Content Marketing Today

  Get content. Get customers.,has now sold more than 10,000 copies in its hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions.

Even though Joe Pulizzi and I wrote and updated it in the early stages of the content marketing revolution, our book’s vital lessons and detailed case studies are just as valid and valuable today. The range of organizations that we analyzed extended from huge multibillion dollar public companies to midsize companies with a few hundred employees and even to very small single owner organizations.

If you haven’t yet read Get Content Get Customers, we know that you will want to run out and buy the book because it is chock-full of content marketing knowledge that you can put to work immediately.

But, just to wet your content marketing whistle, here are the top 10 takeaways we gleaned from some brilliant content marketing practitioners. These represent the themes that we recognized again and again as we examined how organizations are putting content marketing to work.

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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 Post illustrates the 3 shocking secrets that you can apply to your online headlines. Read More

Via Scoop.it - Content Marketing Now

Written by Chuck Frey on his "Mind Mapping Software Blog".

Grow your core business by looking for adjacent markets, technologies or areas of focus where you can expand. Here's how to do it visually.

One of the key strategies for innovation and business development today is to look beyond your core business for adjacent markets, technologies or areas of focus where you can expand without severely taxing the resources of your organization. Tools like mind mapping and business diagramming can help you to visualize these adjacencies and to make informed decisions about which opportunities to pursue. Read More

Via Scoop.it - Content Marketing Now Written by David Meerman Scott One of my favorite videos is HP Invent, which was co-created by Tom Wrigglesworth. I've shown this video at many of my speaking gigs because it beautifully captures what HP Workstations are about. The video is not a product pitch. And it is entertaining as heck.   HP - invent from Films & Things on Vimeo. This HP Invent video has nearly 600,000 views. Imagine that – a video [...] Read More

8 Ways to Extend Your Print or eNewsletter's Reach Far Beyond Its Core Subscribers

When you publish a monthly print or electronic newsletter that targets an important audience segment,  you probably invest heavily in generating the content that will make this newsletter relevant and valuable to its readers.  That is obviously critical.  But you can do much more to make that newsletter and its content work harder for your organization. How? Easy. Think outside the newsletter. After all, the newsletter has a relatively finite reach, even online.  Think beyond this single content product.  You can dramatically increase the impact of your content marketing by thoughtful repurposing of the information and resources you developed in order to create the newsletter itself. Here are 8 ways to extend the reach of your content far beyond the circulation of that print publication.  None of these require significant incremental expense. But they will consistently deliver dramatic increases in the reach of your content to prospective customers—and the impact it has on them. Read More

Beautiful blog design and compelling, relevant content by historical novelist Catherine Delors.

This is one of the best websites I've seen from a novelist. It brings us deeper into the 18th century period about which she writes. The engaging content and simple, but elegant style are a perfect match. Kudos to Catherine.

More about Catherine and how her writing journey may inspire budding authors:

Catherine Delors was born and raised in France. She graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne School of Law and became the youngest member of the Bar of Paris at the age of twenty-one. She later moved to the United States and passed the California Bar. She worked at a few large American law firms before setting up a solo practice following the birth of her son. She now splits her time between London and Paris, while remaining a partner in an international law firm based in Los Angeles. Her second novel, For The King, was published in July 2010. Catherine is currently writing on a third novel, a prequel to Mistress of the Revolution. She is also researching a fourth one, which shall revolve about Jane Austen and her French connections.

For those of us who are authors--or would-be authors, she traces her journey from unpublished to published:

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Via Scoop.it - Content Marketing Now     Sally Hogshead's video explains the 9 second rule. Grab them fast or lose them. Keynote speaker Sally Hogshead is the author of FASCINATE, teaching audiences how to persuade and captivate in a world with a 9 second attention span.       Listen to Sally and You'll Begin to Understand Why You Need to Buy Her Book: Fascinate.

More on this fun, fabulous, and yes, fascinating read: Read More

Via Scoop.it - Content Marketing Now

From the Hubspot Blog, by Karen Rubin

HubSpot launches a free new tool to help you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your entire marketing program.

Since 2006, HubSpot's award-winning free tool, Website Grader, has graded more than 4 million websites. Website Grader has given marketers advice on how to improve many aspects of their websites and encouraged millions to bring their website presence to the next level, all for free. But now the time has come to replace Website Grader! A lot has changed since 2006, and these days, marketing is about much more than just your website. Read More

Via Scoop.it - Content Marketing Now   By Brad Shorr of Smashing Magazine The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition. A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows:

“Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.”

This definition is a great place to start. Although the discipline has clearly evolved, this breakdown of its scope makes perfect sense. The aspects of content strategy that matter most to Web designers in this definition are design (obviously!), development, presentation and production. In this article, we’ll concentrate on the relationship between content strategy and design in creating, organizing and displaying Web copy. Read More

Via Scoop.it - Content Marketing Now By Raul Kaevand at DreamGrow.com. I covered the importance of Call to Actions in my blogpost Read this: 9 Secrets Towards an Awesome Call To Action. Go read it later, if you already haven’t done so. But many people are still asking for solid Call to Action examples. Read the full story at: Via www.dreamgrow.com Read More