Sailing is a wonderful, exhilarating sport for those who have the training and experience to enjoy the ever-changing interplay of wind and water on a boat driven by its sails.

First, you have to learn how to sail.  Happily, like 100,000+ students before you, you can do just that at Fort Myers-based Offshore Sailing School.  Once, you have learned from their skilled instructors, sailing becomes a lifelong pleasure.

But, you can learn even more from the Offshore Sailing School  folks. You can learn a lot about content marketing online.

Bringing Modern Marketing to a Traditional Business

Steve and Doris have been running a sailing school for more than 40 years, building a successful business with multiple locations and a world-class repetition. Although they have been doing this for a long time,  there is nothing dated or old-fashioned about their approach to content marketing. They are fully engaged online with a website, a YouTube channel, a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account. 

I particularly like what they are doing on their website and on YouTube as examples of how to take a traditional business and bring it successfully into the 21st century content marketing world–with a strong visual approach to everything that they do.

How Their Website Makes It Easy to Transform Site Visitors into Sailing Students

• They feature a big, beautiful slideshow at the top of the page that illustrates the beauty of the sailing experience. There is almost no need for words to introduce prospective students to the idea of a lifelong love of sailing. Their own eyes will make the sale about sailing.
• When it comes to home page copy, they get right to the point. In just two opening paragraphs, they make the case for sailing and for the  Offshore Sailing School:

Be Inspired by Sailing!
We know your time is valuable, so we’ll teach you everything you’ve always wanted to learn about sailing, fast. In just three days, our Learn to Sail Course gives you the confidence to sail mid-sized sailboats with ease. In one week you can gain skills to sail and live-aboard big cruising sailboats with our Fast Track to Cruising® course. Like to sail really fast? If you’re new to racing or currently race and would like hard-core hands-on coaching, you’ll benefit greatly from seven days of race training on our Colgate 26 fleet, with seminars and video recaps by North U. in Offshore’s racing courses.
Whichever sailing course you choose, you’ll be inspired, refreshed, amazed at how much you learn. Whether you want to get away for a day or go around the world, sailing is now within your reach. Offshore Sailing School is the leader in sailing lessons and sailing vacations – discover one of our seven locations today!

• They make it very easy to connect with a prominent "Quick Connect" box in the upper right-hand part of the page.
• They display the latest news prominently on the left sidebar, using complementary images as appropriate.
• They combine text and images frequently with sidebar items such as their featured course, their sailing specials, and their newsletter sign-up.
• They highlight their social media connections on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube  to make it easy to continue the connection.
• They integrate a timely and informative blog, which, in turn, includes numerous videos from YouTube as well as their latest Tweets.
• And, it may be a small thing,but the site’s background is an ocean panorama on what looks to be a perfect day for sailing. For many websites the sort of background would be superfluous. But, for Offshore Sailing School, this is perfect.

Offshore Has Their Own YouTube Channel with Plenty of Engaging Videos

The Offshore Sailing School YouTube page has been nicely designed to complement their website.They have 20 videos which provide sailing instruction, testimonials, and some examples of the sailing experience. Their "Learning to Sail" six minute video has had more than 3000 viewings.That’s pretty powerful when you compare towhat they might have expected from traditional magazine advertising in days gone by.

Does their approach to online content marketing work? Well, if you search for  "sailing school" on Google, you might not be totally surprised that they come up #1 in the organic results.

Not bad for a couple of old salts.

I continue to be surprised by the number of marketing and advertising companies who have websites that hide examples of the great work that they do behind a bunch of content clichés that fail to distinguish them from every other similar company. 

I recently stumbled upon the website of such a company who is missing its primary content marketing opportunity. They have great stuff, but it’s really hard to find.

Content marketing is all about providing relevant, compelling, and easily accessible information to your prospective customers.

In this case, what is genuinely relevant and compelling is the work that this agency has done on behalf of of its clients. That  visual content represents potential solutions to the problems that its Web visitors are facing.Unfortunately, the content that counts is lurking behind some same old, same old verbiage.

The copy below is from the actual website that I happened upon  They appear to do some really good work. But,  as a potential client, I would have to be truly driven to find that work. First, I would have to wade through all the generic copy that promises pretty much what any good marketing/advertising company could do for me :

“Fill in the Blank” Advertising Company creates custom marketing solutions from strategy through execution to help build and transform your business needs. Let us get to know you inside and out. Let us become instrumental in helping you develop breakthrough solutions to meet your brand objectives and increase your profits. With smart planning & execution, we strengthen your image and reputation as the world around us changes. Change is reality.

