Content Marketing Today

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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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HK construction, LLC. Is a Fort Myers Florida based construction company with a website that could be dramatically better with a modest level of investment in money, time, thinking, and design.

The site provides some good basic information about the company that is combined with visuals that appear to represent the kind of construction work it does.

This is a very basic site with just six main pages. Making meaningful content improvements would be simple, fast, and inexpensive.  If they were my client, this is what I would tell them to do:

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When it comes to the power of WordPress, you don't have to take my word for it. The Performancing.com blog provided four dozen ways in which websites and blogs can use this powerful and flexible tool to create unique content solutions. This Twist 'n' Shout gallery application is just one example. Blog author, Raj Dash, is a CMS (content management system) expert who, as he puts it, "has both written a small, custom CMSes from scratch as well is evaluated million-dollar professionals see in masses for large corporations, Word press' robustness and never ceases to amaze me." Much of its power derives from the huge open source community of developers who keep adding more and more value and capability to the Word press platform. WordPress is still free, but offers the power of the CMS solutions that might cost upwards of $50,000, even in today's competitive market. Here are my five favorite of those 48 really cool applications of WordPress: Read More