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February 21, 2017

How to Use Psychology to Create High-Performing Content

When email marketing first started becoming popular in the late 1990s, it was possible to get open rates over 80 percent . When AdWords started getting traction, you could buy clicks for high-volume keywords at very low cost. In the early days of content marketing, it was easy to rank in search. As time goes on, you have to deal with more and more competition, which makes it harder to stand out. It’s not as easy to rank or drive leads as it used to be. But, there’s a deeper, more pernicious aspect of aging marketing channels that people rarely talk about: As more and more content gets created, it gets harder to make your company sound different from its competitors. Related: The 3 Types of Marketing Emails That Nobody Has Opened in Years One of the reasons for this is that we tend to look to our competition, […]

Your Essential Guide to Internal Content Linking

22Today, it’s easy to get caught up in the glitzy, glamorous SEO tricks and tactics that are flooding the web. SEOs and marketers everywhere are focused deeply on things like site audits and the latest and greatest in Google algorithm updates, and that’s all well and good, but sometimes it means that the simpler and, often, more critical fundamentals get overlooked. One of these overlooked SEO components is internal linking. If you think of SEO as a house, internal linking is the framework of that house. Internal linking provides the flow of traffic, allows you to navigate the space from room to room, and makes the space comfortable and intuitive. When you think of it this way, why would you build a blog without internal linking? Unfortunately, many people do. (And yes – if you look closely, you’ll notice I internal linked above!) In addition to making your web […]

Writing for the web: 8 must-read articles

You’ve determined what content you need, who is going to write it and when. Yay workflow! But now it’s actually time to write. For some this can be a breeze, for others more of a challenge, especially when you’re creating content that needs to suit both business needs and user goals. Add on top of that the brand style, authentic voice and tone and perhaps even SEO and translation requirements, and it can quickly become an intimidating and stressful task that gets pushed further down the to-do list. Panic not. We’ve published several articles with advice to help you write better content for your websites (and audience!). I’ve gathered 8 of those here and between them they cover SEO, micro-copy, UX, plain English, translations and more. There’s even a bonus article about proof reading your content once you get through the production stage. Getting started: How to write great […]

Keeping content on track for big website projects

Emileigh is presenting at Confab Central in Minneapolis in June. The World Wide Web is turning 28 this year, which means companies, governments, and schools have had almost three decades to let their content grow out of control. Increasingly, these organisations are asking for help, and they’re turning to content and industry professionals, like you and me, for answers. That means at some point, you may find yourself working on a big, messy, existing website. But content on large websites isn’t the same as content for small sites. Existing content is not the same as new content. So how can content designers be successful, when they’re taking on massive projects? Don’t throw away your tools, but do tweak them President Dwight Eisenhower said, “in preparing for battle, I have found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Figuring out the shape of existing content is crucial for project […]

Leverage Your Network to Help Drive Your Own Branded Content

< All Articles    The Content Creation Conundrum If you’re looking to grow your business’s online presence, original branded content is the way to go. According to a Forrester study , 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making a purchase. Original branded content allows you to: proactively engage with these prospective customers, establish your organization’s credibility, and increase the chances that prospects find you in the first place. The problem is that creating this content can turn out to be very time-consuming. And if you want to maximize the return you see on this content, the majority of the work actually occurs AFTER your content is published (if you’re interested in learning more about content promotion tactics, this blog post by Ameer Rosic is a great place to start). So what’s a business owner or time-constricted marketer to do?! Start […]

The Truth About How Often to Post in Social Media

Will Roe v. Wade be overturned? Will the United States bail on every international treaty to which it has previously signed? Will Nicolas Cage have a late-career resurgence? How often should I post to social media? These (among others) are the central questions of our time. You could fill Tom Brady’s trophy case with the amount of research that has been conducted on social media posting frequency. Our friends at CoSchedule, in fact, collated much of it to create this nifty consensus guide on when to post . It’s good stuff. But, it’s not true. None of it is true. Because all of those studies look at the success of each post in a vacuum. How many clicks, likes, shares, comments, etc. did a piece of social content get, and what happens to those baseline results when the frequency of publication goes up, or down? Every single one of […]

Want to Scale Up Your Content Operations? 4 Things to Think Big About [Infographic]

Let’s say for some time you single-handedly make something that people love to consume: cinnamon buns, maybe, or content. You decide to go big with your operations and bring more bliss into the world. Boatloads of bliss. We’re talking content (or cinnamon buns) galore. We’re talking more than simply doing more of what you’re doing. We’re talking scaling up. You need to do more than throw more people at the situation. To handle increased complexity, you need updated processes, new strategies, and more automation. For example, in Automating Content Reuse: One Marketing Team’s Story , Jen Brass Jenkins tells the story of the content teams at the University of Utah Health Care system who are revamping the way they create, tag, distribute, and manage their content so they can reuse their content in smarter ways and get it in front of more readers. Boatloads of readers. Many marketers dream […]

SEO Checklist for Content Marketers: 21 Common Mistakes to Avoid

With so much content being created, published and promoted online every second—as well as consumers becoming increasingly self-directed in their quest for answers —competition to capture your audience’s attention has never been more fierce. As a result, quality and strategic SEO has probably never been more important for helping you be the best answer whenever and wherever your audience is searching. But as seasoned marketers know, SEO has gone through a tremendous evolution since its early days of keyword-focused content. With more than 2 trillion searches happening on Google every year, today’s SEO is about finding the perfect balance between user-centric content and convincing search engine crawlers that your content is supreme. Of course, on the journey to creating the perfect content for both humans and search , you may make some mistakes. But the good news is that may are easily avoidable. Below we dive into some of […]

These Six Content Marketing Tactics Will Give You 142% More Traffic in Six Months

You don’t need me to tell you how potent content marketing is. I could spout off a laundry list of stats, e.g., “ conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters” or “content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.” You get it. But the term “content marketing” is a wide umbrella, encompassing a nearly infinite number of strategies and variations. What you really need to know is which content marketing tactics will get you legitimate results—which ones will boost your traffic and generate sustained leads. In other words, which strategies are truly worth your time? In this post, I’d like to discuss six key tactics I feel are most pertinent for content marketers in 2017. More specifically, these tactics will give you 142% more traffic in six months. Here we go. 1. Create multiple landing pages […]

How to Create Exceptional Content Even If You Suck at Creating Content

One of the myths on the web today is that the people we look up to were mysteriously placed there by alien forces. They have some unknowable advantage over us that made them rise to the top. But that’s not the case at all. Everybody starts at the bottom. Everybody can rise to the top. This post will prove it. I just finished writing my sixth book, an epic tome called KNOWN: The Handbook for Building and Unleashing Your Personal Brand in the Digital Age . The publication is the result of more than a year of research conducted to answer one burning question: Is it possible for anybody today to use the Internet to become known in their field? First let me explain that being “known” is not the same as being famous. It’s not about having millions of fans and red carpet appearances. Being known is about […]