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We’ve been studying and honing the craft for years, and we’ve seen content marketing work ROI wonders for all of our clients, from the national brands to the small businesses. If you’re interested in making a career out of content marketing, you don’t need a degree to do it — you just need to start by reading the right articles and putting them into practice.

We’ve rounded up the articles we’ve found most insightful and the tips at tactics we use every single day. Wait until you see what they can do for you! Open your Evernote and save this blog post, because you’re going to want to go back to these articles over and over again as you implement your updated (or new) content strategy. And if you took one look at this list and immediately started having a panic attack — don’t worry.

We realize content marketing isn’t easy, and it does take a lot of time, research and testing to get it right. If tackling the content marketing beast solo doesn’t sound like your idea of a good time and you’d rather outsource content marketing, we’ve got you covered — contact us for details.

For those of you who are still with us, here’s everything you need to know about content marketing (via the leading experts in the industry):

Keyword research and competitive analysis are two things you should tackle first when building a website or improving your web presence. After working with hundreds of businesses over the years, both in the B2B and B2C space, we’ve learned that search engine optimization (SEO), specifically keyword research, is the one thing business owners are most likely to screw up (or get screwed on, if they hire the wrong agency). If your keyword game isn’t on point, you’re missing out — on site traffic, on leads, and on money.

This blog post will walk you through the keyword research process, including an overview of the tools you’ll need, how to find keywords for SEO, how to prioritize the keywords and how to implement them into an effective blogging strategy. And, in case you’re a total newbie to this, there are screenshots that will help break down the process.

These tactics will work well, whether you’re looking to overhaul your SEO keyword strategy or are just looking for some choice keywords to weave into a blog post you’re working on. In fact, the method outlined in this post is the same one we’ve used for our site, and TCF currently ranks #1 for a variety of highly competitive, very lucrative keywords. If you follow the guide, there’s no reason why you can’t achieve the same results for your site.

First, let’s review the tools that you’ll use while finding keywords — and what they do:

We write thousands of blog posts every year for our clients and agency partners. Our editorial standards are obnoxiously high, and we do our best to write the best web content our clients (and their competitors) have ever seen. Although we try to catch everything, occasionally a mistake sneaks by us. Recently we made a very costly mistake, and I think it’s one that every blogger and business owner should be aware of.

It all started when one of our writers published a blog post to a client’s site – it was about finding great deals in Omaha, Nebraska (complete with an altogether underwhelming photo of the city, which may or may not have been taken by a drunken college student with a camera phone in 2005). You wouldn’t see this photo and immediately go book a vacation there, is what I’m saying.

I’m also saying that I have a hard time believing the photographer commands thousands of dollars per image – most of his work had nothing at all to do with photography, and he wasn’t an artist with any kind of recognition or awards to his name. Anyway, the website was new and it wasn’t an especially popular post – we could prove via Google Analytics that fewer than 100 people read it. It wasn’t our proudest moment, but we’ve learned a lot from the experience.