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

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.

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 It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook This requires companies to think like publishers.

Proving again that our readers like to dig into a variety of topics under the broad content marketing umbrella. how to create effective elevator speech to drive your content marketing using content marketing to survive the recession making an eBook The topics range from : low cost research as killer weapon

Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool It is difficult enough to use content marketing effectively in a more traditional verbal and static visual context. Tags: Content Marketing Knowledge Center News Online Tech Tools Tips & Mini-Guides Trends Vide Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online. But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.

The just released study on business use of social media from the folks at Business.com is must reading for content marketers who are active, tentative or hesitant about social media. The study was designed to assess current trends in the use of social media in North American businesses. Tags: Content Marketing Knowledge Center Marketing Basics News Online Social Media Tips & Mini-Guides If you’ve been dragging your feet on social media, it’s time to take both of those feet and jump right in. Their research, 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study makes it

Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad. The real investment will be in time and thought required to craft a content marketing strategy which provides valuable information to your customers and prospects. You may need to a hire specific content creation resources either internally or externally. But, most small to medium-sized businesses have yet to participate fully and enthusiastically. We have just written about a powerful new research study that paints a picture of how thousands of smart companies are already benefiting from the inclusion of social media.

Local newspapers and business-to-business publications face similar challenges as drastic drops in ad revenue drive equally drastic drops in relevant and compelling content. Moreover, business-to-business magazines that are well positioned still offer uniquely valuable niche content that helps readers succeed. believe that the potential nail in the coffin for local newspapers is the ease with which readers They provide too much of what readers can get anywhere and too little of what readers really want. But for newspapers, ad revenue declines are exacerbated because the highly