Amy Harrison recently gave us 5 Things Every Copywriter Needs to Know About Their Prospects based on Lagos Egri’s 1946 book, The Art of Dramatic Writing. She casts prospects as protagonists in their own stories, and challenges content marketers to mine their prospects’ past experiences, present conflict or need, and possible actions.

Approaching content marketing from an educational standpoint, I often modify a favorite teaching strategy called K-W-L: Know, Want to Know, and Learned. I’d draw three columns on the board or have the students do so in their journals and together fill in what they already knew (or thought they knew) and what they wanted to know about a particular topic. After the lesson or unit, we’d return to the chart and fill in what we learned, sometimes making changes to the original Know column.

When it comes to … Read More »

I work with clients on content creation continuously when they sign up to use the Innoblogs Business Blogging Platform. There are 3 main stages that we go through.

1. Implementation planning
2. Implementation/content building
3. Continue content creation and blog maintenance

During the implementation planning stage we discuss the the goals of their content and blog. Also, we discuss the voice they will use to accomplish these goals. These two building blocks lay the framework that we’ll use to be successful with this tool, and not to get lost from where we originally wanted to go!

Implementation and content building is the time where we build up some content for the launch of our blog. The developers are quickly putting the nuts and bolts together so we have time to prep. Since we know our overall goals and … Read More »

By now, you have probably seen a ton of Infographics. These are the pretty visual images that tell a story with data. For examples, visit our Pinterest board where we have aggregated a lot of Infographics for Marketing

Did you ever wonder what goes into creating one of these great custom designed Infographics? It’s more than you may think!

I sat in a session by Graphic Design Company Lemon.ly at the New Media Expo (NMX) in Las Vegas recently where they took us step by step to create a high quality infographic. This blog post is about that process with some enhancement by our Innogage marketing team.

1. Inform

Start with the goal (the Thesis of your infographics). What are your 3 main points – what do you want to reader … Read More »

Thanks for reading installment No. 2 of my short series on Nudge Marketing. This is a continuation of 15 Nudge Marketing Tactics from the New Media Expo Conference with speaker Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz.

To recap quickly, Rand Fishkin spoke about Nudge Marketing at the New Media Expo (#NMX) in Las Vegas recently and I was lucky enough to hear his presentation. I blogged about Nudge Marketing Tactics 1-5 in an earlier post. If you have not seen that one yet, I encourage you to read it first and then come back to this post. For each tactic, I list the tactic from Rand and then provide my commentary in the [brackets] to expand on the subject matter.

Without further adieu, here are Nudge Marketing … Read More »

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz spoke at the New Media Expo (#NMX) in Las Vegas recently and I was lucky enough to snag a seat in the back of the packed room. He talked about a new kind of marketing psychology he called Nudge Marketing. Much of what Rand said came as a flashback to me from several behavioral classes I took during my MBA coursework at Kellogg.

Here are the first 5 of the 15 Nudge Marketing tactics Rand covered in his presentation along with some additional explanatory commentary [in brackets] from me.

Nudge Marketing Tactics 1-5

1. A ton of people can’t be wrong. [Use a statistic to make people think they are not in the cool crowd if they don’t use you. For example, we could say, “4 out of 5 social media experts … Read More »

In my earlier post, Content 101, I mentioned the 3 C’s of large-scale content marketing strategizing. Today I’ll dive into day-to-day content planning, once again borrowing some principles from the field of education. After all, content marketing brings customers in by offering something, and often that is information or a skill. Sounds a lot like teaching and learning!

Understanding by design, or backwards design, is a planning framework that starts with the desired end result and, you guessed it, works backward. In teaching, the obvious goal is knowledge, but there are different ways to measure that: written tests or quizzes, performance tasks, or project deliverables, to name a few. I often wrote these objectives as “I Can” statements, as in, “I can identify the four trophic levels,” … Read More »

In keeping with my last post’s theme of questioning, let’s look at the most angst-riddled question every blogger asks him or herself at least once a day:

What should I write about?!

You can have the best blogging platform in the world. (I’m partial to the benefits of Innoblogs…but that’s just me.) You can have a legion of wordsmiths at your disposal. You can even have tons of eager prospects chanting, “Blog! Blog! Blog!” at your web site and a foolproof way to turn those prospects into clients. But the truth is, without a steady stream of quality content…Your. Blog. Will. Die.

Heavy, I know. But an easy way to relieve that what-to-write anxiety is to turn the question around: What do my viewers want to read about? What are the key questions coming from your audience? If you have … Read More »

Did you know that teachers are the ultimate content marketers? It’s true! They generate squillions of activities, assignments, and assessments in order to move their students toward that noble but slightly nebulous goal of “learning.” Their payoff is not in dollars but the very tangible benefits of an educated populace.

More than once in my teaching career, I had the arduous task of designing an entire course from scratch with nothing but the Ohio Academic Standards to guide me. I had a flashback to that past life this week as we sat down to plan Innogage’s content strategy for the coming year.

If you feel like your online content marketing is a bit haphazard when it comes to form and/or function, maybe it’s time to sit down and plan a little. As a teacher (and, further back, a student), I found that the keys … Read More »

What is Digital Sharecropping? Here is my personal definition -  a Digital Marketing phenomenon whereby marketers place their digital marketing assets on another company’s web properties and relinquish all rights and control to their marketing and, at times, to their business model.

Sonia Simone from Copyblogger wrote a piece on Digital Sharecropping that I felt compelled to cover in my blog, partially because I loved the article and partly because the risks she talked about are something I have been raising on my blog and to customers for years: Giving up control of your digital marketing assets.

Now, Sonia and I are not ignorant of the value of using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest to elevate your brand, connect with current and would-be customers, disseminate information…etc. We are, however, very concerned with companies who use these … Read More »