Content Marketing Today

Written by Heather Lloyd-Martin.

Looking for some writing inspiration? Why not check out some Dr. Seuss books. Learn what Dr. Seuss can teach you about good copywriting.

Confession time: I love Dr. Seuss.

The words to One Fish, Two Fish are stuck in my brain. I have a Dr. Seuss watch. I have Dr. Seuss books on my iPad. I watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” ever year. I even have a limited edition print hanging in my bedroom. Read More

Home pages. If you have a website, you have one of these bad boys.

And no matter whether you’re selling real estate or racoon prevention (that’s really the entire spectrum there, right?) there are certain things that your home page MUST do if you hope to sell your product or service. Read More

It’s All About Making It Easier for the Customer to Buy

OK, I’ll admit it. I not the primary grocery shopper in the family. But, I’m always happy to hop over to Publix, Fresh Market, Whole Foods or SweetBay to buy stuff.  Since I’m not a grocery aisle guru, it usually takes me way too much time to find the items I have been entrusted to buy and bring home.    Occasionally, that makes me a little cranky.

SweetBay Shopping Carts Saved My Day

But,  Sweetbay has achieved the equivalent of a user-friendly e-commerce interface with its shopping cart. In a move that is as brilliant as it is inexpensive to design and deploy, they have equipped each shopping cart with a sheet that lists major grocery items alphabetically and shows the aisle in which they can be found.

At Sweetbay I was looking for coffee. Because my shopping cart helpfully listed coffee in aisle 6, I found it within 30 seconds rather than the 5 minutes of aimless wandering it would usually take.

The genius of the Sweetbay shopping cart content marketing strategy contrasted with my Publix experience.
While there, I went through the frustrating aisle-wandering exercise to find when I needed. Publix is an excellent supermarket. But, they sure made it much harder for me to buy what I needed to buy.

If a supermarket were a website, I would've been off like a shot from Publix to Sweetbay, knowing that they would take me by the hand to find exactly what I needed in a minimum of time.

As content marketing leaps 'the chasm' and lands in Geoffrey Moore's back garden, more and more marketers are on the lookout for a B2B content marketing agency that can make them famous. ...

That's a good thing. But almost every B2B agency out there is hurriedly carving a new 'Content Marketing' sign for their front door.

So it pays to have a think before you get yourself committed. Read More

Written by Amber Mac, Fast Company.

When I interviewed entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki recently, I chatted with him at great lengths about his Twitter publishing habits.

Take a look at his feed, and every few minutes you'll see a new post, from why videos go viral to Playboy's plans for a strip club. Read More

Articles published during breakfast and lunch yield more views on average.

Last month, Skyword’s clients, including The Wall Street Journal, IBM, Everyday Health, and Education.com, used our content production platform to produce more than 13,000 pieces of original content for their Web and social properties. Read More

By Matthew Turner (@Turndog_million)

Growing up I was under the impression writers were artists… usually alcoholics, people teeming with personal issues, and eccentric as hell. These people wrote, sent out their work, got published, and sat back watching the royalties pour in.

Now, this was probably naïve of me, but for all I know this was true. What I can be sure of it’s no longer the case. Writers are still artists, and they may still be drunks, eccentric, and teeming with personal issues. However, they’re also marketers, and designers, and personal speakers, and coaches, and just about everything else you could possibly think of. Read More

A lot of great marketers make lousy social media marketers.

Most of the time they don’t even know how bad they are at it, probably because they’ve been so successful in some other kind of marketing (advertising, PR, CRM… something). Read More

Written by Lee Odden

I’ve had people learn that I’ve recently written a book called Optimize and they ask what it’s about. I say it’s about optimizing customer discovery and engagement with content. The response I usually get is something like, “Oh, cool. I thought it was about SEO.”

Well, in a way optimizing content and customer experiences is SEO. That’s because what most of the better SEOs practice today is really more about the promise of marketing: attracting, engaging and inspiring customers to buy.

Whether it’s Google, Social Networks, Online News Media, Digital Assets or any other channel/format for content – best practices optimization is in effect for smart companies that want an advantage. 

2005 Called, It Wants Its SEO Back. If your SEO is still overwhelmingly focused on massive keyword lists, ranking reports and directory/social bookmarking style link building then you’re stuck in 2005. It’s time to evolve with an optimized state of mind. Read More