digital Archives - Michael Dillon

January 31, 2018January 31, 2018

Credibility Killers: Does Your Website Lack Curbside Appeal?

My wife, who works as a real estate agent, uses a term to describe whether or not she feels a house will sell quickly or not: curbside appeal. No matter how good the neighborhood is, or how good the school district is, or even if the home is close to shopping and parks and other things people crave, if the curbside appeal of the home does not immediately grab your attention…forget it. Your home will not sell quickly. Whenever she takes on a new client, the first direction she gives to potential sellers is “make sure the front of the house sells itself.”

Websites have curbside appeal too; how well your site is done, and how accurate and current your information is presented, can tell much about your company. That is to say: the average potential customer looking to do business is very superficial; if your website is clean, organized and free from errors, they will most likely be drawn to it and may contact you for business. Have a website that looks out of date, riddled with old and inaccurate information and fuhgettaboutit; they will more than likely pass you right on by, even if your company is a well-run business juggernaut. Continue reading “Credibility Killers: Does Your Website Lack Curbside Appeal?”

May 15, 2017

The Easy Guide to Creating Expert Roundup Articles

Expert roundup articles are my absolute favorite link building strategy.

You ask a question. Experts, peers and influencers provide their answers. You piece it all together and have a piece of content that’s naturally designed to be sharable.

What’s not to like?

Well, maybe it isn’t quite so easy. A good expert roundup can take a lot of time and effort to produce.Also, this type of content is hardly new. Some would even argue it’s overdone , with some going so far as to call for the death of expert roundups .Although there’s no guarantee you’ll achieve spectacular results, using this guide to creating expert roundup articles will help increase your chances of success. Step 1: Ask a Question The first (and most important) decision you’ll need to make is what question or topic your expert roundup article is going to cover. Be warned: This will make or break your article.There are […]

7 Content Types That Gain the Most Engagement & Links

What type of content should you create?

Answering this question can, at times, be stupefyingly difficult.

The world of content today is crazy, with volume (literally) growing by the second.

The content opportunities are numerous – blogs, articles, ebooks, infographics, social media updates, to name a few. Which should you be doing first or next, and how do you create these content types most effectively?Fortunately, deciding which types of content to invest in is as simple as evaluating your company’s goals and knowing a little bit about what kinds of material will best support them. Why Invest in Content Today? First things first, why invest in content?The answer to this one is easy: because creating organic, brand-enriching content is the only way to get noticed online today.In a world where ad blockers make it exceedingly difficult to buy attention (83 percent of people today wish they could filter out obnoxious ads) and […]

3 questions to have front of mind when refreshing your website copy

Don’t overlook the words in your digital overhaul.

A website migration or refresh is a great opportunity to practise some digital feng shui – to rethink your goals, refocus your user journeys, archive all the content you don’t need any more, and ensure your content is aligned with your up-to-date proposition.

But done well, a migration is an opportunity to refresh and review not just the structure and design and look-and-feel of your digital presence – but the words too. What’s the point of spending all that time and effort and resource on a shiny new UX, a super-smart, contemporary new look and a cutting-edge CMS, only to pour back in all the tired words from your old site? And yet this happens, of course, and depressingly often.

So to make sure your website refresh is also a copy refresh, here are three key questions to have front of mind as you […]

New eBook: 30 Essential Ingredients to Stock Your Content Marketing Kitchen

My mother was the chief cook in our household. It was a thankless job. Her customers were three kids with radically different ideas about what was edible and what was, like, totally grody.

When we asked what was for dinner—one of her least favorite questions—she would frequently answer, “Well, we could make peanut butter sandwiches, if we had any bread. Or any peanut butter.”

In other words, regardless of what your diners are craving, you can only make what you have the ingredients to make.

