The best internal linking strategy takes planning. If you blog a lot, build an editorial calendar to

map out your blog posts for the week, month, or even the year. You’ll spot lots of opportunities for internal linking. By planning post topics in advance, you won’t forget about relevant posts you wrote months ago, and you can breathe new life into them with an internal link. Here are some tips on internal linking strategies you might not have thought about.

1. Don’t tell the whole story. Don’t give away the farm in every post. Instead, use early posts to build basic concepts, and expand on those concept in later posts, linking back to key points. Think of those internal linkbacks like a book or movie sequel, which spends some time in the first chapter or the beginning of the movie re-telling the back story.
2. Share related stories. Adding a “related stories” widget to your blog provides the perfect opportunity for internal links. When you work from an editorial calendar, you’ll have a good idea of what posts will show up in that list.
3. Don’t be afraid of outbound links. Outbound links encourage linkbacks from the blogs you linked to but, more importantly, they can help your blog post go viral. You can count on the blogger you linked to sharing your post with his network—and his readers may share it with their networks, and so it goes. If you believe in “content karma,” you can build your bank account with outbound links. But even if you don’t subscribe to “paying it forward,” generous outbound links are an effective internal linking strategy.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

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If you are hiring writers to serve a diverse client base, your pool of writers should be equally diverse. Maybe Kate’s funny, conversational style has wide appeal, but what happens when a strictly professional client comes along and frowns upon her jokes? Or maybe Kate is a financial wizard who can write up a storm about stocks and bonds, but she’s baffled when it comes to French cuisine. You want writers of all backgrounds and voices—those who can win people’s hearts and those who can sell a product, those who know SEO content inside-out and those with a more creative bent.

So when the times comes to hire a freelance writer for your content marketing agency, don’t look for a clone of some other writer who has done good things for you in the past. Look for a fresh voice, a different background, a unique specialty, and before long, you should be able to find a perfect match for every client’s needs.

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Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.

Rules are for robots. This is the basic logic behind Mike Volpe’s explaination of “Why a Social Media Policy is Stupid” in his HubSpot post. He questions why companies feel the need to make specific policies for social media practices when they have never had explicit rules for any other types of person-to-person communication. I think his point is worth considering. What kind of attitude do you want to form around your business’s use of social media? If it starts to become regarded as programmed and robotic,  you risk missing the whole point of social media marketing in the first place – utilizing connections between people.

No one is stopping you. According to Seth Godin, “Validation is Overrated.” It’s always nice to have some positive reinforcement now and again, but I think this encouragement is especially helpful in the realm of blogging and social media. Online forums have bestowed us with a new ability to speak directly and instantly to people who want to hear us, so why not fully utilize this freedom?

Get to the point. Time and time again I’ll start excitedly telling a story, really getting into it – word-for-word dialogue, hand motions – and then I’ll look up to take a breath and realize that no one is listening to me anymore. It is always so tempting to give as many details as possible when talking about something that really excites us. But this is not how to keep listeners. In his article “Simplify and Package the Sale,” Chris Brogan gives some useful tips on how engage your customers with simple, to-the-point information so that they stay as excited as you are about your product.

The cover matters. The old “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” adage doesn’t cut it when it comes to marketing content, especially online marketing content. Mary White reminds us that it doesn’t matter how good your content is if people don’t stick around long enough to read it, and she outlines some useful strategies for how to “Enhance Website Content with Visual Appeal.”

From the experts: “6 Challenges to Managing a Brand on the Social Web.” Mashable consulted six experts in the field of web marketing to put together this list of the biggest challenges you can face in trying to manage an online marketing campaign today. While it’s important to stay up-to-date with the constant feed of new ways you can utilize social media, it’s also important to stop for a minute and think about the roadblocks you may encounter once you dive in – and how you should best deal with them.

Marcella Vieraitis is a new summer intern at ideaLaunch. She loves writing and editing, and is soaking up all there is to learn about the world of blogging, social media, and content marketing.

