Content Marketing Today

  It’s been a very good year for content marketing. In fact, visitors searching our site for the phrase “content marketing” increased by 85% in 2009 over 2008.

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.

Dean Piccirillo Makes a One-Person Blog-powered Website Look like a Major Corporate Presence Online

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.

The best small business solution is to eliminate a separate blog and website.

Unfortunately, typical small companies often misunderstand the power of a business blog--and cannot envision how it can and should be the driving force behind your online presence.  Your best bet is to leverage the power of blogging software to create an online presence which is, at once, timeless and timely.

Most of us began with a website that contains static content that was never intended to change much over time. Your static website will be an essential source of product, service, and company data to the majority of buyers that now relying on the Internet as their primary repository of information for potential purchases. Your static website is a vital beginning.  But, it's only a beginning. 

To compete for the attention of both search engines and buyers, you will need to add more and more dynamic content over time.  That's where a business blog comes into play.  If you already have a blog--or are considering one--you probably think of it as a completely separate entity with limited functionality.  That may be true for large organizations.  But, for a small business, your blog should be the engine behind a full fledged website that delivers much more clout than your old-fashioned static version.

Our readers flocked to a broad range of content marketing-related issues over the past 12 months. In fact, the breadth of topics surprised me. Here's the Cliff's Notes version of what you can find:

• Unlearn Traditional PR
• Transform website into sales machine
• The Secret to Online Marketing
• Authenticity at Starbucks
• Sexy Headline Secrets from Cosmo
• A Really Bad Website Concept
• 6 Reasons to Publish an eNewsletter
• 5 Reasons to Launch a Blog-powered Website
• 6 Ways to Survive the Recession with Content Marketing
• Is it Time to Abandon Yellow Pages Advertising

Read on for a quick take on the posts that readers like you made made most popular.

Do what NextBus did. Put content marketing to work on your website!

NextBus is a dynamic high-tech company in the San Francisco Bay area.  Its sophisticated technology enables bus and train riders to do something important, but easy: they can determine exactly when the next bus is arriving so they can plan their travel intelligently.

Now NextBus has an equally sophisticated website which provides a rich variety of content relating directly to the problems and solutions critical to their customers.

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. 

If the UK government with its mega-billion-dollar budget has confidence in WordPress to power its prime minister's website, I think the rest of us can confidently consider making a similar move.

The surprising news came from Chris Garrett's blog, ChrisG.com.  Chris writes consistently great stuff about blogging and new media.  Nonetheless, I was a little surprised to read this morning about merry old England's move to a blog-powered website.  But, I think we can learn something from our friends across the pond.

More than 10,000 visitors voted with their mouse clicks to make these the 6 hottest articles out of 126 that we have posted in the virtual pages of ContentMarketingToday.com from January through June 2008.

They range from transforming an old-fashioned brochure site into a killer sales machine...to why you need to unlearn traditional PR in the 21st century...to why you must publish an eNewsletter. 

Read on to find out why these articles were so popular with so many marketers.

You may not be a fan of Bob Barr or of the Libertarian political persuasion.  Nonetheless, there is a lot to like about his WordPress driven website,BobBarr2008.com.  There is also a lot to learn about his effective use of an online content marketing strategy to spread the word and to raise money.

Barr's site illustrates how flexible WordPress can be as a tool for building out a full-fledged website. It also illustrates how an effective online content marketing strategy might be able to take a candidate from relative obscurity and little funding to someone who might be taken seriously on the national stage.

Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia, recently announced that he is running for president of the United States as a libertarian.  In pre-Internet days, such a candidacy would have gained no traction whatsoever.  Raising campaign funds would have been a prohibitively expensive proposition. Moreover, telling his story to a nationwide audience would have been virtually impossible.

A typical professional services website will explain what services the professional provides, offer a brief bio of the principal or principals, provide basic contact information, and perhaps show a list of clients.  That information is necessary but sadly insufficient.

By adding two simple but powerful content marketing elements, any professional can stand out from his or her peers. 

1. Provide a basic primer on the subject area in which the professional is an expert.  For example, an accountant could do basic articles on the importance of cash flow, how to minimize tax exposure, and what to look for in a business loan.
2. Provide regular news about topics that would be important to clients.  For our hypothetical accountant this might be the impact of new tax laws, health insurance changes or new withholding requirements.

Check out a live PR website prototype to see what's not just possible--but easy