- Above the Fold: Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Site De
- Adapting to Web Standards
- Art of Non-Conformity
- Art of Readable Code
- Art of SEO
- Back to the User
- Beginning PHP6, Apache, MySQL Web Development
- Book Notes
- Books to Read
- Bored and Brilliant
- Born For This
- Choosing A Vocation
- Complete E-Commerce Book
- Content Inc
- Core PHP Programming
- CRM Fundamentals
- CSS Text
- Dealing with Difficult People
- Defensive Design for the Web
- Deliver First Class Web sites
- Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty
- Designing Web Interfaces
- Designing Web sites that Work: Usability for the Web
- Designing with Progressive Enhancement
- Developing Large Web Applications
- Developing with Web Standards
- Economics of Software Quality
- Effortless commerce with php and MySQL
- Epic Content Marketing
- Extending Bootstrap
- Foundation Version Control for Web Developers
- Guerrilla Marketing for a Bulletproof Career
- HACKING EXPOSED WEB APPLICATIONS, 3rd Edition
- Hacking Web Apps
- Happiness At Work
- Implementing Responsive Design
- Inmates Are Running the Asylum
- Instant LESS CSS Preprocessor How-to
- jQuery Pocket Reference
- Letting Go of the Words
- Lost and Found: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World
- Making Every Meeting Matter
- Manage Your Day to Day
- Marketing to Millenials
- Mobile First
- Monster Loyalty
- More Eric Meye on CSS
- Official Ubuntu Book
- Organized Home
- Pay Me… Or Else!
- Perennial Seller
- Pet Food Nation
- PHP 5 E commerce Development
- PHP In a NutShell
- PHP Refactoring
- PHP5 and MySQL Bible
- PHP5 CMS Framework Development
- PHP5 Power Programming
- Preventing Web Attacks with Apache
- Pro PHP and jQuery
- Professional LAMP
- Purple Cow: Transform Your Business
- Responsive Web Design with HTML and CSS3
- Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3
- Rules of Thumb
- Saleable Software
- Search Engine Optimization Secrets
- Securing PHP Web Applications
- Serving Online Customers
- Simple and Usable Web, Mobile and Interaction Design
- Smart Organizing
- Smashing UX Design: Foundations for Designing Online User Experiences
- Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
- Talent is Not Enough
- The 10x Rule
- The Benefits of Working with Git In Your Software Projects
- The Clean Coder
- The Herbal Handbook for Home & Health
- The Life-changing Magic of Tidying up
- The Modern Web
- Think First
- This Is Marketing
- Traction
- Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition
- Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Cus
- Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide
- Web Word Wizardry
- Web Word Wizardy
- Website Owner’s Manual
- Whats Stopping Me
- Work for Money, Design for Love
- Your Google® Game Plan for Success: Increasing Your Web Presence with
- Checklists I Have Collected or Created
- Crafts To Do
- Database and Data Relations Checklist
- Ecommerce Website Checklist
- Learning Stuff From Blogs
- My Front End UI Checklist
- New Client Needs Analysis
- Newsletters I Read
- Puzzles
- Style Guides
- User Review Questions
- Web Designer's SEO Checklist
- Web site Review
- Website Code Checklist
- Website Final Approval Form
- Writing Content For Your Website
- Writing Styleguide
- Writing Tips
- 7 essentialls of graphic design
- Accidental Creative
- Choosing the right color for your logo
- CMS Design
- Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and
- Designing for Web Performance
- Eat That Frog
- Elements of User Experience
- Flexible Web Design
- Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability
- Homepage Usability
- Responsive Web Design
- Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective Use
- Strategic Web Designer
- Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web sites
- The Zen of CSS Design
- Complete Book of Potatoes
- Creating Custom Soil Mixes for Healthy, Happy Plants
- Edible Forest Garden
- Garden Design
- Gardening Tips and Tricks
- Gardens and History
- Herbs
- Houseplants
- Light Candle Levels
- My Garden
- My Garden To Plant
- Organic Fertilizers
- Organic Gardening in Alberta
- Plant Nurseries
- Plant Suggestions
- Planting Tips and Ideas
- Root Cellaring
- Things I Planted in My Yard
- Way We Garden Now
- Weed Decoder
- 101 Organic Gardening Hacks
- 2015 Herbal Almanac
- Beautiful No-Mow Lawns
- Beginner's Guide to Heirloom Vegetables
- Best of Lois Hole
- Design in Nature
- Eradicate Invasive Plants
- Gardening Books to Read
- Gardens West
- Grow Organic
- Grow Your own Herbs
- Guerilla Gardening
- Heirloom Life Gardener
- Hellstrip Gardening
- Indoor Gardening: The Organic Way
- Landscaping with Fruits and Vegetables
- Real Gardens Grow Natives
- Seed Underground
- Small plot, high yield gardening
- Thrifty Gardening from the Ground Up
- Vegetables
- Veggie Garden Remix
- Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
- What Grows Here
- Activities for Kids
- Animals In My Yard
- Baking & Cooking Tips
- Bertrand Russell
- Can I Get that on Sale?
