Last week we explored the first five of the Top 10 content marketing tips you need to know.  Today we’ll dive a little deeper, while acknowledging that this is a vast topic.  To keep up on content marketing trends I suggest you follow the Content Marketing Institute blog.

Here are the final five of the Top 10 content marketing tips you need to know:

6.  Listen to what your audience is complaining about.  The best content solves problems.  With this in mind, participate in communities with your peers, prospects and clients to note trends in what matters to them.  Sometimes these topics will be ones that they are excited about, but the hot button topics that they regularly complain about are the topics begging for your expertise, help and solutions …so give it to them.  They’ll love you for it!

7.  Consistently connect.  Delivering your content on a regular basis is crucial. You can have short blog posts as well as long ones, but post at least once a week if possible.  Post and comment on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and relevant blogs to your industry daily.   Regularly post on, and through, platforms like Foursquare, Instagram, Flikr, FoodSpotting, YouTube, etc.  Give people a reason to look forward to each time you’ll share new content, by being a resource that they want to follow.

8.  Make people feel special.  This is the key to a happy life and one of the best ways to ensure that people will care about you and your content – care about them first.  As Zig Zigler famously said, “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”

9.  Entertain before informing.  One of the cardinal rules of public speaking is to entertain 90% of the time and inform 10% of the time because no matter how great your information is, no one will listen to you if you don’t entertain them.  This doesn’t mean you have to be a dancing monkey with unending witty comments, but being interesting is what will attract people to interact with, and share, your content.  Think about the content you love and the people who make it.  They make you smile and laugh, don’t they?

10.  Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.  Content is a dish best served over and over in different formats to multiple audiences to reach as many people as possible.   Once you put your hard work in to creating a live webinar you can also record it to be replayed, transcribe it into an eBook (as well as multiple blog posts, white papers and one-sheets), chop pieces of it into “how to” videos, grab nuggets of wisdom out for tweets and Facebook and Google+ posts, and the entire presentation can be loaded to SlideShare.  Aim to work once and then repurpose your content at least 5 different ways.

Content marketing should be a key ingredient in your social media and digital marketing recipe.  It takes a lot of time, but when it’s done correctly it can be the gift that keeps on giving.  Great content begets great benefits; people – even prospects and customers – will like you more, your employees will be happier to work for your company, more people will talk with you and about you, and even better, they’ll trust and care about you.

How do you become the recipient of such great rewards?  You start by remembering the following Top 10 content marketing tips every time your lightning fast fingers prepare to make a keystroke on that keyboard sitting in front of you right now.

Paste the following words of wisdom on the wall above your computer screen (or on the outside of your laptop to share them with the world) and let them light the way to your content marketing success:

1.  Don’t write a word, share pictures or post videos unless you want to.  In life there are “have to’s” and “want to’s”.  We run away screaming from “have to’s” and wild horses can’t keep us from doing our “want to’s”.  If you don’t want to write, if content creation doesn’t turn you on, if you don’t smile when you finish posting content, then you need to hire someone who does to do create your content.   Otherwise, you’ll create very little content, and what content you do create will carry that feeling of being an uninspired chore rather than an attractive passionate expression.

2.  Focus on giving.  You’ll notice that the content you love to consume has an element of the author giving you something.  It may be inside information, helpful tips, funny videos, infographics that help to explain a complex topic, pictures that make you smile, or stories that you relate to and care about.  The point is that we love content that makes us feel good, so as a content creator, that’s the best kind of content for you to focus on.

3.  Know your business goals.  Not doing this is the #1 problem with online marketing.  You need to develop informed goals for your company and create content to support those goals.

4.  Reach the right audience.  Content marketing is attraction marketing, so post content that will attract the people that matter the most to your business, who care about your expertise, and who will share it with their like-minded friends.

5.  Communicate with a friendly tone and flavor.  Don’t come off like a robot.  The basis of why social media works is that people want to connect and be validated.  That means they want to read, see and hear content that reaffirms that they are in the right place, doing the right things with the right people.  The tone of your content needs to be similar to how you communicate with your closest friends and dearest neighbors, not how you communicate with the customer service robot at your least favorite telecom company whom you feel no connection to.

Digest these ideas, leave comments on how these content marketing tips have worked for you, and come back for the final five tips next week!

This post was originally posted in the Smart Simple Social Blog.

In less than two years since it’s launch, Pinterest has blasted off to be one of the fastest growing social networks of all time.  At the end of 2011 the site was listed by Hitwise as one of the top 10 social networks when it had grown to 11.7 million monthly unique visitors.  This made Pinterest the fastest site in history to pass 10 million monthly unique visitors.  Since the first week of 2012, Pinterest has surpassed YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Yahoo and Bing in driving referral traffic to retail websites.

This is undoubtedly impressive, but what does this mean for your brand?  Should you be on Pinterest?

