Image Credit: Cool Hunting

We are all living in a world of content saturation: text, videos, Tweets, images, updates, texting ad nauseum! Your challenge is to make your brand engage and reverberate, if you are to have any success in this always on chart topping focused content world!

How to make your Content Stand Out above the Digital Din:

• Be authentic – let the world know what your about and/or what your company stands for.
• Don’t be overly aggressive in promoting goods and services; subtlety slip these in.
• Become our brand’s version of Walt Disney – people love a good story and integrating a subtle product or customer success story in it, if artfully done, is cool.
• Convey implicit value in your content strategy – your customers are looking for valuable insights.
• Engage with your audience. This will empower your overall content and make it stand out.
• Crowd source your content when/where you can. Ask for feedback and be prepared to listen to it.
• Leverage the Power of Words to make your content stand out: New, Save, Guaranteed, Discover, Health, Results!!

Now let’s focus on a Content Syndication Strategy:

• Who is a thought leader or in your market and where do they get published? To identify a viable thought leader try Peer Index or Klout to come up with worthy candidates and then back track into their social stream to ascertain where these high fliers are getting published.
• Think of the new crop of social network/Q&A sites like Focus or Quora and the better established LinkedIn Groups as fertile ground to make your brand shine. Articulate well and dazzle em with high quality content.
• Live Social – Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare, Yelp (review that local hot bistro, maybe Steve eats their too), LinkedIn are all hot spots for content syndication and promotion.
• Get a guest blogger, author or poster to dive into your content stream to amplify or augment your content flow. Everybody wants to be a star right? You’ve got a content home waiting for them.
• Leave some content bread crumbs behind on high visibility blog or media sites – make a sizzling post that leads the masses back to your content outpost. Be lively but not loquacious.
• Be everywhere your target market is. Dive into your market and follow your customers via the social stream and ascertain where they live, play, eat, sleep and breath (the last one may be difficult). Find, follow and engage with your ever present content flow.

Your content syndication strategy: think it, say it/write it/publish it – replicate it! Need help with your content strategy then click and talk to me or comment below. Love to connect………

Image Courtesy of Noupe Design

Content Curation is rapidly becoming one of the buzzwords du jour, as we all drown in a sea of content coming at us from every direction, through multiple devices and on a 24/7/365 always on timeline.

What is content curation? My definition may be somewhat abridged from industry pundits – here goes: “organizing and sharing the most relevant content on a finite subject.”

Why is content curation important to your brand or business? Simple answer – if you want to connect with your potential customers and market segment your content has to be relevant, concise and “speak to your market” in a meaningful way.

According to latest news, our ability to store, communicate and compute content has been growing at a rate of 23% per annum since 1986. (Science Magazine). We are all drowning in a mass of content, encompassing digital assets, including photos and videos coming at us via the web, email, smartphones. Information overload rules the day!

Ten Steps to Content Curation:

1) Get a grasp of your market focus. Who are you trying to communicate with, impact and/or influence? And what is their preferred method of receiving your content? A Generation Y or Millennial type is warm and fuzzy getting a message from you via a Tweet, YouTube Video and may find an email boring and “so yesterday.” A baby boomer is comfortable getting that now staid newsletter from you, with an offer to connect via a URL link.

Image Credit: Volusion

2) Understand what topics are important to and will resonate with your target market. What do your market demographics want to hear from you and what’s going to impact them in some meaningful way.

3) Who are the thought leaders, influencers, bloggers, editors/reporters/digerati you want to connect with. It’s cool of your latest Tweet gets mentioned by someone with say a few thousand Followers. But, it’s much cooler if Robert Scoble Tweets about your hot startup. He’s got 165K Followers and your definitely going to pick up some interest if Robert mentions you.

4) What content platform will reach your target market. By platform I mean web site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, LinkdedIn and others. Where does your target market live online? If you pick the right platform you are building a brand and engaging with the right market demographics. As an example, if you are a Spa located in Phoenix Arizona, engage with consumers via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Yelp – a presence on LinkedIn conversely would not generate much consumer interest.

5) Timing of content publishing and curating is essential. Reams of digital press have been written about how critical it is to Tweet on Twitter during 9-5PM EST (we west coasters are at an inherent disadvantage). Your simply going to get your messaging out in front of more online eyeballs during standard business hours, versus nights and week-ends. The right timing equals greater marketing ROI.

6) Create good content and the market will follow. It’s not quite that simple. But, if you don’t have content that as perceived as being valuable you aren’t going to get much traction in the marketplace.

