20 Success Lessons From the Top Marketing Blogs

Are you hoping to take your blog to the next level? Well, there are several strategies that make the top marketing blogs in the industry successful.

In this post, we’re going to dig into the finer details of these top marketing blogs. With each one, we’ll inspect a particular aspect you can emulate that makes the blog thrive.

1. Content Marketing Institute Blog – Success Focus: Editorial Calendars

One of the first parts of building a strong content marketing campaign is getting your team on the same page and coming up with a content strategy for the weeks, months, or years ahead.

The more topics you cover and the more writers you bring on board, the more important it is to create an editorial calendar.

Through my experience with the Content Marketing Institute blog, I know firsthand that staying on track and on schedule is of utmost importance to the organization.

You don’t have to look past the main page of the blog to realize that content is being published regularly, that many authors are featured, and that a variety of topics are covered, from marketing automation to optimal strategies for raising your conversion rate.

2. Copyblogger – Success Focus: Headline Use for Organization and Guidance

A blog without headlines can turn into a nightmare for the reader. The person eventually leaves the page, never to return.

Copyblogger understands the importance of targeted, detailed headlines. This holds true both for the creation of blog post titles, such as Why Lazy People Make the Best Content Marketers, and for the subheadings.

Take it from them: headlines should play a large role in content marketing strategy.

The aforementioned post is roughly 1,100 words in length. With six subheadings, readers are given additional guidance an average of every 185 words or so. This helps organize the content and move the conversation along, all while keeping the reader’s attention.

3. ConversionXL – Success Focus: Provide In-Depth Content

While length is important, length with top-notch quality is what you are after. This is where the ConversionXL blog excels. Your content strategy should be built on the idea that you need to produce quality work.

Its post on human behavior (originally written in 2016 but updated in 2020) is an excellent example of this. As you scroll through the post, it contains more than words. Every section tells a story. Every section provides actionable advice. Furthermore, the primary content partners nicely with blockquotes, headlines, screenshots, videos, and images.

4. Convince & Convert – Success Focus: Using Images the Right Way

Images are a big part of a successful blog, but only if used in the appropriate manner.

An image should complement the content. It shouldn’t be added for the sake of taking up space.

Convince & Convert knows when to add images, when to leave them out and how to avoid “image overload.”

In a short post, such as this one, there are only three images. Move onto their longer posts, however, and you can expect the number of images to reach 10 or more.

Don’t just use images: use images the right way.

5. Moz – Success Focus: the Use of Case Studies

If you understand the importance of publishing unique, useful content, you should realize that case studies can be your best friend.

Moz takes this to a whole new level, publishing case studies that are works of art.

For example, this case study outlines the importance of title tag rewrites for SEO.

The use of case studies allows for greater depth, screenshots with examples, and a strategy for readers to copy.

6. TopRank Marketing – Success Focus: Social Marketing, Social Proof

You may understand the power of social media marketing, but that doesn’t mean you are making life easy on your readers and taking advantage of every strategy that is available to you.

TopRank makes it easy to share content socially, thanks to a list of social icons displayed prominently above each title.

Even more important is the number to the left of the icons, which displays the total number of shares. The bigger the number, the more important the content appears. This can also prompt other readers to share the content, knowing that their peers have already done so.

7. Econsultancy – Success Focus: Link to Useful Content

Don’t be stingy when it comes to linking to useful content. If it can help the reader, it’s worth a link.

If you want to mimic a blog that does this well, check out some of the work by Econsultancy.

They scatter links throughout, including such as in this piece about Facebook’s new smart glasses. Along the way, there are a variety of internal and external links, all of which support the content and/or provide the reader with another avenue to learn more.

8. Neil Patel – Success Focus: Comment Interaction

It’s one thing to write and publish a blog post. It’s another thing entirely to interact with your audience. Remember, the primary purpose of each post is to teach your audience something, and content marketing as a whole is about engaging with the audience that buys your product.

If you are successful in providing quality information, more and more comments will show up on your blog. You can either ignore these or you can get involved.

In my Neil Patel blog, I do my absolute best to respond to every comment, even those that do not ask a specific question. Even after a post is published, it’s important to continue to provide quality content. Answering comments allows you to add more value, while gaining the trust of your audience.

9. Social Media Examiner – Success Focus: Varied Content within a Niche

There’s only so much you can say about a particular subject, right? Well, Social Media Examiner proves this theory wrong.

By taking a broad approach to your niche, but without losing focus, there is always more to be said. Things change, new trends arise, news happens, and so forth.

Just in the past five days (preceding September 21, 2021), Social Media Examiner has covered how to grow your Instagram following, how to create YouTube in-stream ads, how to partner with YouTube micro-influencers, and more.

Broaden your scope to keep your content calendar full and to avoid boring your audience.

10. Search Engine Watch – Success Focus: Use a Multi-Author Approach

In the early days of your blog, before it gains traction, you may be the only writer. There is nothing wrong with that. Heck, this strategy can generate results even after you hit it big.

However, there are times when a multi-author platform works best, and this is what you see on Search Engine Watch (among many other top marketing blogs).

The benefits of a multi-author approach are varied, including the ability to publish more content, unique viewpoints, and the option to leverage the audience of each writer.

11. Brian Solis – Success Focus: An Authoritative Voice

Authority is something that is earned, not given. There are things you can do to speed up your growth, such as proving your authority in each post you publish, just as there’s more than one marketing strategy out there that might work well specifically for you.

Brian Solis does a nice job of proving personal authority works by taking a unique view on topics that are anything but mainstream.

For instance, you won’t find many blogs with titles such as “The Augmented Workforce: How Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, And 5G Will Impact Every Dollar You Make.”

If you want to be an authority on your subject, don’t tackle the same topics and issues as the competition. This isn’t a rule that applies solely to online marketing. It can be implemented in every niche imaginable.

12. Buffer – Success Focus: Be Tran

Statistics validate your content, enhance trust between you and the reader, and give your audience confidence that you know your stuff. They also enable you to see if your content marketing efforts are helping you reach your goals.

Many posts on the Buffer blog are full of good statistics. For example, in one transparent post, they discussed their pay gap in an article called “2021 Pay Analysis: How We’ve Lowered Our Gender Pay Gap From 15% to 5.5%.”

Engaging and use of stats? Enough said.

13. Ignite Social Media – Success Focus: The Proper Use of an Introduction

Ignite Social Media has taken to providing a short introductory description of the content, giving the reader a clear idea of what’s to come.

Here is an example:

Social media marketing is unlike any other. It’s the only form of marketing where the target audience is able, and even encouraged, to talk back to the brand. When you hire a dedicated social media marketing agency, they’ll be able to guide you toward the strategies and tactics that help brands win at social media.

But how should you choose a social media agency to ensure you are working with one of the best? Below are a few secrets that separate high-performing social media agencies from the pretenders. Hear the six secrets directly from our CEO, Jim Tobin.

Providing this in the intro gives you an opportunity to hook the reader.

14. MarketingProfs – Success Focus: Be Unique

It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man show or part of a bigger digital marketing team, a unique approach sets you apart from the crowd.

The MarketingProfs blog has a different layout from other blogs. There is an intuitive category filter list in close proximity to the content.

These subtle changes can make a big difference.