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Wondering what the future is for blogs?
Is blogging dead?
To discover what the future holds for blogging, Michael Stelzner interviews Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer....
Tumblr and WPP conducted an exclusive survey recently to know what readers are looking for on social media networks. Surprisingly, what they are looking for is content. Each of the apps that you’ll read about next was designed to take your simple content and boost its perceived value. After all, you can’t say that your content is high quality until the readers say so or benefit from it.
Let these nine content marketing apps reshape your vision, guide you on the right path, and revamp your content into content that drives traffic and leads....
According to Social Media Examiner’s 2014 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING INDUSTRY REPORT, 97% of marketers engage in social media marketing, and 92% of marketers consider social media important to their businesses. But is social media content effective?
Based on our ANALYSIS OF 13.8 MILLION PIECES OF MARKETING CONTENT, the answer is resoundingly, “No.”
We analyzed the effectiveness of marketing content from 8,800 B2B and B2C brands posted across Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram over a 24-month period. Across the board, the data show that engagement with brand-generated social media content is declining.
Your visitors and followers prefer using social media sites during specific hours. So if you start sharing your content when your users are on these social sites, you’ll not only gain more shares, but you’ll also notice an increase in traffic.So, when should you be sharing your content? Well, just follow the times in the infographic...
As a busy business owner, you likely don’t have time to create new content at the rate at which your audience demands it. Yet, with content marketing now being the #1 driver of search rankings, you can’t afford not to be constantly publishing new content.
Fortunately, there are ways you can take your existing content and feed it to the content marketing beast. With a little bit of elbow grease and some creativity, you can edit and re-use what you already have, and turn it into something your audience can’t get enough of!...
Okay, so here are a few opt-in form designs that I really like.
I’ve approached a few of these people to find out conversion numbers and will share that info along the way.
As always, I wanted to give you a starting point where you can get some ideas for your own mailing lists. Some of the below examples will include lessons that I think are really useful to learn....
We live in the tl;dr (too long; did not read) era of the Internet. How do you make traditional text stories and content succeed in an online world where attention spans are dwindling and success necessitates visual media?Over the past year at Tenacity5, we’ve learned a few tweaks to drive more traffic to text heavy copy. Here are a five formatting methods and writing tips to liven up long stories....
Content marketing is non-interruptive marketing that engages and informs a visitor. It’s gonna work or fall flat in about ten seconds like a great Sam Cooke song - you’re humming along or tuning it out.
You have ten seconds to get the attention of your visitor. The usability maestro Jakob Nielsen’s Darwinian logic is spot on for content marketers. - Headlines drive the visitor into the text; or not!
- Be compelling.Know your visitor – what do they want to read and how do you educate?...
Scoring influence has never been so important, as brands, consumers, search engines, and social networks figure out ways to rise above the content clutter. It all started when everyone voted content king.
It goes like this: Content creators need to pay attention to emergent authorship, as Google, LinkedIn, and other media companies continue to focus on actual content creators versus an entity (business or website). Great content creators (that includes public relations professionals) and marketers recognize that original, engaging, and informative content by real authors may be the future of SERPs....
Most consumers (74%) say they generally trust educational material from a business as long as it seems objective and doesn't explicitly try to sell a product/service, according to a recent report from Kentico.
However, trust is extremely fragile: Even just adding a product pitch to the end of an otherwise objective blog post or newsletter brings the credibility level down significantly, with only 45% of consumers saying they trust such content....
A few weeks ago someone sent me a link to the BuzzSumo website. It is a gold mine of data regarding what content is the most shared across any topic. Cha-Ching...
Here at BuzzSumo, we’ve analyzed the social share counts of over 100 million articles in the past 8 months. So it’s fair to say we have a pretty good idea of what gets shared the most.
There’s always been some nagging questions that we’ve wanted to answer. We came up with this set of questions, hoping to challenge popular assumptions on how to make your content go viral:
...The inPowered/Nielsen study reminds us, in other words, that there is no one correct strategy for content marketing—but there is a unique strategy for your brand, and the key to that strategy is to start where your audience is, and not with where “the industry” is.
Are you still writing killer content? Is anyone still searching for it?
There’s a race; a competition for your attention and you know it, I know it and the person we write for in our content knows it.
People have a finite amount of attention to give you as they pass by in a social media stream, unless of course they have a problem. Real problems are like toothaches, they start off gentle or they erupt into a powerful burst of pain right under your brain making it seem like it’s a thousand times worse than it really is...
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There are thousands of articles that have been written about ways to grow your social media following (some of which by myself), but one of the things that most articles fail to cater for is actually growing them from nothing.
We all know how Coca Cola, Pepsi and Oreo have built enormous social media followings, but what if you’re not a huge brand? How about if you’ve just set up a blog and had no real online presence beforehand?
This is what I’m going to focus on – the first 3-4 months of your social media campaign.