In the world of blog marketing, people link to your content, not websites. Those few friends who read your blog are your most valuable asset, your first link to driving traffic inbound. Linking your existing social networks is the best way to employ this established group, but you’ll need to do some work on your end.

According to web information company Alexa, Facebook is the second most visited website in the world. Adding a ‘Like’ button to your posts is an unobtrusive way to promote your blog downstream to the networks of your friends. Having friends share your links in this way will bring a new audience to your site; it’s up to you to give the content to keep them coming back and, ideally, sharing your posts with their own networks.

Another quick and easy way to get the word out is to see who’s ‘Liking’ your content and engaging them. Saying thank you and promoting their site through your own network goes a long way in building a base of readership.

Two simple changes can help you steadily build a base of readership for your blog, but it’s up to you to offer them a reason to keep coming back!

Lou Perseghin lives in Providence, RI and works for a non-profit managing volunteers, recruiting members and handling marketing efforts.

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1. Pay attention to quality from the beginning. Curdled milk won’t taste sweet no matter how much chocolate syrup you pour into it, and content marketing won’t succeed if your content is nothing more than a couple of mediocre paragraphs stuffed with keywords. You should hire a freelance writer whose copy is polished, professional, and free of spelling and grammatical errors.
2. Quantity and quality go hand in hand. Too little syrup leaves a glass of chocolate milk pale and underwhelming, while too much just makes you sick. The same goes for SEO content. Hire writers who are able to strike the right balance, optimizing your content with a variety of keywords, but avoiding an overdose that would only leave readers distracted and annoyed.
3. Don’t forget to stir. SEO may be about marketing content, but you also want to improve conversion rates, and potential customers appreciate a company website or blog packed with well-crafted, relevant content, not random keywords. When you’re hiring writers,  find someone with a talent for mixing keywords into good content like chocolate syrup in a glass of milk, till the two are blended seamlessly. The final product is guaranteed to be both delicious and nutritious for your customers and your company.

Whimsical metaphors aside, the quality of the writing and the skillful use of keywords on your site or in your blog should be integral factors in your marketing strategy. If you want to achieve the best possible results, hire a content marketing agency with plenty of experience in blending these ingredients just the right way.

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Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.

Thank god we still have blogs though, right? No character limits here, just sweet sweet freedom to share our musings with the world. Not so, says Chris Garrett in a recent post for Copyblogger.  Brevity is a virtue for blogs and tweets alike. If you blog for your business, be sure to deliberate over each post just as you would over a tweet.  You may have successfully piqued your followers’ interest on Twitter and lured them to the bulk of your content, but don’t assume you’ve won them over just because they’re on your  site.  Each blog post should show that you value your readers’ time. That’s not to say you can’t indulge in a few linguistic flourishes, but make sure that you have a clear point—that you have something of use to share with your readers.

Successful content marketing should benefit producer and consumer alike.  Blogging on its own can be a massive time commitment, but effective, succinct, well-edited blogging is even more so. If you aren’t sure you’re up to the task, or as Chris Garrett puts it, you are just “too lazy to write less,” you may want to consider outsourcing your content marketing efforts by hiring writers who have the time, energy, and expertise to tackle your blogging needs.

Nicola Fairhead is an ideaLaunch editorial intern with a ferocious appetite for writing, editing, and consuming content.  She has quickly become a content marketing evangelist.

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“Ghostwriting”—when you hire a freelance writer to create content and then put your own name on it—has been an accepted practice for centuries. Celebrities often flesh out a book idea, create an outline, and then hire a freelance writer to do the work. The ghostwriter gets no credit, but he gets to cash big royalty checks because the celebrity’s name helps sell books.

Ghostwriting on the Internet is no different. You can hire a freelance writer and provide her with article outlines, ideas, titles, and other marketing materials related to your business. The freelancer writes the piece. You read it and approve it. Maybe the approval process goes through someone else in your company—someone who knows you well and understands how you think. That’s okay, too. The end result exactly what you would have written if you had the time, capability or inclination to write as well as the freelancer you hired.