Image Credit: Betty Draper Home Album Collection

7) Be original – pick your band or rock star encompassing Bruce Springsteen to Lady Gaga. There’s a creative muse that is readily apparent in every piece of content they touch (music, videos, interviews, Tweets, smoke signals…..you get the picture).

8) Organize your content so it can be found (Search Engine Ranking) and easily listened to, read and/or most importantly, engaged with. Viral videos are a great content source – Volkswagen’s The Force was an instant commercial success with millions of view prior to it even being shown during the Super Bowl. It was engaging to say the least!

9) Be discerning when sharing content. Your content reflects your core branding and people on the social web can be like hungry wolves at times. Meaning, they can devour your content or turn on you and overwhelm with dislikes, critical comments, etc. Jump on Quora and post a weak answer and you’ll feel the wrath of this very discerning community.

10) Set your content free! An important component to content curation is leveraging the time and energy you spend creating it. I tell clients to reuse content on an order of 3-5X across the social web. A blog post can be shared on Quora via an answer, Tweet out referenced via a wall post on Facebook.

If you have a comment about Content Curation jump in below and comment away – love to hear your thoughts or questions. As always, no words were harmed in this Blog Post!

Content rules the web and social media – it defines anything and everything your trying to convey about your brand, company, products, services, etc. Our powerful strategies for content marketing based on twenty plus years of experience.

Use the Right Content Platform

It’s amazing to see the number of sites today using staid web platforms based on proprietary code and technology.  Nothing against Microsoft Products (we use and recommend many), but the absolute best Platform for your Content is WordPress.

WordPress is a powerful accelerator for maximizing content; search engines rank content on WordPress sites faster than any other platform, there’s a wealth (tens of thousands) of plugins that can be used to extend your content across the Social Web, enhance your SEO capabilities and much more. It’s a no brainer to use this platform – to not do so means your wasting money, time and minimizing search rankings for your content.

Update Your Content Frequently

Search Engines (including Google, Yahoo and Bing) rank sites much more faster if they are updated frequently. Clients as me/us all the time “what’s frequently” – there is no simple or perfect answer, the more updates you add to your site the better in most cases. Also, Google looks for “authority sites” – those that have lots of content typically will be considered “authority sites.” Be patient, won’t happen overnight.

Optimize Your Content for the Web

People don’t read online like they do the Wall St. Journal or Rolling Stone – they graze and scan content. Look at the structure of this Blog as an example. The content is typically comprised of short paragraphs, with only 2-3 sentences at most, surrounded by images, to break up the text and make it visually appealing (also helps with search engine rankings) and we use Headers to drive the reader’s interest into the text.

Integrate Keywords with Content

You don’t need to get crazy and keyword stuff your content. When you are writing the content take a look at Google’s Free Keyword Tool to come up with some ideas. Then, try to intelligently add these Keywords to your content – we’ll Italicize or Bold keywords in some posts or pages, sending a signal to Search Engines these words are important. This helps to get these Keyword ranked. Use your primary Keywords in your Headings: “Integrate Keywords with Content” is a good example in this paragraph of keyword usage.

Cross Promote Your Content

Don’t write content and use it once on a Blog or web site – when we are setting up Content Strategy for clients we strive to reproduce the content at a minimum of five times across the social web. For example: Blog post should be pushed out via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Plurk, Posterous and or Tumblr.

Posterous and Tumblr are what we would call “light blogging” services – both have automated tools that enable you to easily submit content. But, be aware, both have models based on your interacting with their communities.

Utilize Social Media to Drive Content Search Rankings

Google and Bing this week announced that they are now incorporating social media, conversations and interactions to enhance the credibility of a page via Danny Sullivan’s (Search Engine Land) interview with both. The basic takeaway is that both search engines (using Twitter as an example) consider “authoritative” people on Twitter to lend authority to pages that they Tweet out.

So, sending out links to your own Blog or others is a great way to let search engines know these  URLs are important, provided you have a Following on Twitter and are established.

I believe and am counseling my clients to embrace social media marketing now, as I believe moving forward that a company’s or individual’s “social influence” is going to have a large impact on how their online content is valued. Klout is a good example of one of many social scoring sites that gives you a quick snapshot of your social influence.

Sidebar: companies are starting to incorporate a Klout score for an individual when they are dealing with customer service issues or giving them some type of a reward – makes sense and drives social conversation.

How to Develop a Content Strategy

Many of us in the social media marketing business use Google Reader to stay on top of a never ending flow of content that we need to stay on top of. Set up a Google Reader account, then click on the RSS Feed logo on any web site to add that site’s content to your account.

