tweet on Twitter
• Posting an image to Instagram
• Commenting on a Google+ stream

Answer? They’re all forms of content marketing, designed to attract likes and links, friends and followers, comments and customers. Regardless of the channels you’re using, many of the same principles of content marketing apply. Check out the following articles collected from the Thinks archive and across the web to point you to content marketing success:

Content marketing tips

1. Before beginning with any content marketing, you should give some thought to what your brand story is. Then check out these tips on how to build your brand story online.
2. Blogging is a big part of content marketing, whether posted on your brand’s blog, your Facebook page or on Google+. This next post outlines 4 steps to creating great content for your blog. And, while it mainly talks about blogging, the tips apply equally well to your other content marketing channels too.
3. Of course, you’re not responsible for creating all the content you share with your friends, fans and followers. You can use these 5 tools to help you curating great content.
4. In fact, if you’re going to do more curation than creation, check out SEOmoz’s great guide to content curation for SEO.
5. Learning from others is a great way to build your content archive. So you will probably enjoy these 8 cool content marketing tips from the HEDNA conference.
6. A number of resources out on the web contributed to these7 tips to build a better blog. And they apply almost equally to just about any other part of your content marketing.
7. If you’re posting to Pinterest, you might find this marketer’s quick guide to Pinterest useful, as well as our entire Pinterest tips roundup.
8. Now, content marketing is really just another form of marketing itself. So take a look at these 5 common mistakes killing your online marketing and apply them to your efforts.
9. I’m often asked to assess how well various efforts work for my clients. These simple tips for measuring the value of your blog content can help you answer at least one of those questions for yourself.
10. With the rise of other social media channels such as Facebook and Google+, I’m often asked, “Is small business blogging still relevant?” I think it is. But check out the article and decide for yourself.
11. And, of course, I recommend checking out our guide on how to build your small business blog. It applies to non-business (i.e., non-profit) and personal blogs, too.
12. Finally, interacting with your customer is a crucial component of content marketing. Check out this story to see why you must respond to negative comments in social media.

Crafting a consistent brand story and the content to support it online isn’t always easy. But check out the tips above and you may find it’s a lot easier than you thought.

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