Morning reading has changed.
Instead of unfurling the day's newspaper over a cup of coffee, we unfurl our laptops and check our blog feeds. And that’s great for entrepreneurs: you get to pick out your favorite marketing blogs rather than sift through a thousand classified ads.
The problem: there are so many marketing blogs out there in 2016 that it’s hard to get a real read on what’s worth the click. In fact, type “marketing blog” into Google and you’ll get 257,000,000 hits.
To make sense of it all, let’s take a look at some of the most insightful marketing blogs in 2016:
SethGodin.com
Primary Blogger: Seth Godin
Seth Godin is an essential perspective in marketing and has been for a long time. If you’re looking for nitty-gritty details and SEO tools, this isn’t the blog to seek out. If you’re looking for a better understanding of marketing and how business and innovation work, then Seth Godin’s blog is a must-read every morning.
Noteworthy Post: Turning Paradoxes into Problems
NeilPatel.com
Primary Blogger: Neil Patel, entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Crazy Egg
Old hands in the SEO/SEM industry will recognize Neil Patel’s name. Not only has he been one of the most relevant marketers in the digital era, but he’s always featured highly detailed, relevant content on his blog, which is almost exclusively focused on practical, data-driven tips.
Go ahead. Just try and find one blog post to bookmark. You can’t do it. There’s too much going on, from mastering Instagram to creating a blueprint for content-driven posts.
True: Patel’s expertise is focused on the digital world, which means he has an oddly specific take on marketing. Not every marketer is going to swoon with interest in A/B testing and keyword research. But it’s hard to argue with the results—not to mention the in-depth, actionable content he’s constantly putting out for free.
Noteworthy Post: How to Master A/B Split Testing Quickly (and Increase Conversion Rate)
Big Brand System
Primary Blogger: Pamela Wilson, blogger for everything from Copyblogger to the Mogul Mom
If there’s one word that’s thrown around too much these days, it’s the concept of “branding.” You need to brand this, brand that, build your brand, grow your brand, until you have brand coming out of your ears.
What Big Brand System does is take the concept of branding and turn it into useful posts about how a brand is even achieved in the first place. Here’s a key quote from How to Speak to One to Reach Many that takes the abstract concept of branding and turns it into a real takeaway:
When you build relationships and engage with your best customers you create great stories to tell that resonate with others with the same challenges. You’re no longer guessing or making things up to satisfy some imaginary persona.
In short: read this blog regularly if you feel like you haven’t yet fashioned your own identity as a company yet.
Noteworthy Post: How to Speak to One to Reach Many
Duct Tape Marketing
Primary Blogger: John Jantsch, creator of the Duct Tape Marketing Consulting Network
John Jantsch and Co. do a great job of finding insights and pairing them with useful marketing tools, giving each post actual, actionable advice while throwing in pearls of marketing wisdom.
Concepts at Duct Tape Marketing include basic offline marketing (Five Reasons You Must Advertise) as well as the nitty-gritty of digital marketing.
Perhaps more importantly, many of these blogs are brief, which means that Jantsch has no problem for getting to the point. If you want to stay up on marketing techniques but don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to blogs, Duct Tape is a great place to start.
Noteworthy Post: Five Questions You Should Ask Every Customer
The Foundation
Author: Various
The Foundation is really an amalgamation of multiple entrepreneurs’ perspectives, and the eclectic posts show it. Anything and everything marketing is tackled here, from avoiding rookie sales mistakes to best practices for utilizing social media.
This blog is great for anyone who wants to avoid a single perspective and is simply looking for ad hoc introductions into the world of marketing. Sure, the advice sometimes comes in piecemeal, but the content is always strong, on topic, and worth checking out.
Noteworthy Post: Building Authenticity into Your Social Media Strategy by Sandy Connery
RyanHoliday.net
Primary Blogger: Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me: I’m Lying and The Obstacle is the Way
Ryan Holiday, infamous P.R. man behind some truly questionable stunts, is an essential voice thanks to his often stoic take on the world of P.R. and marketing.
His posts might not seem like marketing material at first. In fact, they often talk about concepts as abstract as the “ego.” But the philosophical bent of Holiday’s writing comes from a truly insightful writer whose archive is worth exploring at length. Holiday takes the time to break down why P.R. and marketing works.
Quoting college football coach Nick Saban in the aforementioned Here’s the Strategy Athletes Use to Perform at the Highest Level post, Holiday displays how he’s able to take business insights from any walk of life:
Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.
Noteworthy Post: Here’s the Strategy Athletes Use to Perform at the Highest Level
Moz
Primary Blogger: Various
Moz is more than a blog, really — it’s sort of an ongoing project full of eclectic insights, SEO news updates, and free marketing tools. You might think of it as an interactive web magazine for marketers.
In fact, some of their essential contributions to the world of marketing aren’t even blog posts. They’re innovations like the MozBar or Check my [Local] Listing.
But what’s great about Moz is that it isn’t exclusively about any singular type of business. While some of the best marketing blogs focus on affiliate marketing or PPC, Moz is about your company’s Internet presence as a whole.
Noteworthy Post: The Balanced Digital Scorecard: A Simpler Way to Evaluate Prospects
The Best of The Best
Choose any of the above as your morning read and you’re bound to end up a better marketer for it. As for choosing newspapers — well, that’s another post.
What are your go-to marketing blogs?
