The nofollow tag has accomplished the opposite of what it was set out to do a decade ago.
When nofollow became common knowledge as a tag, the ideal that Google had in mind for search engine optimization was based around the authoritative score or “trust” that sites had with regards to one another.
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90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years? Faced with this huge, ever-increasing amount of data, threatened by social networks such as Facebook, search engines had to adapt or die. They found a better way of identifying quality and relevant content that genuinely addressed users’ needs. How can companies improve SEO to comply with secret algorithms that are constantly being revised by search engines?
Improve SEO by not doing SEO
That’s right! The old SEO is dead. Backlinks-only strategies are not only inefficient but condoned by search engines. As Neil Patel says, “you can’t just pop up an ugly website, throw up mediocre content, build a few links and expect to rank well”.
The only way to improve SEO now is to understand the new SEO: content marketing. Don’t do SEO, Search Engine Optimization like we meant it when the acronym was invented. Do content. Content that you audience cares about. Content that brings them added value. That’s how search engines feed their first page.
Content Marketing is about sharing and education. It’s about being useful to your audience. As Carlton Hoyt was pointing out on the Content Marketing Institute’s blog: “Stop Thinking Content, Start Thinking Resources”
At Scoop.it, we’ve always been eager to learn. We do that by curating great content from influencers, by deriving our own conclusions from our own experiments and by sharing with the Scoop.it community on this blog and on our social channels to spread the results and collect feedback.
We’ve been doing that for some time now and even though we never had more than one full-time employee in charge of content, we now have a pretty big collection of content published including:
So as we’ve seen many marketers go through the same questions, we felt it would be interesting to share what we learned on this question, what mistakes we made and what successes we had.
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I really liked Dan Stasiewski’s article about the 8 mistakes CMOs make when structuring their marketing teams and I was going to curate it and add a few lines about what to do to be good at marketing without a CMO (or a good one). I got carried away. I’m not reinventing the wheel here, but sharing my own experience on how to manage and thrive as a marketing professional even when you’re not lucky enough to have a CMO or marketing leader – or even a team!- to help you structure things around.
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“Penguin. Panda. Pigeon. Phantom. Navigating the constant pace of Google algorithm updates makes SEO in 2015 a much harder game to play. But companies and individuals who are producing high-quality branded content on a consistent basis are the ones that have the edge in terms of search visibility.”
Is SEO really a harder game to play as KunoCreative’s Dan Stasiewski put it in this excellent SEO guide infographic?
Christopher Penn made a great analysis by extracting from the Mary Meeker internet report data on time spent with digital media. Let me give you 3 ways for lean marketers to beat content shock with limited resources
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In this article, Mike Huber rightly says “more is what you need when it comes to content marketing”, and then points out in 6. that “your team needs to be all in”. And since “the best time to start a content marketing program is 5 years ago and the second best time is today”, you’d better start publishing content regularly now.
Our experience adds one lesson to this post: “curation helps you publish more”. And not just more, also better.
On April 21, 2015, Google made a massive update to their SEO algorithm and was clear that they’d be handing out manual penalties to websites that didn’t abide by mobile best practices. Don’t panic just yet—Google doesn’t expect every website to run out and develop and app or otherwise become their “best” mobile ready self. In order to appease Google’s algorithm and avoid a penalty, consider these your new content marketing rules for a very mobile ready world (and marketing campaign).
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Sooner or later, especially for B2B companies, you’re going to be asked how much of an impact your content marketing efforts had on the #1 metric of all: revenue.
Lead generation is already a key objective for 83% of B2B content marketers and the trend is going up.
So how do you effectively measure the impact of your content marketing on lead generation for your company?
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“According to Gartner surveys, content is the most important thing marketers can do and yet they’re unequipped to take it on from a skills and sourcing level.”
Source: www.gartner.com
Last week, Gartner released the results of their study around the 5 top emerging trends in digital marketing, and one of the big 5 is around the “rise of big content”.
Most marketers understand how important content is for their audience and their overall marketing strategy, but they critically lack resources/skills to either create good content or source good content to curate.
The choice of words Gartner used was very wise: we all know “marketers understanding that” does not mean “CEOs understanding that”. So just like most marketers, you might be facing a situation where you and anyone within your company who can and would write has millions of other things to do with deadlines that can’t be pushed.
In my opinion there are three answers you can bring to scale your content marketing and address the challenges created by the rise of big content:
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Do you read online? Come on… be honest. Because if you’re like most people, you don’t read online. You scan. According to usability specialist Jakob Nielsen, on average readers actually read only about 28% of…
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Despite what my friend Eddie would say, even Messi can’t do it alone. Let’s see if some of these quotes I heard or felt about my content marketing team sound familiar:
“I’m always behind on my publishing goals”.
“I know if I had more content to distribute I would have more traffic on my website, but I don’t have enough resources to write this content”.
“My co-workers who are supposed to write something for me keep pushing back the deadline”.
“I can’t constantly follow up with all my co-workers to make sure they share my content to their social network”.
Rings a bell? Don’t worry there are ways to cope with that.
First of all, if you’re still not sure how content curation can solve some of your content struggles, then have a look at this must-read post by Heidi Cohen on the 3 no-brainer reasons you should start curating content, and then come back here for more tips.
I’ve identified two reasons to expand your content marketing team that can really help you increase your content production and your content reach: extend the party committee so others can write and curate with you, and/or leverage your co-workers’ social audience.
