Content That Works

Ever had writer's block? If you're the one churning out content for your website, chances are you have. The worst is when you've exhausted all of the usual places you look for inspiration and come up empty-handed. Well, here's another source to add to your arsenal of awesome content ideas: your web analytics. That's right, those pages and pages of keywords showing how people find your site are full of great content ideas, says Dianna Huff of the Content Marketing Institute.

Dianna says every time she looks at her Google Analytics report, she comes away with at least half a dozen content ideas. (Hey, that could be two weeks worth of content!)

She shares her tips for finding content ideas in keyword reports:

• Look for combinations of search phrases around a specific topic.
• Look for questions/phrases that need answers.
• Look for non-relevant search phrases.

Check out the post for more insight on each of these.

Creating content simply because you (or your boss) think you should will keep your site or blog or Twitter feed full but may not satisfy your readers. Frank Reed, owner of FT Internet Marketing, argues that it's more important to create content your readers actually look forward to receiving.

Statistically speaking, the number of people who really look forward to your next installment likely represents only a fraction of your total traffic. But Rich notes, that fraction comprises the true believers, the true fans - think the 80/20 rule.

But they tend to be overlooked in the drumbeat to peg SEO goals - which is a sure way to squelch their interest. "They are your most valuable customers yet they are sacrificed in most marketers’ attempts to get bigger numbers rather than a better (albeit smaller in many cases) audience of true fans," Rich writes.

So, Rich says, hone your content creation to cultivate that loyal fan base. "The old axiom of 'Quality beats quantity every time' holds true in the content world as well," Rich concludes.

What in the world could a band known for its live shows, drug culture and merchandise have to do with successful content marketing today? Surprisingly, a lot, says Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com, as he shows how the Grateful Dead successfully mastered the use of content marketing to create their army of intensely loyal “Deadheads” in only four steps.

Even if you’re not a member of a psychedelic jam band, you too can use these steps to think about your business’ content marketing approach and how to best “give away something valuable in order to sell something related.” According to Clark and “the Dead,” there are four key steps to truly successful content marketing:

Dubbed Blog Muse, the tool essentially creates a loop connecting readers and posters:

The interaction cycle we envisioned, shown below, is that readers would share with bloggers topics they were interested in reading about. Our tool would then forward these requests to potential bloggers, and if any of these bloggers then wrote about the topic we would then notify the requesters. We also allowed users to vote on others' topics in order to gather large audiences together, all of whom wanted to read about the same thing, as we thought this would be an even greater incentive for bloggers to write about a given topic.

It was interesting that while a test of the trial indicated user engagement rose, writer engagement didn't seem to rise also. As someone who's hit the writer's block wall numerous times, I have a gut instinct that being given a list of topics is only the first step. One still needs to have something to say about them, and that's where the real blockage occurs.

Nevertheless, the researchers seem to have added evidence that it helps to know what your readers are itching to hear, so you have a better chance of scratching it.

The great thing about Twitter is there is no wrong way to use it. Sure, you'll see missteps in etiquette and plenty of spammers, but for the most part it's like Thunderdome: There are no rules.

There are guidelines, however, and Proactive Report offers a handy tip sheet from Ogilvy 360 for advice on various strategies—and suggestions on who to follow, what kind of content to create and how to engage for each situation.

If you're a Twitter pro you will probably recognize the various suggestions, and perhaps have some of your own to add, but if you're going to be covering an event or handling crisis management for the first time with Twitter this is a great starting point.

Although every business or brand can benefit from productive content marketing, there are some times when you shouldn’t even bother, explains Joe Pulizzi over on the Junta42 blog. He shares seven problems for brands that often result in ineffective or even useless content marketing.