We differentiate your company from the competition……

A genuine irony flows from the website copy that makes the promise: "We differentiate your company from the competition."  Sadly, there is almost nothing in the copy that differentiates this agency from its competition.

Actually,  there is a differentiation to be found on this website–but not easily found. That differentiation consists of the proof behind the copy clichés, that is, the actual work that this agency has done. But, you have to struggle to hard-to-find it.

Making It Too Hard to Get to What Really Matters

To get to the good stuff,  you must click on a small  link called, "The Work,"  that sits at the bottom of the page. There, you will find a wealth of visual examples of excellent marketing and advertising projects done for a broad range of companies from relatively small to very very large.  You can even watch videos of commercials that are memorably amusing and interesting.

Moreover, the agency’s work examples include several very well-known brands that add implicit credibility to their skills and experience.

There is another missed opportunity, however. In an era of quantification, none of the work examples are accompanied by information about the objectives of the work and successful outcomes. I’m sure that there were plenty and that they would provide plenty of trust building content for potential clients.

The simple lesson: When you have great work to show, make sure that it is front and center on your website so that impatient visitors find it immediately. Then, use that work to power the copy that populates your homepage and the rest of your site.  Content marketing fails when you cannot find the content that counts quickly and easily. Only pirates love buried treasure.

In other words, when you can show specific successes, you do not have to rely on generic copy that fails to differentiate you from dozens of other similar companies.

Oh,and be sure to avoid clichés like the plague.

Surprise! The Liquor Control Board of Ontario manages to tread the fine line of selling cases of liquor while extolling moderation.

Their website, www.LCBO.com, couldn’t be any more graphically pleasing or fun to peruse. Believe it or not, they also entice you to come in and shop for premade cocktails or to select from a huge selection of vintage wines.

They are currently featuring visually appealing ‘French Lessons’ that make it easy for anyone to understand French wines.  They combine slide shows and videos to turn even the most uninformed wine drinker into a knowledgeable purchaser of vintages from Beaujolais to Bordeaux.

This is a terrific example of accessible and informative content serving the marketing needs of its government agency, the LCBO. It’s even kind of sexy. And don’t start with me about Canada and sexy being another oxymoron.

Nice work, eh!

Imagine for a moment  that your website is really a compelling magazine that sits on a giant virtual magazine rack on the Web where only qualified buyers are browsing.

You are better situated than a store in a shopping mall where idle passers by might wander in to kill time. You’re also better positioned than you would be with a booth at a trade show, when thousands of theoretical prospects stroll through the aisles looking for something that might be of interest.

In both cases, you will certainly attract some potential prospects. However, only a fraction of those mall or tradeshow visitors are seeking the specific solutions that you can provide.

Your website’s presence on that virtual global magazine rack offers you the opportunity to attract visitors who are actively searching for answers to specific problems. They are on a mission to solve those problems. They need to find a company that can meet their needs now.

The Unique Qualified Buyer Attraction Value of Your Website

Your website can be both different and better than a store in a mall or tradeshow booth. Your visitors are both pre-qualified and ready to buy.  Moreover, they are predisposed to believe that you can help them.  Why?

The vast majority of visitors to your website arrive as the result a search for information that is important to them right now. They have typed in keywords or phrases that pull up your website and enticed them to visit. When they come to your site, they begin with the assumption that your site and your organization may well have answers to their problems.

But, they are in a hurry. Google search has given them a ton of possible solutions providers. So, you cannot afford to waste their time. Don’t let them guess about how you can help. Make it instantly obvious why they should care about your company from the moment they land on your site. 

To learn more about that need for information communication speed, read our related post: What Do You Tell Your Web Visitors About You in their First Second on Your Site?

Your website may be chock full of terrific content that is both relevant and compelling to your ideal target customers. But, you won’t have a chance to share that content unless you communicate  instantaneously that you provide the precise solutions they are desperately seeking.

Your visitors are the potential customers for whom you have developed your content.  But those visitors won’t root around in the hope of buried treasure. They have neither the time nor the inclination to guess whether you understand their needs and how you can help them.  That’s why you have to engage them them immediately on their arrival on your site.

