Since listeners often download audio from your podcasts to their devices, there's no "click" to tell you that they listened. But there are several ways to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing podcasts. Find out how.

Last week, we looked at the basics of landing pages. If you don’t have the skills in house to create effective landing pages, you need to find a great copywriter. There are a number of different kinds of copywriters available in every town, but only some are your best bet if you are looking for someone to create a landing page. Here is a short guide to the kind of web writers you may encounter and which  one to choose.Continue reading

One of the easiest yet most often overlooked marketing tactics is the call to action. I recently gave you ideas on how to include calls to action in your content marketing, but where should you send people and what do you say? Landing pages: Where visitors like to land A landing page is a page on your site dedicated to delivering on promises made by the offers in your content. The goal is to get a consumer of your content to take another step toward becoming a customer. Your home page is not a good landing page. Instead, you want to send your prospects to a page where they are asked to do something specific and logical. So what makes a good landing page? Reader Sarah Mitchell responded to my last call for samples with  a web page that illustrates how to integrate content marketing and landing pages.   She wrote the product page for ezytire.com. I like this example because businesses tend to use this space to talk about themselves and their products. They forget about the visitor. A...

There is an old yarn that, when it comes to a ham and eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. The most common question I get from clients when I recommend a healthy diet of content is, “And how is giving away content going to increase sales?” It can seem like content marketing finds a lot of chickens, those that are involved with a brand. But where are the committed pigs, the ones who will put some (pig) skin in the game?Continue reading

Aren’t we all trying to get a reaction? A few months ago, I showed Content Marketing Institute members how to create a marketing reaction using some household chemicals and some simple lab equipment. I hid the science from you by talking primarily about converting a blog into an eNewsletter. Today, I want to expose the chemicals and reactions to you so you can begin to see how content marketing strategy is simply a combination of common reactions combined in interesting ways.Continue reading

We’ve all heard the message from the social media pulpit: social media marketing is about conversations and building one-to-one relationships. It’s about playing nice, being authentic, embracing transparency and doing so in a human voice. For bare teeth marketers this all seems reasonable, but it’s the kind of language that sounds hard to quantify. How do we measure our return on transparency (ROT)?Continue reading

Melanie is your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt. Bill is the voice that rings through the headsets of your customer support people, unwavering in his desire to get what he wants. Amy is that segment of your house list who got distracted before she finished ordering online. None of these people exist, but they are powerful guides for any business that wants to grow in an age of digital content. Melanie, Bill and Amy are touchpoint personas, and they can walk right into any meeting you have and “lay down the law.” They know what they want, and they are your ally in getting the resources you need to deliver. Read on to learn why a touchpoint persona is so powerful and to figure out what information you should include.Continue reading

If you believe that your prospects don’t want to receive email from you, then you are missing a huge opportunity. HubSpot looked at data from 605 business blogs and found that they got 12 times more email subscribers than RSS subscribers on average. What your prospects don’t want is promotional email that only talks about you and your products. They want you to educate them, entertain them or both. So, where can you find a regular source of content that is educational, entertaining and easy to produce? Look no further than your blog. If your blog isn’t educational and entertaining, what’s the point of having one? Here are five steps to turn your blog into an engaging email newsletter for your prospects and customers. Continue reading