Pitching content and doing blogger outreach isn’t rocket science.  At its most basic level, securing placements for great content is all about understanding what publishers want.  

More often than not, writers, editors and bloggers are looking for content that is useful, fresh, timely, and will provide their readers with something nobody else can give them.  

As an agency specializing in viral content creation and promotion, we’ve written and spoken quite a bit about the emotional drivers that enhance virality and that increase the chances for content to be linked to.    

What we don’t talk nearly as much about is the importance of relevance and freshness, as well as the ability of pitched content to “contribute to the unfolding story.”

Adding to the Unfolding Story

Mining current events is a highly effective technique for content marketers looking to achieve widespread exposure.  Entering into a conversation already taking place, and adding value there, is perhaps one of the simplest methods for engaging an audience and generating interactions across a large network of people.

The key is to examine an issue or topic, then find ways to supplement what is already being said in a useful way.  With nearly any newsworthy topic, there are a number of things to look for when considering opportunities to create supplemental content.

(more…)

 Content marketing evangelists have spoken – “Create great content that appeals to your customers and you’ll profit.”

While this is true, marketers often forget the importance of promoting their content – people don’t find content by mistake, or by accident.  Every content plan needs a complementary promotion plan that combines paid, owned, and earned media. 

Beyond Simple Sharing on Corporate Social Accounts

I was watching a video where one content marketing evangelist went through the strategy and creation of content in great detail, but completely ignored the importance of promoting content.

He suggested that marketers should share it from corporate social accounts, and share it with employees, so they could share it if they wanted.

While these strategies are an acceptable start, they overlook the simple fact that for the vast majority of companies (unless you’re a market-leading megabrand), simply publishing content gets them nothing resembling good results.

It’s like writing the great America novel and leaving it on your doorstep.  Or creating a baseball diamond in a cornfield in Kansas.  Only in the movies do random strangers find your great things and make them a big deal.  In the real world, you have to work hard to get anyone to pay attention to what you’re doing.

But that’s why marketers have jobs right?

Building Your Promotion Plan Across Paid, Earned and Owned Media

While it’s become a something of a buzzword, thinking about your content promotion plan in the ‘Paid-Earned-Owned’ matrix is a useful cognitive pattern. 

The Altimeter Group Converged Media Model

Across your companies paid, owned, and earned channels, how will you promote your beautiful piece of content?  How will you get the word out and ensure the right people see it and share it?  This can’t be taken care of as end piece – these questions have to be answered before you ever start your content creation efforts.

Owned Media: Using Your Permission Marketing Assets

We’ll start with owned assets – they tend to be the simplest to discuss in this context.

(more…)

I. On Content Inspiration

Inspiration Comes Anytime

“After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in.” – Henry Miller

Become familiar with thinking of content topics in your spare time. As you read or consume popular or viral content, think about why you like it, why you want to share it, and how the content was unique. You will find that by doing this regularly you will soon have ideas “pop” into your head at random moments. Just don’t forget to write them down!

Draw Inspiration from Experience, and Desire to Gather Experiences

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau

Having a broad array of interests, experiences and knowledge can be hugely helpful to a proficient content marketer. Compelling content often comes from tying together disparate ideas or topics in a new way. Strive to learn about many different things and be genuinely interested in the world around you. Knowledge sponges and those who love learning tend to make the best content marketers.

Step Outside of Yourself and Your Routine

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.” – Toni Morrison

(more…)

As content marketing continues to become increasingly popular, more and more Internet Marketing companies and In-house teams will be attempting to execute successful campaigns.

Unfortunately, if done incorrectly, these campaigns can easily fall flat. What follows is a guide to common errors and pitfalls that beginner content marketers should make themselves aware of.

Pitfall #1, Problems with Scope:

Attempting to accomplish too many objectives with one initiative

Content marketing can accomplish many goals, but trying to accomplish too many at once with the same piece of content can result in failure to meet any of those goals. 

Before deciding on a content marketing strategy, clearly define what you are looking to get out of it.

• Are you looking for new customers?
• Are you looking for social brand engagement?
• Are you looking for improved search rankings?
• Are you looking to educate current customers about your product or service?

(more…)

Today’s post is a collaboration between one of our favorite customers, Bill Sebald, and BuzzStream’s Matt Gratt.  Bill owns Greenlane SEO in Philadelphia, serving small and medium-sized businesses.  Previously, he was the SEO director at GSI commerce (an eBay company.)  You can follow Bill on Twitter or circle him on Google Plus.

