Category: Content Marketing

Posted on in Content Marketing

Content Marketing:15 Blog Examples To Inspire Your Own Content

Starting a blog can help you connect to new audiences, generate recurring inbound traffic, and promote any products and services while building your brand.

Blogging also gives you room to experiment with content, tell customer stories, educate readers, or target key words and phrases to help your website rank higher on Google.Click here to start selling online now with Shopify

There are lots of ways to make money blogging, but many entrepreneurs struggle, because it takes time, care, and effort to get it right. Simply publishing a few posts a month isn’t enough to regularly bring traffic to your site.

That’s why we’re going to take a close look at 15 blog examples. These blogs all have unique strengths that will help support you as you develop your own, no matter what topics you plan to cover.

What is a blog?

A blog is a digital publication that can complement a website or exist independently. A blog may include articles, short posts, listicles, infographics, videos, and other digital content.

15 successful blog examples

The following blog examples are successful in their own unique ways and offer inspiration for your own blogging initiatives.

Marketing and social media blogs

1. Brilliant Business Moms

Brilliant Business Moms’ About page on the right side is a woman wearing a scalloped top and holding up her left palm to the sky
Brilliant Business Moms publishes tips for mom entrepreneurs who want to build a business and balance family life.

Brilliant Life Shop sells digital products aimed at helping small-business entrepreneurs—particularly those who are moms—find more success in their endeavors. Its blog, Brilliant Business Moms, features content to complement the paid resources—and it’s pretty much an entity of its own.

The Brilliant Business Moms blog has more than just articles with business advice and ideas for marketing strategies. You’ll also find podcast episodes, free templates and printables, and a list of recommended business tools and resources. When blog readers are ready to upgrade their freebies, they can head over to the shop to purchase more comprehensive templates and downloads.

2. RetroSupply Co. 

RetroSupply Co. blog homepage with three recently published posts with its blog header and a description under each page
RetroSupply Co. has a mix of product content and editorial content about art and design.

3. Bravely Go

Bravely Go blog homepage with photo of founder Kara Pérez as she smiles, standing outdoors with trees behind her
You’ll find personal finance advice on the Bravely Go blog.

Bravely Go is a personal finance blog run by money coach Kara Pérez. She publishes content about how to save, manage, and invest your money in a sustainable, ethical way. She also has videos and money tool recommendations, and provides money coaching services for a fee.

Tech blogs

4. RenewedMacs

Screenshot of RenwewedMacs blog homepage with featured blog post
RenewedMacs’s blog focuses on tech advice, focusing on Apple devices.

RenewedMacs is a website that sells refurbished Apple phones, computers, devices, and accessories. It also publishes a blog with tech advice. Posts cover everything from how to choose and purchase a device to caring for it or troubleshooting issues. The design is simple, showing a feed of the most recently published posts and a sidebar of the most popular ones.

Photography blogs

5. Path

Screenshot of Path blog homepage with recently published posts
The Path blog offers product photography tips, Photoshop tutorials, and photo editing advice.

Path is a virtual clipping path and photo editing studio that offers basic Photoshop edits for ecommerce product photos. Along with its services, it also publishes a blog featuring content about photo editing and product photography in general.

Articles include tips on how to shoot, edit, and optimize product photos for the most sales and best ROI. There are also several Photoshop tutorials—including articles and videos—to help businesses learn how to edit their product photos themselves.

6. Pretty Presets and Actions

Pretty Presets and Actions sells digital products on its Shopify site, offering presets, filters, brushes, and actions for Lightroom and related software. Its blog helps readers learn how to use Lightroom themselves, a perfect complement to the products the brand sells. Readers will find tutorials, how-tos, and other inspiration for their own editing processes.

Health blogs

7. The Squeeze Magazine

The Squeeze Magazine homepage with featured posts and its associated blog headers
The Press blog, The Squeeze Magazine, has tips for living a balanced, healthy lifestyle.

Press delivers plant-based goodies like cold-pressed juices and kombucha. Its blog, The Squeeze Magazine, provides tips for living a healthy lifestyle. The blog’s simple, bright, eye-catching design, and hero images follow the same color palette of the juices it sells.

The Squeeze supplements the brand’s juices and cleanses with advice that educates readers on making healthy choices. Topics span from switching to a plant-based diet to healthy recipes to suggestions for how to improve digestion while traveling, as well as video interviews with influencers.