Instead of producing custom content just for the sake of having it, knowing these common pitfalls could be key in refining your content marketing strategy. He shares seven, but here are the three we found most useful:

1. Your content doesn’t meet the needs of the customer. As Joe puts it, “If you are a chip company, why are you aggregating pictures of babies and puppies? Why are you spending time and resources on content marketing that will have no hope of generating more revenue or cost savings in some way?” The goal is to enhance your relationship with the customer, and providing relevant information that actually helps them is the best way to do this.
2. You’re producing content that’s just like your competitors’. The reason you create custom content is to make your company stand out from the competition. If a customer can get the same information elsewhere, what’s stopping them?
3. Your content suffers through lack of expertise and resources. If you’re going to do it, it only pays off when it’s done well. Pulizzi recommends doing what you can do well internally while outsourcing at least a portion of the content marketing.

It's news to no one—who doesn't know that Google is the No. 1 search engine? But a new report from Experian Hitwise gives content marketers an important reminder about keywords and search engine optimization.

Sure, there are other search engines out there, namely Yahoo and Bing, but those stand in the shadows of Google, which accounted for 72 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in May, according to the report. Yahoo's share was 14 percent, while Bing had 9 percent of all U.S. searches in May. Ask.com accounted for 2 percent of all U.S. searches.

If your content marketing strategy includes keywords for search engine optimization, give preference to content that will influence where you want your business to land for that keyword in Google. In most cases, the content marketing strategy for getting Google hits will be the same for the other search engines, but don't get too excited if your business pops up on page 1 in Bing but buried in Google. That keyword should still be marked "needs improvement." Or rather, "needs content."

Every once in a while, it's a good idea to step back and take a thorough look at how effective your blogging efforts are. Sociatic calls this auditing your blog, and breaks down the 20-question process into six areas to look at: Design, subscriptions, content, monetization, marketing and measurement. Some of the questions they suggest you ask yourself include:

• Do I have the essential pages set up? Make sure you have an About and Contact page, and consider other pages like Resources, Services and a custom error page.


• Is your RSS feed (or feeds) easily located?


• Is my content well-formatted (and formatted consistently)?


• Is my monetization method (i.e. ads) working?


• Is my blog showing up in all of the major search engines?

As a nod to all of the professional journalists who are turning to content marketing for job security, Clare McDermott of Junta42's Content Marketing Institute gives us six things we can learn from these former newsroom junkies about content marketing. They all are great and make perfect sense, but here are my favorites:

• Remember that you are reporting a story, not marketing a product.This is huge, and it really is the difference between folks actually reading the content on your site and rolling their eyes as they navigate away from your site.
• Schedule consistent pitch meetings.We're content experts and we hold a weekly meeting to come up with new, fresh ideas for our Hammock blog.
• Institute strong editorial guidelines. Just because it's on a website or a blog doesn't mean it can be messy. This is especially valuable if you have more than one content contributor. Make sure everyone posting knows how to cite a source. (And proofread, please!)

Call us nerdy, but last night at dinner my husband and I were amusing ourselves talking about the abundance of abandoned corporate blogs and Twitter accounts that are littering the Internet. You know the ones: They have introductory posts making grandiose promises about the purpose of the blog or social media account and then…nothing. It's particularly a shame when you find a blog with lots of activity, but then realize the top post you're reading is from October 2008.

I would love to see a statistic on how many of these accounts have been abandoned. Many more than are active corporate accounts, I'm sure.

The reasons for giving up on social media are many:

One of the major obstacles to implementing a B2B social media marketing plan is skepticism that social media are a passing fad, without foundation. Ironically, it often happens that when a business does start building social media awareness, it doesn't take the time to lay that selfsame foundation.

In her brief essay, "The Four Pillars of Social Media Marketing," Liana Evans points out that social media marketing takes work, both pre- and post-launch.

It really doesn't "change everything" (let's hope we never hear that phrase again), because it must be approached like any other kind of marketing - with research, strategy, engagement and measurement.

The tools and media are different - just as mass print media, radio, TV and Internet were different in their turns - but the methods are the same:

In the end, the essential haven't changed since Homer spun out the Odyssey in exchange for his supper, or Scheherazade (right) told her tales in exchange for her life.