First Impressions are Important in Person, But Life or Death on the Web

You may make a misstep when you meet someone if you are a bit slow off the mark,  lack an elevator speech or take a business fashion risk. You can often recover from that less than stellar first impression because your prospect will give you more than one second to communicate understanding and value before moving on to another solution provider. 

Unfortunately, you won’t get away with an imperfect first impression on the web. You have only that single second to communicate your relevance to your visitors verbally and visually . If you blow it, they’re racing off to your competition.

On the other hand, if you get it just right, they will almost certainly stay for another 5 seconds to better understand how you can help them. Even better, there is a darned good chance that they’ll hang out even longer to investigate how they can benefit in obvious ways from the information you provide.

Keeping your prospects on your site long enough–with just the right combination of verbal and visual content–enables you to earn their trust. Winning that trust is the essential first step in winning their business.

Want to know how you’re doing with first impressions on your website?

Gather an informal user group and ask them what your site says to them in one second…in five seconds…in two minutes. You may not like what you hear, but that feedback will put you on track to reshape your home page so that those same users grasp exactly the right message when you ask them back. 

I should confess that I just went through this very exercise with a preliminary web design for a good client. The feedback was painful, but it will enable us to reshape our verbal and visual components so that we communicate exactly what our prospects need to know.

Thanks to Kristina Halverson of Brain Traffic for the content pyramid concept (and for a host of other ideas from the Content Strategy Forum in Paris).  If she doesn’t have a fan club, I’d like to start one. She is sensational. Visit her site and buy her book.

Social media certainly loomed larger in the past 12 months but interest in content marketing strategy accounted for the majority of the most popular posts.

Here is the Cliff’s Notes bullet point version with more detail and links to the full articles following:

• How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
• 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
• 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
• Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
• 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
• Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
• 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
• Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
• 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business

A more detailed look at the top 10 with links to each complete article is just below.  Kick back and enjoy.

1. How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
   It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others. Click to read more.

2. 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
   Of course, I’m assuming that you already have a website and are probably doing some business blogging.  You may also do a regular eNewsletter to inform your customers and prospects about the great content you have created recently online.  Your next step is to create an e-book that targets your ideal customers. Click here to read more.

3. 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
   You may be wondering why something as seemingly simple as Twitter causes so much confusion and consternation among business people.
   Perhaps, it best likened to a tool like a hammer which is simultaneously simple and powerful.  After all, a hammer can be used to put up a basic bookshelf or to build an entire home that will house a family for a lifetime. Click here to read more.

4. Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
   Think of yourself as the ultimate knowledge resource like those concierges serving fine hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons—But Available 24/7. Click here to read more.
5. Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
   How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers
   In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy.
   In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to fashionable. When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed in the past two years. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for ‘content marketing,’ has increased by a factor of 10. Click here to read more.
6. 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
   It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook
   Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal. Click here to read more.
7. Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
   Inspiration from ‘Visual Blogger’ Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Marketing
   It’s hard to make things easy. And, it’s even harder to be amusing at the same time.
   But the very best visuals take a complex idea or series of connected ideas and make them instantly understandable. Just the right visuals make those ideas even more memorable when they are funny as well. In the case of the Intersection Marketing blog from Mark Smiciklas, he manages to do both consistently. Click here to read more.
8. 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
   Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad. But,  most small to medium-sized businesses have yet to participate fully and enthusiastically.
   We have just written about a powerful new research study that paints a picture of how thousands of smart companies are already benefiting from the inclusion of social media.  What’s clear from that research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.
   Social media marketing is here to stay.  Because you want your organization to be here for the long haul as well, you need to move now.  Not next week. Not next month. But now. Click here to read more.
9. Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
   This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.
   Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget.  Click here to read more.
10. 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business
    Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool
    Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online.
    But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.   In that spirit we’re happy to can share with you six terrific tips for using video successfully from talented Southwest Florida professional, Kathy Saenz. Click here to read more.

Thanks to everyone for their support in 2009!

Building a solid business blog-powered website is challenging for all of us. But it’s even more difficult for anyone who lives in the financial services universe.

Because financial services professionals must adhere to strict compliance regulations, they must be very careful about what they say and how they say it.  Dean Piccirillo a principal in HBK Sorce Financial, LLC, manages to convey relevant and compelling information while maintaining essential compliance.

Even more impressive is the quality of his own site’s design which manages to be simultaneously newsy and professional. To build DeanPiccirillo.com, Dean used a WordPress theme called Live Wire that can be significantly customized for the needs of an individual business.  Perhaps most impressive of all is the fact that Dean did almost all the work himself. Although this may be beyond the capabilities of many of us, it shows what a non-technical businessperson can achieve using the power of a tool like WordPress.