8. The Maudern

Maude blog The Maudern homepage with a single hero blog post and header image of a bike parked on the street at night
The Maudern, Maude’s blog, focuses on sexual health and wellness.

Maude sells essentials for sexual wellness with a mission to “make intimacy better for all people.” The Maudern, Maude’s blog, is key to delivering on that mission. Its accessible, honest articles cover playful topics. Articles aim to make topics such as sexual health and intimacy accessible for everyone.

Categories include arts, history, culture, living, dating, people, film, relationships, food and drink, science, health, and sex education. The company also sends out new posts in an email newsletter of the same name to increase distribution of its content.

Food blog examples

9. Great Jones

The Great Jones blog homepage promoting a lasagna recipe at the top banner
The Great Jones blog shares stories and delicious recipes.

Great Jones makes cookware for home chefs. The goal of its blog is to empower people in their culinary journey. Digest has real-world stories where they interview a guest who makes a meal of their choosing. The “Recipes we love” section features recipes created by different chefs, the stories behind them, and the Great Jones items you’ll need to make the dish.

These two approaches to storytelling make for unique content. Posts also create a sense of community for readers: Digest+ feels more like a home kitchen than an ecommerce blog. It’s a place where readers can come to read a story, learn about a culture, or try out something new next time they’re in the kitchen.

Learn more: How to Monetize a Food Blog (Even if You’re Starting From Scratch)

10. Partake Foods

Partake Foods blog homepage
The Partake Foods blog publishes allergy-friendly recipes, tips, and advice for health-conscious people.

Partake Foods is a brand of allergy-friendly vegan packaged snacks. It uses its blog to share its passion for healthy food through recipes, food allergy resources, and snack ideas. Readers will also see notes from the Partake Foods team, including founder and CEO Denise Woodard, who started the company to provide her own family with healthy snacks.

Travel and outdoors blogs

11. BioLite

Screenshot of BioLite blog article titled Introducing Big Power From BioLite: Meet BaseCharge
The BioLite blog features helpful posts full of outdoor tips and tricks.

BioLite sells outdoor energy gear like solar panels and camp stoves. Its blog does an excellent job both quietly promoting its products and offering value to its readers. BioLite’s blog has a conversational and friendly brand voice, a simple design, and articles that tell stories, educate readers on outdoor activities, and offer behind-the-scenes looks at products for prospective customers.

BioLite’s blog excels at guides and building reader trust. It brings in the experts to tell the story, offer the advice, and walk readers through the “how to.” It’s a well-rounded, thoughtful approach to blogging that blends infographics, videos, and storytelling into genuinely helpful reads.

12. Seea

Seea blog homepage with Dive Deep into the Blog on the left and woman surfer in bikini on the right
The Seea blog shares inspiring stories and surf tips.

Seea is a sustainable swimwear brand made for active women—surfers, in particular. As such, its blog features those surfing women, dubbed Seeababes. Along with inspiring stories of women in the water, the blog publishes advice on how to connect with the water, behind-the-scenes looks at the brand and its products, and tips for surfing.

Lifestyle blogs

13. Consider the Wldflwrs

Consider the Wldflwrs blog homepage with hero story text on left and jewelry on right
The Consider the Wldflwrs blog covers product announcements, and shares jewelry care tips, interviews, and product roundups.

Consider the Wldflwrs is a fine-jewelry shop in Nashville that sells heirloom-quality pieces, including everything from bridal jewelry to everyday essentials. The brand’s blog is a well-designed collection of articles.

The blog is simple and helpful, and it strikes a good balance between educational content and product promotion. Topics range from new products, a guide to cleaning fine jewelry, teammate features, product spotlights, and roundup guides. The shop also sends out an email newsletter that announces new products and sales.

14. Kirrin Finch

Kirrin Finch is a brand of gender-neutral clothing. Its blog creates an emotional connection with customers through inspiring content. Along with video interviews, styling tips, and behind-the-scenes content, the Real Weddings series highlights the nuptials of non-traditional couples.

15. Talking Crap

Who Gives a Crap offers sustainable paper products and donates 50% of its profits to improving sanitation and building toilets in developing countries. Its blog, Talking Crap, has a simple design, custom hero images with bright colors, and quick-hit posts.

Building on the brand’s silly personality, its voice and tone is comedic, lighthearted, and fun. Topics include notes from the CEO, updates on the company’s progress building toilets, the history of paper towels, and information about bamboo paper products. The team even wrote one post in the style of a poem.

