Content marketing is built on beautiful principles.

Instead of interrupting people’s day to day lives with TV adverts, skyline-blocking billboards and glossy magazine ads, content marketers create useful resources for their customers and for each other. A strange mix of copywriting and journalism, content marketing has the moral edge over traditional marketing because the public don’t go out of their way to expose themselves to adverts, but they do voluntarily read content.

In case I’m interrupting your busy schedule, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post for the key takeaways.

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You won’t find a harsher place for self-promotion than the ‘front page of the internet’.

As the 31st most highly trafficked website in the world, reddit has huge opportunities for awareness, leads and sales.

You could take advantage of that, if only you knew what you were doing.

Our content promotion team at Process Street sure didn’t. We all learned the hard way that redditors hate their platform being used for reddit marketing. They want value, great content and entertainment on site (so would rather not click through for it). While this seems like a dead-end, we can use it to our advantage.

In this post I’m going to tell you what worked, what didn’t, and exactly what I told the promotion team to turn things around.

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A content marketing process turns research, creation, review, publishing, and promotion into repeatable work with clear owners and approvals. A look inside Bolton Remote’s experience shows why that matters: the remote staffing company replaced Word documents that people read once and then executed from memory with a visible, trackable content workflow.

Process Street spoke with Edsel Mendoza about the marketing team’s approach in 2015. The story captures Bolton Remote at that point in its history; SupportNinja acquired Bolton Remote in 2022. The lesson still holds: a documented process helps a distributed team complete every step without a manager checking each action.

In light of a recent study from IZEA commissioned by Halverson Group which revealed that the lifespan of a blog post is 24 times longer than first thought, it’s time to re-evaluate the other reasons why not blogging is a mistake in the current marketing climate.

Contradictory data floods businesses daily. It’s understandable some need hard facts to justify the investment in a blog. That’s just good business sense. Yet, researchers bury vital statistics in 60-page white papers which don’t always reach the audiences that need them.

Thanks to several new studies, the benefits of blogging are out in the open.

Here’s a compilation of recent findings showing the contrasting success of companies that blog versus those that don’t.

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Have you ever been asked for your email address to see extra blog content? It looks something like this:

That’s a content upgrade. I’ve written pretty extensively about them in this blog post on lead generation, so if you need an in-depth look at the topic (plus the psychology of why it works), that’s the place to start.

They’re great tools for blogs connected to businesses because they capture the contact info of people who are likely to want your product or service. They get the valuable content, you get another email on your list of subscribers plus a free pass to market to them. The best part is that it’s not just any old email address, owned by someone who doesn’t care what you’re saying. It’s the email address of someone who is:

1. Interested enough in what you’ve got to say to give away their email address

2. The perfect fit for your product

It’s doubtful you’re the sort of person who turns down leads, so if you aren’t already using a way to capture emails with content upgrades (or you’re doing it in an awkward way), you’ll want to check out these four tools.

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Ok, so, I am far from an epic content creator. I am, however, aspiring to become a better one and in that journey, I have come across some great resources on how to become a better writer and content creating extraordinaire.

I mentioned some of these in my post – Advanced Content Promotion Checklist (interactive checklist), but this is such a critical point that I thought they deserved their own post. Plus, this is kind of an exercise for me where I force myself to re-read them all. I hope they help you create epic content.

On a side note, if you’re interested in blogging we just released our tool Checklists for Bloggers – a simple way to create checklists that you can embed onto your blog and capture leads with. Check it out here.

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If you’re building a startup of any kind, chances are you’ll need an explainer video.

Explainer videos are short 1-3 minute videos that help spread your message and teach people what your product and company is all about. A startup video can help explain difficult to understand concepts and, if you’re lucky, can go viral and give you a bunch of traction — as was the case with Dropbox.

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Blogging is a proven method of getting leads and sales for your business. Yet many companies are just not doing it.

Last week I made a Website Launch Checklist that got lots of great feedback, but a few people told me they don’t have a website (specifically a blog) to launch. After investigating further I found the most common reason for companies not blogging was because they didn’t know how to set one up.

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A few days ago I had a great call with Katie Sotor Vice President of Marketing for Crane to talk about a creative marketing campaign she ran that included sharpie markers, artists, and competitions. The campaign was extremely successful running for almost 6 months and netting 20k Facebook likes in the first 3 months.

Crane is a design company that takes ordinary boring products like humidifiers, air purifiers, and space heaters and turns them into beautiful creative designs.

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If you run a website for a purpose, like a website or blog (see also: how to set up your company blog in 5 min), where the purpose is to drive more sales or educate your customers, ultimately resulting in higher profits, you MUST be focused on capturing leads for your website.

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