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5 Awesome Content Marketing Blogs to Keep Your Eye On

There are a number of great, well-known blogs in the content marketing space; Hubspot, Content Marketing Institute, and Copyblogger immediately come to mind. While they all provide great information, there are other, perhaps lesser known blogs that definitely need to be on your radar, too.

These lesser known blogs can get down in the trenches more so than their larger counterparts. They release unique studies, analyses, and op-ed pieces that can be invaluable to any content marketer.  Read on to learn about 5 awesome content marketing blogs to keep your eye on.

The Content Strategist

You might be familiar with Contently, a site devoted to helping hungry, talented, and passionate guest bloggers get published. They have a very helpful tool for guest authors that allows you to gather all your writing samples into one portfolio. The site also has a blog that covers the strategy of creating high-quality pieces as well as how to’s and best practices for publishing them on other sites.

The Content Strategist is updated very frequently and it often adds an interesting dash of pop culture to its observations, like this recent piece on Jerry Seinfeld?s impact on branded content. Plus, let?s be honest, some days you just need a laugh, and the photos that run with the blog posts always provide a chuckle.

CoSchedule Blog

CoSchedule is a social media editorial calendar for WordPress (WordPress is dominant blogging platform), and the CoSchedule Blog covers all things related to social media and blogging. The first thing that grabs your attention about the blog is the illustrations, which highly stylized and hand drawn by blog editor Julie Neidlinger.

This unique approach to adding visuals to posts makes CoSchedule stand out in a sea of blogs peppered with stock photos and clip art. The format of the posts themselves is also unique. A post about making your blog fun to read begins as a choose your own adventure ? a brilliant idea that screams reader engagement.

The best blogs are ones that practice what they preach, and the CoSchedule Blog does a terrific job of following its own advice. Whether expounding fun content ideas or how to make a living blogging, the ideas are always unique and well-articulated.

Markerly

A blog with a sense of humor always wins points, and Markerly has a killer one. Markerly is a platform that advertises branded content. The blog features unique firsthand accounts with irresistible headlines such as ?Content Killed the SEO Star.?

And the posts are just as clever as the titles. They explore big issues in content marketing such as how advertisers can turn influencers into advocates and whether blog commenting for SEO is a waste of time. I always find myself thinking about the posts long after I?ve read them. For instance, a recent post on how to create urgency for a brand had me brainstorming new approaches for a company I?ve worked with that creates federal resumes. Marketers will be inspired to help their clients by these posts.

Sparksheet

Sparksheet is a magazine focused on how brands use different platforms to get their content in front of the right people. It has a YouTube channel with some fantastic interviews as well as fun hangouts with smart thought leaders like Dorie Clark, CEO of Clark Strategic Communications.

Sparksheet also publishes what they used to call ?think pieces? back in the day — the type of well-thought-out analysis that creates a buzz. One recent story asked this provocative question: ?Should Coca-Cola Quit its Content Marketing Journey?? It examines Coke?s decision to largely eliminate its focus on a corporate website and traditional public relations press releases and instead push further engagement with its audience through social media and long-form content.

{grow}

Mark Schaefer is an expert on social media, and in fact, I first heard of him when he was the keynote speaker at a social media marketing conference I attended in 2012. Though he often speaks on social media, his blog {grow} covers so much more. He focuses on the intersection of social media, humanity, and marketing, with special special attention paid to the types of marketing, like retargeting, that can can help businesses grow and scale.

The blog certainly sparks discussion. One post, a podcast called ?What Skills Do You Need to Succeed in Marketing?? posed so many questions about this profession that I started wondering if ?engagement specialist? might be a better term than ?marketer.?

These content marketing-focused blogs do more than provide interesting viewpoints and new ideas. They also prompt you to think about how you can market in a different way, which keeps you, as a marketer, sharp, current, and on top of your game.

Want more ideas on how to market creatively to drive engagement and response?  The ReTargeter blog has a host of unique ideas, best practices, tips & techniques, and industry news and information that will help you market better and drive more business.  Visit ReTargeter’s rich resources section that’s filled with interesting eBooks, presentations, webcasts, and cast studies that will help you do your job better.