Among my favorite elements:

• His horizontal navigation includes both page links and links to the most important categories so that visitors can search intuitively for exactly what information they want right from the top of the page.
• He has a featured blog post in the upper left which changes periodically to keep the site fresh.
• He includes a tabbed news feature which lets visitors choose from: latest news, popular, and latest comments. This makes Dean’s site look as professional as a major newspaper or magazine.
• The quality of his articles is first class. For example, he writes thoroughly and compellingly about the need for long-term care insurance. That’s a topic that is or should be top of mind for all of us as we approach a certain age.
• He includes both RSS links and social media elements so that we can connect with Dean pretty much anywhere.

Dean is relatively new to the blogging and social media arena but has found it an extremely valuable tool in establishing his credibility and that of his company among prospective clients in Fort Myers. So I asked him how he’s benefited and what he has learned from his experience. Here’s what he had to say:

A Q&A with Dean Piccirillo

What tangible benefits have you gained from your business blog?

• I think blogging makes you a better professional as you are compelled to write regularly about topics of importance within your field.  Blogging challenges me on a daily basis to think carefully about the issues that are faced by my clients.  Part of this process involves considering and researching solutions to these challenges and writing about possible courses of action in a concise manner.  For this reason alone I would recommend that professional advisors blog.
• By paying attention to the statistical information available about my blog from tools such as Google Analytics, I am gaining extremely valuable information about what topics business people are interested in relative to my field.  For example, I have learned a great deal by monitoring which articles visitors to my blog are reading and what keywords they used in their search that brought them to my site.
  

What are some of the most important lessons you have learned from the process of building your site?

• Design matters – I invested a considerable amount time examining the blogging tools and platforms available, reviewing other successful blogs and thinking about layout and design.  I also invested some dollars with a professional designer for my site’s header.  Additionally, I purchased a “premium” Wordpress theme rather than using a free one.  I think this effort has paid off as the feedback I’ve received related purely to site design, layout, organization, etc. has been excellent.
• Spend a significant amount of time monitoring and listening online to successful bloggers – I spent months reading other blogs, considering style, word count, etc.  I don’t think I’ve really found my “blog voice” yet, however, this research was extremely useful to me when I actually began to create content for my site.
• Consider how you’re going to integrate social networking platforms and tools – Social networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn are a significant source of traffic on my site.  They serve as “outposts” that allow me to easily promote the content on my site.  Because Google Analytics shows me the sites referring visitors to my blog, I know that social networks play an important role in promoting my site.
• If you’re in a highly regulated profession such as financial services, work closely with compliance and get them involved early in the planning process – Communications in financial services are tightly regulated and in most cases must be preapproved, monitored and archived.  This doesn’t preclude financial service professionals from participating in social media and social networking; it’s just more challenging and requires a considerable amount of pre-planning.

The bottom line: I believe it’s almost impossible to overestimate the power of a terrific blog powered website like DeanPiccirillo.com.

Here’s why: Of course, I can learn a little bit about Dean from his business card and from a brief conversation in a social setting. That doesn’t take him from stranger to trusted advisor, however.

On the other hand, his blog-powered website will almost certainly be the differentiator when it comes to comparing Dean to his financial services peers. His site conveys so much compelling information so professionally that it immediately generates a level of confidence in his knowledge and capability. That level of trust would otherwise be extremely difficult to achieve in so short a time.

Be sure to check out his site and see what you think.

You might think that Realtor.com, Yahoo real estate, the Yellow Pages, either of the two local newspapers or all of the big area real estate companies would trample an individual realtor on Google. But, you’d be wrong.

In fact, when you search for "Bonita Springs real estate" in Google, you pull up a total of 557,000 results. But, standing at an impressive #4 is LifeinBonitaSprings.com. That’s the blog powered website of Chris Griffith, a realtor with Downing Frye real estate. It’s worth noting that, although Downing Frye is a successful, well-established local realtor, their company website doesn’t show up until page 3 of the listings.

Although Chris gets a terrific ranking, does that translate into business for her? You bet it does.

Chris says that she currently gets more than 90% of all of her real estate business directly from the Internet. Just five years ago only half of her business came from the Web.

