Howdy, folks! This week, I wanted to talk about something I’ve seen everywhere online recently, either in tangible topics or in a thought behind the topic.
It’s the fact that “NOW is the best time to jump on the bandwagon of content.” And I don’t really like to call it a bandwagon. It’s more like a strong, sure era than just a passing thing. Make that word “era” decade, or century. Literally—content isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.
Why Today is The Best Content Era (No Excuses For You To NOT Create!)
Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute recently talked on this very topic: This Week in Content Marketing: Why the New Golden Age of Marketing Is Now, read full blog on CMI. Besides the host (Robert Rose) being quite hilarious (including discussing “inner goddess”, the “Christian Grey of marketing” and more), this is an overall great listen.
Agency Says Content Is Their Biggest Opportunity: In the CMI blog was also a mention to another great resource, an AdAge post: Emphasis on Content Marketing Revives Agency SEO Efforts and Revenues. The agency showcased, Profero, said that “content is the biggest opportunity for us.”
How Agencies Can Survive in a Content-Driven Worldby Joe Lazauskas on Contently. This is an interview blog with Steve Rubel with a lot of good insights on how content marketing is at the top of the curve today, and how to do content if you’re in a tight niche, where it’s hard to think of unique things. Finance and technology are mentioned as intriguing industries where it’s easy to spark interest.
How To Dominate Content Marketing in 2015by Neil Patel via Forbes: his #1 first tip is guest blogging. And we absolutely agree. Then, it’s all about user centric content, instead of focusing on SEO; and more good tips follow. A must read.
And, to make sure your content is the best as you take on this era of content, take a look at this great post:
How to Do a Content Audit (& Why It’s Worth It) by Heather Lloyd-Martin. If you’re not sure about a content audit, what it is or how and why to do it, you need to read this post. It’s a great, clearly written piece about the necessity of content auditing.
Viral content. It turns heads. It stops us in our tracks. We HAVE to look. We have to read (at least a little of it).
What makes content viral, and how do you get a piece of the game so you can experience the results of heavily trafficked, popular content? I have some awesome resources for you this week. Let’s take a look!
Viral Content: Resources From The Great Content Roundup!
10 Quick Tips for Going Viral from Problogger. Useful piece. “You can’t go viral if you say the same as everything else.” Getting your basics right, being a trend setter and leader, writing list style posts, and using emoticons and being long are all features of viral content, as written here.
The Secret to Creating Viral Content (Get Contagious) on Social Triggers.Did you know positive oriented content is more of a candidate to go viral than negative voice content? Or, practical and useful content is almost always a viral candidate winner? This piece gives some very useful tips that will help you cover all your basics when creating content to go viral. Plus, there are 7 emotions listed that can make your content contagious to include in your content creation. (I have this list in my editorial calendar already.)
Backlinko Blog-A “Viral Content” Case Study – “How To Generate 36,282 Readers — and 1,000 Email Subscribers — From Your Next Blog Post (Case Study)”. Now you might think this is some crazy automated product for sale by the title, if you’re anything like me, but don’t worry—it isn’t. It’s one of the best pieces of content on how to share and create viral content that I’ve read. Basically, this guy says that if you 1) find awesome content that is getting a ton of popularity and 2) make some awesome improvements to that content (write your own and make it better) 3) lastly, promote via email—well, you’ve got a winner. I’d go as far as to call it viral content creation. And he’s got a whole impressive case study showing proof of this suggestion. I can validate this entire strategy because you’re basically creating terrific quality content here by identifying what’s popular in your industry and how you can add your own voice and improve directly upon it. Rock on, Ben! View their other viral case study on a blog generating 17k plus viewers in a day.
And, The Viral Content Problem (Many People Don’t Care Whether It’s True) on Gigaom. A most objective, interesting and truthful piece. This really hits the nail on the head about blogger sites like Upworthy, Huffington Post, etc. A woman with three breasts made for a viral but untrue topic – just one of the points made. Fake news got distributed, driving millions to a website. It’s called a fleeting instance of joy in this piece. And there are “viral content warehouses” like Buzz Feed.
Like this post? Tell me what you’d like to see in the next Roundup! Email Julia.
On week three of the great content roundup, I wanted to specifically pull out links that talk about content and SEO in 2015. I’ve been seeing some great stuff on the Internet circulating around this hot topic and wanted to share my favorites from this week.
As you know from my past posts, I strongly believe that content IS SEO. Therefore, this will revolve around content marketing and everything SEO related. There are some great articles here, so enjoy, and feel free to share or leave a comment!
Best Content Marketing Tools in 2015 by Sujan Patel on SEJ. Great info shared. He says that 78% of CMOs believe custom content is the future of marketing. Wow!
The Technical Future of SEO by Scott Stouffer. A unique search engine engineers perspective on SEO. He mentioned that PPC is over-saturated and no longer profitable; and how organic search can be looked at.
Today, I’m choosing to talk all about great content curation tools. I think there are awesome ways you can find and curate great content for your business, website, blog, and readers. Tools make life so much easier—right?
Lets Curate It
#1. Scoop.It. If you’re not on this awesome platform already, you should be. To start curating, just sign up, create your topic of interest, and scoop to your topic from what’s already out there on Scoop.it or what you’ve created yourself. Check out the FAQ for some initial guidance.
#2. Quora. Your questions, from your audience, are waiting for you to discover on this awesome platform. I look up copywriting, and I see people asking for the top resources on copywriting, or a specific way of how to write headlines. So I go create blogs that answer their questions, using my expertise.
And, to step beyond and to talk a little about creating awesome content.
Creating Great Headlines: 2 Awesome Resources
With some of our content orders, many times our writers will create the blog / article piece and the headline. Some clients will provide their own, but most of the time, we create an original headline.
For inspiration, we utilize two awesome tools out there that are great for helping writers come up with headlines that stand out, using all the right adjectives, grabbing your attention, etc.:
Basically, if you plugin a keyword or a couple words, the generators give you full topic ideas. (Disclaimer: Remember, they’re machines not humans. So, a couple times their results may be way off. Use with judgment!)
Lastly, if you haven’t seen our Content Strategy services (that include content curation), it’s time to look into them!
We’re starting a series of curated posts, called The Great Content Roundup.
Welcome to Week 1!
What to Expect?
In these “roundup” posts, we will summarize and link to anywhere from 5-15 posts in one blog post. These articles and pieces we link to will be the ones that we found held value and use for direct businesses in the areas of content marketing, SEO, and social media. These are posts you won’t want to miss!
For Week 1, I want to share some awesome resources with you on curation, since that’s exactly what we’re starting to do with this first post.
Welcome to Week 1 of the Great Content Roundup!
Our Topic: Content Curation
Content curation is becoming more and more a big topic online. As you may or may not know, we launched full content strategy services that include content curation in late 2014. Here are a few great guides that explain content curation in general, and a few more specific posts that offer intelligent insight, including a few of our own guest blogs.
Lastly, view our Google Hangout event that happened January 13, 2015 with Julia McCoy (our CEO) and the Scoop.It CEO, on content curation (we use their tool in our curating).
And, a bonus link…
BONUS:
Five Social Media Predictions for 2015 via HuffingtonPost, authored by Tania Yuki. In this brief but thorough piece, Tania explores how social media will change in 2015, including a focus on more personalization and building real relationships. People won’t be in “static buckets” anymore. Since content is all about real people, we totally agree with Tania! She also predicts that Snapchat will become more popular than ever.