Having not published original content on the blog for 30 days, we saw only a 4 percent dip in traffic compared to the previous month. The extra time off allowed us to experiment with content in some amazing ways. Our most successful experiments were these:
- Create new email drip campaigns based on Buffer blog posts
- Update older blog posts with new information, graphics
- Create SlideShares
- Republish content to Medium
- Bundle tools posts into Product Hunt collections
I’m happy to explain fully how we went about this experiment and all of the 14 strategies that we tried. And happy to clarify anything in the comments!
“More content is being created in 48 hours than what was produced from the beginning of time until 2003.” –Eric Schmidt
It’s difficult to comprehend how much content is being produced, isn’t it? Did you know there are more than 2 million blog posts published every single day? It wasn’t long ago when I was updating web content once or twice per year; yet now you have websites like Huffington Post that update content more than a thousand times per day. Sounds crazy, right?
And creating all this content doesn’t come cheap either, as B2B marketers are spending more time, money, and resources on content than ever before...
Content marketing can be hard. It takes time and you might make a lot of mistakes along the waThe good news: You get to learn from those mistakes and improve your content and your strategies.
One of the key lessons I learned early on was the benefit of using frameworks to guide your content marketing strategy. I’d love to share my experience and strategies with you to give you a leg up in the content marketing game....
I’m sure most of us can commiserate – no matter what we’ve accomplished in the past year, our industry changes so fast that it’s hard not to feel like there’s something we missed or could have done better.
The good news is that there’s always time to up your game when it comes to content marketing, and we have a stable of experts who provided need-to-know tips, tactics, and techniques for doing just that. If you’re ready to start the new year feeling prepared to tackle any content marketing challenges that come your way, read on for some killer ideas that will help you reach your goals....
Everybody talks about the need to provide quality content on your site if you want to rank well in searches. But how do search engines identify quality content?
Successive Google algorithm updates (culminating in the recent Panda 4.1) aim to refine results so that they match the intent of the search query and deliver the most comprehensive, accessible and well-written answer.
Put simply, Google (and other search engines) are always looking for genuine quality content, and are increasingly smart at finding (and dismissing) pages that try to game the system.
For example, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm restructure from last year enables it to better understand the meaning behind search queries as well as the semantics behind content.
So what should you focus on if you want to produce content that search engines will recognise as high quality? Here are five key factors that we have identified....
It's tempting to take marketing cues from the most successful businesses, but most brands need to build something Fortune 500 companies already have: Name recognition among target customers.
Marketing is in my blood; I heard this sentence from a teenager at a hotel. I stopped that guy immediately to know what was going in his mind. I thought he’d hesitate to talk to me as I was a complete stranger to him but he was completely opposite.
...I’ve done the motivation part of this article above and now it’s time for the direct implementation part. I’ve already found 5 sources through which you can drive traffic. I’m not sure you are aware of them or not but if you use them then you are more likely to convert your blog into one of the top blogs online....
One of the great panels at Demand Success 2014 featured a robust discussion on the state of content marketing. Tenacity5 Media’s Geoff Livingston moderated a panel consisting of Nichole Kelly from Social Media Explorer, Christopher Penn from Shift Communications, Job Webster from SmartBrief and Richard Binhammer from Binhammer Social Business & Communication Consulting.
The group shared some great information, and below is a brief rundown of some of the key takeaways. You can apply their expertise to strategies for marketing your business....
I think you’ll agree with me when I say: Getting your content to stand out today is HARD.
In fact, according to one source, there are over 2 million blog posts published every single day.In other words, when you hit your WordPress “publish” button, you’re one of 1,999,999 other people doing the exact same thing.
Despite the intense competition, you may have noticed that certain people are able to generate hundreds of Tweets, backlinks and visitors to everything that they put out there.If you’ve ever wondered “how do they do that?”, you’re in for a real treat....
Do you want more people to visit your site and consume the content for longer? Stop distracting them and making them click away from your main goal. Simplicity is not only beautiful and elegant but it is also effective. It helps you tweak and perfect the user experience. It leads to decluttering of your site, makes it faster to load and more focused on your targets. Following are the simple methods you can use optimize and fine-tune your site to make it more strategically effective....
Much has been made in content marketing circles of The Atlantic's recent investigation into how Netflix took on Hollywood and wildly re-categorized all the films available in their library into genres and sub-genres tuned to the specific interests of their viewers.
Retailers get the point of this idea better than most. Amazon is getting into the business of mind-reading what their customers will eventually buy, while old-school retailers like Barnes & Noble now feature a Paranormal Teen Romance section — far away from past categorizations for fiction and non-fiction....
Design for the Scent of Content Too many content marketers simply aren't planning a detailed, thoughtful way to organize their content before they dive in and start producing content. Without having properly segmented their audience or figured out how their existing content should be organized for reuse, they are hiring internal writers, licensing content that may be well-sourced but not specific to their needs, and bringing in freelance content creators without a plan in place to ensure their audience will even find what they publish....
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Very valuable insight from two social media thought leaders – Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer. Recommended reading and listening. 9/10