Pamela Wilson says, “You know the drill: another day, another piece of content to connect with your audience. You churn out post after post, social media update after social media update — typing, typing, typing all the way. It reminds me a little of this classic Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. We’ve all felt like Fred the Baker from time to time — dragging ourselves to our keyboards to create yet another readable, but forgettable, post. What if you could break the “time to make the donuts” cycle with an information-packed piece of content that readers would line up (and sign up) to consume?”. Build... [...]

Jerod Morris says, “Articulating the goal of content marketing, a wise man once wrote: You lift prospects out of their ordinary worlds and invite them to consider a journey that ultimately leads to a transaction. Easy to say. Not so easy to do. We know that to lift our audience members out of their ordinary worlds we need to tell a compelling story — a story in which the audience member sees himself or herself in the role of hero while we play the role of mentor”. How to Ignite a Feeling in Your Audience ‘Copyblogger’ Blog  [...]

Jerod Morris says, “Content marketing works. This is no longer up for debate. Granted, there are no shortcuts. You have to publish useful content that stands out above the noise, you have to do it consistently over the long haul, and your content strategy needs to place you into a particular kind of role relative to your audience. When you do all of this, content marketing works and you give yourself an unfair business advantage. But there’s one major problem with content marketing”. The Rainmaker Reseller Program: Come See What All the Fuss Is About ‘Copyblogger’ Blog  [...]

Danny Chadburn says, “In the UK, every vehicle over three years old used on public roads must undergo a test to check it’s roadworthy. It’s known as the MOT (Ministry of Transport) test and, like death and taxes, it’s inevitable. You rarely hear any major protests from car owners – the last thing they want is for the various bits of steel, aluminium and electrical wiring to fall apart when they’re travelling at 70mph down the A31. They understand it’s in their best interests to give their car a thorough check-up every so often – it would be marvellous if every website owner... [...]

MarketingProfs team says, “The secret to content marketing success: document a strategy and adhere to it. Two critical factors differentiate great content marketers from the rest: having a documented content marketing strategy, and following it very closely, according to the findings of the fifth annual content marketing study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute. Just 35% of content marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, although 48% say they have one but it’s not documented, the B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America... [...]

Dan Brotzel says, “It’s easy enough to create amazing content if you’re ASOS or Red Bull or LEGO. But what if you’re a dentist or a funeral provider or you sell Hoover spare parts for a living? In the world of content marketing, ‘boring content’ seems almost to have become a genre in its own right. It tends to stand for content from B2B organisations facing those classic considered-purchase challenges: sales lead-times that can run into years, forbidding levels of compliance and stakeholder review, and products/services that can be dauntingly complex or just too mundane to inspire... [...]

Martin Beck says, “Would I share this? That’s the question BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti says BuzzFeed producers ask themselves when they are trying to generate viral content. BuzzFeed has built a thriving business valued at an estimated $850 million upon the foundations of that basic tenet — 75% of BuzzFeed traffic comes from social referrals, including email and instant messages — but Peretti showed there’s much more to it than that during the keynote conversation with Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan at SMX East Wednesday night in New York”. BuzzFeed’s... [...]

This is a reminder for Business 2 Community’ webinar on landing page optimization.  Business 2 Community is hosting a webinar with Tim Ash on Wednesday, October 1 at 2.00 pm ET. The topic of the webinar is “The 7 Deadly Sins of Lead-Gen Landing Pages”. The ‘Business 2 Community’ team says, “Landing page optimization can produce huge improvements in online marketing campaigns. Yet many companies ignore this key money-making machine and focus instead on driving traffic, only to turn potential leads off with poorly designed landing pages. This is a mistake. The first... [...]

Neil Patel says, “Content marketing alone won’t deliver organic traffic. Content marketing employed strategically will deliver the organic traffic you want and need. But how do you create that refined content strategy? If your goal is to drive organic traffic, what specific, strategic methods should you employ to build the right amount of organic traffic? In this article, I explain the process for creating a content strategy that drives traffic in detail. It starts with audience research, and is built on determining the best form of content, creating a pattern of frequency, tailoring... [...]

Erin Hogg says, “A major challenge in content marketing is not just creating and delivering valuable content, but also determining how that content is shared. Company Folders built a blog of rich and useful information targeted at its intended audience — prospects with a graphic design background — and shared it via PPC ads and Twitter. When the blog was not garnering the engagement it should, the company determined the content wasn’t lacking; it was the blog promotion. Learn how the company shifted to using Facebook Promoted Posts for sharing blog content and achieved more than 2,000... [...]