- Cleaning Tips and Tricks
- Colour Palettes I Like
- Compound Time
- Cooking Tips
- Crafts
- Crafts for Kids
- Household Tips
- Inspiration
- Interesting
- Interior Design
- Keywording & Tags
- Latin Phrases
- Laundry Tips
- Learn Something New
- Links, Information, and Cool Videos - Stuff for My Kids
- Music Websites for Parents and Kids
- My Miscellany
- Organizing
- Quotes
- Reading List
- Renovations
- Silly Sites
- Things that Make Me Laugh
- Videos to Watch
- Ways to Be Nice
- YouTube Hacks
- Bug Tracking Tool
- Business Tips
- Code Packages I Like on GitHub
- Content Management systems
- Creating Emails & Email Newsletters
- Games
- I Made A Framework
- Open Source
- Patterns, Textures and other media
- PHP Coding Standards
- Programming
- Project Verbs for to do lists
- Qualities of Creative Leaders
- Scalable Vector Graphics
- SEO
- Software Design
- The Shell, Scripts and Such
- Writing Instructions
- Accessibility
- CSS Frameworks
- CSS Reading List
- CSS Sticky Footer
- Design of Sites
- htaccess files
- HTML Tips and Tricks
- Javascript (and jQuery)
- Landing Page Tips
- Making Better Websites
- More Information on CSS
- MySQL and Databases
- Navigation
- Responsive Design
- Robots.txt File
- Security and Secure Websites
- SVG Images
- Types of Content
- UI and UX and Design
- Web Design and Development
- Web Design Tools
- Web Error Codes
- Website Testing Checklist
- Writing for the Web
- Writing Ideas for your website
- Animations and Interactions
- Being a Better Designer
- Bootstrap Resources
- Color in Web Design
- Colour
- CSS Preprocessors: Sass and Less
- CSS Tips Tricks
- Customer Centered Design Myths
- Design Systems
- Designing User Interfaces
- Font & Typographical Inspiration
- Fonts, Typography, Letters & Symbols
- Icons
- Logo Designs
- Photoshop Tips and Tricks
- Sketch
- UX and UI and Design Reading List
- Web Forms
- Well Designed
Content, Inc
Great content marketers do two things:
- document their content marketing strategy
- review and consistently refer to the plan regularly
Your unique difference is in how you communicate. Use that to your advantage to build an audience. Find your sweet spot: the intersection of knowledge or skill area plus your passion point.
- make a list of knowledge areas and special skills
- make content for something you are passionate about
- for businesses, choose a customer pain point
Once you pick an area, focus.
Clarify your audience:
who are they?
How do they live an average day?
What is the person's need? What is their informational need and/or pain points?
Why will this person care about us, our products, our services?
To be successful, you have to become indispensable to your audience, focusing on your most defined audience. You can add other audiences later.
Content Titling: find a problem area that no one else is solving and exploit that area with content.
How do you uniquely solve a problem?
If the content doesn't tell a different story, it will likely be ignored. So focus on what your customers want to be and help them get where they really want to go. Become the content your customers want to engage with over everyone else. Forget what your competition is doing and focus on what you are good at; your uniqueness.
If you are not sure what the pain points are, ask your audience. Setup up listening posts:
- one on one conversations
- Search keywords
- web analytics
- social media listening
- customer surveys
"The ultimate content strategy is listening."
Social channels are a great place to build followers, but you have no control over what those companies do with your connections. Only your website is under your control.
"The easiest way to turn off your community members is to broadcast the same message across multiple channels." Leverage your assets in multiple ways; act differently on different channels.
- Facebook: provide exclusive content as it is a gated channel
- Twitter: tell a story through tweets; make use of hashtags and use it as a testing ground for keywords; cover industry events
- LinkedIn: business publishing platform
- SlideShare: the YouTube for PowerPoint presentations
- Instagram: unique, behind the scenes and personal content. Turn followers into sources of content.
