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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Who doesn’t want more website traffic? Like money or good looks, it seems like it’s just not possible to have too much traffic to your blog.
Trouble is, traffic is tricky. You can buy it, sure. But if you don’t convert that traffic into dollars, you’re losing money. And to actually see ROI, you have to not just make back the money you’ve spent on advertising. You’ll also have to cover the overhead for your business and the time you spent managing it all.
If you go the other way and build up free traffic, you’ll have to get enough results to justify your time. Anybody can spend an afternoon building traffic to their blog. But did they get enough traffic from those efforts to justify the time spent and the opportunity lost?
It is, of course, possible to get an ROI on your blog traffic work. I’m about to give you specific ideas for exactly how to do that.
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As a marketer, you’re probably already familiar with the importance of conducting regular content audits on your site. This tool is hugely important when it comes to measuring the success of your marketing campaigns and making sure the content you’ve created is helping you meet your goals.
That said, it can be harder to apply these same principles to your social media campaigns measure the impact they’re having on your business’s bottom line. Sure, you can track the number of “likes” your Facebook posts receive or the number of followers you have on Twitter. But the thing is, surface-level metrics like these don’t have a direct impact on your revenue or profits.
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Is social media the biggest business opportunity of our generation – or a complex scheme devised to take up all your time?
I’ll admit it can feel like the latter, but productive, efficient social media activity is possible. It happens every day. You can cover all your bases on the major social networks in just minutes.
I’ll give you the play-by-play tips to manage social media in 30 minutes below.
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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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Content Marketing is the new SEO. To fully understand how SEO evolved and how content impacts it, here are 4 of the best pieces of content I’ve read on this topic (+ one from me):…
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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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Twitter has become a very busy place. As we’re collectively following more and more people, our Twitter timelines become more and more crowded. The consequence: less organic reach, lower engagement.
Last year, observing the same phenomenon, I wrote that social media publishing had to dramatically change to keep yielding results for professionals and marketers. This post, which followed Facebook’s own admission that organic reach was declining for pages, was one of the most resounding ones on our blog with many of our readers confirming this trend through their own experience. Our recommendation back then was simple: use a content hub for all your content – not just your blogs and created content but also your curated content. Bring your social traffic to it so that you can have engagement on your own turf and drive conversions.
This is still the best thing you can do to align your social media and your content marketing efforts and get results. But today, we’re adding a new way to drive engagement up by making sharing your curated content as an image effortless.
Here’s how.
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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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Editor’s note: at Scoop.it, we’re obsessed with how our customers use the platform and what improvements they make to their content process by using it. Here’s a time-saving Scoop.it hack by Joseph Rizzo, whose agency iNeo Marketing helps implement Marketing Technology.
As curators, we may have different objectives and different ways of pursuing those objectives, e.g., some curators scoop only the article without Insight, some focus almost entirely on Insight, hybrid of both, etc., etc. But there is something that is common to all curators…
Cutting down on the time to curate.
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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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Repurposing is a key strategy of the lean content marketing methodology. Megan Marrs has 11 interesting best practices and ideas on how to repurpose content efficiently in this great post which made me want to elaborate on this topic.
So here’s the take of several other content marketing experts on the value of repurposing content, a cheat sheet that summarizes key ideas to repurpose content (Megan’s 11 plus 4 others I added) as well as the ROI analysis of two of our own experiment with content repurposing.
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Even though it’s been addressed by a lot of professional SEO experts, including Google’s Matt Cutts, this is still a question we get a lot. So let’s review it in detail.
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By this point, as a reader of this blog, it’s not unlikely that you’re familiar with my story. I was hired straight out of college as a community manager by Scoop.it and have spent the last few years diving into the worlds of community and content marketing on behalf of this awesome brand. As I prepare to move on to my life’s next adventure, I’d like to share some of my key learnings about community management and content marketing with you.
A majority of my day-to-day responsibilities at Scoop.it could fall under the umbrella of “non-traditional” marketing, which means that I put forth a lot of effort to learn about the space I had been thrown into. Today, I’ll share four key learnings and observations on community management and content marketing and I’d love to hear how you feel about them as well.
