The Number 1 Rule for Content Marketing
…or the dog will just ignore you!
Content Marketing Personas
It seems like only yesterday that I typed the following words into my computer: Conversion rate is a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take. It’s a reflection of your effectiveness and customer satisfaction. For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs. In order to help you understand what visitors need in order to achieve their goals, you need to have empathy about their journey through the buying process. Too…
Content Marketing: Where’s The Value?
After the first dot-com bust, “content is king” was the rallying cry of any competent Web worker. Back then this revelation was novel online. Soon after, this mantra became a cliché. As it often goes with clichés, they start out as something true and meaningful. Eventually, the words become common, outlive their value, and are so overused that they’re easily ignored. Saying content is king is the equivalent of saying money is valuable; it’s true but obvious. Tell that to…
A Tale of Two Publishers: And What Every Business Needs to Know
It is the best of times and the worst of times for some businesses. Many look at the world and see the opportunities of being data rich, customer centric, and nimble while others imagine they can bring their old school thinking to the new media, always-on connected customer. They sit cross-fingered hoping that putting lipstick on their pig will improve their results. Let’s explore two publishers making news recently and learn how one is failing while the other has become…
12 Insider Techniques to Increase White Paper Leads
Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising? Many sites offering “free” white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn’t treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won’t either. The problem starts by thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information, you…
10 Steps to Optimizing Copy and Content
If we could spend only a few minutes working together to optimize your website, we’d still get results starting with a process. When evaluating and improving any type of content or copy, there is a quick 10-step process you can use. 1. Headlines. Why are headlines first? They are the critical attention-getters that allow your visitor to determine if the page is relevant to her needs in just a few seconds. Readers of your pages scan the headlines and sub-headlines…
The 5 Rs of Search Engine Marketing
We came up with 5Rs of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to demystify the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This 7 1/2 minute video interview with Dr. Ralph Wilson from Web Marketing Today covers how content on your site must be (1) Relevant, (2) build your Reputation, (3) Remarkable, (4) Readable, and (5) of sufficient Reach.
The Future of Publishing and Advertising
No one knows exactly when the first advertisement was published on a printing press. We do know: In 1609, a British newspaper published an ad for migration opportunities to America. For hundreds of years, ads and print went hand and hand. Then came the Internet. AT&T was the first to pay HotWired to display the first ever online ad; a 468 x 60 banner that came to life on October 25, 1994. Do you remember the days of explosive CPMs?…