What makes a successful blog?

A necessary part of an organic marketing strategy is building a blog, whether it’s educational, SEO-driven, simply fun, or full of inspiring stories.

Organic marketing is when you advertise on your own channels, so you’re not paying for eyeballs—you’re creating content on your media channels or your website without putting dollars behind them. That means it’ll take longer for folks to see your content, but as you gain traction, the traffic, or people coming to look at what you’ve created compounds on itself. Over time, potential customers will look at your free content to help them make purchasing decisions, big or small.

You need to develop a blog strategy in order to get to your content to that point. Here’s what you can do to make your blog successful:

Add value

Your blog should contain content your target audience wants to read. Entertain them, educate them, share news, or do a little of all three. Just remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your customers’ wants and needs.

Have clear goals

What do you want to get out of blogging? Ideally, you should focus on bringing in readers through search engines, social media, and qualified leads, building a relationship with them and eventually driving sales.

Focus on brand building

Blogs can be used not only to support your brand, but to help establish it. Blogging gives you a voice, and you can harness storytelling to connect with your audience and make your brand stand out.

Be consistent

If you can only put out one post a month, that’s OK. Just remember to make time to hit that once-a-month mark consistently.

Why study other blog examples?

There are three reasons why it’s a good idea to check out other blogs:

1. Inspiration

It can be difficult to come up with ideas for your blog, especially if you’ve never done it before. Seeing what else is out there can provide inspiration for your own blog, whether it’s the design and layout, post format, blog post templates, or tone and voice.

2. Insight

It’s always a good idea to check out your competition, be it their blog, products, pricing, or even marketing strategy as a whole. This gives you insight into what might be working—or not working—for them. For example, if a competitor started a blog series but you only see two or three posts for the series, it could indicate it didn’t perform well or was difficult to execute. But if you see a competitor doubling down on behind-the-scenes videos, you might think of developing your own unique approach to similar content.

3. Ideas

When it comes to topics themselves, looking at other blogs can help you come up with your own ideas. If you sell baking products, for example, see how Great Jones and Partake Foods publish recipes—you might consider posting your own recipes as well.

Use these blog examples to inspire your own

Blogging has a lot of potential if you want to build your brand, increase email subscribers, establish relationships with potential customers, and drive sales. But it can only yield these benefits when you put consistent effort into every post.

The blogs we highlighted are all from vastly different industries, targeting different audiences, each using different approaches that worked well for them. As you get started, remember your blog will need to speak to your customers and target audience in ways that are most interesting and accessible to them. Setting up interviews with your customers to gauge their interests is a great place to begin.

Wrapping up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

This article partly refers to: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/za/resources/funding/south-african-female-entrepreneurs/

Posted on in Business in South Africa, Content Marketing

10 Content Marketing Pitfalls To Avoid In 2023

You’ve made your list, but now it’s time to check it twice. No, not THAT list. At the vert start of 2023, it’s time to double-check your 2023 content marketing list. Whatever your strategy, we’ve put together this list of common content marketing mistakes to help you ensure your content marketing strategy stays off of the naughty list.

Top 9 Content Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid

#1: Not Investing In Content Marketing

A simple, but costly mistake, if you’re 2023 marketing strategy and accompanying budget doesn’t include any content marketing, time to rethink your plan. Content marketing is far more than just a simple blog and the occasional piece of gated content. It’s any piece of consumable media (blogs, videos, podcasts) your company publishes. 

Content, regardless of its form, is how your brand can engage with your consumer base. Each piece of content you deliver is another opportunity for your brand to share its story and how it can better improve the lives of your customers. 

#2: Not Sticking To A Strategy

If you’re going to invest in content marketing, be sure those content marketing pieces are built around a centralized strategy. A good plan not only dictates what type of content you publish and how often you publish it, but it also identifies how your content will benefit your audience. 

If you’re creating content around a central topic, but have no idea why it’s time to revisit your content marketing strategy and ensure it’s aligned with the needs of your customer base. 

#3: No Content Marketing Goals

As a note, this should be part of your strategy, but brands often overlook it. It can be a bit tricky, but you need to create goals around your content marketing program. How else are you going to be able to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts? 

