10 Ways to Get Your Content Marketing Strategy in Motion Content has always been king, but more recently content marketing has started to get more of the attention it deserves in organizations with budget allocated to creating content. In recent years, we have also witnessed many new software platforms entering the market to help companies create content. As many of you would attest, it’s always easy to go out and spend money on creating content or any marketing campaigns for that matter. Alternatively, in my experience almost all companies have access to lot of content in-house, but for some reason they are either not surfacing them or not using their resources efficiently to create new content that can help them with their content marketing efforts. Content creation is a huge undertaking. 1. This is a classic way of creating content where you can use your favorite keyword tool and type in the keyword that you want to target. Most content creators are tempted to go with the first keyword since that has the most query volume. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine Content Marketing is hot. White hot. SEO and digital marketing thought leaders are declaring that Content Marketing is the next big thing. Even Rand is touting its importance. The strategy of Content Marketing makes sense: instead of pushing messages about your product at prospects, pull prospects towards you by publishing content about your prospects’ interests. So the conversation is no longer about if or why an organization should practice Content Marketing. So if you’re wondering “How?” The Machine First, let’s take a look at the machine, all of its pistons, cogs, smokestacks and miscellaneous parts. Now we’ll go over the machine, part by part. Goals & Plan What is the goal, the end output for your Content Marketing Machine? Your plan then becomes to create a content-powered path that takes your prospect from where they are today to the end goal. What questions does the Persona want to answer at this stage in the process? Team So you’ve got a plan. Ideas Production Audience Development
4 Ways to Create Content That Sells Let me just cut to the chase here: When it comes to business blogging, there is content, and then there is content that sells. Ask any business owner or marketer which they’d prefer and the obvious answer would be the latter. The fact is, all the business blogging in the world doesn’t help a bit if it’s not increasing sales. Make no mistake—a business is a business and it needs to make money. In this article I’ll discuss 4 ways companies can create blog content to bring in more sales. Here goes… #1: Teach With Story and Sell With Subtleness Of all the things I’m going to discuss in this article, teaching with story and selling with subtleness is really the most important. Here’s how this works. But first, customers want an answer to “What’s in it for me?” Here’s an example of how to first teach with story and then sell with subtleness. And I shared the story of a company doing just this. That was the “teaching” segment of the article. Enable your employees to be content producers.
The Ultimate Guide to Content Planning A transition is in effect. The web is maturing and like any form of media that has gone before it that can mean only one thing: That content is now at the epicentre of audience creation once again. The introduction of Penguin, as we know, is forcing every online business to re-examine how it ‘does’ online marketing and begin looking for ways to grow reputation, reach and visibility via content rather than the link building practices of old. As Google turns up the algo to promote great content and social gives us all access to the social graph and the network effect it offers there has never been a better time to get your content game in shape and pull together a killer strategy for your brand. I recently wrote a piece for another digital marketing site that goes into a little more detail around why content is coming to the fore and so for extra context it is certainly worth a read. How to Plan Stage one of any great content strategy is the plan. Understand your Brand Understand your Audience
20 Content Marketing Tips to Boost Traffic, Engagement and Sales With the explosion of sites like WordPress, YouTube, Pinterest and Facebook, content can go viral very quickly. By creating high quality, engaging content your brand can be shared around the world within minutes – something that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing costs ten years ago. The social media revolution has changed the way we market content. 2 billion videos are watched daily on YouTube200,000,000 blog posts can be read on WordPress50 million tweets per day on TwitterMore than 1 billion active users on Facebook But the shift towards content marketing can also be credited to Google. An if that wasn’t enough Google launched Penguin in April 2011, an update to the algorithm that penalized websites with low quality links and over-optimization. Both of these updates lead to a change in the SEO industry. Content marketing is a must-have if you are an online marketer, and it is fast becoming the most valuable way to increase brand awareness and nurture leads.
The Guide to Developing a Content Strategy for "Boring" Industries The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. There have been multiple articles that have discussed the value and opportunities that content marketing brings to SEO - from organically building external links and ranking for more long tail keywords, to establishing a community and building brand awareness. As the SEO industry slowly moves away from manual linkbuilding and adapts a more long-term and forward-thinking approach (whether it be forced as a result of recent aggressive Google algorithm updates or because as an industry, we're starting to seek a sustainable methodology to establish authority), the challenge is in figuring out how to set up a proper framework that would help our community develop a content strategy for all websites. Image courtesy of SEOmoz Image courtesy of Distilled Step 1: Asking the Right Questions (Learning About the Industry) How do tire shoppers use the Internet?
Content Brainstorming Tools for 2013 When it comes to content marketers, there is one question that always piques our interest – Where do others get their ideas? And with more brands creating content than ever before, it can be challenging to continually keep ahead of trends, churn out fresh concepts and repurpose ideas – let alone do so across multiple platforms. To inspire the creation process, I’ve highlighted a few resources to help guide your brainstorming and idea generation efforts for 2013. Whether it’s a long-form blog post, a resource article, an infographic or video, a good brainstorming process should be your jumping off point to fuel ideas. Here are a few brainstorming techniques to try out for your next group session: …but first a few ground rules as a good reminder: Encourage Free-Thinking, No BoundariesNo Criticizing or DismissingKeep the Process MovingLet Ideas You Don’t Understand Go Mapping Brain Writing Trigger Method Online Mind Mapping Tools And if you still find yourself at a dead end…Just Google it!
An Eight-Step Plan to Get PR-Driven Links In a past life I worked exclusively in traditional print and broadcast PR, where digital coverage was viewed as a bonus. But since landing a job as a PR consultant at Distilled, all of that has changed. My goals have shifted. Previously my goals were things like brand awareness and changing audience perceptions—and these were driven by press coverage. But, while these goals still come in to play, I have a new goal too—to build links. So, eight months down the line, I feel it's time to share what I've learned. An eight-step plan There are a few tried and tested methods for PR driven link-building, like guest posting and pitching for by-lined articles, but these can be slow-burning processes. What I'm going to talk you through is a process which, if invested in and executed well, is much more likely to result in multiple links from high quality, authoritative news sites. There's no quick fix. For any marketing campaign you should be looking to use multiple channels. Step one: Find the story 1.
The Ultimate Social Media Profile Chart, Social Network Profiles in Share Email Share 241 Email Share Below is a list of some of the most popular social media sites, all arranged by category (i.e., bookmarking, blogging, news, etc.). Besides the obvious factor that these sites allow you to get involved in their communities, they also allow you to create a unique profile which includes your own custom URL, a link (or sometimes links) back to your site and information about you and/or your company. While engaging the features and communities of social media site can be very beneficial to your business, social media profiles additionally help you to accomplish two things: build inbound links to your site and help manage online reputation. – Logo and link to site’s home page – Refers to title that will appear on your profile page. – Simply an area in the profile where you can add a brief description about yourself, your company or even the services you offer. – Are links followed or nofollowed? – Brief description of what social media site offers. Custom Yes No