Content Marketing Today

Shama Hyder proves how powerful a website and blog can be for a solopreneur.

Shama is an online marketing expert.  How do I know this without having met her?  Because I have visited her website, "AftertheLaunch.com," read her blog, and downloaded her e-book, "Online Marketing Plan." There is so much great stuff inside this e-book that you'll be amazed she's not charging big bucks for you to buy it. How did I learn about her in the first place?  Because she wrote a great comment on one of my blog posts.  That prompted me to visit her website where I discovered all the terrific stuff she's doing. In other words, she is walking the content marketing walk. Read More

Billboard marketing is fine on Route 66, but it's all wrong on the information superhighway

Your job as a marketer is to make it easy for your buyers to buy from you. But making it easy for them may be hard for you, unless you can execute an effective content marketing strategy. Content marketing is the art of understanding exactly what buyers need to know and delivering it to them in a relevant and compelling way.  This extends way beyond product information into the realm of best practices, case studies, success stories, and more. Why?  All the rules have changed.  You will need to relearn the marketing game with a brand new marketing mindset.  Those that can adapt will flourish.  Those that don't...well... think of the fate of the dinosaurs. Read More

Don't get me wrong.  Public relations is still a critical component to any marketing strategy for companies of all sizes.  Nonetheless, I am convinced that we need to turn our notions of public relations upside down so that it functions within a content marketing context. I was inspired to think again about the transformation of public relations by a recent post from David Meerman Scott in his WebInkNow.com blog.  He was sharing some top of mind ideas relating to successful public relations strategies for small businesses.  Here are his top two out of ten: Read More

If you are a solopreneur, you certainly have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Imagine how much more you could accomplish if your website was actively selling for you 24 hours a day seven days a week! That's exactly what Stephanie Diamond is helping solopreneur, Natalie Currie, to accomplish using a custom MindMap. Natalie provides training and consulting in the pharmaceutical and biotech fields. Because she is so busy working in her business, she has been challenged to work on her business. and, like most entrepreneurs, creating a content marketing-driven website is not something she ever would've learned in school or on the job. Thus, her website is nice but is typical of the brochure sites most small business owners put up on the web. Read More

Way too many advertising agency and marketing company websites make it way too difficult to understand why you should use them. In many cases, it may be that they are not web savvy and that they have been talked into a wild and weird flash opening. As we have pointed out with many examples in the past, this kind of misbegotten eye candy is likely to drive visitors away before they ever get a look at the great work being done by the company. I found one marketing company site that does most everything correctly. But, the one thing they do wrong does diminish the site's overall effectiveness. Happily, you can learn from both the good and the bad. Read More

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

Well, actually it's on the Wall Street Journal's new My Online Journal (MOJ). But, it's a great start!

It means that any WSJ subscriber can customize a reader page that would include our regularly updated content. So, in principal, hundreds of thousands of WSJ online subscribers could include ContentMarketingToday as part of their individual MOJ home page. What's going on? It's all about widgets, content aggregation, and Web 2.0. As we wrote in our post about the Customer Content Conference, the old web(and old media, for that matter) was all about getting people to congregate. Everyone went to the same place and viewed the same content. That's all changing. Today, we are all becoming aggregators of information. Read More

Learn what some of the smartest people in the business had to say about 21st-century marketing.

When you invite leading edge content, marketing, and technology pros to address 150 professionals who spend all their time thinking about content, you are at risk of sensory overload. Particularly when it takes place in New Orleans. So, we will cover the highlights today. In the days to come we will add detailed articles to provide in-depth coverage of individual presentations. If you're not familiar with custom publishing, what's important to know is that it provides targeted and relevant content to carefully selected customers. Content marketing flows directly from custom publishing roots.

Here are the essential 11 content marketing insights to guide your thinking, strategy, and tactics in the months and years to come:

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There is a fundamental reason that Barack Obama is beating Hillary Clinton's brains out. It boils down to who is using content marketing most effectively. Content marketing works only when you have a thorough understanding of your target customers. Once you have this understanding, you must learn to communicate appropriately in order to connect with them at the deepest level. Content marketing is not about reciting a laundry list of features to your customers--or in Clinton's case policy positions to voters. It's about building a level of trust so that your customers or the voting public believe that you are best suited to take them to a better place. Read More

They spent millions. You can do it for $79.95.

I've written a lot about WordPress and how it can help you create and manage a terrific website. To illustrate what's possible, we'll take a look at the Revolution set of themes built on top of WordPress and one actual user, ImWritingSports. Basically, each website has two core elements: What you see up front and what goes on behind the scenes. When you visit the Washington Post website you see a well designed, easy to understand, news-style website. Behind the scenes, resides a very sophisticated content management system that would've been custom built. We don't know exactly how much time and money they spent to get there. But it was surely many months and millions of dollars. Read More