A content marketing productivity tool for faster content marketing

[caption id="attachment_23960" align="alignleft" width="257"] Little Bird - a great way to find and learn about key people online fast[/caption] If you spend time like I do, writing content for special interest groups online, then you probably love to hear about content marketing productivity tools that can help you optimise your time during the different stages of the content marketing continuum, and  improve your return on content marketing effort (ROE). After years working as a publisher, I’ve now got a new job as a startup CEO, managing a content marketing agency, as well as doing the digital marketing for a…

Creative Content Marketing with Lee Odden: Connecting Brands with Receptive Consumers

This Friday April 12th 2013,  join Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and author of Optimize for a free Smart Insights webcast on Creative Content Marketing - view here. In this post Lee introduces 5 ideas for creative content marketing and will expand on these with examples and more tips in the webcast. In the webcast Lee will teach webinar participants how to Get Better Results with Creative Content Marketing.  It’s a topic he knows well, in practice at his agency and as a marketing thought leader sharing his content framework at major industry events from London, England to New York City. Alongside conversion rate optimisation, content marketing is this year’s top priority for digital marketers. It’s no wonder; companies are tripping over themselves to be noticed over the deafening din of marketing noise facing an increasingly attention-deficit consumer. In…

Book review:  Optimize - How to attract and engage more customers, by integrating SEO, Social media and content marketing by Lee Odden

We read a lot of new marketing books at Smart Insights since we like our advice to include different perspectives and we enjoy seeing how different writers explain what works and what doesn’t. We have had a few requests that distilled reviews of books would be useful and it would be useful to hear more from the authors. So here we are. I’ve started our series of reviews with this book by Lee Odden since Lee will be talking at our next webcast on Creative Content content marketing and I thought it would be a good way of introducing Lee if you don’t know his acclaimed TopRank online marketing blog already. You can register free for the webcast …

A practical guide to setting up categories and tags on your blog or website

For every content project I’ve been involved with, categories and tags have had a role to play. Sometimes, there are clearly defined systems, which make a positive contribution to the user experience. However, it must be said that very often something goes awry. There is no set plan, and users find themselves confused by numerous and options. Over a period of years, this can lead to a sort of digital rabbit warren that can be expensive to sort out. Thus it’s important to have a defined approach to categories and tags to order your content.

Categories and Tags – What’s the Difference?

Any users of Wordpress will be familiar with categories and tags, but a number of sites I’ve worked with have struggled to differentiate between the two. Typically I define the two as follows: Categories – grouping of content…

A 3 Phased Approach to integrating Content and SEO Audits

In every book about Content Strategy, the recommended process will have an audit as one of the first steps; this is much the same as for Search Engine Optimisation. Granted, there are some specific technical aspects of SEO – particularly regarding server-side issues – that aren't related to content, but SEO audits will also cover onpage issues that need to be forwarded to product or editorial teams. As these disciplines merge, it is useful to get these groups working together, and it saves time to do onpage SEO and content auditing in one go. Thus I suggest combining the audit process as I'll explain here.

Phase One: Gathering Through Crawling

Using Xenu & Excel

Content Strategy books seem slightly wary of using crawlers for content audits. In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson writes (p.48): "During the audit process… technology can…

Defining the four pillars of successful content

Many digital marketers are talking about 2013 being the year when Content Marketing becomes a priority. There’s been a lot of focus on tactical elements of content marketing, so in this blog post I will take a look at what I see as the foundations of a sound content strategy. A comprehensive content strategy project would also involve outlining a plan for content process, such as workflow and maintenance, but in this post we’re going to focus on the foundations of good content. To simplify content marketing to a manageable area you can work on, I see four main areas of a content marketing strategy that need to defined to create content useful for your audience and to give a return on investment to a business.

1. Customers’ goals

Questions to ask include: Who are you…

Webcasts from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit

At our recent free summit many viewers asked to share the slide and recordings, so to collect them together we have a short series of posts to point you in the right direction. These is one for each of the topics covering each of Reach, Act and Convert and Engage in the Smart Insights PRACE digital strategy framework:

The full series of posts covering all eight webcasts are:

REACH audiences using SEO, Social media and content marketing

InterACT with audiences on mobile platforms and for B2B audiences.

CONVERT visitors using persuasive design and CRO.

ENGAGE customers through content and email marketing.

You can view all recordings here.

The two webinars focusing on engaging customers and encouraging advocacy were:

1. Content Marketing priorities for 2013 with Dan Bosomworth of Smart Insights and First 10

Dan Bosomworth MD of First 10 discussed…

Our content marketing blueprint - updated

It's almost a year ago since we created our blueprint for content marketing infographic - and with so much conversation now around the converging of digital and 'off-line' media, the proliferation of mobile and the increasing popularity of marketers talking about paid, owned and earned media we wanted to update our blueprint for 2013.

Paid, owned and Earned media meets Inbound Marketing

It's important to be alert to paid, owned and earned, in relation to content and inbound marketing. Especially owned media - this has to be a key priority in 2013. Without your own (ed) brand platform from which to both publish, and to which you want to drive traffic there becomes a far weaker case to create and promote content. Since how will you garner any traction with your consumer, show any conversion? This is the key area that we've updated our infographic from last year, as…

Ideas on improving content marketing in 2013

I was recently invited to speak at an event for members of the Content Marketing Association discussing trends to consider for 2013. I enjoy learning from other speakers and discussions with the audience at events and since each speaker was focusing on different predictions I thought I’d share the presentations here.

Neil Perkin - Digital Content Trends 2013

First up was Neil Perkin a content marketing commentator who gave his thoughts on Digital Content Trends in 2013. I was particularly interested in his thoughts about subcompact publishing, a concept defined by publishing commentator Craig Mod in article from November 2012. Evidence of this trend can be seen in new compact publications like The Magazine social sites like Branch and Medium launched in August by Twitter’s co-founders. …

7 tips to effectively promote your infographics

Last week I gave tips about creating effective marketing infographics. But creating an infographic isn't enough, to generate the return you'll obviously have to promote it. You'll want to do this since infographics are primarily useful for promoting your knowledge around a topic by being insanely shareable, and in turn attracting inbound links - the more exposure you can build, the better the return.

The power of show not tell

Infographics are visually appealing - if I were to tell you about the popularity of pork pies vs steak and kidney pies you'd be bored very quickly, however let me show you a crafted graphic to illustrate that and I'll be sure of at least a wry smile and probably a tweet or share into Facebook if you have an opinion on either over the other. Leveraging this obvious benefit holds the key to promoting an…