Content Marketing Today

Without conducting research to understand your customers, you risk very painful missteps. Happily, even very small companies can conduct high quality research that would have been affordable only for multimillion dollar companies just five or 10 years ago.

Of course, it's possible to do way too much research.  That's when you wind up with the paralysis by analysis situation.  But, in most small to midsize entrepreneurial companies, there is too little research and too much gut feel. That's when some very bad decisions get made.

Because we know that the essence of content marketing resides in a thorough understanding of your customers, regular research should be a core component of your content marketing strategy.  The good news is that you don't need to spend a lot of time or money conducting reliable research.  Here are some basics to get you started.

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They spent millions. You can do it for $79.95.

I've written a lot about WordPress and how it can help you create and manage a terrific website. To illustrate what's possible, we'll take a look at the Revolution set of themes built on top of WordPress and one actual user, ImWritingSports. Basically, each website has two core elements: What you see up front and what goes on behind the scenes. When you visit the Washington Post website you see a well designed, easy to understand, news-style website. Behind the scenes, resides a very sophisticated content management system that would've been custom built. We don't know exactly how much time and money they spent to get there. But it was surely many months and millions of dollars. Read More

Too many people--and I used to be one of them--think of a blog as an out-of-control rant by a fanatic about some topic or other. Sure there's plenty of that. However, today, business blogs are pervasive. They provide enormous value by delivering relevant content on a myriad of topics. But, more importantly, an increasing number of what have been termed 'blogs' in the past are really websites. They are full-featured websites with as much capability is anything that could be built from scratch by talented programmers. I'm indebted to my new friends at ContentRobot.com for the new term, ' blog-powered website' that I will use from now on. They're doing some great stuff. Be sure to check out their website ,which is the featured graphic to the right. The secret sauce behind the ContentRobot.com site, ContentMarketingToday.com, and thousands of others is the powerful and often free software that will enable you to establish a content rich website. I happen to be a fan of WordPress which is an open-source content management system whose roots are in blogging. But, whatever tool you choose, you now have the ability to create a full-featured website with a minimal expense in a short period of time. You no longer have an excuse to stick with the brochureware website that your sister's cousin's nephew built for you in some kind of JavaScript that nobody knows how to modify. Since your excuses for change are gone, here's why you need to launch a blog-based website right now: Read More

Get visual.  Use a mind map.

Many of us offer fairly complex sets of services that may be difficult to describe.  In fact, they might be too complicated for the classic thirty second elevator pitch. Don't give up.  Follow Stephanie Diamond's advice to use a mind map that strips away much of the complexity of your service offerings.

In her February Mind Jet newsletter column, Stephanie was challenged by a new company with a brand-new concept.  The company, Yovia.com, is a "social media optimization service agency."  I know what you're thinking.  What the heck is that?  Well, that was their problem.

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Forget Google.  Count on StumbleUpon instead.

Let's assume there are plenty of reasons for people to go to your website.  You have great content.  Your visitors will learn something important.  You have developed thought leadership in an area that's critical to your best prospects. 

All that is essential but not enough to make sure that you get a consistent level of traffic to your website, particularly when you're just starting out.

There is a great social media marketing tool, StumbleUpon, that will drive traffic to any page on your website either free--or for a predictable five cents per visit. In my experience over the past two months, it has served as a reliable source of traffic both to my homepage and to specific articles. 

Thanks to Harry Hoover of My Creative Team whose recent blog inspired me to share my experience with this terrific tool.  If you need web traffic, here's how to get it.

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Business Week apparently has absolutely no affinity for small business marketing.  At least that's what a recent column by regular contributor, Gene Mark, would lead me to believe.  Entitled, "Tech ' Solutions' Your Small Biz Can't Use," the article shows an appalling lack of understanding of some very important content marketing enablers.

The author made a lame attempt to critique numerous online marketing components including blogs, RSS feeds, online video, and search engine marketing tools. The Blue Chip Marketing Tips blog did a wonderful job of eviscerating his article from the January 4, 2008 issue of Business Week. Blogger, Caroline Melberg, critiqued each of his points, by pointing out how wrong he was. You can learn both from what she had to say--and by doing the opposite of what Gene Mark suggests you do.

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Why one small French restaurant should ignore their advice and blog their brains out!

In a December 27, 2007 article, blogging got the attention of the New York Times. According to an American Express survey referenced in the article only 5% of small businesses with less than 100 employees have a business blog. As far as I'm concerned, that's way too low. Although the NY Times headline, "Blogging's a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool," seems to endorse the value of blogging, much of the article effectively limits the types of organizations who ought to be blogging. As far as I'm concerned, they're missing the point. Read More

 

If you're selling products and services and if you are using the Web to sell, social media marketing must soon become part of your marketing repertoire. 

Thanks to an alert on my-creative team blog , I found the Social Media Starter Kit on Marketing Profs. It's a terrific beginning point for those of us who are just beginning to focus on the ever shifting universe of social media marketing.

It's a great way to learn the basics with helpful hyperlinks to resources you may want to use.  Click below for our take on the article. 

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You can achieve measurable results for your company or for your clients.  But it may involve changing your press release approach dramatically. You have to write for the Internet and for the search engines.

If your primary public relations strategy still amounts to sending press releases to a finite number of media contacts, you fail to take advantage of the Internet.  You are not reaching the new influencers, to use Paul Gillen's term. Even if you are sending your news release to a wider audience by using one of the excellent online PR tools, you are still making a mistake if you don't optimize your release for the search engines.

In a superb post on the "Online Marketing Blog," Lee Odden compiles the best advice from the folks who are running the major online news release outlets such as PR News wire, PRWeb, and Business Wire.  Here are some key takeaways:

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You may have seen sophisticated 3-D representations of data on TV commercials. If you did, you probably thought this was some sort of futuristic dream that would never be implemented. Thanks to MindManager Pro 7 and the virtual world, Second Life, it may be closer than you think. Read More