Here's #6 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #6:
Great Web content is emotional. It raises the hairs a bit.

Whether you’re selling financial services to consumers or databases to businesses, remember: Companies don’t buy things; people do. So their purchase decisions are influenced by more than steel-trap logic and facts.

“Since we all buy with our emotions first and our rational minds second, you’ve got to uncover the emotional reasons for buying your products and services, or you’ll just be competing on price—a bad place to be,” says Web copywriter Sid Smith. “A strategy built around satisfying your customer’s emotional needs works far better than one focused solely on lead generation ‘tactics.’”

Good content gets the reader involved personally. Look for ways to put the reader into the story. Perhaps her inspired purchase of your product will earn kudos from her peers. Or maybe the content shows a family man how your product or service will give him more time with his wife and children.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

I enjoyed this series of short videos by Brian Solis titled "Ideas Connect Us More than Relationships." There are several points here that are relevant to thought leadership, and how social media changes the game.

Overall, I appreciate Solis's comments for bringing social media down to earth a bit. Other analyses about social media boil down to: "it's so cool because everybody can say anything about everything, whenever; aren't you doing it yet?" That's mind-boggling but not useful.

Solis states that the democratization of information does not give us license to say anything all the time, but gives us the opportunity to be curators of content. The notion of a curator implies responsibility and control, which I appreciate. "The folks that we network with will find those curated updates to be more profound than others," he says.

Solis's notion that we are connected by ideas, and not our relationships (e.g., Twitter followers, Facebook friends) is important. "It's not a popularity contest," he states, "It's about changing the way you share information, and how people are getting information."

Sheer numbers of "friends" and "followers" are meaningless unless the content published at the hub of relationship has meaning to all the people connected to it. In fact, the groups connected to content are always in flux, but the content itself needs integrity and consistency to find its audience.

Companies with something to say will be thought leaders when they embrace the role of content curator.

Labels: blogging, social communities, thought leadership

Here's #5 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #5:
Great Web content is search-engine friendly--while communicating effectively.

Recently I've blogged about how marketers are being tempted to crank-out content to satisfy increasingly voracious search engines. At the end of the day, people, not search engine spiders,
are the ones reading your content. Market leaders know this, and place a premium on content that doesn't just rank, but communicates.

Search engine marketing specialist Todd Miechiels writes: “Companies everywhere want to throw money at search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) in hopes of getting their share of the new, less-costly-to-acquire customers that Internet marketing has promised.

“The truth is, without content—and I mean good content that clearly communicates, persuades and inspires—a good amount of search marketing dollars are wasted. A lot of companies get lazy on the content development side, which turns a pretty low risk marketing channel into a pretty sure bust.”

Also check out the advice of Aaron Wall in his article, “If People Hate Your Writing, Google Hates Your Website.” He writes, “Content without links only works if you operate in an undiscovered or uncompetitive niche. … If you point a few more quality links at a real content page, it will rank far better and be far more profitable than a hand-crafted page that was created exclusively for bots.”

In other words, it’s important for content to be spider-friendly—but that is a secondary objective. It’s far more crucial that your content is written for people and packaged for people.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.
illustration credit

Labels: content marketing, Search Engine Marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

AdAge has published its Book of Tens, and one page is the ten Ideas of the Decade. In sum, these ten ideas tell the story of the new role of thought leadership in business.

Please refer to the article for complete descriptions. The ten Ideas of the Decade are:

1. Consumer Control (i.e., consumers having control)
   
2. Brand Journalism
3. Branded Utility
   
4. Crowdsourcing
5. Marketer as Media
6. Earned Media
7. Long Tail
8. Tipping Point
9. Madison & Vine
10. Lovemarks

Given hindsight of an entire decade, we can see that these ten ideas are actually one: market leaders are members of communities.

Brands are no longer pushed out, launched, and proclaimed to the public. The media are no longer one-way channels for marketers to exploit. Marketing is a conversation, not an announcement.

Marketers who ask themselves "Is Anybody Following Our Thought Leadership?" might be asking the wrong question. If they are trying to hard to lead, but not to participate, they'll be lonely.

Labels: thought leadership

Here's #4 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #4:
Great Web content is should be repurposed.

Copyblogger's recent post, "How to Do Less and Get More," applies to web content and marketing in general. Marketers who frequently rework and rewrite their message might believe they are "keeping it fresh," but they are muddying the waters.

Just because you put something “out there” once doesn’t mean that the target audience saw it, so you need to keep pushing out the same messages—with new twists and fresh formats.