Once this is done you have a ready resource of articles from thought leaders, news sites, Blogs, etc. that should give you ideas for content development. Another tip, once your account is setup you can use a third party app for Twitter like Social Oomph (well worth the cost) and then feed the content right into your Twitter account.

Once you have content sources in place then take the time to sit down and map out your content strategy with a spreadsheet. Integrate keywords with your overall strategy – this may sound very basic (it is) but I find that many clients have no meaningful content sourcing and editorial calendar place at all.

Hope these powerful strategies for content marketing have been helpful to you – you might want to read this recent Blog post on the “Power of Words” - which will give you a deeper dive into utilizing the right words for your content.

The Power of Words is unquestionably what drives the digital economy in some shape fashion or form. Powerful Words are the underlying building block of any web Web Site Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Optimization Campaign, Content Publishing, Brand Building and much more.

Top Ten Power of Words you want to incorporate in your Content and Advertising:

1) “You” – considered the go to word for every copywriter going back to Hal Riney’s days. It personalizes your message instantly for the reader and you (no pun) should use it frequently in your marketing copy.

2) “Proven” – sends a signal to your reader that whatever your selling or promoting has been tested, works well, etc. and can also help to remove fear from the buying decision.

3) “Love” – powerful way to make an instant statement – can be trite at times if used improperly.

4) “New” – everybody likes something that’s unique, novel and fresh.

5) “Save” – who doesn’t want to save money in these times (excluding Bill & Steve).

6) “Safety” – resonates with many on a personal level for health or even quality.

7) “Discover” – convey a powerful emotive content that resonates with many.

8) “Guarantee” – conveys a real sense of confidence when purchase is being made.

9) “Results” – sends an implicit message that product or service will deliver.

10) “Health” – adds real sizzle when used in conjunction with a product.

Some Great Power of Words Resources:

Visual Thesaurus – generate a burst of creativity using this new online tool for wordsmiths.

Paid Content – best  portal resource online for all things content focused.

Copyscape Plagiarism Checker – Freemium model – discover if your content is being ripped off.

We trust this post on the  Power of Words helps to provide critical insight about your content marketing strategy moving forward.

That’s a narrow definition; but, if you map your content strategy to this very focused description it will generate responses that are consistent with your content marketing strategy.

One of the greatest challenges of content market today is the lack of measurement. Most companies are stumbling blindly into content marketing via social media and worse, have no real understanding how to maximize their efforts and measure ROI in a systematic approach.

Measure your content ROI with these variables:

Clickthrough traffic
Engagement (if social media focused)
Brand development
Lead generation
Repurposed elsewhere (viral, mentioned, commented, followed liked, retweeted)

Think of Content as Anything and Anywhere your building Brand:

Text & Images
Video & Audio
Social conversations about your Brand
Blogs, Wikis, discussion groups
Corporate web sites
Mobile devices (images, text, video)

What makes good content:

Engaging and has personality
Keyword rich
Relevant and fresh
Gets picked up by the Social Stream
Fosters Community and knowledge silos
Incorporates business and/or marketing objectives

Social Content Marketing Absolutes

Content must have perceived value
You can integrate community with advertising
Should leverage social influencers
Be measurable and quantifiable

This Blog post on content marketing is a subset of a presentation made at LavaCon earlier this month – for a deeper dive please click here to go to the Slide Share Presentation.

At least the MSNBC index page is not as bad as the interior pages. The latter have perhaps the greatest mashup of Content we’ve ever seen – Ads, Social Bookmarking and Text and Video Content are all squashed together with (count them!) four rows of Universal Menus at the top of the page and bottom.

And, just to make sure the visitor is overloaded with data they’ve added a “More From MSNBC” Section at the bottom of most major pages. The whole site is sensory overload at it’s worst – it’s the digital version of a Lady Gaga design! Toss this design out and start over!

Yahoo’s Days of Yesteryear

Yahoo’s design is now as ancient as an Atari game console! It’s time for a much needed makeover of Yahoo’s index and interior pages – Yahoo has had this Directory look since the .com days on their index page. It’s crying for a dramatic makeover as befits a portal with this much great digital DNA.

What’s the deal with the links from the index page into other Yahoo properties?  Their is no design continuity at all among most of these island sites.

Your looking at a textual directory site one minute with random images and ads – one click in an your looking at a web property Yahoo has either bought or created. with an entirely different menu, user interface, social media enablers, etc. New meaning for dazed and confused!

Our vote for the worst site from a visitor’s perspective – a dead heat! It’s like comparing being told you have jury duty to getting that postcard from your dentist letting you know it’s time to come in for a checkup…….

