5 Tips to Get Off the Content Marketing Struggle Bus & Create Content Your Audience Will Love

The young man at the back of the ballroom in the Santa Monica, Calif., Loews hotel has a question he's been burning to ask, having held it for more than an hour as I delivered a presentation on why content marketing is invaluable for search.

When the time comes for Q&A, he nearly leaps out of his chair before announcing that he's asking a question for pretty much the entire room.

"How do I know what content I should create?" he asks. "I work at a small company. We have a team of content people, but we're typically told what to write without having any idea if it's what people want to read from us."

When asked what the results of their two blog posts per week was, his answer told a tale I hear I often: "No one reads it. We don't know if that's because of the message or because [it's the] wrong audience for the content we're sharing."

In fishing and hunting circles, there's a saying that rings true today, tomorrow, and everyday: "If you want to land trophy animals, you have to hunt in places where trophy animals reside."

Content marketing is not much different.

If you want to ensure that the right audience consumes the content you design, create and share, you have to "hunt" where they are. But to do so successfully, you must first know what they desire in the way of bait (content).

For those of us who've been involved in content marketing for a while now, this all sounds like fairly simplistic, 101-level stuff. But consider this: While we as marketers and technologists have access to sundry tools and platforms that help us discern all sorts of information, most small and mid-size business owners — and the folks who work at small and mid-size businesses — often lack the resources for most of the tools that could help flatten the learning curve for "What content should I create?"

If you spend any time fishing around online, you know very well that the problem isn't going away soon.

For small and mid-size business looking to tackle this challenge, I detail a few tips below that I frequently share during presentations and that seem to work well for clients and prospects alike.

A Guide on How to Use XPath and Text Analysis to Pitch Content

In my day-to-day role at Builtvisible, I build tools to break down marketing challenges and simplify tasks. One of the things we as marketers often need to do is pitch content concepts to sites. To make this easier, you want to pitch something on-topic. To do that more effectively, I decided to spend some time creating a process to help in the ideation stage.

In the spirit of sharing, I thought I'd show you how that process was created and share it with you all.

Tell me what you write

The first challenge is making sure that your content will be on-topic. The starting point, therefore, needs to be creating a title that relates to the site's own recent content. Assuming the site has a blog or recent news area, you can use XPath to help with that.

Content Gating: When, Whether, and How to Put Your Content Behind an Email/Form Capture

Have you ever considered gating your content to get leads? Whether you choose to have open-access content or gate it to gather information, there are benefits and drawbacks you should be aware of. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand weighs the pros and cons of each approach and shares some tips for improving your process, regardless of whichever route you go.

All Content is Not Created Equal: Comparing Results Across 15 Verticals

Are you holding your content marketing to unrealistic standards?

No matter how informative your infographic about tax law may be, it’s not going to attract the same amount of attention as a BuzzFeed Tasty video. You shouldn’t expect it to. In order to determine what successful content looks like for your brand, you first need to have realistic expectations for what content can achieve in your particular niche.

Our analysis of hundreds of Fractl content marketing campaigns looked at the factors which have worked for our content across all topics. Now we've dived a little deeper into this data to develop a better understanding of what to expect from content in different verticals.

What follows is based on data we've collected over the years while working with clients in these industries. Keep in mind these aren’t definitive industry benchmarks – your mileage may vary.

Penguin 4.0: Was It Worth the Wait?

For almost two years (707 days, to be precise), one question has dominated the SEO conversation: “When will Google update Penguin?” Today, we finally have the answer. Google announced that a Penguin update is rolling out and that Penguin is now operating in real-time.

September has been a very volatile month for the SERPs (more on that later in the post), but here’s what we’re seeing in MozCast for the past two weeks, including last night:

Advance LInk Building Tips - How to Productize Link Acquisition and Dominate Your Niche -

Strategic Link Building: How to Productize Link Acquisition and Dominate Your Niche

This week, despite still being seriously under the weather (see this week's sad WB Friday), I flew down to SMX West to speak on the Link Building Strategies panel. Although I'd wanted to put more work in and deliver a better presentation, I received some very kind words afterward and requests from folks to share the deck via the blog. Before I embed the actual deck, though, I need to provide some context (as this isn't a wholly self-explanatory presentation).

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27894767/Strategic-Link-Building

Link building has, classically, been a tactic slapped on to a marketing campaign or website post-launch. I believe that those companies/sites that treat link acquisition as an afterthought, rather than building it into the product, will always lose out to those who treat link building strategically. In the deck below, I walk through a number of examples of sites, primarily startups, that have done this. These include:

Twitter - every user of Twitter has an incentive to link to their profile so more people will follow them. This is also true of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, DeviantArt, Etsy & others.

Vimeo - nearly everyone who uses Vimeo appreciates the beautiful aesthetic they've created. The embeddable versions of Vimeo videos look and feel more professional and high quality than nearly any other player, hence they get embedded (a lot). This embed action automatically drives links back to the video on Vimeo's site, Vimeo's homepage and the user's profile, all with targeted anchor text.

Urbanspoon - not only do they give badges to restaurants like Yelp and have started an online reservations system like OpenTable, Urbanspoon also features reviews from bloggers and foodies, who are then incentivized to promote their inclusion on the site.

Last.fm - the widgets users embed on their site to share their favorite music automatically creates links back to the service.

SurveyMonkey - a truly viral product (anyone who's surveyed is automatically exposed to the site), SurveyMonkey is inherently link acquisitive through the product. In order to use the service, you need to link to SurveyMonkey's site, where your form is hosted.

Scribd - just look at the embed and the link below; 'nuff said.

Miibeian.gov.cn - possibly the greatest link building strategy ever devised. The Chinese government requires that all websites in the country link to this site in order to operate legally; not too shabby, eh?
Here's the deck:

As you can see, I've put in a shameless plug for Open Site Explorer at the end. If you haven't seen the new features launched yesterday, you're missing out. Tons of the data is completely free, and top pages is just about the easiest way to find traffic and link opportunities ever built (not that I'm biased or anything). :-)

Look forward to your comments about the presentation and the concept of productizing link acquisition into a site.

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