Content Marketing Today

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:

Read More

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

If you aren't delivering a regular eNewsletter to build your business, you should ask yourself why. You are probably missing the biggest and best opportunity to communicate in a consistent and meaningful way with your customers. Of course, you need to generate regular content that brings value to your customers. But, with that basic proviso, an eNewsletter should become an integral part of your content marketing arsenal. Here's why: Read More

Too many people--and I used to be one of them--think of a blog as an out-of-control rant by a fanatic about some topic or other. Sure there's plenty of that. However, today, business blogs are pervasive. They provide enormous value by delivering relevant content on a myriad of topics. But, more importantly, an increasing number of what have been termed 'blogs' in the past are really websites. They are full-featured websites with as much capability is anything that could be built from scratch by talented programmers. I'm indebted to my new friends at ContentRobot.com for the new term, ' blog-powered website' that I will use from now on. They're doing some great stuff. Be sure to check out their website ,which is the featured graphic to the right. The secret sauce behind the ContentRobot.com site, ContentMarketingToday.com, and thousands of others is the powerful and often free software that will enable you to establish a content rich website. I happen to be a fan of WordPress which is an open-source content management system whose roots are in blogging. But, whatever tool you choose, you now have the ability to create a full-featured website with a minimal expense in a short period of time. You no longer have an excuse to stick with the brochureware website that your sister's cousin's nephew built for you in some kind of JavaScript that nobody knows how to modify. Since your excuses for change are gone, here's why you need to launch a blog-based website right now: Read More

You don't necessarily need a big budget to tell a great story that your customers will remember.

Once again the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdale ad was the favorite ad in the 2008 Super Bowl. It outscored all the rest of their ads that were trying to strengthen the Bud Light brand against Miller Lite. In fact, only three Anheuser-Busch ads scored in the top 10. It's not clear that they accomplished much with their hodgepodge of Bud Light ads, most of which scored poorly. What is it about Hank the Clydesdale and all of the preceding Clydesdale commercials that put them at the top of the pack? And, what lessons can you apply to your own marketing, whatever the size of your budget? Read More

You don't have to take sides in the current presidential race to notice fundamental differences between many of the candidates. Whether you plan to vote for John McCain or whether you disagree with most of his positions, research suggests that most Americans believe him to be authentic. One could argue that reason he has survived the political rough-and-tumble so far is that so many Americans hunger for authenticity from their candidates--just as they do from the companies that they are doing business with. So, when I stumbled upon a blog that Senator McCain's daughter, Meghan, is writing on the campaign trail, I was intrigued. Why? It all has to do with the contrast between the freedom that Senator McCain and his wife have allowed Meghan and the muzzle that has been placed on Chelsea Clinton during the campaign. Read More

My looming dermatologist visit resurrected the directory issue. Since I had written so critically about the Yellow Pages in a recent post, I thought it only fair that I try a real-world experiment to test their usefulness. Checking out a doctor's info was a great test. I am sorry to say that both the print and the online Yellow Pages did poorly. Here's what hit home after the experiment: For almost all of us, the Internet has changed our fundamental search processes so dramatically that most of us have moved away from the print Yellow Pages--and probably away from online Yellow Pages as well. Their old slogan, "Let your fingers do the walking," was all about how easy it was to use the print directory compared to wandering around downtown looking for a store, a lawyer or a doctor. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the rest of the search engines are letting our fingers do the walking today. What also seems obvious is that an effective content marketing strategy will almost certainly produce better results dollar for dollar than a traditional Yellow Pages advertising campaign. Read More