Mom’s little proverb holds true for content marketing, too. We have finnicky readers to please, people who won’t settle for filet mignon when they really want a classic PB&J. They’re increasingly demanding a more personalized menu: Research shows that over 200 million people use ad blockers to cut out content that isn’t to their taste. To make a crowd-pleasing recipe, you have to stock the right ingredients.For […]

Why the Future of Marketing Is Curiosity, Not Creation

Since the beginning, marketing has required a balance between analysis and execution. Especially in digital marketing, the cycle of analyze > optimize > execute > repeat is the nucleus of all successful initiatives.

But the age of cognitive marketing has begun, and robot assistants will handle more and more of the creation duties that used to belong to human marketers.

IBM (a Convince & Convert partner) is the forward guard of this movement, with their Watson Marketing suite of tools and APIs powering an increasing number of real-time analysis and optimization opportunities. The IBM Think Marketing portal , for example, uses the Watson CMS to automatically serve up a different mix of content based on what you’ve read in the past. This past weekend gave us another glimpse of marketing’s future, at The Masters golf tournament. IBM is a long-time sponsor of the storied event and provides all the technology for […]

3 Data-Driven Insights to Boost Your Guest Content Strategy

It’s every content marketer’s dream to have a perfect company blog. Imagine your site filled with a variety of content that shares unique and thoughtful insights, from exceptionally written articles to interactive infographics to professional videos. It’s enough to make any marketer swoon.

Unfortunately, even this stellar blog of your dreams isn’t enough on its own to get your brand in front of your full audience. It’s unlikely that your entire target audience already visits your blog regularly, so by posting only to your own site, you miss out on reaching those potential consumers who don’t follow you yet.

Enter guest-contributed content. Guest posting is a natural and effective way to meet consumers where they already are, and it promotes your ideas, raises brand awareness, and, ultimately, increases your bottom line . The Right Way to Contribute Guest Content

There is definitely a right way and a wrong way to get […]

High Traffic Does Not Equal Good Customer Experience

High website traffic is not necessarily a sign of a positive customer experience Just because a webpage is popular doesn’t mean that it’s useful. In fact, it could be getting in the way of a more useful page.

“We’ve recently decided to remove Basic rights at work, the most visited advice page on our website,” Hannah Horton from the UK’s Citizen Advice recently wrote. “It gets 70,000 visits a month and is in the top results for lots of queries about work problems on Google.”

If an organization was judging web success based on volume of traffic they would certainly not remove their most popular page. However, Citizen’s Advice does not measure success that way. It measures success based on how successful people are at solving problems.

The page wasn’t working. Firstly, the data told them that people were not searching for this page but were rather searching for much more specific […]

Content Amplification Strategies: Tips From Barry Feldman

It’s tempting to love our blog posts so much that we expect others to find and share them automatically. We produce blog posts and display them for the world to see, without thinking about the content amplification strategy . But how often are those posts seen? Your content is competing for attention with millions of others published every day.

Publishing quality content, even beautiful content, is not enough. You need to have an amplification strategy to ensure your content reaches your audience.

We recently asked Barry Feldman , consultant, copywriter, and author of The Road To Recognition, to deliver a lesson on amplification on a BuzzSumo webinar. Below I’ve set out the amplification strategies he shared, along with a series of questions from the marketers who attended the webinar and answers from Barry and Steve Rayson. Key Takeaways

Content amplification is the process and practice of drawing attention to your […]

Part 1: Getting started with content personalisation

This is the first of a three part series about content personalisation. The series will address when it’s advantageous for organisations to press pause and consider the best route to optimise its strategy and approach: Before getting started

After a series of “one-off’ forays into content personalisation

Post platform and tech investment

If content personalisation was easy, everyone would already be doing it. This is the inconvenient truth about personalisation which is defined as contextually targeted content to a specific person or user. While interviewing senior leaders for the Forbes “Publish or Perish” report, Mark Yolton, then senior vp of digital for Cisco shared the following: Personalised experiences improve content performance, but create huge upstream challenges. Introducing personalisation around just three personas increased content volume 30x and created pressure to update the website every four hours, instead of every week. Why such a large increase in content requirements? The […]