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 »

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 »

If your online marketing strategy includes corporate blogging, then I have one challenge for you concerning your blog. Remember from my last article, we are supposed to remember to internalize the idea that our corporate blogs are to gain leads. On that note, I have a word I want you to concentrate on (a phrase really) that makes marketers drool: inbound marketing.

Content Makes Your Blog a Foundation for Inbound Marketing

Seriously? Yes. Seriously. But you have to use it the right way. And that comes down to the content. I have read so many blog articles and books about the importance of content, and I agree with them. Content should be informative, helpful, funny, inspire awe, and yes, content is king. I get it. But there are so many blogs and websites out there that it seems like all … Read More »

Ross Furlong of blogstar.co.uk, recently posted a great infographic about business blogging in one of the LinkedIn groups that I follow. With the post, he asked a good question: are corporate blogs an inward facing vanity project or a marketing powerhouse for customer engagement?

*Original infographic posted here: http://www.blogstar.co.uk/our-blog/

Why Do Businesses Blog?
In answer to his question, I reflected on the stats concerning “why” a business blogs. Seventy percent of the responders said that they blog to share expertise, in comparison to the 52% who said that they blog to attract new customers. While sharing expertise is a definite draw for people to read your blog, if this is your ultimate goal for blogging, you haven’t yet internalized the purpose of a corporate blog.
While sharing expertise is what we are doing when we write for … Read More »

Keyword density as it concerns content optimization, is the percentage that a keyword appears in your content, as compared to the total number of words in your content. There was a time when keyword density was extremely important to your search engine rankings. Today, not so much. At least, not in the way it used to be.

A little keyword density history
Over time, a couple of things began to happen. First, online content writers became proficient in applying keywords, and this method of website optimization became the norm. Second, webmasters began to take advantage of keywords, to the point that they abused them. Terms like keyword stuffing, search spam and spamdexing came about as a result of this abuse. Essentially, search engines are smart enough to realize when content has too many keywords and this can result … Read More »

I read a blog post today by Lee Odden on his Top Rank Online Marketing Blog and I felt compelled to post about it.  It’s not often that I agree with everything in a blog post but Lee really nailed it with his post called 5 Tips on Business Blogging With Minimal Resources.

One reason I got so excited when I read Lee’s post – it validates the functionality we have worked hard to put into InnoBlogs.  Lee wrote this post because blog management is NOT easy.  It takes work and strategic focus and dedication and a team – which is then hard to manage and control… With each of Lee’s points about business blogging, I immediately recognized functionality we built into InnoBlogs to assist with or relieve each challenge.  Here are the Five points Lee makes … Read More »

If you’re like most companies, you produce a lot of content for your media marketing – but creating content is not your primary business objective.  You blog, you have newsletters, email marketing, whitepapers, direct mail and other marketing materials.  The problem is your core business is selling products and services – not producing content.  How do you keep up with it all?

Try re-purposing your content.

If you are running dry on your business blog, take a look at past newsletters and web marketing materials.  Is there anything you can leverage?  Perhaps you can take the content of a newsletter and tweak it with minimal effort to make it into a blog post.  Email campaigns can be a great source of blog content.  Comb through your past emails to see what content can be leveraged.  If you use an email system … Read More »

One of the things I am involved with in Columbus is the American Marketing Association Special Interest Group on Social Media or AMA SIG – Social Media for short.  Instead of doing our usual speaker / Q&A format we mixed it up a bit with Round Tables!  Watch the video for how it went.  You can check out photos from the event on this Flickr Set!

AMA SIG Social Media Round Table Discussions from TOM WILLIAMS

Here are a few of the take aways from the Different Round Tables:

Using LinkedIn for Business – Hosted by Nate Riggs:

Think about LinkedIn outside of your profile. Focus on how your updates reach other people’s profiles across the network
To get the most out of LinkedIn, you need to engage. Get in the habit of checking LinkedIn for updates … Read More »

I was in Los Angeles a few days ago, having had the chance to be the best man in rock-superstar Dave Ghazarian’s wedding… It was an awesome time but that’s another story for another day (wedding was beautiful, btw).  The point of this blog post is actually what happened on the flight back from LA.

I was sitting on a very full flight wondering who would sit down next to me. Much to my surprise and delight, it was Greg Goodfried!

Who the heck is Greg Goodfried? you say…valid question. I actually didn’t know either at that moment. Then Greg starts to tell me about how in 2006 he and his business partner, Miles Beckett, hatched an idea to put a show on YouTube. They pooled a little money, casted for it and found … Read More »