February 2017 - Page 2 of 7

February 21, 2017

5 Ways to Level Up Your Content Marketing Maturity

Large or small. Growing or dwindling resources. New or experienced in the content marketing realm. Every organization is at a different stage in their content marketing maturity, looking for innovative and even practical ways to bring their efforts to the next level. But as the old adage goes, you have to walk before you run—and that couldn’t be more true when it comes to growing your content marketing maturity. Simply put. In order to grow your content marketing maturity, you have to understand where you’re at and create a strategy to get to the next step. Using TopRank Marketing’s own content marketing maturity model —developed by CEO Lee Odden —below we offer insights to help you determine your current level of maturity, as well as tips to help you move on to the next. #1 – Stasis Stasis is the ground-level of our content marketing maturity model, with marketers […]

Your Essential Guide to Internal Content Linking

22Today, it’s easy to get caught up in the glitzy, glamorous SEO tricks and tactics that are flooding the web. SEOs and marketers everywhere are focused deeply on things like site audits and the latest and greatest in Google algorithm updates, and that’s all well and good, but sometimes it means that the simpler and, often, more critical fundamentals get overlooked. One of these overlooked SEO components is internal linking. If you think of SEO as a house, internal linking is the framework of that house. Internal linking provides the flow of traffic, allows you to navigate the space from room to room, and makes the space comfortable and intuitive. When you think of it this way, why would you build a blog without internal linking? Unfortunately, many people do. (And yes – if you look closely, you’ll notice I internal linked above!) In addition to making your web […]

Meet the New Boss: Why the Annual Employee Review is a Terrible Idea that Must Go | Michael Dillon | Pulse | LinkedIn

Writing for the web: 8 must-read articles

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 […]

Leverage Your Network to Help Drive Your Own Branded Content

< All Articles    The Content Creation Conundrum If you’re looking to grow your business’s online presence, original branded content is the way to go. According to a Forrester study , 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making a purchase. Original branded content allows you to: proactively engage with these prospective customers, establish your organization’s credibility, and increase the chances that prospects find you in the first place. The problem is that creating this content can turn out to be very time-consuming. And if you want to maximize the return you see on this content, the majority of the work actually occurs AFTER your content is published (if you’re interested in learning more about content promotion tactics, this blog post by Ameer Rosic is a great place to start). So what’s a business owner or time-constricted marketer to do?! Start […]

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]

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 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 […]

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 […]