Content Marketing Today

Written by Geoffrey James.

With inbound marketing, the customer comes to you, but you still have to move the opportunity forward.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of "inbound marketing"–the concept that you should attract prospective customers by offering useful (on a website, for instance). Read More

Rethink Your Content Marketing by Aiming at Billions of Buyers on the Move

For those of us who been around computing since the early days of PCs, the consumer move to mobile devices and away from desktop and even laptop computers is astonishing--and maybe a little terrifying.

Smartphones Soar

First, smartphones such as the Blackberry, Nokia, and iPhone entered the picture. But, as recently as 2007 total smartphone sales were only 122 million. Alex Cocotas of BI Intelligence predicts that annual smartphone sales will hit 1.5 billion units by 2016. That's 10X growth in less than 10 years.

Tablets Triumph

In the first year of its existence, 1981, the IBM PC sold 100,000 units. Most of those buyers were geeks or leading-edge business users. Apple's new iPad sold 3 million units in its first weekend and more than 50 million units since the introduction of the first iPad just 2 years ago. Read More

Content Marketing is about the most effective way to harness content's ubiquity and power. Individual pieces of content work to attract and engage web users, but when the pieces are combined, the effect can be dramatic. Read More

Amanda Maksymiw of OpenView Venture Partners shares her inspiration and advice on content marketing.

In 2009, the Boston-based venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners was not satisfied with its branding. Rather than hiring a marketing firm, OpenView founder Scott Maxwell found his solution in a book called Get Content Get Customers.(co-authored by Newt Barrett)  Read More

Written by Brianne Carlon

A good goal for headlines is to evoke emotion in some way. Whether it is amusement, curiosity, joy or sorrow, intriguing a reader is the biggest responsibility of a headline. And there have been some good ones over the past few years: 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

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

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

Naming a company or a product used to involve a number of factors—none of which related to SEO considerations. But no longer. "It doesn't matter whether your brand is online or not, "[I]t will be googled, " says Ann Smarty in an article at MarketingProfs.
"So, before you choose your brand name, you should understand ... three major facts about how Google rates and ranks personal and business names," she advises.

Here are the big three: Read More