What Is "Owned, Earned and Paid Media"? If you work in a marketing agency, or are a marketer in-house in a larger company, you probably know the answer to “what is owned, earned and paid media?”. But we small business owners wear many hats. Marketing may be one of 6 or 7 responsibilities you have. In fact, you may have so many responsibilities that you’ve run out of hats (see cartoon above). That being the case you may not be as familiar with certain marketing concepts, such as owned, earned and paid media. So let’s dive in and see what it’s all about. Definition: Owned Earned Paid Media This phrase is simply a framework for how to organize and execute your marketing: Owned media is when you leverage a channel you create and control. Earned media is when customers, the press and the public share your content, speak about your brand via word of mouth, and otherwise discuss your brand. Paid media is when you pay to leverage a third-party channel, such as sponsorships and advertising on third-party sites. Avoid These 2 Myths 1.) 2.)
Ethical and Legal Image Use As bloggers, we love to use images in our posts. For one, they make your blog more attractive. For another, they help break up the text of your posts. And lastly, as we all know, no one reads on the internet anyway (haha, I kid. Kind of). Anywho, you definitely want images in your post. Before you freak out, keep in mind I've never heard of anyone being sued for posting copyrighted images on their blog (although I have heard of bloggers being *threatened* with a lawsuit, but quite frankly that's ridiculous. Before we go any further, there are some terms you should be aware of: Copyright—The person (or company) who possesses the copyright owns the image. So! What if you find an image you really REALLY want to use, but you're not sure how it's licensed or it carries full copyright? Basically, just treat other people's images with the same respect as you would other people's written words, and you should be fine. Questions? (Note I am not a lawyer.
Can Gratitude Reduce Costly Impatience? News The human mind tends to devalue future rewards compared to immediate ones — a phenomenon that often leads to favoring immediate gratification over long-term wellbeing. As a consequence, patience has long been recognized to be a virtue. And indeed, the inability to resist temptation underlies a host of problems ranging from credit card debt and inadequate savings to unhealthy eating and drug addiction. The prevailing view for reducing costly impatience has emphasized the use of willpower. That is, emotions are to be tamped down in order to avoid irrational impulses for immediate gain. In a potentially landmark study, a team of researchers from Northeastern University, the University of California, Riverside, and Harvard Kennedy School challenge the conventional view by demonstrating that feelings of gratitude automatically reduce financial impatience. The study is forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The hidden gem of content creation: interviews As content becomes a more respected medium, readers expect more from content writers. It isn't enough to gab about any topic that strikes your fancy at 2 am when your readers expect a new post the next day – today's content writing requires preparation, research, and good prose. In short, content is beginning to take a few cues from journalism. And one area of content writing that I think could use a professional overhaul is the interview. The Classic Blog Interview When blogging was new, interviews were frankly nothing more than a way to fill space and promote a peer. Usually, you'd conduct an interview if a colleague asked you to help promote their launch or if you had a personal investment in their success as an affiliate. If all this sounds shallow, then you're getting the right idea. These interviews were pure fluff. They aren't a thing of the past. The Reinvented Interview It's not bragging and promoting. Who to Interview and What to Ask That's key, right there. And here's what I'd ask:
3 Website Analytics You Can Improve in 2 Weeks or Less 3 Website Analytics You Can Improve in 2 Weeks or Less Posted by Sam Lowe on Tue, Apr 08, 2014 @ 08:30 AM Analytics are a vital aspect to any marketing effort and especially for inbound marketing. Most marketers haven’t ever had this much quality data at their fingertips, so things can get a little overwhelming. It’s great to have a ton of data to sort through, but what if you want to try and influence some of your less desirable metrics? You won’t be able to make changes and affect all of your metrics quickly, but there are a few you can turn from bad to better in a short(ish) time. Bounce RateTime For Results: 2-3 Weeks Your site’s bounce rate is a measure of how often users navigate to your site and then leave after viewing only one page. Right away you should take a look at your page titles and meta descriptions. What else can you do? Time On PageTime For Results: 2-3 Weeks Wow, your site gets 50,000 visits a month? Conversion RateTime For Results: 1-2 Weeks Time To Take Action
Answers to 18 SEO Questions You Were Too Afraid to Ask When I first started out in marketing, I thought I knew what SEO was all about. I knew it stood for search engine optimization. And I knew that the better your SEO was, the higher you would rank on search engines. I'm an SEO genius now, right? Not so much. So let's talk about all of the SEO things I had questions about along the way, but wasn't sure who to ask for clarification. 1) What is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. 2) What's the difference between organic vs. paid results? Organic results are the results that appear in search engines, for free, based on an algorithm. 3) What are meta descriptions and do they still matter? A meta description is the text that appears below your page in a search engine result that explains what the page is all about. Meta descriptions still matter, just not in the same way they used to. 4) Should I optimize my domain name to include keywords? 5) How do I know when I’m using the right number of keywords on a page? 10) What is robots.txt?
8 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Blogging Trying something new for the first time can elicit a whole range of emotions. Whether you're nervous about the outcome or excited for the new challenge (or both!), there's always that element of the unknown. And I'll bet anyone who starts blogging for the first time can relate. But as the saying goes, you never know until you try. Luckily, you're not the first person to start blogging. 1) Success Doesn't Happen Overnight I'm gonna give it to you straight: Blogging is a long-term investment. But remember: Most good things don't come easy. 2) ... That's one of the greatest things about blogging. With blogging, on the other hand, the content you create today will continue to generate results long after you first hit "publish." So if our blogging team decided to go on vacation for a month, we'd still generate 73% of the traffic we generated the month before. 3) There's Always Something to Blog About "But what if I run out of things to blog about?" 5) ... 6) Commenters Can Be Really Mean
Digital Marketing Glossary, Part 2 In the first installment of this series, I commented that I’d gotten “lead gen” and “demand gen” mixed up. Seems I am not alone, so before we leap off into the next group of definitions, a few more words are in order about “demand generation vs. lead generation.” In a recent post on Content Marketing Institute’s blog, Eric Wittlake commented that “When many B2B marketers say demand generation, they mean lead generation — which is to say they will measure success based on the number and value of the leads their efforts bring in. The problem is this: Demand generation is focused on shaping the audience’s perspective, while lead generation is focused on capturing their information.” I asked Jay Hidalgo, founder of Demand Gen Coach (and a marketer with both Fortune 100 and SMB cred), to comment. With all that said, let’s get on with Part 2 of the Glossary: Earned media: Publicity or social buzz that’s free. eBook: There’s a lot of overlap between eBooks and white papers.