Tuesday, March 27, 2018

7 AI Tools to Help You Grow Your Blog

OK, you get it. Artificial intelligence is kind of a big deal. It’s a huge buzzword in the marketing community. People talk about how it’ll change the world daily. And you can’t throw a rock without hitting a company with AI in the name these days.

But what about real world uses for AI? Where do marketers start using AI to solve actual problems they have? All the speculation and theory is interesting. But at the end of the day, we marketers have KPIs and business goals to hit.

Don’t worry, we got you covered. Let’s start with a common marketing challenge:

You want to get more people to read your blog posts. More people reading means more opportunities to convert those readers into prospects. More prospects means more opportunities to sell. More sales equal happy executives, which equal happy marketers.

Turns out, there are AI tools that can help you get more readers in several different ways. And they can help you starting right now.

Write Better Posts

Better posts equal more engaged readers. Period. But it's not always easy to improve your writing or your team's writing quickly. AI is here to help. Grammarly is a tool that uses AI to recommend better writing. It can tell you what grammar mistakes you've made and how to fix them. It can also offer powerful recommendations to improve your tone and style.

The result is writing that captures attention. For an individual blog writer, it's a critical tool to stay at the top of your game. For teams, it can transform the quality and effectiveness of your entire blog.

Blog About What People Want to Read

You can write the world's best post, but it doesn't matter if it's on a topic your audience doesn't care about. How do you find compelling and popular blog topics?

There are a few AI-powered tools that can help with this, too.

Crayon uses AI to give you intelligence on what competitors are doing online. The tool analyzes over 100 different types of data online from seven million sources. It tracks changes to competitor websites over time. And it uses AI to display the most meaningful insights from competitor activity.

These insights reveal much about a company's messaging and content strategy. That gives smart marketers lots of material for their own blogging. You can determine what topics matter most to audiences and where gaps exist to fill with your own content.

You might also combine Crayon with HubSpot's Content Strategy tool. The Content Strategy tool uses AI to help marketers discover new content ideas. You'll get suggestions on topic clusters to pursue. You can also determine which opportunities are worth spending time writing about.

Together, these two AI tools offer powerful topic generation capabilities. You might actually find yourself with too many great topics to write about.

Engage Readers More

Your existing readers may love your content. But how often are they consuming more than one post per session? Are they served fresh content before they leave your site? Most importantly, are they served additional content they actually care about?

Personalization is key to engage readers and keep them coming back for more.

An AI tool called Uberflip can help you do it better. Uberflip uses AI to catalog the topics you've written about. The tool then recommends content to visitors based on what they've already read on your site.

It's a scalable way to make sure every blog reader stays on-site longer and reads more.

Find More Readers for Your Blog

Aside from creating great content, how do you find more readers? One way is by going to where they congregate online. A tool called Pathmatics can point you in the right direction. Pathmatics uses AI to show you digital advertising information for hundreds of brands.

You can see how much a brand has spent on ads. You can also see what ads it runs. Most importantly for our purposes, you can see where the brand advertisers. This information can tell you where audiences like yours hang out online.

For instance, you could use Pathmatics to see where your competitors advertise most. From there, pick top industry sites that may align with the blogging you do. Voila! You have some good ideas on who to pitch for your guest posting strategy.

Scale Your Blogging and Create More Posts

The more good content you can publish, the more eyeballs you'll get on your blog. After all, you're giving more people the ability to find, share, and link to your blog.

But this requires you to scale blogging. And that's no easy task, especially for a large organization.

If you're an enterprise looking to scale your blogging, Acrolinx is worth a look.

Acrolinx uses AI that reads and analyzes your content. Then, it uses what it learns to make sure everyone follows brand standards and guidelines. No matter how many writers you have across the world, they'll stay on the same page. All posts are on-brand and follow your style criteria exactly. That frees up a lot of time normally spent tweaking, formatting, and editing for consistency. That time can then be used for more high-quality blogging.

Another tool for enterprises looking to scale is BrightEdge. BrightEdge’s suite of AI-first products make content production a lot easier.

On one hand, the company's solution automates production tasks. Say goodbye to tedious things like adding header tags, cross-linking, and optimization.

On the other, BrightEdge will tell you which types of content may perform well for your brand. That saves you a ton of time, and increases confidence in the ROI of blogging efforts. BrightEdge can also recommend ways to rank your content and keep readers engaged.

After all, you can't get more readers if executives shut down your blogging because it doesn't work.

For more actionable advice on how to use AI in your marketing, subscribe to the Marketing AI Institute. We regularly publish expert advice and case studies on how AI can supercharge your marketing.

 

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