Happy Thursday!

Welcome to Boringmarketing.com, where you'll find "boring" marketing tactics to grow your profits via AI, SEO, and more.

Quick tip for the day—Be a long-term investor, not a day trader:

• Identify the right keywords
• Steadily build links
• Write high quality (AI-assisted) content
• Launch programmatic pages, etc.

Others can keep searching for instant results. We'll keep compounding.
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​That said, in today's rundown:

• Think piece on our Boringmarketing’s AI tool
• Crucial content marketing metrics to track
• Breathe life into your old content
• A prompt for generating more traffic from your infographics
• An AI SEO tool used by Amazon, Shopify, BuzzSumo
• SEO Director’s note on search engine crawling

Read time: 10 mins

Think Piece: On BoringMarketing’s Custom AI Tool

Our R&D team has done some amazing work so far by automating internal operations, fine-tuning SEO workflows, and leveraging AI for high-quality content creation.

But the one we are most proud of is our “Unboring” custom AI tool. We use it for our AI-assisted content workflows & here’s what the process looks like:

1. AI-based research

Writers - Provide strategy, direction & goals upfront (keyword targeting, topic research, and outline development)

Our custom AI tool - Gets the initial basic, relevant research done.

2. AI-assisted brand tone and voice

Writers - Copy-paste pre-written articles to ascertain the brand’s tone

Our custom AI tool - Analyzes your brand's unique voice and tone from the get-go

3. AI-powered content generation

Our custom AI tool - Handles the heavy lifting of initial content creation. The human prompts our internal AI tool to write a complete first draft.

Writers - Step in for the refinement stage. This includes editing, optimizing, restructuring & proofreading.

To measure the effectiveness of our workflow, we compared the results produced using this workflow with the results from our favorite writer.

And the results were promising:

Time:

80/20 AI-assisted workflow - 30 mins

Our favorite writer - 5.5 hours

Quality: Comparable (considering the effort-to-reward ratio)
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Check out the tweet here.

This is still in the early stages, but we are planning to open access to our close-knit boring community. Would you be interested in gaining early access to our tool?

Are you Tracking these Crucial Content Marketing Metrics?

Consistently tracking key performance indicators is crucial for evaluating and improving content marketing strategies over time.

However, with so many potential metrics to choose from, it can be overwhelming to know which ones to focus on.

That's why a recent detailed piece by Semrush provides an invaluable framework for thinking about content marketing metrics. It categorizes the most vital metrics to monitor into four buckets:

Visibility Metrics:

• Organic search traffic
• Views
• Keyword rankings
• Backlinks
• Impressions

Audience Metrics:

• Traffic sources
• Brand mentions

Conversion Metrics:

• Conversion rate
• Content marketing ROI

Engagement Metrics:

• Follower growth
• Average engagement time
• Average engagement rate
• Click-through rate
• Social media engagements

Using this framework ensures that you track your content marketing efforts from all possible angles, rather than being fixated solely on rankings and impressions.

Bring Your Old Content Back to Life

Consistent, high-quality content is crucial for SEO success. But it's easy to fall behind on publishing when you don't have a plan.

With the accelerated pace of content production, it's easy for old posts, videos, and podcasts to get buried and forgotten.

However, existing content still holds tremendous untapped value if given new life.

Ross Simmonds on Moz’s Whiteboard Friday, outlines creative approaches for breathing new life into existing content assets.

Simmonds categorizes tactics based on content format:

For text content like blog posts:

• Promote on social media with dedicated posts
• Create social carousels to showcase key points
• Re-send old posts via email marketing

For video content like webinars:

• Turn scripts into new on-camera videos
• Extract audio into podcast episodes
• Embed videos or podcasts into existing posts
• Chop videos into shareable clips and audiograms

For audio content like podcasts:

• Transcribe into long-form posts
• Embed full episodes into related blog posts
• Clip key moments into social audiograms

Check out the entire video here for more ideas.

Fav Links of the Week

How does a website on cars drive an additional 331k visits/month using pSEO [LINK]

How to conduct an intent audit [LINK]

Study on product-oriented searches for eCommerce [LINK]

SEO is changing (and it’s not AI) [LINK]

How do internal links affect traffic from Google: study [LINK]

SEO automation guide: 17 tasks that can be automated [LINK]

How to create an SEO roadmap [LINK]

Link building tips for beginners [LINK]

Early Google SGE stats [LINK]

Must-Try SEO Prompt

This week's prompt leverages ChatGPT's new ability to analyze images to help optimize content.

Provide ChatGPT with an infographic or data visualization related to your target topic. For example:

"I have an infographic on the topic of content marketing trends that I'd like a detailed textual description of. Please break down each section and its key points. Emphasize any particularly insightful statistics or data points. I intend to use this to enhance a blog post on content marketing trends for SEO. Here is the image:"

You will get a written summary of the visual, extracting the most important details.

You can then insert this summary in your content, properly formatted and cited, to make the information more accessible to readers and search engines.

This provides an easy way to optimize visual assets for online content, boosting engagement and reach.

SEO + AI Tool

This week our spotlight is on an all-in-one AI-powered content suite for SEO, INK (used by companies like Amazon, Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify, BuzzSumo)

INK offers a breadth of features, including:

• AI-assisted writing & optimization
• Content analysis to identify issues & improvement opportunities
• AI-generated images and visual assets
• Tools to research keywords and user intent
• Capabilities to rewrite and enhance existing content
• Built-in plagiarism and quality checks

The platform aims to help creators develop content at scale while ensuring SEO relevancy. INK combines automation with human override for control.

If you are looking for a powerful content+SEO tool, INK is worth a try (they offer a free trial.)

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Director's Cut

​Sanjay Shenoy is a partner at Boringmarketing.com and the Director of Search. He’s been in SEO for 14 years and has trained over 1000 students in the latest organic search strategies. Every week, he’ll share answers to the most common questions we receive:

Q: How do you prioritize SEO tasks?

A: SEO tasks may seem overwhelming and never-ending. So it’s important to prioritize them.

I use Pareto's principle for this, which states that—80% of your SEO results are driven by 20% of SEO tasks.

And vice-versa—80% of your SEO tasks only drive 20% of the results.

For example:

• 20% of keywords drive 80% of traffic.
• 20% of pages attract 80% of links.
• 20% of factors impact 80% of rankings.
• 20% of backlinks are responsible for 80% of rankings impact.

And, in your SEO efforts, 80% of your results will likely come from just 20% of the work.

The key is identifying and prioritizing that vital 20%.

1st priority - 20% of SEO tasks that drive 80% of results

2nd priority - 80% of SEO tasks that drive 20% of results (these are still important)

This way:

• you save time
• get quicker results
• stop wasting resources
• get the maximum ROI

Have you observed the Pareto Principle apply in your own SEO efforts?

What other questions would you like me to answer? Hit reply & send all your questions my way.

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