If you keep a McDonald’s cheeseburger out for a year, even without refrigeration, it will not expire.  The bread and cheese will get hard, but there will be no mold, no smell, and though it might taste funky, you can safely eat the thing.

Is creating the indestructible hamburger a smart move by McDonald’s?  It’s certainly not organic.  I believe many times when writer’s are creating “evergreen content,” they’re creating this cheeseburger.

Much of the evergreen copy I read on websites looks like it was written to be boilerplate copy.  Rarely does it connect with me, or is it conducive to driving me deeper into the product or page.  I see it there – it doesn’t necessarily offend me, but I sense it’s kind of stale – and perception is reality.

(more…)

Inbound marketing – getting found and educating your customers through SEO, social marketing, and content – is a fantastic way for emerging companies to acquire customers.  Because of its low-cost, high-cleverness nature, it’s especially great for startups, who often have agility, smarts, and tenacity, but lack big advertising budgets.

This week, I asked marketers at some of my favorite startups to open the kimono and share how they do inbound marketing and get the word out about their new service without breaking the bank.

Our Bold Startup Marketers:

• Gregory Ciotti, Inbound Marketing at HelpScout
• Eric Siu, Director of Inbound Marketing at Treehouse
• Brian Whalley, Director of Inbound Marketing at Kinvey
• Jonathan Kay, COO & Co-founder at Apptopia

Gregory Ciotti, Inbound Marketer at HelpScout

Gregory Ciotti is an inbound marketer at HelpScout, a startup in the help desk space based in Boston.  Greg is also the author of Sparring Mind, a blog about psychology and content marketing.

How do you decide what topics to create content about?  How do you decide what forms of content (blog post, list, ig, etc) to use?

Before we got started “really” getting into content marketing, we took time to figure out what our space was missing, or what doing incredibly well. We found that for customer loyalty/customer service, there were far too many pieces of content revolving around best practices, with very little data to back it up.

Nowadays, we look at what our ideal customers are talking about, but that hasn’t been covered to death in article form. We also look at how we can bring in our angle and make an effective argument in a new direction.

The last thing we always keep in mind is something no online startup can escape: writing content for the web. Our audience is quite professional (it pays to know your readers!) so we can get away with some styles that other bloggers cannot usually go near, but we are always certain to keep important web-specific aspects in mind: writing magnetic headlines, keeping body paragraphs short and to the point, ending with a persuasive argument/CTA, etc.

Bottom line, great content only happens with great “research”, and I don’t mean the academic kind: you have to know your current and prospective audience well to create the kind of content that will perform well in your space. As Abe Lincoln once said, “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”

We think of our content strategy in the same way.

(more…)

Thanks to Dan Tynski for this contribution.  Dan is a content marketing veteran, with over 7 years experience creating and promoting viral content to social audiences. He is the co-owner of Fractl, a digital agency focused on creating massively shared, high-impact content marketing campaigns for brands looking to push the envelope.

Returning to the WILD WEST

As I read some of the SEO focused resources that used to give me so much inspiration, I don’t come across content that inspires me often enough.  As the industry has evolved, innovative SEO focused posts are fewer and farther between.  The feeling of limitless possibilities and gold-rush enthusiasm has waned.   Although it’s hard to admit, it often feels as though some segments of the SEO publishing industry have become a glut of rehashed conjecture and stale, increasingly moot debate.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this recently and realized that although I have these feelings about certain SEO focused content, I’ve found renewed enthusiasm and vigor in reading a slew of new marketing blogs, especially those that focus on other areas of online marketing, areas that are growing, changing, and evolving rapidly.  I’m finding invigoration in the places where innovation is happening.  

(more…)

Data is the new content.

Don’t believe me?  The most popular political journalist in the United States is writing computer models, not spending time with campaigns. 

And that’s just one example.  Using data to tell an interesting story is one of the most compelling ways to drive attention, links, and shares to your site. 

For example, Mint.com and OKCupid, both incredible examples of effective content marketing, both used a mixture of data analysis, data visualization, story telling, and promotion to gain significant mindshare in two very different markets – finance and dating.  Now pricing data up-and-comer Priceonomics is writing a highly popular blog featuring articles that analyze their own data.

But data journalism and visualization is tough – and this means it hasn’t been incredibly overused yet.  There are still outsized returns available in data-based content marketing.  And today I’m going to show you how to do some data analysis to make your own data-based blog posts, visualizations, and more. 