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Ally here, as usual, bringing a special newsletter-themed design to the Scoop.it blog today, mostly because I have some news to share with you.
I started a college internship at a brand new company called Scoop.it on June 15th, 2011. Exactly one year later, on June 15th 2012, I started as a full-time community manager. Just about two years after that, in May of 2014, I took over the role of Director of Community & Content.
Now, after four amazing years, I’m turning in my Scoop.it hoodie (not literally, though, don’t worry) and taking on a new adventure.
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While small businesses are called the backbone of the American economy, they are also challenged with smaller budgets and less employees, which can make things like marketing and advertising very challenging. Content marketing is more than a valuable addition to a successful advertising strategy, it can also help:
With brand reputation, management and awareness
Connect better with existing and potential customers
Increase website traffic and gain new leads
Increase visibility for the brand and business
But for our struggling small business owner, who has the time for content marketing these days? The answer to this question is, make the time. Here are some tips on how to have a successful online content marketing strategy without spending an inordinate amount of time or money:
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It’s the start of a new year and that means a re-evaluation of the viability of your SEO strategy. And, all good Internet marketers know that their SEO content strategy needs to be evaluated every so often in order to retain its functionality.
There are a lot of SEO changes that have happened over the last couple months and in order to stay on top of your game, you need to be aware of what still works and what doesn’t. Your SEO strategy is usually based around a handful of reliable methods that work for you.
Let’s see if yours makes the list of SEO content strategies that are still relevant in 2015: keep reading!
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The rapid incorporation of digital approaches has made marketing an industry of silos. It’s time to rethink the way we build our teams and our skill sets to break those walls apart.
Source: moz.com
How is Marketing structured in your company?
I’ve been thinking about how this translates to SMBs as obviously not every company has to do “government relations”. But whether the Marketing team is big or small, there are interesting distinctions made in this slide in terms of the skills they represent.
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It’s 2015: you’ve probably sent a Tweet in your lifetime. You know all about Snapchat, and you’ve even lost a few hours to Instagram. But does that make you a social media guru? Of course not—unless you consider your 13-year-old niece a guru.
So how are you expected to out social-media half the U.S. teen population, and create a winning strategy you can be really proud of?
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You want content curation resources? We’ve got content curation resources. I can preach until my face turns blue about content curation and content marketing best practices, but none of it really matters unless you’re also doing this one very important thing:
Read MoreAdding insight and editorializing your curated content.
This post contains excerpts of our recently published ebook: “ROI or RIP: the lean content marketing handbook for SMBs” that you can download for free here.
According to research performed earlier in 2014 by Gigaom and reported by eMarketer, email marketing is still the most commonly used method of digital marketing, with a whopping 86% of respondents claiming to use it. If that’s not enough, though, over half (59%) of B2B marketers surveyed by HubSpot say that email marketing is the most effective channel for generating revenue.
Email marketing needs content and content marketing needs email
Why are email marketing and content marketing such a great match? And what does it mean for your marketing strategy?
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Blogging remains the pillar of content marketing, particularly for SMBs. But when you browse many company’s websites, you realize their blog is under optimized.
1. It’s hard to maintain the discipline: even when you have an in-house team of content writers, creating content is time consuming and it takes a lot of efforts to maintain the rhythm. Publishing great content on a consistent basis costs a lot.
2. It’s easy to get demotivated by the lack of impact. Initially a blog doesn’t get much traffic so for ROI-driven management team, it’s tempting to dismiss it into the “tried this; didn’t work” category.
Fortunately, getting results out of your content marketing in general and out of your blogging efforts in particular is accessible to anyone. Sure, it requires some particular techniques but the good news is they’re not particularly hard to implement.
Read MoreIn a world of constant content, it’s no secret influencers can help you augment your content marketing efforts, rise above the noise and generate results.
It’s important to determine the influencers who can generate the most impact, and build a streamlined process for engagement, relevant to your goals. When I’m planning our content for Traackr, I focus on a few main groups of influencers who I know will help move the needle for our brand. By sharing my model and process, I hope it helps you strengthen your own influencer marketing practice to create really great content!