As she tells it, a typical first-time phone caller will refer directly to houses they have seen via her website or to information that she has conveyed.  It’s also worth noting that Chris does absolutely no traditional advertising to generate business.

By integrating both blog and website functionality, Chris has the best of both online tools. She shares her insights, her knowledge of, and her love of Bonita Springs within the blog component. Simultaneously, she enables her visitors to search comprehensive real estate listings within the website component. In this way, she meets the needs of those visitors who just want to learn more about Bonita Springs as well as those who are ready to think seriously about making a real estate investment.

In case you think that only a high-powered realtor with a giant team and a huge budget can replicate Chris’s success, you should know that she built her website by herself for zero dollars using WordPress. 

Chris’s success is an object lesson to what’s both possible and essential based on three key content marketing realities:

1. In just the past five years buyer behavior has changed dramatically. The vast majority of serious buyers for real estate and other major purchases are using the Internet as their primary information and research source prior to selecting what to buy and who to buy from.
2. Because buyer behavior has changed so much, traditional marketing and advertising is significantly less effective than it was before we all began to rely on Google and other search engines to find what we need before we make a buying decision. This reality is reflected in the catastrophic drop in advertising revenues throughout the print publishing world.
3. Technology empowers even non-technical people like Chris to create a professional blog powered website that has all of the core functionality that you would have seen from even a local newspaper 10 years ago. For example, if you look at the image of the 1999 Naples daily news, you can see that Chris’s blog powered website replicates pretty much everything they were doing.

What a difference a decade makes: An individual in 2009 can outshine $1 billion corporation from 1999 at a fraction of the cost

Hundreds of thousands of dollars invested by media powerhouse, Scripps, delivered this website just a decade ago –The Naples Daily News:  October 1999

An individual real estate agent today can deliver the kind of polish, power, panache that a publishing powerhouse achieved online circa 1999 –Chris Griffith’s  21st-century blog-powered website, LifeinBonitaSprings.com: 2009

Summing up: If you are still waffling about the need to create your own blog-powered website, you can take comfort in the success Chris has generated in the past five years. She shows us that by substituting knowledge, passion, enthusiasm, and technology for big bucks, you can generate great results on Google search and on your bottom line. You won’t achieve these results overnight. But you will achieve them over time with a consistent, compelling content marketing strategy.

I became aware of the Metwell website as a result of a promotion they had sent me via Twitter. Their website is full of unintended ironies as they offer online marketing advice which the website appears to ignore.

It’s also a good example of a website with a pretty good layout that is undercut by a lack of focus and a serious shortage of relevant and compelling content.

I found it hard to understand exactly what Metwell does or how they could help me after a quick–and then a more in depth–visit to their website The company seems to know content is important because their site attempts to provide a lot of content, at least on the surface. But they misunderstand the essence of content marketing by failing to make their content relevant and compelling to prospective buyers.

Here’s what I find to be most problematic:

• They have a big visual slideshow on the top left of their home page but this doesn’t necessarily relate to what they do. Rather, it seems to be a sharing of widely varied business news/concepts.
• Below this big section, they have a very quick slideshow which reviews seemingly unrelated services they provide. But once the slideshow is finished there is nowhere else on the home page that tells you what they do.
• Below that slideshow they have an article titled, "What to Do with a Good Idea." This is fairly interesting but I still don’t know if they can help me as a businessperson take a good idea to market or not.
• To the right they have a headline, "Hire Your Kids?" This relates to potential small-business tax benefits. But, again, I have no idea from what I see on the home page whether this company is either willing or capable of helping me with tax issues.
• At the bottom of the page, they have a section called Differentiate Your Business. Unfortunately, on their own website’, they fail to differentiate their business from thousands of others who may do exactly the same kind of things.
• If you click on the Our Services button, you get a bullet point list of the many and varied services they provide. But, it is so varied that you would be hard put to trust their expertise in each and every one. Moreover, because they offer absolutely no explanation of what they do for each of those bullet points, we are really left hanging.
• The website includes no information about any of the company principals so that we are completely in the dark about their knowledge and experience as it might relate to our needs.

How they miss the point on the importance of relevant and compelling content

High up on their website they have a news section in which the lead article (with unintended irony) is titled, "What Makes a Great Website. The entire content of the article, pasted directly from their website, is as follows:

• Hire a professional and we will build you a great website.  Rembember, five mediocre website designers working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one super-star.
• Avoid being clever – use insight.  Many websites scream "look at me" our goal is to design your website and customers will say "here’s what I’m looking for"
• Update your site continuously. Keep your content fresh and always have new products on your virtual shelves.  This will generate business and keep the search engines visiting your site and better ranking
• No great website was ever conceived by more than 3 people.  One voice, one vision.
• Metwell will design a great website for you and maintain it or show you how to do it.