Content strategy is the first definition of your brand and so much more than a web site in today’s digital world. Some touch-points:

1. Content has no barriers today – it’s commented on, pushed around/across the global web via Comments, Tweets, Likes, etc. like never before.
2. Great Content involves blood sweat and tears – or else a great copywriter who can write circles around ordinary humans.
3. Today’s Social Media driven world means content is scanned (“snacked” if you will) and needs to be chunked into digestible formats – people don’t read on the web they scan, snack and click.
4. The more your content can be extended the better – it’s written once but should be repurposed across the Social Web many times, leveraging costs and timelines.
5. Content Strategy should be global – barriers to communication are gone in today’s digital village.
6. Great content strategy also should include Video, Discussions/Posts via the Social Web and Comments on others – another secret to great content is getting it quoted, commented or pushed around in a digital sense.
7. Protect your content with trademarking and use third party applications like CopyScape to see if others are using your digital intellectual property.
8. Content is like fresh fish, spoils quickly and needs to be frequently replaced or wrapped with other content such as a Blog, Images, Comments, Related Articles, etc.
9. Great content should involve keyword strategy – if you take the time and trouble to develop great content you want it to produce traffic.
10. Cross link and cross reference content when/wherever possible to drive ROI and incremental traffic and visibility.

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Nonplussed with Design & Content Strategy

We are non nonplussed with this brand new spanking online iteration of their publication and integrated social media components. We have to give them credit, it’s certainly flashy, image driven and they are making valiant attempts at leveraging their old content (“Top 500 Greatest Albums of all Time”) but the overall effect is weak.

Fire or demote the designer who came up with the idea of covering over the name -  obscuring their core branding message and the visual is bad to say the least.

The overall site design is busy, the Advertising elements seem to be sprinkled everywhere with Ads and Text Link Ads – as boring as Debbie Boone singing “You Light Up My Life.” (No, no………)

What’s the deal with the black background? The designers must have been thinking black will make the images pop and make us look edgy. But, black doesn’t work – it has connotation of death and porn and makes the liberal usage of red clash. Pick a style guide that’s retro or edgy, but this is all sharp angles, not innovative or very creative.

The Content has 4-5 rows of topics and images, with Ads interspersed on screen right and sprinkled in here and there. It’s so busy and over the top and just plain difficult to make sense of any type of coherent usability strategy other than throw a lot of content at the visitor and something will stick.

Social Elements MIA

Finally, the Social Components are clearly an afterthought at best, with Comments, Likes, Shares, Facebook and Twitter accounts as the primary Social Elements. Where are Blogs, Guest Bloggers, ways to vote on and nominate bands, review shows, tours, contests, etc. The site does not engage the visitor in a meaningful way.

Second pass Social Media integration could involve UStream Broadcasts with interactivity with Rolling Stone’s broad audience, Contests, User Generated Comment uploaded into multiple sections, VBlogging back to Editors – components that engage the community with the portal and make it interactive. It looks like the design team looked at a few random  Ning sites and then threw up a weak attempt at Social Media.

Paywall & Monetization

This is an iconic publication with roots in the 60′s and there is so much more that Jann Wenner (Publisher) could do with this site to make it relevant in the digital world.

Why not trash the advertising altogether and just bring multiple sponsors and have them sponsor individual sections, integrate their branding in the content and Social Media Elements with Contests, Promos, Event Marketing, etc. This would cut down on the overall busyness of the site.

Finally, we can understand their need for some kind of Paywall integration – just pick up a print copy of Time, Newsweek, Men’s Journal (another Wenner Publication) and you can tell ad rates are heading south. We support this move from Free to Freemium (limited access) but wish they rewarded existing subscribers with some kind of discount, recognizing past support of the publication.

Rock on Jann – call us if you want a site that sizzles – we’d love to chat!

Single Domain Strategy Leverages Costs

A primary component to any domain strategy is early on making the right decision about how many domains your should utilize for your business model. We highly recommend registering  just one domain and then deploying a content strategy that enables you to be more market or product-specific with interior pages on this single domain.

These interior pages or “island sites” can all be optimized for specific keywords, topics, subjects, etc. and you can easily drive PPC traffic directly to these “island sites” if need be moving forward.

And, you aren’t dealing with the headaches of multiple sites that need to be updated via Content Management Systems for each one, monitoring multiple sets of Analytics, SEO optimization for each, multiple Social Media points of presence, etc.

Your so much better off focusing your marketing resources on one domain; i.e. high quality content, topical and relevant back links, social bookmarking and social media marketing. Your building a single digital asset that will have strong Intellectual Property for your company moving forward.

