Content Marketing Today

Cool company uses videos to explain complicated concepts for its customers.

Common Craft is a very small company with a very big idea.  And, it is one that you can emulate easily and inexpensively.

To understand what they do, think for a moment about the current generation of UPS television commercials. These uniquely simple UPS commercials use drawings to explain complex supply-chain concepts. 

UPS is big enough and wealthy enough to afford unbelievably expensive television advertising.  They could have gone with a cast of thousands, elaborate outdoor shots, and expensive spokespeople.  Instead, they offer commercials that are content rich.  They understood that their customers almost certainly did not understand many of the concepts and practices behind their ability to get packages exactly where they needed to be, when they needed to be there, anywhere in the world.  To make the complex simple they use animated drawings that perfectly illustrate a variety of supply chain and logistics concepts.  This content is powerful because it makes customers believe that UPS understands its business so well that it can explain even the most complicated process in a very simple way.

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In the next few weeks, you'll have the opportunity to read our new book, Get Content. Get Customers., hot off the proverbial presses. We're pretty sure that you will find it relevant, valuable, and compelling in just the way that content marketing is supposed to be. But, in case you can't wait for the book itself, here is a MindMap that lays out the entire tome on a virtual or actual page.

Throughout the creation of the book, I have used MindManager MindMap's for numerous book related tasks.

Read on to learn ho mind mappingoptimize the book collaboration and creation process with Joe Pulizzi-- and how it's now helping us with the process of marketing of the book.

Among the ways that mind mapping simplified the creation of the book:

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Microsoft makes your job easier thanks to its superb content marketing efforts.

Microsoft's continually improving content marketing strategy empowers its Web visitors to improve their own marketing efforts significantly.  This is true whether you ultimately choose to use a Microsoft product or not.  Here are 3 important lessons you can learn from Microsoft:

1. If a giant with the clout of Microsoft believes a content marketing strategy is critical to its success, it is absolutely essential to those of us in much smaller organizations.
2. You can improve your online marketing by carefully observing and adapting the best practices of other related organizations.
3. If you can give away something free, that will bind your customers to you for the long-term, by all means do so.

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I spoke earlier this week to a business person who is launching an executive coaching practice.  As I was explaining to her how important it is to establish a comprehensive web presence, I realized that the idea seemed very intimidating to her. 

So, to prove to myself that it did not need to be intimidating, I set about creating a very rough prototype website, using WordPress, to see how long it would take.  From start to finish it actually took about 19 1/2 minutes.

I know what you're thinking, "You do this all the time so how hard could it be for you?"

Fair enough.  I can probably do it faster than somebody who has no experience with WordPress.  But, it is also true that even an absolute neophyte can launch a basic blog-powered website in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.  What would have taken a professional software developer with HTML coding experience days or perhaps weeks to accomplish 10 years ago can now be accomplished in a fraction of that time.  And what would have cost perhaps $50-$100000 or more can be achieved anywhere from free to $5,000 plus.

Here's what you can do in 20 minutes or less.

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If you are a solopreneur, you certainly have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Imagine how much more you could accomplish if your website was actively selling for you 24 hours a day seven days a week! That's exactly what Stephanie Diamond is helping solopreneur, Natalie Currie, to accomplish using a custom MindMap. Natalie provides training and consulting in the pharmaceutical and biotech fields. Because she is so busy working in her business, she has been challenged to work on her business. and, like most entrepreneurs, creating a content marketing-driven website is not something she ever would've learned in school or on the job. Thus, her website is nice but is typical of the brochure sites most small business owners put up on the web. Read More

If you are a small business marketer, there's a lot to love and to learn by watching this video.

When you need to make a splash in the small business marketplace and your budget is limited, imagination needs to take the place of money.  That's exactly what the folks at the Search Engine Guide had to do this spring to promote their upcoming Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference.

Of course, they could have gone the route of traditional press releases sent out to everybody they knew. But that's what everybody does.  Moreover, the search engine guide folks are big fans of social media marketing. 

They had to cook up something a unique and compelling that would meet the challenge as they described it, "How do you capture someone's attention online, where information overload has left most Internet users blind to anything resembling a sales pitch?"

Here is exactly what they did to break through that clutter.

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When it comes to the power of WordPress, you don't have to take my word for it. The Performancing.com blog provided four dozen ways in which websites and blogs can use this powerful and flexible tool to create unique content solutions. This Twist 'n' Shout gallery application is just one example. Blog author, Raj Dash, is a CMS (content management system) expert who, as he puts it, "has both written a small, custom CMSes from scratch as well is evaluated million-dollar professionals see in masses for large corporations, Word press' robustness and never ceases to amaze me." Much of its power derives from the huge open source community of developers who keep adding more and more value and capability to the Word press platform. WordPress is still free, but offers the power of the CMS solutions that might cost upwards of $50,000, even in today's competitive market. Here are my five favorite of those 48 really cool applications of WordPress: Read More

Well, actually it's on the Wall Street Journal's new My Online Journal (MOJ). But, it's a great start!

It means that any WSJ subscriber can customize a reader page that would include our regularly updated content. So, in principal, hundreds of thousands of WSJ online subscribers could include ContentMarketingToday as part of their individual MOJ home page. What's going on? It's all about widgets, content aggregation, and Web 2.0. As we wrote in our post about the Customer Content Conference, the old web(and old media, for that matter) was all about getting people to congregate. Everyone went to the same place and viewed the same content. That's all changing. Today, we are all becoming aggregators of information. Read More

Regular readers know that I'm a big fan of mind mapping. I've written frequently about the concept, but applications and about Mindjet, the company that sells MindManager software. Both the product and the concept are growing in a viral way over the Internet.

Chuck Frey has a lot to do with spreading the mind mapping  virus through his mind mapping blog and his Innovation Tools website.  Not only is Chuck a great thinker he's also a great marketer.  His mind mapping software update eNewsletter is a superb example of content marketing.

Basically, he manages to compress a huge chunk of his blog content into an eNewsletter.  For those of us who subscribe and who are mind mapping fanatics, this ' blog in your inbox' eNewsletter is welcome whenever it arrives.

Here's what makes it so powerful:

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Marketing ourselves often takes a backseat to actually providing the services we ought to be marketing.

Therefore, it's essential to find a way to keep the most important elements of your marketing strategy right in front of your face all the time.

In her latest article in the Mindjet user newsletter, Stephanie Diamond simplifies at least one critical component: how to create a mailing list building system that self perpetuates.

We all need systems. The simpler the better.This use of a visual mind map simplifies what might otherwise be a bit daunting. Here's how it works.

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