Not only is this article bereft of content, it appears to be more infomercial than legitimate information.

From those five bullet points, one derives a single piece of advice: Customers  arriving at your site should say, "here’s what I’m looking for." The rest of the content seems self congratulatory and clichéd. Moreover it’s incomplete.

If they meant to share with us the essence of a great website, they fail to do that. If they meant to tell us why they are perfectly positioned to create our website, they don’t do a good job of that either. In fact, they failed at proofreading because the very first bullet point misspells the word ‘remember.’

The final irony of their website is that several of their bullet pointed services relate directly to website design and development

The lesson we all have to learn is that good design is critical, but without great content even the best design is simply wasted effort.

In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy.

In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to fashionable. When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed in the past two years. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for ‘content marketing,’ has increased by a factor of 10.

I’m delighted that content marketing has come out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Even so, for most small businesses, developing a content marketing mindset and a strategy to follow just does not come naturally. Fortunately, the fundamentals of a successful small business content marketing strategy are much more commonsensical than you might think.  In fact, they build on what have long been best marketing practices.  Even those content marketing elements that require a new mindset have a simple and compelling logic that even the smallest business can grasp and adopt.

Here are the six steps that can put you on the path to an effective content marketing strategy:

1. Precisely define your ideal customer and develop an in-depth understanding of the problems they face and the solutions they seek. You cannot hope to market and sell to an ill-defined and poorly understood group of prospects. This is critical even to the behemoth, Wal-Mart. They can tell you that their ideal customer is the person who lives paycheck to paycheck. Their current tagline, “Save Money. Live Better,” carefully reflects their understanding of the frugality and aspirational character of their customers. I think it’s much more powerful than its 19-year-old predecessor, “Always low prices.” As a small-business owner, you have even less margin for error than Wal-Mart and certainly must be at least as precise in your understanding of your target buyers.
2. Determine how your company can solve those problems and provide those solutions. Stop defining the value of your products and services as a big set of features–or even a vaguely defined set of benefits. The beauty of your benefits is strictly in the mind of the beholder. Therefore, you must determine what problems you will solve and how you will solve them. That’s what genuine customer benefits are all about: the positive outcomes that your prospects can envision as a result of working with you and your company.
3. Establish as a primary content marketing goal to become a trusted source of information for your target buyers. Trust is the all important element that can transform prospects who were initially skeptical into long-term customers who have faith that you can and will deliver results for them time after time. That trust begins when you provide content that is relevant and meaningful for your target customers in that context of solving their problems.
4. Develop an online presence that is increasingly rich with relevant content with each passing week. This means that, although you will need the timeless content typical of a standard website, you must absolutely have the more timely content typical of a blog. Moreover, your content and your company will become more valuable over time as you keep adding critical mass of information online. For a small business, building a blog-powered website is the surest way to fulfill this component of your content marketing strategy.
5. Take on the role of traditional media in the minds of your customers by thinking like a publisher. Imagine, for a moment, that you are your target customer’s favorite magazine or newspaper. Thus, when you create and publish content that is vital to your customer, present it just as compellingly and accessibly as savvy publishers do. This is easier to say that it is to do. Therefore, you may need to get help from professional writers or journalists who know how to tell great stories to a well defined target set of readers–or in your case, buyers. In fact, I am beginning to believe that one of the most significant future marketing expenditures will be contracting with talented writers who can translate your knowledge into accessible and compelling content.
6. Make it easy for your customers to transition from learning from you to actually buying from you. In other words, you must provide complete and easily accessible online product, company, and contact information. First, you teach your customers what they are desperate to know and then you make it incredibly easy for them to buy. Put yourself in the customer role for a moment and look at your website objectively. Would you find it easy to buy from you? If not, begin by adding whatever product and service content is missing. Then, refine your structure so that the path from interested prospect to committed customer is simple and straightforward.

It doesn’t take a lot of space to define the six vital steps. However, it will require a major rethink on your part about your approach toward marketing. In addition, you will need to allocate both time and talent to implement a successful content marketing strategy that replaces the old-fashioned stuff that just doesn’t work very well anymore.