Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The first cog is your website.

It starts with you designing and building your website for the social web and surround it with tools and technology that search engines and social networks love.

The second cog is content.

The next piece of the puzzle is the content. Creating and publishing it is just the start.

Marketing it to the world is the next step. Ensure your content is easy to share when they show up and is pushed out after the publishing button has been punched.

The final cog? Focused digital marketing of your products and services.

Making sure that the products that sit at the epicenter of your website are tempting people enough to hand over their name, email and maybe even their phone number. Then taking them on the buyer’s journey.

Here is some of the tactics, technology and the tools to make this happen for your startup, blog or business....

Words are hard.

Whether you're a published author or just getting started with blogging, it's not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something.

But every marketer should be able to write -- and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It's just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing. 

Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section....

Content creation is one of the most vital aspects of digital marketing – posting content that will inform, interest and amuse your online audience so that you’re one of the first places they turn to when they go online. This means creating content of a consistently good quality on a continual basis. That's a pretty tall order, even for the most imaginative of digital marketers. The biggest challenge faced by B2B content marketers is producing enough content, closely followed by producing the type of content that engages the target audience.

I listed 25 content creation ideas that business bloggers can use when they run out of ideas for attention-grabbing new content. But besides ideas you need more to create content better.

Most professionals use a toolkit of some type or another and that’s just as true for content creators. Today we’re looking at some of the most useful content creation tools that you could add to your content creation toolkit, including some tools that will help you to post some great visual content – we all know that images, GIFs and videos pack a powerful punch when it comes to getting the marketing message across....

More engagement with every image you create.

Perfect for creating social media posts, ad graphics, content marketing visuals, email images & more!

89% More Favorites (Source: Buffer)

150% More Retweets (Source: Buffer)

84% More Clicks (Source: Kiss Metrics)

Create images faster & easier than ever before. Pick a background. Add some text. No biggie....

Reported.ly was a news operation that covered breaking news primarily on social and distributed platforms. It was also the first place many people turned to verify developing stories. But in August, its parent company, First Look Media, pulled funding and shut down the site.

The Reported.ly team was small and spread out across the globe, which meant they relied on many digital and social tools. Before they said goodbye, the staff compiled a list of some of the tools they found most useful. We take a look at six of their favorites....

The main problem of most writers, including your humble narrator, is verbal intelligence. Grammar, punctuation, and stylistic mistakes can kill your content despite its awesomeness. Trust me, I know what I am talking about:

Editors don’t give a damn about your copy because, you see, they find typos (well, yes, s**t happens), awkward grammar constructions (hey, and what if it’s my awesome writing style?), poor punctuation (oh, really? does anybody still care about Oxford commas? I LOVE them, by the way), and so on.And the only thought that comes to your mind after yet another knockback. What an embarrassing fail!

With that in mind, you don’t stop improving your writing and editing skills, and looking for blogging tools to help you become a better content creator and get more clients.

To help you out, here are 10 of the best blogging tools....

Pagelines Platform 5 is a free WordPress plugin which allows you to edit any WP-powered website theme without the need to edit code. In addition Platform 5 makes it easy to drop in sections of pre-coded design with a single-click.Free version provides access to 65% of the available features.

Pricing info: https://www.pagelines.com/pricing/ ($99/year)

My comment: Powerful solution for anyone publishing a website with WordPress and needing to customize and edit specific sections with unique features, content blocks and without needing to rely on a webmaster. Download it now: https://www.pagelines.com/platform/

Landscape is a powerful image resizing tool designed to help social media marketers, content creators and business owners develop a standout presence in an increasingly visual social world.

Our tool offers social media professionals an efficient way to produce multiple image sizes optimized for social media profiles, messages and campaigns - ultimately giving them more time to focus on what matters most: fostering engagement and authentic conversations through social.