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 »

Welcome to Part III of the blog mini-series about Nudge Marketing with content from the Rand Fishkin presentation from NMX in Las Vegas. If you missed parts I and II, I encourage you to read those first and then come back to this blog post.

You can find Part I at this link, and Part II at this link.

To recap very quickly, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz talked about a new kind of marketing when you slowly and consistently nudge your prospects and customers to take small actionable steps that benefit them and you. In the digital marketing space, this can take on many different appearances depending on what kind of business you have and who … 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 »

Content Marketing is about to overtake Search Marketing according to Google Trends. All good digital marketers and SEO consultants have always known that real search marketing is, at the heart, good content marketing. It’s not about finding loopholes or playing on the black-hat side of the fence. Good SEO is about delivering great content with the appropriate keywords. I have long been waiting for the term content marketing to take it’s rightful place in the Google-sphere and according to Google Trends, we are right at the cross roads of that event.

When I think about Search Marketing, a number of different thoughts and companies come to mind. When I think of Content Marketing, however, I think of Joe Pulizzi. Joe is the founder of Junta42 and the Read More »

If you read our blog often, you probably recognize posts by Drew Dillon, Marketing Manager at Innogage. Like other Innogagers, Drew is an enigma of talent both on and off the digital marketing field. Whereas my “off the field” talents lie mostly in music, Drew’s lie in the area of power lifting. In addition to being an awesome manager at Innogage Drew is also a trainer and agent for Olympian Holley Mangold who lifted in the women’s competition in London this year.

There is another way that Innogage is similar to the Olympics and that has to do with content. Although we may have all had a lot of resentment to NBC for not broadcasting most of the Olympics live from London, one thing they … Read More »

I was recently asked to lecture on Content Marketing and Business Blogging at Sinclair College in Dayton Ohio. What I love about presenting at conferences and colleges is it always makes me take a big step back and look at the information through fresh eyes.

This time I added a new classification to content channels. I had always talked about the “home base” (websites and blogs) and social “outposts” (facebook, twitter, linkedin…) but I never had a good description for channels that you control but that don’t really “live” on a Home base or an outpost. Channels such as Webinars, Email Marketing, Podcasts, Whitepapers…etc.

You’ll have to check out my presentation on slideshare below to find out what new bucket I created for these media channels! I know it’s always hard to view a presentation without the verbal commentary so if you … Read More »