At a minimum, your goals should: 

Be Attainable: No, it’s not reasonable to expect a 10,000x ROI from content marketing

Be Quantifiable: Get some metrics and KPIs in the mix

Be Aligned: Your content marketing goals should ladder up to your general marketing and revenue goals; otherwise, why invest? 

#4: Not Sticking To A Regular Schedule Over The Long Term

Raise your hand if you have a colleague or boss that soured on content marketing once the first (and only) blog post you publish didn’t produce a paying customer. Does this sound familiar, “I guess content marketing doesn’t work for us!” 

Too many brands make the common mistake of giving up on their content marketing after publishing a few sporadic content pieces. Don’t be those marketers. 

Proven content marketing success comes: 

  1. When you stick to your strategy (as long as it’s a good strategy) over the long term.
  2. When you publish your content pieces on a regular schedule. 

That schedule could even be monthly; the point is to be consistent.

#5: Not Creating Great Content Your Audience Finds Valuable 

There is a gluttony of “good” content in the market. The world doesn’t need any more. If you want your content marketing efforts to be successful, you need to move away from good content.

Instead, strive to produce great content that your audience finds valuable. Teach them something, provide them with insight, answer questions, leave the content world more enriched with every piece of content your produce. 

#6: Focusing Too Much On Selling. 

Speaking of producing great content, leave the hard sales schtick out of most of your content pieces. Your customers are smarter than you give them credit for, and they can pick up when a post goes from “Hey, this is super useful.” to “Oh, here’s where they start selling to me.”

The second that happens, they’ve tuned out of your content and are moving on to the next part of their day. 

The one exception, it’s okay to produce sales-oriented content if it’s geared towards individuals that are actively going through your sales funnel. 

Which brings us to mistake #7… 

#7: Only Creating Top-Funnel Content 

Most content marketing is written to promote brand awareness. Get a keyword. Write a piece of content for that keyword. Have Google rank your site for that keyword. Get discovered. Get a customer.  Repeat. 

Yes, content is a vital part of driving awareness and filling that top-level of the funnel. But it’s not the ONLY part of the funnel that content marketing can affect. 

From consideration to decision-making to retention and loyalty building (and even reselling), your brand should be producing content that aligns with each stage of your customer’s journey. 

Again, the key is to provide value. Different topics are more helpful to a customer, depending on where they are within their journey with your brand. 

#8: Creating Content That Doesn’t Account For Your Audience’s Preferences

Content marketing is more than just blog posts. We know blogging is (dare we say) easier, it’s a writer and a bit of graphic support. Maybe a researcher and a copy editor if you’ve got the resources. But, brands need to understand, not every audience WANTS to read a blog post. 

Some prefer more design, others video, still others audio. Audiences have preferences, and if your content marketing plan doesn’t account for the known preferences of your target audience, you’re content marketing efforts will never reach their full potential. 

#9: Not Having A Content Amplification Strategy

By far, one of the biggest mistakes we see made by marketers regards their amplification strategy (or lack thereof). Brands collectively spend a small fortune on producing content but many  don’t reserve any resources to help share and distribute that content so it can be seen by an audience. 

The thought: that SEO and “free traffic” will bring the eyeballs.  When the traffic fails to materialize, they throw up their hands and say, “Content marketing doesn’t work!”

You need to have channels in place to amplify your content. 

The most common include: 

Paid Social Advertising: Publish your content to a social profile and pay to promote it.

Paid Native Advertising: Use a content advertising platform like Outbrain to increase awareness of your content. 

Email: Send new content to your subscriber base. 

Organic Social: Publish your content organically to your social profile

Fan Advocacy: Leverage the social-sharing power of your biggest fans to amplify your content by sharing your best pieces of content onto their personal social feeds (Curious about fan advocacy, see it in action here.)

The strongest amplification strategy uses a mix of all of the above to ensure every piece of content is getting the attention and awareness it needs to be successful.

#10: Not Diversifying Your Content

If you’re only producing one type of content (e.g., blog posts), you’re missing out on the opportunity to reach a wider audience. Try diversifying your content mix to include things like:

  • infographics
  • ebooks
  • webinars
  • videos
  • blog posts
  • surveys
  • quizzes
  • podcasts

Remember, the individuals that make up your audiences all have their preferred content. By creating a mix of different content types, you can better ensure that your message reaches your audience on the platform that best works for them.

Wrapping up

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

This article partly refers to: https://www.socialtoaster.com/9-content-marketing-pitfalls/