Content marketing and blogging are often mentioned in the same sentence.
That doesn’t necessarily make them the same thing, though.
In this article, I’ll examine the relationship between content marketing and blogging and try to give you an answer to the question from the title.
Let’s do this!
What is blogging?
In its simplest form, blogging is the process of creating informational written word content and publishing it on the World Wide Web.
This doesn’t even begin to describe what modern blogging entails.
Just like “getting the ball through the hoop” doesn’t even begin to describe what basketball is.
Blogging went through an evolution over the decades and somewhere along the way money got into the mix.
From that point, the evolution of blogging only accelerated.
Hobby blogging vs Professional blogging
The realization blogs could be monetized differentiated Hobby blogging and Professional blogging.
Both of these types of bloggers exist today.
But more and more bloggers are trying to monetize their content.
Also, there’s a lot more competition as there are over 6 million blog posts published daily.
These two facts together are pushing bloggers to become more skilled and sophisticated.
Today, bloggers routinely worry about ideas like niches, keyword research, competition research, content silos, email newsletters, call-to-action, relevance, themes, plugins, publishing schedule, and so on and so forth…
As blogging evolved, it was set on a collision course with another concept called content marketing.
As far as I’m concerned, the two already merged and have a baby together.
The sooner aspiring professional bloggers realize this, the better.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating value-first consumer-centric content with the goal of getting positive business results.
This content can be written word, audio, video or multimedia.
There are also no restrictions on where the content can be published.
It can be published on a whole slew of channels.
The relationship between content marketing and content marketing channels can be described through a simple analogy.
Content marketing is the house content marketers (builders) are trying to build using various tools (content marketing channels).
I said it was a simple analogy… I didn’t promise it would be good.
Moving on…
One of those content marketing channels are, you’ve guessed it, blogs.
Blogs are a fantastic channel for companies to provide value to their consumers and get more traffic to their websites at the same time.
Which, in turn, increases lead generation and sales.
And that’s how blogging and content marketing connected and started their relationship.
If you want to know more about why content marketing is important and how it can improve your business, check out my article on this topic.
Content marketing vs blogging
Every relationship has its upsides and downsides.
Content marketing makes blogging more useful to audiences when it comes to providing solutions to problems.
It also pushed blogging towards being a profession.
This kind of pushed out hobbyist bloggers that use blogs as web diaries type of outlet.
In a way, content marketing aided in the loss of innocence that blogging experienced in the last 10-15 years.
On the upside, content marketing is the reason why we see so much educational and informative content published by experts.
This happened when people and companies realized there’s real money in blogging.
All of a sudden, individuals started living off of blogging and dedicating more time to producing high-quality content for their audience.
And companies started utilizing blogging for their business goals.
Even though there are upsides and downsides in the relationship between content marketing and blogging, it’s a happy relationship for the most part.
Is blogging for content marketing worth it?
Blogging as a part of your content marketing strategy is a worthwhile activity.
Here are a few insightful statistics that back this claim up:
- 43% of B2B marketers say “blogging” is the most important content they produce.
- Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
- 9x more leads were reportedly generated by using long-form blog posts.
- 55% of marketers want to focus on blog creation as their top inbound marketing priority.
It’s safe to conclude that blogging and content marketing are great ways of getting eyeballs to your product or service offers.
Blogging also works well for developing both personal brands and company brands.
When done right, blogging and content marketing combined can have very impactful effects on building trust and relationships with your customers.
Here’s my article on how to use content marketing to build trust and relationships with your customers if you want to check it out.
To succeed with blogging and content marketing, you can’t just publish anything.
The content you publish has to provide value to your audience and it has to connect them with solutions to their problems.
Only then will blogging and content marketing help you build your brand and increase brand awareness.
I published an article on this very topic not long ago so feel free to check it out here.
Blogging for content marketing best practices
Everyone makes mistakes.
But to avoid some of them, it’s important to know some of the best practices when it comes to blogging for content marketing.
Here are a few of them…
1. Create relevant content
One of the most important goals of content marketing is to provide as much value is possible.
Going very broad with topics and keywords you want to cover doesn’t help to accomplis this goal.
Be targeted and deliberate with your content.
If you want to know more about content relevance and how to create relevant content feel free to check out my article on this topic.
2. Create comprehensive content
Content comprehensiveness is important to both the search engines and your audience.
The search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated and can read and understand content almost as well as humans.
Combine that with the fact there’s so much competition on any given topic out there, and you’ll realize how important it is to create comprehensive content.
Use the Skyscraper Technique when creating content and your content will do well.
Don’t know what the Skyscraper Technique is? Check this video out.
3. 80:20 approach to SEO
SEO is still very important.
Not as much as creating high-quality content, however.
So it’s a good idea to strike a balance when it comes to putting in time into SEO as opposed to just creating more content.
80:20 rule is a great approach here because you can get 80% of the results by putting in 20% of the work.
Here are a few key SEO areas to pay attention to:
- Keyword research – long-tail keywords are better than short-tail keywords
- Competition research – research what’s out there on topics and keywords you’re covering
- User intent – pay attention to what type of content appears on the first page of Google for topics and keywords you’re covering. Is it lists, tutorials, in-depth guides, etc.?
- Have a mobile-friendly website – Google is moving to mobile-first indexing so not having a mobile-friendly website can hurt your rankings
- Interlinking – two inter-domain links are worth as much as one backlink
- Backlinks – quality backlinks are still a very important ranking factor
- Publishing schedule – publishing as much high-quality content as possible on a regular basis is vital
4. Track results and adjust your approach accordingly
It’s always important to know how your content is performing and then spending time and effort where it’s effective.
One of the better tips I’ve heard was from Neil Patel.
His approach is to basically maintain a certain standard of quality with his content and track how his content does.
When he notices a piece of content is doing quite well, he then doubles down on it and expands it to make it the best piece of content on the topic in existence.
This works because you already know Google is giving you relevance on that topic so making the piece even better means Google will love it even more.
Conclusion
Content marketing and blogging aren’t exactly the same, but they go exceptionally well together.
Especially if you’re trying to monetize your blog, create a brand, or increase your brand awareness.
The only difference between content marketing and blogging is in the fact that blogging is a tool and content marketing is an over-arching strategy in which this tool is utilized.
There’s a symbiotic element in the relationship between content marketing and blogging.
They simply complement each other so well.