The short answer is yes.  Historically, most companies wait a little too long to dip their toes into a new social network to make sure that it’s going to last.  This leaves them playing catch up, and you don’t want to be late this party.  At the very least you should secure your brand username before a squatter does.

The longer answer is maybe.  There are a few key considerations with how to allocate business resources that should always be considered before committing them to developing social media communities:

1.  Is your audience hanging out on this social network?

2.  Is your audience actively participating on this social network?

3.  What are your business goals that will be tied to your activities on this social network?

4.  What is your overall social media marketing strategy and how well does Pinterest fit in?

5.  Are “Pinners” already spreading your brand around Pinterest?  Type the following URL into your browser and replace “yourdomain.com” with your own web site: http://pinterest.com/source/”yourdomain.com” to follow and identify “Pinners” and boards that your brand’s content is appearing on.

Lifestyle brands benefit the most from Pinterest.  Currently 97% of Pinterest’s 1 million+ Facebook fansare women.

The current Pinterest user base is 83% female; 30% of whom are 25-34 years old, and 25% of whom are 34-45 years old.  These women are well educated with over 60% having some college experience, 19% holding Bachelors degrees, and 6% holding Graduate degrees.  They are more likely to live in mid-west states with 35% living in households with incomes between $25,000-$49,999, 34% living in households with incomes between $50,000-$74,999, and 14% living in households with incomes between $75,000-$99,999.

Therefore, if this is your target audience and you aren’t on Pinterest, you should open a new tab on your browser and request an invite.  Yes, Pinterest has had the growth mentioned above as an invite-only website.

If this is not your target audience, consider how your products and services can become attractive and valuable to this active audience.  Think about the lifestyle benefits and attributes of what your company offers and how your customers use your products or services to enhance their lifestyles.  If you’re not sure where to start, there are dozens of resourceful articles that can steer you in the right direction.  It would be a shame to not connect with all of these people who are having fun, sharing pictures and videos, and driving traffic to retailers.

This article was originally published on Room 214 ‘s Capture the Conversation

Advertising through Google AdWords continues to grow, and to be one of the main ways businesses try to reach new customers.  Understanding how AdWords auctions work is one of the biggest areas of confusion for people who aren’t sure how much, if any, of their marketing budget should be spent on AdWords.

With Google’s $32.2 billion in advertising revenue being 97 percent of Google’s total revenue, this is a pie that is worth figuring out, especially if you invest hard earned revenue into this ad platform. For instance, have you ever wondered how Google determines what advertisers pay, or how Google determines which ads are shown where?

Well, the infographic below can help you understand and make more sense of this world. Is this how you thought Google AdWords worked or have your experiences given you a different impression?

No matter how much you may already know about optimizing your website to create a better experience for your visitors, we bet that you’ll learn at least 2 new tips from this video.  You may even laugh a little too.

I sat down with Derek Olsen of Foraker Labs after Derek’s Pivot Guild presentation on The Ten Commandments of Website Usability to discuss some great tips to help you with your website.  Grab a pen, smile and hit play.

This article was originally posted on Hip Chameleon.

With how fast the Internet and digital marketing are evolving, it can sometimes be difficult for traditional marketing education to keep up, as shown on this site that lists common marketing degree programs that are still organized around traditional marketing themes. For the best information on how to succeed in digital marketing, often the best place to learn is on the internet itself or from experts who are actively involved online.

I did a quick Q&A with author and marketing pro Aaron Goldman after the Pivot Guild launch event held on Sept 22, 2011 at Boulder Digital Arts. Get Aaron’s take on the most important thing a business owner can do to be successful with digital marketing strategy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To define our panel at Blogworld,  the other Blogging in the Age of Social Media panelists (Dave Taylor, Doyle Albee, Jeannine Crooks, Joshua Dorkin) and I wrote a post together on the panel title.  Here’s a short excerpt:

Ah, the good old days. Blogs were a world unto themselves and if we bloggers did anything related to social media it was purely to post URLs and hope that it’d help drive some traffic our way. With the continued rise of Facebook and addition of the surprisingly slick Google Plus combined with Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg and so many other social sites, however, a smart blogger’s gotta know how to manage the social nets, not just a blog.

Whether you look at personal blogging, business blogging, micro-blogging or how they overlap and support each other, blogs have become essential sources of self-expression, thought leadership, information, news, entertainment and community building in our social media age.  While 73.5% of the blogging population is under 35 and connecting on personal levels, companies that blog receive 55% more web traffic and 77% more leads than companies that don’t.

Though social media has become a catch all phrase meaning various things to various people, the heart of social media is that individuals have become the media, and blogs are where their stories live to provide the sound bites for Twitter and Facebook content.  As social media platforms continue to proliferate, the content that makes them interesting and builds their followings are often tied back to blogs.  Imagine Twitter streams, Google searches and Facebook feeds without links to blogs to serve up content that helps readers to dig deeper, connect further and laugh harder.

