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... [...]

David Kirkpatrick says, “Among the positive benefits of inbound marketing is the ability to track visitors and interactions on the website, through the content marketing channel and on social media platforms. A challenge is making sure all that data is more signal and less noise. UrbanBound, a B2B relocation management software company, realized that everything was tracked, but the metrics were too broad to provide any useful information for improving future marketing efforts. The team shifted its focus, and through content-rich campaigns and inbound marketing, the team increased leads 35%“. Content... [...]

Larry Kim says, “Content marketing can be a great way to gain exposure for your company, but getting the media to care about your brand’s news is difficult. Unless you’re a Fortune 500 company, mainstream media, and even industry publications, probably won’t cover your news. You can try newsjacking—inserting your ideas and commentary into breaking news in the hopes of being quoted. Journalists get a ton of such press releases, though, and yours is usually just another needle in the haystack. So how can you use content marketing to break into popular news stories? We recently... [...]

Alex Sobal says, “When you work as an inbound marketer, it’s inevitable that you’ll spend a lot of time online. And when your job duties include being your company’s social media manager, it’s also inevitable that you’ll spend a lot of time finding content to share on your various social channels. That being said, as someone who’s currently in charge of the social media duties at our inbound marketing agency, I sift through a lot of inbound marketing content each day looking for the best articles to share with our Twitter followers. As a matter of fact, in the past year alone,... [...]

Jerod Morris says, “Yesterday, Brian Clark published a highly anticipated answer to a question that’s been on a lot of entrepreneurial and marketing minds. If you missed it, that question is: Isn’t it time for more power and less hassle from WordPress … without breaking the bank? The answer is yes, of course, and he provides the solution — a turnkey, hosted platform for content management that is already providing the technological engine for many smart content strategies across the globe”. The Lede: Are You Overlooking This Cornerstone of a Smart Content Strategy? ‘Copyblogger’... [...]

Isla McKetta says, “Picture it. A room full of executives from a company you never thought you could land as a client. They’re so engaged in what they are saying that they’re leaning forward in their chairs. The CEO looks poised to ask a question but you can tell she doesn’t want to interrupt your flow. This is the moment content strategists dream of. But if you’re like me, it’s easy to get caught up in how new the field is and wonder, “Am I even doing this right?” There are lots of posts to help you, such as  How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy... [...]