Step 1: Go Find a Data Set

To do data-driven content you’ll need data. Fortunately, there are many places you can get great data:

Your Own Data

Today’s guest post comes from Benjamin Beck, an SEO Associate at SEER Interactive. You can connect with Ben on Twitter and Google Plus.

Working at SEER Interactive, you hear a lot of talk about doing “RCS”. RCS stands for “Real Company Stuff”, where companies do real strategies that add value, instead of “Fake Company Stuff” where the sole purpose is to try and quickly increase search engine rankings. 

An example of “RCS” could be creating an interactive visualization of industry data your company has collected and letting industry journalists know about it.  By contrast, “FCS” is doing large numbers of spam comments, spinning press release articles, and other similar tactics that exist only to manipulate search engines.

Our CEO Wil Reynolds presented about RCS at MozCon this year and SEOmoz is extremely generous by allowing anyone to watch the full video here.

The great part about doing RCS is that it makes your job as an online marketer easier. Here are a few ways you can promote and gain more links for your company’s Real Company Stuff.

1) Infographic Link Building

Infographics enable marketers to communicate an idea and data to their community. While lots of companies are employing this strategy, I believe most aren’t realizing the full value of their efforts.

Where to promote - The article by Paddy Moogan has a list of sites to submit infographics to.

How to find links – If you create an infographic, you should be sure to include an embed code so that people can post the graphic on their own site. Posting your graphic on the list of sites that Paddy gave makes it more likely that your graphic will be found and used by others. Sites that feature your infographic don’t always link back to your site. To find these opportunities, use Google reverse image search to see who’s using the graphic but not linking.

2) Brand Link Building

No matter how big or small your company, you will be surprised at how often your brand is mentioned online.  It is important to find these mentions, not only to try and get links, but also to understand who and how people are talking about your brand.

Where to promote - This article by Adam Melson goes over several ways to build links with your logo alone.

How to find links - These are a few ways that I like to monitor a brand online:

1. Use Google reverse image search to find people using your logo.
2. Set up Google Alerts for your brand name.
3. Set up Topsy Alerts for social mentions ( Topsy Tutorial ) 

3) Image Link Building

Like infographics, high quality images are great way to connect with your audience. An image link strategy works especially well for companies that already produce high quality photos of their merchandise – like gear, food, and clothes.

Where to promote - Like Paddy Moogan’s article about infographic sites, I recently created a list of high quality image sites where you can submit images.

How to find links - Like the previous strategies, using Google reverse image search can be extremely effective at finding people who are using your high quality images but not linking to your site as the source.

4) Protecting Your Quality Content

When you do RCS, you are producing quality content. Unfortunately, others around the web will borrow it without citing you as the source.  We don’t always want people to take our content, but if they do, we want to make sure they cite us as the source.

How to find links  – There are ways to make sure that high quality content gets properly attributed when used by others.:

1. Google Alerts– Take a snippet of your content and make an alert for when someone uses it.
2. TYNT is a piece of code that inserts a link to your page’s URL when your content is pasted into emails, content management systems, and onto social sites.  Allie Brown wrote a case study on how TYNT helped one of her clients develop links.
3. CopyScape protects your site against plagiarism and content theft by monitoring the web for copies of your content and emailing you as soon as they appear.  John Henry Scherck also wrote an article on how this method obtained links for his client.

All Attendees Got Ducks of Awesomeness

Earlier this week, Paul May and I attended Distilled’s SearchLove Boston Conference. It was great to connect with so many smart, passionate search marketers, in the beautiful city of Boston.

In addition to meeting really great people, I learned many actionable ideas from the speakers. Here are my 4 biggest takeaways:

Domain Names Matter

If you’ve ever purchased a domain name, you know the process: have a good idea, then find it’s taken.  But you can get the dot net, the dot info, the hyphenated version, or a much worse variant of the name.  So you go through the sad process of picking the least bad domain name you can find, often ending up with something dramatically longer and less catchy than you’d hoped.  (The end product also tends to be tough to spell, pronounce, and remember.)

But is an investment of thousands of dollars really worth it?  Are great domains a great buy?

As it turns out, yes.  Stephen Pavlovich, co-founder of Wish.co.uk, spent around $12,000 for his domain.  And he was rewarded with an instantly memorable website that served as the basis for many advanced PR and social campaigns.

Journalists and potential customers told Stephen they had heard of Wish.co.uk before, even though it was a new startup.  From a branding perspective, this is pure gold – like starting a game of football on the 20 yard line.  (For international readers, it’s like starting a game of football with 2 goals.)  

(more…)