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 […]
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]
![Want to Scale Up Your Content Operations? 4 Things to Think Big About [Infographic]](https://www.iammichaeld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/scale-up-content-operations-390x215.png)
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 […]
7 Ways to Accelerate Your Content Review and Approval
As a content marketer, you have so much of the planning and execution phases in your control. You drive forward, setting up tasks to be done and milestones to be hit, and then knocking them down one by one. You have a tangible feeling of accomplishment and momentum. Everything’s running on time. The finish line is in view. You can almost taste victory when BAM! You hit the wall – the review and approval phase. Suddenly, that feeling of accomplishment is gone. Momentum: gone. Your delivery date: blown. Instead, you feel like your coffee has been spiked and reality is tumbling in slow motion out of your grasp. Your once-vibrant, healthy project has mutated into a delayed , unrecognizable mess. If you’ve been there, you’re not alone. When we polled Content Marketing World attendees on this topic in 2015, 92% confessed to being victims of the review and approval […]
7 Tools for Generating Infinite Content Ideas for Your Blog
Blogging sucks. Okay that’s a bit extreme. In fact, there’s a lot that I enjoy about blogging—mainly connecting with you guys. But what does suck is having to constantly come up with new ideas for blog posts. It’s a grind that can be quite exhausting, especially if you’re simply coming up with ideas off the top of your head. Research from The Content Marketing Institute found that “57% of B2B marketers say that producing content consistently is their biggest struggle.” And the struggle is real. If you’re like me and writing up to eight posts per week while juggling multiple businesses, it can be seriously draining. So out of pure necessity, I’ve experimented with a plethora of different tools to aid me in the process of generating new content ideas. Some have been home runs and some have been strikeouts. But there are seven in particular I really like […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Do You Have a Plan to Scale Content Creation?
< All Articles Content marketing seems simple enough…at first. You write content, then you publish it. I can’t help but be reminded of this scene from Mrs. Doubtfire : Daniel : What do I do? Tony : Well you take all these cans, you box ’em, you ship ’em. Then you box those cans over there, ship them, then more will come in. You box those, you ship those. Any questions? Daniel : After you box them…? Tony : You ship ’em. Lotsa luck, smartass For small marketing teams with one or two people, the content creation process can seem just as straightforward. Everyone is on the same page. You what’s being published and when. There are few points of failure. But what happens when the amount of content increases tenfold? What happens when you have 5, 10, or even 20 people contributing content on a […]