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It’s 5:02 a.m. on Friday as I am writing this. The dog is on the floor licking…something (he likes to lick a lot!) and my wife is asleep beside me in bed.
The last 10 minutes have gone something like this:
• What’s happening on Twitter? Boring.
• How about Facebook? Someone else got engaged. Yay for them.
• Any new emails? Delete. Delete. Inbox Zero!
• Hmm…
Source: blog.bufferapp.com
We’ve all been where Bryan Harris was when he wrote the above introduction to this post. As bloggers or content marketers, we always hear that voice in the back of our heads.
Read MoreWhen are you going to just sit down and write that post? What are you even going to write about? How are you going to actually make an impact with the finished product?
Editor’s Note: At Scoop.it, we’re strong advocates of the content hub and building a place for marketing content to live. Website and SEO expert Drew Hendricks has some answers to one of the more technical questions involved in creating a content hub: what type of hosting should I use?
Virtual hosting is one of the most common options people choose when buying hosting services. It is affordable and easy to use. If you use free hosting, you could be losing valuable sales. Spending the few bucks to upgrade to virtual hosting can really help you spike your sales as well as conversions. Read on to see how you could be missing out – and what you can do about it.
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Some say content marketing is only for people with deep pockets, and that short of creating Star Wars, you’ll struggle to make an impact. We happen to disagree.
Over the past three years, we’ve been diligently working with SMBs to find success with content marketing via our products, our blog, a Meetup series, and endless conversations with clients as well as subject matter experts. The results of this work have added up the lean content marketing ideology, which is the practice of optimizing content strategies in order to create the highest impact with the least amount of time and resources.
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The absolute need to deploy a serious content marketing strategy has been obvious for quite some time now – at least amongst businesses with a reasonable online ambition. Content is the lifeblood of SEO, engagement, brand awareness, thought leadership and ultimately lead generation. So, while “Content is King” might not be the latest scoop; it doesn’t necessarily mean that every SMB has deployed an effective content strategy.
And by effective, I mean a strategy that delivers a positive, measurable ROI.
Since 2011, we’ve been providing SMBs with an effective way to curate content as part of their overall content strategy. As our user-base has grown, we have fielded several surveys to assess the value of curation, and to understand what the next, major need would be as far as content marketing is concerned.
As we suspected, SMBs who include curation in their content marketing report a positive ROI. We also understand that concrete return on investment is the overarching objective for SMBs. While content is still king, it also needs to fill the treasury! It’s ROI or RIP.
In order to deliver ROI, content marketing for SMBs needs to be lean.
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“A few years ago, blogging and social media were separate. Blogging was long-form, serious, and crafted. Social media was short-form, personal, and spontaneous. Some people predicted that social media would replace blogging because of declining attention spans. Now blogging and social media not only amicably coexist; they complement each other. The trick is to use a blog to enrich your social media with long-form posts and to use social media to promote your blog.”
Source: blog.marketo.com
Last year, one of our most successful blog post was titled: “Social Media Publishing Is Dead (as we know it)“. Its premise was that because of declining organic reach for brands and pages on Facebook (that the company was open about and that in fact is impacting all other social networks), social media could no longer be considered as a standalone publishing activity.
What do we mean by that?
Historically, many brands and companies have considered their Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ pages as some form of web pages they could maintain by publishing content to it and generate engagement, independently of their main website. Community Managers who were independent from Content Strategists were managing these pages with different objectives than the ones being defined for the company’s Content Strategy.
This doesn’t work any more as many now agree, including Guy Kawasaki, the well-known evangelist and author of the Art of Social Media.
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The key to success in a myriad of web content that may drown us in 2015 is to curate content. The whys and hows are explained in-depth inside this article.
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
It’s interesting to see that content curation is evolving from an opportunity to a necessity as Julia McCoy from ExpressWriters recently noted in the Search Engine Journal explaining how we must curate content in 2015.
Why is that happening? Why is this accelerating?
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