Read the full article here.

No one wants to be sold, but everyone wants to buy.

At an event I attended this week someone from the audience asked a presenter about how much they thought marketing affected the success of tech startups.  After a pregnant pause the co-presenter responded, “I think he just threw up in his mouth.”  To which the first presenter responded accurately,  ”If your product sucks, no amount of marketing will help you.”

Yes, and if your product is awesome there are always three primary marketing needs that the founders usually aren’t experienced in; because instead, they’re probably experienced in creating the product they passionately made for the world.  1) Finding the people who love what you have to offer. 2) Reaching them by communicating what’s in it for them to check out your product and 3) Making them feel special.

Many times it seems that marketing (connecting) is undervalued or devalued as much less important than creating and executing a product idea.  I invite you to see marketing as the creative execution of connecting great products to great people rather than a necessary evil of doing business.

Businesses are successful when they are executing effectively on both creating great products and creating great relationships with people who want those products.  Businesses that fail often create products they think people want without even asking their target audience what those people want, and creating those products first.

Bad apples and bad experiences have led many people to associate marketing with snake oil salesmen and hyping worthless products.  This definitely exists, but that’s the dark side of the marketing force (think of Darth Vader marketing to Luke to come over to the dark side).  On the bright side of the marketing force, marketing for me has always been about connecting the people who care about specific interests (mobile apps, technology, natural products, great restaurants, gardening, cuff links, motorcycles, clothes, …whatever) to the latest and greatest products and services related to those interests.

Everyone loves to connect and be validated.  Everyone loves to be turned onto products and services they think are valuable.  Certain people love to be the early adopters and be the first ones to both learn about new products and to be the one to tell their friends about it.

Whether you read about it on Twitter or Facebook, stumble on a YouTube video, hear about it from your friends, or see it on a Superbowl TV ad, you learn about everything new from being on the receiving end of marketing.  And then there’s the question of whether every person on the planet over the age of 5 is a marketer since we all tell people about what we think is cool.

In summary, don’t be a marketing hater.  You’re an amateur marketer if you’ve ever recommended a movie, book, iPhone app, hiking trail, vacation spot, gift idea, car model, fishing spot, or anything else to another person.  ”Marketer” isn’t a dirty word.  Some of us are passionate connectors that love helping out companies run by people who have other talents and don’t know how to find, connect and effectively communicate with the people who will love what they created.

What’s your take on the good and evil of marketing / connecting buyers and sellers / communicating product benefits to the public?

It wouldn’t be a prudent business decision to build any core aspect of your business on a platform you have no control over, right?  Yet in today’s world, having a Facebook Fan Page for your company is essential, and unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you don’t control anything Facebook does with it’s platform.

How will you feel if you have to abandon your Facebook Page one day after years of work to build up your followers, engage your community and have a strong presence on the #2 most visited destination on the internet?

Along with the many upsides to having an active Facebook Fan Page come some crucial downsides.  The reality is that having a Facebook Fan Page is both an indispensable marketing and customer service tool while simultaneously being the equivalent of building a gigantic castle on the beach that could be swept out with the tide without any notice. For example, company’s are currently  losing their Facebook Fan Pages after someone else gains admin privileges and deletes them as an admin to their own page.  This is a major issue, but like losing all of your unsaved changes to a 15 page Word document, your only recourse to this unfortunate event happening to you is to start again from scratch.

I believe in knowing what we can’t control, but focusing on what we can control.  Let’s cross our fingers that you won’t have to deal with your Fan Page being deleted or Facebook imploding anytime soon.  Instead, check out the Top Five ways to build your Facebook Fan Page to make sure you’ve got your bases covered:

1.  After you have 25 fans you should grab the custom username for your business page.

2.  Choose your Fan Page name carefully.  After you have over 100 fans you cannot change the company name on your fan page, so if you owned a business named “Buzz Coffee Shop” and later changed the name to “Buzz Cafe”, you would have to shut down the Facebook Fan Page for “Buzz Coffee Shop” and create a brand new page (with zero fans) for “Buzz Cafe”.

3.  Understanding Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm will help you to create content that is more likely to be seen by your fans.

4.  Create a custom welcome page to greatly increase your conversion rate of visitors who become fans.

5.  Build your community on your Facebook Fan Page by consistently using the Photos, Questions, Twitter, Networked Blogs and other customizable tabs to create a variety of interesting content to share with your fans.

This was too good not to share – So, we’re sharing…

This animated vid is re-purposed from a post on Social Media Timesby Megan O’Neill:  “Animated Video Points Out The Ridiculousness Of Hiring A Social Media Intern”

We couldn’t agree more with Megan. Don’t send a rookie in to do the work of a pro and expect to get the same results. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.  Just sayin’.

This article was originally published on Hip Chameleon