Keyword Strategy for Domain Selection

Use Google’s Keyword Tool to come up with Keywords that fit your target market and that will drive traffic for you. Don’t waste time on secondary Top Level Domains (.net .whatever) -  the right domain strategy is picking a .com if your company is a for profit business.

You may have to export these keywords into an Excel document and then paste these into a Domain Registrar to see what is available – we recommend and use Moniker as our preferred registrar. Be aware, it may take time (3-5 hours in some cases) to find the right Domain that you want to build your brand around if you really want a domain name that will drive traffic and resonate with visitors.

But, if done properly, you’ll have the benefit of a keyword rich domain, which in turns provides immediate type in traffic (in some cases) and that can be optimized for natural search results easily with the right content moving forward.

Finally, think of Domain Strategy as the foundation block that you build the rest of your business around – it’s strategic and important. If you want to go for a pure branding play for your URL then go with something like Google.com or Yahoo.com – this type of domain name won’t drive any incremental traffic early on but certainly helps to define your brand quickly and in some cases memorably!

1) Google Analytics works great, it’s free, very high value and an industry standard; be aware it’s not 100% accurate, you will find some discrepancies with Ad Servers, Twitter traffic and even Bit.Ly URL shortening services. Has a wealth of data for site metrics, keyword analysis, time on site, content viewed, exit and entry pages and much more (click on “Google Analytics” to go to reg page).

2) Google’s Keyword Analysis Tool – this tool used to be unavailable without registration but Google has generously made it available over the public web; you get the same functionality in Google Analytics, but comes in hand some times if you don’t want to log in to your account.  Be sure to understand how to use Broad, Exact and Phrase Search when looking at Keyword Traffic Projection.

3) Skype saves phone bills, has built in instant messaging which works great, enables you to record a call with third party apps, has built in conferencing and now even includes free video conferencing – the latter works great.

You occasionally may experience a dropped call, but certainly no worse than typical cell phone usage. Voice quality is excellent, it’s ubiquitous, used by tens of millions of people around the world. Also, now supports Iphone too.

4) Spyfu.com- best Pay per Click analysis service on the market bar none if you want to analyze competitor’s PPC campaigns and even organic search engine rankings. This low cost/high value Pay Per Click Service has a free (light) web based service with an upgrade (about $300. per annum) to a monthly or annual service.

It’s an invaluable tool that will save you significant time and money and give you a snapshot of exactly what and how your competitors are utilizing Pay per Click Marketing.

5) Aaron Wall’s Search Engine Optimization Book is much more than just a book; we use the free toolbar to get a quick snapshot of any site; but there is a back end community, sophisticated, meaningful training course and much more – Wall St. Journal, Wharton School of Business, PBS and many others have ranked this service well. There so much “SEO snake oil” being sold on the web but Aaron’s course and services are the real deal!

6) Constant Contact has been around for years – we’ve used their services for opt-in email campaigns many times; the service is not free, but it has so many extras; i.e. Analytics, Templates, Personal Coaching, Free sixty day trial and much more. Pricing plans start as low as under $50. per month – very economical – market leader in technology and customer service.

7) Aweber is best of breed Autoresponder but has also broadened out their services to include opt-in email campaigns as well, so some overlap with Constant Contact. Their powerful Autoresponder system is used by hundreds of thousands if not millions of web sites and will help you automate a great deal of your inbound and outbound marketing.

8) Snag It is a handy little application graphics and screen capture application that (under $50. USD) will save you a great deal of time if you are a Blogger that wants to quickly snag an image online (legally), make some image modifications and save.

Snag It  does not mirror an Adobe app  in terms of feature set, but our developers found that after they started using it their Adobe usage dropped dramatically. And the User Interface can be picked up by anyone in a few minutes, has a minimal learning curve.

9) Ginpic is a great little image search application that searches multiple search engines simultaneously – it’s powerful and free, works great, saves lots of time trying to find images online,  shows you the source of the image in the search return and much more.

10) WordPress - we saved the best for last and could wax poetically about the breadth, depth and power of this powerful best of breed Open Source Platform – we, like many other agencies and businesses could not run a business without it.

It’s free, there is huge community of add on plug ins and applications that extend its functionality and a large number of developers that can easily be found to help you build a site on WordPress. In the last 1-2 years it has moved from being the defacto Blog Platform to an industry standard platform for huge web sites; it’s robust enough to support virtually any type of web site that you can conceive.

So, our short list of the Ten Best Tools for Building a Business Online – please contact us via our web site if we can help your business grow online. www.Twitter.com/LinkedMedia