Online Marketing Blog

Development of a content marketing strategy that speaks to the target audience plays a key role in successful execution of an overall online marketing program. Companies that embrace the social web as part of their marketing mix need to consider the content created within social media channels just as much as corporate web site content.

Whether you communicate to your audience via a blog, Twitter or social networking sites like Facebook, the only true way to build relationships with a growing network is to listen, engage and provide content they find valuable.

When developing a social media content strategy, start by asking questions like: “What does my network find valuable?”.

With the importance of content in online marketing, many businesses are hard pressed to come up with original articles, blog posts, videos, images, presentations, etc on a regular basis.  There’s a myth that once you publish something, that all who matter will see it. That’s simply not true.

Does less than 100% or even 50% market reach for marketing content mean a blog or web site should republish exact duplicates at every opportunity? Of course not. Repurposing content probably isn’t substantially “green” either, but as marketing messages are made unique for distinct audiences, content can be repurposed or customized from one format to another or be updated to deliver value to a different distribution channel.  Here are 5 of many ways companies can repurpose content for marketing purposes in ways that are efficient and meet the needs of target audiences.

Over at Junta42 Joe Pulizzi has announced the quarterly update of his Junta42 list of content marketing blogs. I’m happy to say Online Marketing Blog was again included in the list. This time in a slightly improved position as you can see below. I must say, being included on a list with Brian Clark, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott is very humbling.

Lists are always controversial by nature as they exclude and include based on criteria that rarely satisfy everyone. But we’re happy to be included all the same and a BIG THANKS goes to the TopRank team that’s been liveblogging conferences over the past two months of consideration for this list.

Here’s the complete list of 42 top content marketing blogs:

Content is King and links are Queen. Together with a nice dose of marketing they make a nice little kingdom. But what if you have trouble generating new content on a regular basis? How can resource strapped bloggers and busy web site owners leverage what they’re already doing for the benefit of their online audiences and better search engine visibility?

The answer to those questions lies in an analysis of the content creation processes within the overall organization. Companies like TopRank call that process consulting but in the meantime, here are 5 tips for those active in an industry to re-purpose content for the web.

When marketing web sites on the internet 10 years ago, people “surfed” the web, clicking on links between sites they already knew about, links from directories and review sites. Search engines like AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, etc were around as well. Remember those?

People like Eric Ward pioneerd the practice of promoting web sites editorially resulting in links from these sorts of resources. Links had to come from relevant sources otherwise the traffic was irrelevant.

Google came on the scene with PageRank and boosted the value of bot detected links. Search engine quality improved substantially but opportunistic webmasters and eventually SEOs, identified and took advantage of as many methods of link acquisition as possible. Many of those links being topically relevant and many completely out of context. Think “link farm”.

Yesterday, Junta 42 announced their latest list of top content marketing focused blogs (Online Marketing Blog came in at #2 in between Copyblogger and PR 2.0) and it reminded me yet again of how important content is for SEO. It used to be when discussing search engine optimization services 5-6 years ago, we’d focus on keyword optimization of content and getting links as independent tactics. Today, it’s a different story.

Of course many of the basics of SEO still apply, such as keyword research, on-page optimization of existing content and solving crawling issues. But attracting links and creating new content are no longer separate tasks. They’re interdependent.

The success formula for content centered link building is simple:

• Establish distribution channels such as blog/RSS, email list, social networks, social content