Content marketing is the base of inbound marketing. It provides useful content that teaches an audience while selling them a product or service. That’s pretty tricky. Making someone want to pay attention to your advertisement use to mean humor or sex, but now we can actually bring value to people’s lives at the same time. These 7 content marketers are at the top of their game and have figured out how to create viral content that sells.

Brian Clark

The CEO of Copyblogger Media has a 156,000 follower strong Twitter account. Brian’s whole company and mission is to improve content for businesses. He and his staff publish great ebooks, whitepapers, and posts about just that. His Twitter feed is also pretty entertaining, especially if you are a sports fan. He also has a great video about explaining how his company took a virtual company approach to build its company with over 100,000 paying customers with only 27 employees.

Jeff Bullas

Jeff is the owner of Jeff Bullas Blog and blogs about everything for the business and tech crowd. He has some great guest posters and is always coming out with multiple stories each day that routinely get picked up by other large aggregate sites like Yahoo! News. This Australian blogger has over 200,000 followers and is a great source of information and a great place to be published, I’m still getting ping backs 6 months after being published on his site.

Joe Chernov

The recently hired VP of Content at Hubspot obviously knows what he is talking about and his personal site shows it well. He shows how to use infographics even on the most mundane subjects in order to make them interesting. He also publishes a lot of great stuff. Before Hubspot he was VP of Content for Kinvey, a marketing automation startup in Massachusetts, so he knows his stuff.

Robert Rose

The Chief Strategist for The Content Marketing Institute has been in the game a long time. Often used as a consultant, and with a deep understanding, he can write in a very easy to read way. His posts show how to write in a style that keeps an audience’s attention and can even make a boring article with no new information something interesting.

Jon Miller

The VP of Marketing and Co-Founder of Marketo has over 13,000 followers and even more readers. He also has a great eye for editing and judging content closely so they perform well on his company blog. He was named one of the Top 10 CMO’s for companies with under $250M revenue by the CMO institute and surprisingly holds a degree in physics from Harvard.

Joe Pulizzi

The Founder of the Content Marketing Institute knows a thing or two about content marketing and marketing in general. His recently published book Epic Content Marketing has been getting great reviews and really is a huge piece of information from one of the top guys in the game. His Twitter account also has over 40,000 followers where he posts some of his top content that you can learn from.

Margot Bloomstein

Margot is the Brand and Content Strategist for Appropriate, Inc. Her book “Content Strategy at Work” has a 5 star review and is really helpful to find out what kind of content you need to be posting so that it aligns with your company image. Her Twitter isn’t all work, but it can be entertaining and has some great links to follow that show you what she is working on and some other great pieces that are easy to learn from.
These people are a great way to start out if you are looking for some new techniques to improve your content, or even if you are a newly hired marketer who lied on your resume. It’s never a bad time to learn and it’s always a good idea to keep up to speed with what is happening in your professional world.