Did you know all marketers are thieves? Most of what we know and talk about, we stole/learned from somewhere and from someone. We seldom come up with brand new or straight-out-of-the-moon ideas.
Just like Anirudh Kidambi stated in one of my LinkedIn posts, “… there is nothing new under the sun”.
What does this mean as a marketer?
This means your success as a marketer is determined by how fast you steal/learn new ideas and from whom you steal/learn them.
In this article, I’d share nine blogs you should visit regularly to steal new ideas. I divide the sites into the six steps I — and most successful content marketers — follow in creating and executing content marketing strategies.
Brand strategy blogs
Below are my top two blogs when it comes to brand strategy and how to create brand personas, voice, tone, messages, position, USP, etc.
1. Brand Master Academy
You’d find Stephen Houraghan’s podcasts, videos, and blogs super useful in helping you set up your brand strategy.
The blog really fulfils its promise as “Where branding professionals and entrepreneurs come to learn how to build brands using proven brand strategy systems, processes, and frameworks.”
But don’t worry, you don’t need to be a branding professional to apply what you learn from the site.
Two of my favourite blog posts from the Brand Master Academy:
- How To Create A Brand Strategy [14-Step Roadmap]
- Brand Positioning Statement [The Strategic 6-Step Formula]
Column Five Media
Column Five brings their experience from helping brands tell their story through creativity to teach you how to do the same.
You’d find their warm and detailed writing style interesting
My favourite blog post on Column Five:
Customer research blogs
You know the importance of understanding your customers before writing any line of messaging or content. But where do you go to learn more about how to do this effectively?
HubSpot
You’d agree HubSpot need no introduction or description.
They own the inbound marketing space and have published thousands of content so you can succeed in marketing.
They don’t just have an easy-to-use CRM, they have an even easier to read and understand content stack. They have the best resources I’ve seen on customer research.
Here is one of my favourite HubSpot blog content on customer research:
Neil Patel
This is another industry authority that requires little introduction. Though he’s mainly known for SEO, he has amazing resources for customer research.
My favourite blog on Neil Patel for customer research:
Keyword research blogs
Though SEO has become competitive there are still blogs that teach cutting-edge SEO principles and techniques.
Backlinko
Brian Dean started Backlinko to share what he learned and knew to work in search ranking.
This little desire led to building one of the greatest repositories of SEO and keyword research content — that SEMRUSH could not help but buy.
Here are two of my favourite blog posts on Backlinko on keyword research:
Flying Cat Marketing
Flying Cat Marketing (FCM) is an SEO Agency that helps SaaS companies grow with search. While they have only a few blog posts on their website, those posts are concentrated with value.
Here are two of my favourite content piece from the FCM blog:
- 9 Link Building Strategies That Actually Work
- Masterclass: How To Use Keyword Stacking To Reach ARR Goals Faster
Content calendar blogs
Putting a content calendar together and getting your team to work on it to get results is not sexy. But these blogs add some method to the madness.
Backlinko
Turns out Brian Dean and his team are not just SEO or keyword research nerds, they also dig execution.
My top blog on building content calendars from Backlinko:
Hubspot
We can crown HubSpot as the King of everything marketing. Hubspot covers every corner of marketing including content calendars.
My favourite blog on the topic on HubSpot:
Content ops blogs
Managing a content team is not for the faint-hearted. But these blogs make it a walk in the park.
Coschedule
Coschedule have practically dedicated a huge budget to create resources that help marketers manage and organize their teams better.
Here are my top three articles on content ops from CoSchedule
- Content Management Workflow: A Step by Step Guide to Create Your Very Own
- How to Master Content Management From Start to Finish
- How to Build a Remote Content Marketing Team That Produces Results
Content Distribution
This agency does not only help businesses crush it with content, but they also teach it freely. They have an online community and a website where just like they rightly say, they teach “Content Ops for ambitious brands”
Here are my top two articles from the Content Distribution blog.
- How to Hire The Highest Quality, Most Affordable Freelance Writers On The Internet
- How Any Writer Can Write SEO Content
Content measurement and analytics blogs
After all your effort, you want to see how your content is performing. Hands down, Avinash Kaushik’s blog is the best blog I’ve seen when it comes to analytics.
My top two blog posts on the site on attribution and analytics:
- Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling: The Good, Bad and Ugly Models
- Be Real-World Smart: A Beginner’s Advanced Google Analytics Guide
Drown yourself in these blogs!
The links I shared are just some of the best content I’ve seen on these websites. There are hundreds and thousands more on those websites.
So dive in, and drown in them.
If you want more resources that can help you grow with content, visit my blog. If you’re just putting your content team together, then my article on how to build a rockstar content marketing team was written for you.
