It’s never a dull moment in the world of content marketing. Just think of all the possibilities to consider. Between defining a user’s journey, writing compelling content, and optimizing content for search engines, it’s easy to miss a few steps in this never-ending shuffle.
That’s where this blog, Content Crack, comes in handy. It’s an overview of the Top Content Marketing Blogs from the previous week. In it, you’ll find the highlights of the stories we found most useful and timely. Reach out to the writers and ask any questions you may have. Be sure to include @98toGo in the post, so we can let other content marketers know. Image source: Quicksprout.com
Google+ Marketing Tactics: How to Promote Your Content on Google+
April 11, 2014
By Michael Stelzner
Looking for a podcast on social media? Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner hosts a Social Media Marketing Podcast featuring Lynette Young, author and agency owner of of Purple Stripe. Young gives insight on how to get your content discovered on Google+. She shares her Google+ marketing expertise and a few of the tactics that helped her reach over a million followers on the network.
Understanding the nuances of Google+’s user base versus that of Facebook users and taking advantage of Google Search’s seamless integration are just a few tactics mentioned here. The fact that the content you publish becomes an indexed page on Google is a privilege worthy of being exploited and Young encourages you to do just that.
At the end of this blog, you’ll find a long list of key takeaways that sum up the high points in a nut shell. There’s more to Google+ than meets the eye and the savvy content marketer should know every nook and cranny of this network.
If you like this post, you can find more from Michael at http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/author/mike-stelzner/.
7 Keys to Great SEO For Content Marketers
April 9, 2014
By Dori Fern, @dorifern
After an in-depth overview of search engine optimization’s history and present condition, Dori Fern of contently.com gets down to the nitty gritty and delivers seven keys to successful SEO. It’s easy, she says, for content marketers to lose sight of the ‘big picture’ amidst all the algorithm changes and flashy tactics. Fern boils the most important factors down to seven, easy to digest nuggets of wisdom.
Two of which indicate tactics that I find especially under-utilized by content marketers, myself included. They are, ‘original, engaging stories always win’ and ‘keyword and audience research still matters.’ These two can conflict at times, because a great story may not lend itself to chosen keywords. Often times, keywords are too broad, and not long-tail, so they miss the mark in audience targeting. The other five nuggets o’ wisdom equally interesting, so make time to read Dori’s blog (even if it’s just the seven keys at the bottom) and practice them until they’re habit.
4 Illuminating Lessons From One of History’s Most Inventive Content Marketers
April 9, 2014
By Scott Aughtmon, @rampbusinesses
Poor Richard’s Almanac is touted, in this blog, as one of history’s earliest and most inventive examples of content marketing. For 25 long years, Benjamin Franklin used this publication to promote his publishing house. Scott notes how Benjamin provided helpful content that people actually found useful as opposed to shameless, one-sided self-promotion.
We can all learn a thing or two from Ben Frank’s almanac. Scott did a great job of capturing what made Poor Richard’s Almanac crowd pleaser for so many years. The only thing that would make this story more powerful is reading about Ben’s lead conversions. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that someone uncovers this information and writes an awesome blog about it. Until then, Scott’s analysis does just fine. You can find more of his writing on his blog.
Your Content Marketing Will Fail without These 10 Features
April 7, 2014
By Neil Patel
Failure is a hard pill to swallow. It’s even harder to watch someone’s content marketing campaign crash and burn. Sadly, many fail because they lack the simple things, like a real purpose (other than making money and generating traffic), an audience, message, and consistency to name a few.
But this blog is not merely focused on pointing the flaws in a campaign. Neil Paten, co-founder KISSmetrics, CrazyEgg, Hello Bar, takes the time to provide a problem, cause, and solution for each failure he identifies. After all, it’s impossible to learn from a mistake if you have no idea why and where you went wrong.
How to Use Facebook Ads for Content Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
April 8, 2014
By James Scherer, @JDScherer
In the midst of all the content marketing excitement, we cannot afford to let online advertising and social media fall by the wayside. Especially when Facebook ads are such a great way to boost your content’s visibility. And if you haven’t kept up with all of Facebook’s changes since, have no fear. James Scherer of the Content Marketing Institute brings you up to speed in no time.
Facebook offers three different types of ads (Sidebar, News Feed, and Mobile Newsfeed) and eight primary objectives (Page Likes, Post Engagement, Clicks to Website, Website Conversions, App Installs, App Engagement, Event Responses, and Offer Claims). Thankfully, there are many more options available today than were a year or two ago. I remember when small brands could only link Promote your Page or link to your website’s homepage.
Scherer covers ad targeting, lead generation, retargeting and more. If you’re interested in capitalizing on a very inexpensive online advertising tool, read this blog and start using Facebook ads for content marketing.
That does it for this round of Content Crack! See you next Monday!
