Content Marketing Today

Timely Business News, Features, Analysis, and Events Deliver a Competitive Edge.

Southwest Florida Business Today is relatively new on the regional publishing scene.  Publisher and owner, Karen Moore, is a newspaper veteran with decades of experience.  Although her first priority at launch was to get the print publication up and running successfully, soon afterward she focused on creating an online newspaper site that would stack up very well relative to its competition. Read More

1990s icons talk about nothing in a meaningless way.

If you're old enough, you may remember the deeply flawed introduction of the Infinity luxury car from Nissan which was all about flowers and trees and nothing about a high performance high-end car.  Since the new brand entered the market at the same time as Toyota's Lexus, goofing up at the beginning was pretty unfortunate.

The Bill Gates--Jerry Seinfeld adver-tale is equally oblique.  The first in the series also misfires in its effort to lay the groundwork for positioning Microsoft as a leader once more. The campaign launch pairs a retired Microsoft CEO and a rarely seen Seinfeld both of whom flourished in the 90s and have floundered in more recent years (apologies to fans of Windows Vista and the lamentable Bee Movie).

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Leading edge transit technology supplier, NextBus is cited as a great example.

You may think of professors as ivory tower folks who live in a world apart--even an IT Prof within a business school.  But J.P. Allen is a different breed.  He has a great blog that focuses on "the future of IT, business, and society on the new Web."

In a recent post he gave a shout out to NextBus as a great example of a cool company with a cool WordPress-based website, NextBusNews.com. 

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If they ever served a purpose, they serve no purpose today.

That's the word from online content marketing master, Eric Holter.  Eric is just launching a new business aimed at helping ad agencies create an effective Web presence. It's called agencycritique.com.

Splash pages have always struck me as being pointless wastes of time.  Your visitors come to your site to get information about how you can help solve their problems.  They do not come to be either amazed or irritated by some wild and wacky graphic that is supposed to represent your creativity.

Of course, I base this assessment on nothing other than my own belief in the commonsensical nature of that proposition.  Eric approaches the issue with some actual data.

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Take it from author and PR guru, Rohit Bhargava.  Make your brand talkable.

Generating positive and pervasive word-of-mouth is easy if you do something starts everyone talking about you and your brand.

That's what Rohit Bhargava posits in his wonderful book,  Personality Not Included.  Although I intend to review the entire book soon, I wanted to extract a wonderful point that he makes about the concept of talkability and its relationship to word-of-mouth marketing.

We all know that word-of-mouth marketing has been powerful from time immemorial.  That said, it's easier to talk about it than to make it happen.  And,talkability is the ticket.

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Fifth Avenue Advisors Illustrates the Power of the Web to Connect with Your Customers.

This Naples-based company is a boutique firm with decades of experience behind them. As their top 2008 marketing priority, they decided to pursue a content marketing strategy online with a brand-new website, www.5advise.com.

I was fortunate enough to work with the principals of the firm in helping to build a content and customer focused website that focuses on solutions to significant challenges that business owners face at a critical time in the life of their companies.

Here the five Keys that make their website so effective:

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Ironically, Morris Rosenthal's website led me to the content-challenged online home of an intellectual property lawyer who specializes in publishing issues.  It's ironic because Morris is a genuine king of content.  [this is a correction; I initially made the wrong attribution to Aaron Shepard who is also a fabulous content marketer.]

He has written extensively on the nuts and bolts issue that neophyte publishers like me need to know to succeed.  He has written an excellent book on self-publishing: Print-on-Demand Book Publishing. In addition, he provides a wealth of articles on his site about specific issues such as how to deal with a big-time publisher if you are an author. At the conclusion of that particular article he refers his readers to zickrubin.com.  Based on Morris' ability to deliver so much great content, I expected to find something similar on the website of the law firm he recommended.

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Websitegrader.com from HubSpot might make you humble, but it will also make you a lot smarter about how you present yourself on the web.

Since I'm in the content marketing business, I spent a lot of time looking at websites to assess what kind of job they do in presenting content that is relevant and valuable for their likely target customers.  Of course, the success of a website depends both on the quality of content and on the quality of its visitor friendly design.  Moreover, it's important that visitors can find it in the first place. 

Now, a great new tool, websitegrader.com, delivers a meaningful score from zero to 100 --with 100 being perfect--for the marketing effectiveness any website on the net.

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Business blogging expert, Meghan Wier, helps position Dr. Ellie Philips online as an expert in her field.

If you are an expert at what you do, your surest path to success is sharing that expertise with current and future customers.  Of course, that's one of the key tenets of content marketing.  The sticking point tends to be that many executives and professionals are so busy running their business that they have little time to devote to make that communication connection.

That's where business blogging expert, Meghan Wier, enters the picture. Although Meghan views herself as an introvert, she shaped a successful sales and marketing career with a Web software company prior to launching her own business in January 2007.  She learned just how important it is to position yourself online with great content that makes your expertise clear.

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Publishing executive opens his readers to the importance of content marketing

Whether you are an author, a book publisher or just an avid reader, you should be reading Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 blog to get a sense of the future of publishing in every imaginable form.  In fact, he subtitles his blog: "A Book Publisher's Future Visions of Print, Online, Video and All Media Formats Not Yet Invented.

Joe is Vice President and Executive Publisher in the Professional/Trade division of John R. Wiley & Sons, Inc., a publicly traded company with $1.4 billion in annual revenues.  Wiley is doing some great work that extends well beyond print publishing.  It's obvious that they understand the need to be online and to be interactive as well.

So, I was especially pleased to be asked by Joe to do an online interview about our new book, Get Content.  Get Customers. His first question was intriguing because it suggests that "content marketing" is still not an obvious concept.  Here's the first question and answer:

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