Content Marketing Today

External links to your site from high quality, relevant websites are one of the best ways to generate great search results.

Why? Because, from Google’s perspective, your site ranks better if lots of your well-respected peers consider your site worth linking to. It's like being friends with all the cool kids in high school. That makes you popular, too.

Unfortunately, the importance of generating quality links to your site opens the door to nefarious SEO practitioners who send out mass, evidently automated comments to a range of sites that have nothing to do with your company or your online presence.

A perfect example arrived in my e-mail this morning as a link to my article, "Six Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool."

The SEO spammer left this absurd and ungrammatical comment:

"I've implies looked at it by way of that point of view and happen to be enlightened.  I will have to obtain some extra information and report it back again. Thank you."

I don’t know about you, but that sure doesn’t motivate me to connect with the ‘commenter.’

How to Avoid Falling for This Kind of Black Hat SEO Spam Link Building Technique

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Simply Combine the Two Online Personalities to Get a Very Happy Ending

The frightening story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wove the tale of a saintly doctor whose alter ego was an evil murderer. Sadly, there was no happy ending.

In a parallel but more modern context, I found a company that suffers from a similarly split online personality.

If you first meet the good half—the blog, you will want to spend more time getting to know them. But, if you first meet the bad half—the website, you're likely to head off as fast as you can.

The company in question has a website with very little content. At the same time, it has an excellent but completely separate blog, that lives, like Dr. Jekyll, under a different name.

By integrating the two separate content components, this company could deliver compelling content that immediately engaged visitors. The result: a happy ending.

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If You Don’t, You’ll Be Just Another Generic Acme Corporation Whose Content Marketing is Doomed to Fail

Mission and vision statements may be important to your company internally.  They may even deserve a place on your website once your visitor begins to drill down to learn more about your company.  But they don’t belong on your homepage.

Why? Because they are all about you. They rarely have anything to do with your customer.  To capture your visitors’ attention, you must make your homepage content all about them from the first instant. 

Here’s an actual example of content marketing getting clobbered by the prominence of company-centric clichés.

Really Bad Real-world Mission/Vision Statements Scuttle Home Page of ‘Acme’

The following example makes the case better than I can. I swear that I didn’t invent these two paragraphs.  Nor did I use the automatic mission statement generator from NetInsight. Read these and weep. (I owe the company pseudonym to the always victorious Roadrunner who outwits any Acme products.)

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The brand-new and very revealing study from Junta 42 and Marketing Profs reinforces the growing dominance of content marketing in the business-to-business arena. 

Not only are the vast majority of business-to-business marketers employing content marketing but most will also be increasing the amount they spend.

Here are some highlights to give you a flavor of why you need to get a copy of this free study:

• 90% of respondents are using content marketing in 2010
• Content marketing is 26% of the total marketing budget
• 51% will increase content marketing budget in next 12 months
• Average annual content marketing spend: $379,600
• Small companies spend more of their budget on content than large companies
• Most companies combined in sourcing and outsourcing
• Social media ranks right at the top of tactics

The three following charts illustrate vital content marketing and social media trends within the B2B market segment:

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How to Get  Readers to Spend Serious Time with Your Core Content

Be brief. Be complete. Be Enticing.

Headlines have always been important in print publications. They are even more important online.

They grab readers’ attention and lure them into reading entire articles.  If you have lots of great headlines, avid readers will linger much longer with your content.

Solutions for Short Attention Spans

Today’s readers have short attention spans. That’s exponentially true for your online visitors. You have seconds to grab them before they move on.  You need to show why they should care enough to continue reading. Otherwise, your content marketing efforts will fall short.

Easier said than done, you might think. Fortunately, a quick scan of this morning’s online edition of the New York Times illustrates the 3 secrets that you can apply to your online headlines.

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It's All about the Maximizing the Frequency of Critical Keywords on Your Homepage

I have believed that integrating the two content marketing components was important since the very beginning of my own online efforts. 

Of course, your content marketing strategy relies on providing relevant, compelling, and frequently updated information that targets your best customers. By integrating a blog into the homepage of your website, you have the opportunity to do exactly that. You can write lots of articles and organize them in a logical way so that your visitors can find exactly what they need quickly.

But, until last week, I seriously underestimated why the integration of those two is so very important to getting found by Google and by your prospects. And, after all, getting found is what makes great content valuable to you and your organization.

Findability Flows Naturally from Homepage/Blog Integration

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