- Pinterest: try pinning your videos, show the achievements of your customers to share some love', share your reading list, and show your personality.
- Google+: see mashable for ideas
- YouTube - video delivery channel
- Vine: video sharing service
- Tumblr: blogging platform. Use hashtags, post snippets, reblog, and link to your site.
- Medium: little control over the audience. Use it if you want to share a particular point of view and get rapid feedback.
Make a dedicated plan for each channel (just because you can share doesn't mean you should)
- what is the goal of the channel?
- What is the desired action?
- What is the specific type of content the audience wants in the channel?
- The right tone for the channel?
- What is the ideal velocity?
Native Advertising
Paid search units on Google/Bing. Promoted listings on Twitter. Sponsored content on LinkedIn.
Questions to Ask
- Are members more likely to buy?
- Are members more likely to buy new products?
- Do members stay longer as customers?
- Do members talk about us on social media?
- Do members close faster than customers?
- Do members buy more on average?
Don't create content just for marketing; make something valuable
Build a content calendar:
- date content will be published
- topic/headline
- author
- owner of content
- current status of the content (updates as it moves through publishing channels)
Define your channels, content types, visuals, topic categories, keywords, URLs, calls to action, and audience outcomes.
Add images to your text content, and make content ungated.
Test your titles. Create 25 titles/headings for your email messages and test each to see which more people opened.
Advertise your content to build subscribers.
Make a list of influencers: who can we reach out to? Who is good and has influence? Can we nurture influencer relationships by getting guest posts, requesting to share a link, asking to be on podcasts, etc.
Subscriber importance hierarchy
- email subscribers
- print subscribers
- LinkedIn connections
- Twitter subscribers
- iTunes subscribers
- Medium/Tumbler/Instagram/Pinterest
- YouTube
It would help if you had an e-mail offering, a call to action on the email. This should be your first choice for acquiring leads as you have the most control.
Keywords
Make a spreadsheet for the top 50 phrases and check each phrase to see its rank in Google (i.e. its placement). Compare to last month and show changes over time.
Research keywords with tools like AdWords, Serp Stat, Google Webmaster, Bing Webmaster, and SEO Chats Google Keyword Suggest Tool.
- is the keyword phrase relevant
- are we buying phrases through paid search
- am I already ranking for keyword phrases
- will the new page mention keyword phrases
- how much traffic do we get on a phrase
- am I refining my set of keywords
- is a similar phrase already converting
- are there calls to action on the page
- are there related pages to support an internal link
- will the phrase fit into future content
- is the phrase in the domain name
Repurpose your existing content
- take one story idea and make a general topic
- how can you alter this topic and apply it across content types
- research for your first content piece
- after the first piece is created, repurpose your research
- Plan to repurpose, so every content asset you create is different.
If you are struggling:
- Selfish content marketing: create content that solves a customer's pain points. Stop talking about your products so much
- you stop: the biggest source of failure is inconsistency
- activity instead of the audience: acquire an audience first
- no Point of View - to be an expert, you must take a stance
- no process -plan upfront, repurpose/create/distribute
- channel silo: paying attention to one channel only will cause you to miss the true power of content marketing
- forgetting employees - your employees give your brand life. Leverage them in creating content.
- Editing - get an editor and use their services.
Blogging Guidelines
Our editorial mission is to ...
- Posts should advance your mission; have a specific takeaway or key thought; logical and interesting; specific posts for your audience.
- Where possible, include real-life examples and/or case studies.
- Use a variety of media.
- Include detailed instructions or specific recommendations.
Further Reading
- 10x Rule by Grant Cardone
- Report on content marketplace options.
- Content, Inc website
- Experiences: the 7th Era of Marketing by Robert Rose and Carla Johnson
- Digital Relevance by Ardath Albee
- Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
- Art of the Start 2.0 by Guy Kawasaki
- Unselling and Unmarketing by Scott Stratten
- Sorry for Marketing blog by Jay Acunzo
- Orbit Media blog
- Convince and Convert by Jay Baer
- TopRank Online Marketing by Lee Odden
- Twitter @JoePulizzi
Bibliographical Information
Content, Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Joe Pulizzi
2016: McGraw Hill Education, Toronto
ISBN: 978-1-259-58965-2
These are notes I made after reading this book. See more book notes
Just to let you know, this page was last updated Sunday, Oct 13 24