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We’ve said it before: 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past 2 years, and content marketing is approaching mass adoption. How can you break through the noise and get your message to the right people at the right time?
Many marketers are turning to influencers for content marketing amplification – in fact, a recent poll of 125 marketers shows 59% plan to increase their influencer marketing budget over the next 12 months. This means more marketing departments are devoting time and resources to creating authentic relationships with the people who matter most to their business – influencers who shape the industry as trusted resources.
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Obviously, one of the best ways to stay exciting is to look to what’s new—read up on industry news, check out your competitors’ blogs, and listen to what your customers are talking about, and use that information to generate some fresh, new material. However, this isn’t always possible. When it isn’t, you’ll have to look back at some of the older topics you’ve covered and find a way to present them as if they’re new—in a fresh, exciting way.
There are several strategies you can use to accomplish this.
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The launch of Sccop.it Content Director in February was a huge success and a number of you already love the product! We wanted to thank you for the continuous feedback to help us improve it, and are happy to announce the release of a new version of Scoop.it Content Director that takes into account the many enhancements you asked for and that will help you generate more ROI with your Content Marketing.
This new release is centered on three main areas:
– Scale your content marketing with contributors,
– Create engaging newsletters in minutes with a new drag-and-drop editor,
– Measure What Matters – improve and prove the ROI of your content with the new analytics.
We will host a webinar on May 20th to show you how you can leverage Scoop.it Content Director to improve your Content Marketing strategy and ROI. You can register here.
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When it comes to writing content, a question that often comes is: how much should I create? You can hear all sorts of advice ranging from quantitative analysis on the optimized size of a blog post to bloggers recommendations on the merits of 800-word SEO-optimized posts vs long form epic content.
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To calculate content curation ROI, all you need to do is to tally up what it took to do the marketing, and then what you got out of it. The first part of that is to figure out how long it took you to do your work.
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Content marketing has been the most successful method of acquiring users for our startup Process Street. A number of people ask me about my process (no pun) for creating and marketing content that drives users to our product, so I wanted to give the Scoop.it readers the inside scoop.
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In the article I wrote on April 16th, “How We Addressed our Main Content Marketing Pain by Outsourcing to Freelancers”, I explained the process of selecting and using a freelance writer. We did not take…
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What looks like negative ROI for content marketing can often be turned around. And if your content really is not pulling its weight, there are several easy fixes.
Read MoreSource: www.slideshare.net
Do Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, Demand Generation, Community Management and other marketing practices work in silos?
Not if you want to win.
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There are so many content marketing formats that it can be hard to decide which to focus on. White papers, ebooks, slideshares, blogs, infographics, curated content, videos, etc. They all have their merits but don’t…
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Most of us who practice content marketing rely on at least some kind of content marketing software. We’re software people by nature, so it’s only natural we’ve got a thing for digital tools. Of course, it is possible to stay on top of your content marketing work with just Excel and Google calendar. But at a certain point you’ll want to graduate to something more robust.
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Today I’d like to share with you one of the biggest marketing struggles we experienced at Ivalua, the previous company I worked for and where I handled Marketing for over 2 years: content creation – and how we overcame it leveraging freelance writers.
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With so many advances in smart technology these days, marketing professionals, content creators, and their teams need to keep up with the availability of tools that help reduce their workload and maximize their output.
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“According to the experts, a blog will solve all your Internet woes. Blogging will increase your traffic, expand your audience, improve your engagement, position you as an authority, and allow you to shape the message in your space. So should you blog?”
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Content. Content. Content. There’s no denying the fact that content is the leader of the online marketing pact right now. Now don’t get me wrong. It’s important. But the truth of the matter is that content has always been what great marketing was built on. Package it up. Call it something new. Do what you want. But when it comes to succeeding online, your content is the cornerstone of your strategy.
Content Creation vs Curation
Cast your net out there and ask around. Some will tell you that you need to curate content. Others will tell you that you need to create content. Ask me and I’ll tell you that a solid content marketing strategy combines both creation and curation. And I’ll tell you why. But first, let’s look at the benefits of them individually.
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According to the Content Marketing Institute’s and MarketingProfs yearly survey on the state of content marketing, lack of time and lack of budget are among the top challenges B2B content marketers face. The other 2 challenges in the Top 4 are “producing enough content” and “producing the type of content that engages”.
In short: most B2B content marketers don’t have enough resources to both scale their content volume and maintain the required quality to generate ROI.
For the past 3 years, we’ve worked with top marketers, influencers, marketing software founders as well as our customers and users to define Lean Content Marketing as a set of best practices that make it possible for SMB marketers to generate positive ROI with limited resources and budgets. We’ve compiled our findings, experiment results, advice and best practices in the Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMBs and today, I’d like to focus on the most effective practices that generate ROI.
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Creating content, especially in a lean marketing team, is an all-hands-on-deck endeavor. Having a dream team in place to create not only the social posts, blog pieces, and video snippets, but the strategy, big picture campaigns and creative long-term vision should be a top priority for marketers in 2015.
Source: www.b2bmarketinginsider.com
Michael Brenner makes an interesting list of all the various creative talents you would need in an ideal Content Marketing team. But while there’s no denying that this would be a dream team, it’s anything but lean.
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Some marketers make “content marketing” interchangeable with content-marketing activities like social media. Learn 9 misperceptions that devalue content marketing and its potential for success, and find out how to avoid making them again.
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