In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to fashionable. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for ‘content marketing,’ has increased by a factor of How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest

But, if you use it well, you can make a measurable difference in your content marketing strategy. Here are six easy ways for Twitter to strengthen your content marketing efforts: Because effective content marketing is as much about conversation as it is an outbound messages, you need to maintain a dialogue with customers, prospects, and industry thought leaders. You may be wondering why something as seemingly simple as Twitter causes so much confusion and consternation among business people. Perhaps, it best likened to a tool like a hammer which is simultaneously

This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth: Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks. Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget. It’s particularly

Not sure who’s building his content or slides, but please keep them employed! Wow, Gates did a great job at TED this year. Why is he suddenly a great communicator and presenter? What has driven his transformation? I

It’s been a very good year for content marketing. In fact, visitors searching our site for the phrase “content marketing” increased by 85% in 2009 over 2008. Social media certainly loomed larger in the past 12 months but interest in content marketing strategy accounted for the majority of the most popular posts. How To Create the All-Important Here is the Cliff’s Notes bullet point version with more detail and links to the full articles following: 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy

New Crowd Sourced E-Book Is Also a Brilliant Example of Content Marketing Because all of us are smarter than one of us, you will find lots of value in the new e-book, Key Content Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2010 – which even includes my own fearless prediction on content marketing. Aside from its intrinsic merit, this e-book is a perfect example of content marketing at work. The genius behind this e-book is Ambal Balakrishnan. She has turned crowd sourcing into an art form.

When you publish a monthly print or electronic newsletter that targets an important audience segment, you probably invest heavily in generating the content that will make this newsletter relevant and valuable to its readers. But you can do much more to make that newsletter and its content work harder for your organization. Think beyond this single That is obviously critical. How?

If you can succeed at providing plenty of substantive information that addresses their biggest problems, you are beginning to play the role of content concierge in their lives. Your content is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Make sure that every major problem faced by your customers is matched by a critical mass of relevant content on your site. Think of yourself as the ultimate knowledge resource like those concierges serving fine hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons—But Available 24/7. When you find yourself in a new town but are blessed

This talk below was recorded just last month, but the contents are especially relevant today if you consider what is happening in Iran at this moment. The end of top-down control of news is changing everything. Clay Shirky , author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations , has a new TED talk that is not just appropriate for our times in general, but given what is happening in Iran, it's actually perfectly poignant for this particular week. The Internet and social media changed everything, as we know.

We often talk about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook This requires companies to think like publishers.