When you hire a freelance ghostwriter, look for a writer who:

• Can adopt your unique “voice,” so there’s no doubts the content came from you
• Understands your company’s unique marketing message and can convey that message succinctly
• Will maintain confidentiality, never revealing her role as a ghostwriter

Ghostwriting is just one of the many services offered when you hire a freelance writer through a full-service content marketing agency like ideaLaunch.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

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The ideaLaunch blog ranked number 13 on the Junta42 list of Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs. According to the astute and extremely intelligent experts (after all, they put us on their list) at Junta42, websites were evaluated for:

• content strength
• depth
• regular posts
• popularity (last AND least, according to Junta42).

Aside from the obvious, what do the best content marketing blogs have in common?

1. They report and analyze news. Keeping it fresh, current and exciting is the MO of all the best content marketing blogs. For instance, Convince and Convert quoted a new study about Twitter and provided fantastic insight in the post “Surprising Statistics About Twitter in America.” The statistics truly were surprising—and the equally surprising subheads made it fun to read.
2. They are insightful. Conversation Agent recently published an in-depth post about integrating a blog in your content strategy.  Even though the tips got back to basics for businesses new to blogging, the post provided in-depth information readers could implement immediately.
3. They are readable. Both posts from the top #1 and #2 content marketing blogs—as well as those you read here at ideaLaunch, we like to think—are easy on the eyes. Clever subheads, short bullet points, and lists make the posts easy to scan. So does simple language, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. They have personality. “Personality” is hard to quantify. Some people like to call it transparency, but to me, it’s something more. It’s a particular “voice.” It’s flair. It’s not being afraid to use first-person when appropriate. It’s getting friendly without offering up TMI (too much information).

It’s fun to read the posts from Junta42’s Top 42 content marketing blogs and get to know the writers. We hope you feel the same, and will spend some time getting to know us better here at ideaLaunch. 

A good rule of thumb for a company is to have at least one to three months of blog posts in reserve. A freelance writer builds these reserve posts as one project, or the reserve can be slowly built up over time. Since the writing will not take time away from a full-time employee, a freelancer offers companies the freedom to get the project  done without the extra expense. It also ensures that key employees will not be distracted with writing and that the proofreading and editing will be done professionally.

When hiring freelance writers for blogging, it is important to define the voice and tone of the blog so the writer knows exactly what is expected before the first post is written.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop.

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When some companies hire writers to create quality web content, it’s understandable how some of them may start a round of SEO content, finish it up and think the job is finished. After all, how many keywords can you stuff into a website, anyway? But the fact of the matter is, search engines give the most respect to sites that appear active on a daily or near-daily basis. Here’s an excellent example; in 2008, if you did a search on the term “turntabling” you would come up with a list of sites, some of them run by DJs, others run by vinyl music collectors, and others run by people who sell DJ equipment. But after one year of daily posts, Turntabling.net now “owns” that search term, with the website dominating the top search results in Google.

How did a website rise to Google dominance for a single keyword in one year? Daily posts.Turntabling.net is an example of what can happen when you’re dedicated to building a growing database of thematically linked pages using similar keywords in a niche market. The word “turntable” by itself has many connotations, especially in manufacturing. But combined with other relevant keywords on a daily basis, “turntabling” plus “vinyl” plus “record collectors” (and other relevant keywords) equals search engine success. If you dedicate yourself to a small, but steadily growing collection of tips and articles, you’ll achieve just what Turntabling.net did—and with a reasonable posting schedule. Turntabling updates once per day or every other day–there’s no extravagant expenses on a big team of writers to crank out five or ten pieces per day. Your website can do it, too.

Joe Wallace has been a writer/editor since 1992 and is always open to fun new ways to market online businesses. In addition to running Freelance-Zone.com, he blogs about music at Turntabling.net and runs a small press specializing in snarky t-shirts.

Image from turntabling.net