The Internet is perfect for repurposing content. Take a white paper, for example. (Take this white paper, specifically.) You can turn it into several shorter articles. Then, perhaps using an interview format, turn each article into a podcast. Make a video of podcast interviews and distribute it on YouTube.

Get ideas for email subject lines from bullet points and subheads in brochures, case histories and webinar presentations. Issue press releases on new white papers and webinars. Include an image of the paper’s cover so that search engines will index it, too.

These are just a few ways of repurposing content. Go through your “inventory” of content, and you’ll think of many more.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Since the story about AOL's pay-to-play model broke last week, several more stories in the blogosphere raise the question, "What's happening to web content?"

This post on the SEOmoz blog, "Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong." is followed by a long string of comments where quite a few SEO pros argue that content is not king--links are king; quality content doesn't drive traffic.

HubSpot's blog post, "What Google's Launch of Real-Time Streaming Search Means For Marketers" paints a picture of a world where marketers generate content in real time to satisfy real-time demand. The blogger advises:

Keep working to transform your company website from stagnant pages into a mini-publishing house that produces timely, interesting content that your prospective customers are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere out there.

She doesn't advise on how to manage the costs of running such a mini-publishing house. My hunch is that quality may suffer in the race to publish the next tweetable article.

As a purveyor of quality content, I find this trend difficult to ignore but difficult to accept. Underneath the retweets of retweets and rehashes of aggregated blog posts, driving the unwieldy engine of social media, there must be content that people want to read.

(I'm reminded of the old story with the punchline: there must be a pony in here somewhere.)

Without quality content somewhere in the fray, the unwieldy engine will stop turning. (In fact, bloggers are above average in education and wealth; one might assume that many of them have something to say that's worthwhile--not simply laden with search keyphrases.)

Look at TV--the supply of programming includes a lot of crap, but also some ponies. In fact, there's a case to be made that at the high end, the bar is pushing higher. Yes, we have Bromance. But we also have Mad Men.

So my prediction for 2010 is remains optimistic for content. While the average marketer will continue on a downward trajectory, the leaders in 2010 will differentiate themselves by caring less about open rates and page ranks, and more about changing the game. They will be the ones who use content to carry big ideas and to create clever, memorable and useful content that gets read, remembered, shared, and appreciated.

Labels: content marketing, Search Engine Marketing, thought leadership

Last week the Wall Street Journal broke a story about AOL and CEO Tim Armstrong's new strategy to create a content company that is more attuned to what people are searching for and what advertisers want to promote. The plan is to create a network of freelancers that will write copy based on popular searches. Much of the freelancers' compensation will be based on how many times the content is clicked on, and advertisers will pay to be associated with certain types of content much like they do for Google's AdSense--where Armstrong used to work. Supposedly this copy will be better aligned with both searchers' and advertisers needs.

One big question for AOL is how much this will blur the traditional "church and state" roles of journalism and advertising. Are these search results going to be portrayed as "organic" results? If so, the fact that they are in essence being manipulated by AOL without proper disclosure may be a bit sketchy. Others may ask, "Does THAT even matter any more?"

The blogosphere has been less than kind to AOL since the story broke. The TechDirt blog paraphrases the strategy as "filling the Internet with crap."

Tom Foremski, at the Silicon Valley Watcher says AOL is being "clueless" again and that it will result in bland and beige content. He asks, "Why not just repurpose press releases and existing advertorials?"

I tend to agree. Searchers will be able to tell the difference between good content and bad. I don't think this is about creating more appealing content and better search results. This is really a business model strategy that reduces most of the internal content and editorial cost structure that AOL would incur and grafts those costs to a fragmented network of very low cost freelance producers.

Here's #3 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #3:
Great Web content is aligned throughout all deliverables.
Think of alignment as a security blanket that goes with prospects as they move through the sales cycle. The outbound email features the same value proposition that is reiterated on the landing page, reinforced on the registration form and offered up in informational booklet. And all of them highlight the key word phrases that your prospects are using to find the products and services you’re selling.

A complicating factor of alignment: You’ll need to align multiple paths through the sales cycle, because site visitors are entering the funnel at different stages of the decision process. That calls for different landing pages with different offers and different calls to action. (This Forbes study describes how different decision makers, according to age, require different media and calls to action.)

You’ll need distinct content for less qualified prospects who are still in the nurturing stages. B-to-B buyers, in particular, often require months of nurturing. If they won’t bite on a white paper, offer a newsletter or some other “micro-conversion” tactic.

Prospects deeper in the funnel, on the other hand, have less need for educational materials. A qualified prospect with near-term closing potential may be looking for a quote, a feasibility study, or a demo.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content