Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

You’ve decided to start your own site. You may have even purchased a domain name and installed WordPress. Hopefully my step-by-step guide helped. You create an article about your goals for the site or something you think your future audience is interested in. Then you hit the publish button and wait for the traffic to flood in. But nobody shows up.

Successful content marketing is not only about publishing a post. There’s a lot more groundwork to be done. WordPress features many customization options, even before you start considering all the different plugins. Let’s look at this to-do list I go through as soon as I install a new site. Implement the following tips in order to launch your new site with a bang and give yourself a better chance of success....

Company blogs have so much potential. Businesses can use these platforms for a range of purposes, from developing a reputation as an industry thought leader, to engaging with customers and building brand loyalty.

One of the most difficult aspects of running a good company blog is generating the right kind of content. Posts need to be consistently interesting and innovative, remaining on-brand without resorting to generic sales-speak.

Here are three top corporate blogs you can learn from....

Take a look at LinkedIn today, and it’ll bear little resemblance to the LinkedIn of just a few years ago.The design is slick. The mobile apps are polished. And the site has begun to look like a full-fledged consumer social network, replete with content that you actually might want to read.

In that vein comes the next phase of LinkedIn’s evolution: Personal publishing. On Wednesday, the company announced that everyone can now publish personal, long-form content to their LinkedIn profile pages, providing the site’s 277 million-plus users with their own professional blogging platform....

Not sure how to tell if your business blog is successful? Tracking these 15 blogging KPIs will do the trick.Anyone who manages a business blog knows all too well that the darn things require quite a bit of commitment.The bright side is, they can also be extremely rewarding from a return-on-investment perspective. But how do you know if all that commitment is actually leading to a positive ROI? Analytics, my friends. Analytics. As someone who pulls together the monthly report for this very blog, I thought I'd share the metrics I track on a monthly basis (and for certain metrics, much more frequently) to report on the progress and success of our blogging efforts....

Adding stunning pictures to your content is one of the most effective actions you can take to grab and hold the attention of your audience.

You’re a blogger in a visual world. The visual part of online content publishing is as important as the written words, if not even more. Adding stunning pictures to your content is one of the most effective actions you can take to grab and hold the attention of your audience.

How do you communicate with words when your readers are conditioned to absorb information through imagery? To succeed, you better have effective visuals to hammer your points home and hook people with visual cues that tell them they’ve found what they need. To do the best possible job of marrying pictures to your posts, consider these factors...

We all post updates across different social media channels. But if you ever wondered about a picture perfect post….then this article is just for you.

...You may be present different social media platforms but each social media channel has its own workaround. As an example, on your Facebook fan page, a “less is more” approach to status updates, teasing the audience so they can’t resist clicking on your link, can pay dividends. Whereas on Pinterest, images without faces get more repins, while tagging relevant users across all social platforms is an easy but effective way to get their attention and help spread the word.

This infographic from mycleveragency explains how you can create picture perfect posts on social networks....

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....

Blogging is a proven marketing tactic, but it ain't always easy when results are immediately apparent. We provide you with an outline that explains how (And when) you can expect to see return from your blogging efforts.

...What do results even look like, anyways? You first need to define what the overall objective is for blogging as it relates to your overall business goals. Is it to simply generate traffic and raise awareness? Are you trying to drive more qualified prospects to your website in order to improve your opportunity-to-customer rate?

Most importantly, how are you providing value?

This is your content mission statement. Any blogging strategy absent of one will also have a hard time achieving any traction. Asking about results prior to identifying one would be like asking how long it’ll take to lose weight while sitting on the couch with an Oreo sundae. Where’s the accountability?...