Using Multiple Blog Engines

Blogging gives you the opportunity to create relevant content for your customers to drive traffic back to your website.

Blogs increase your SEO and fresh and relevant content is the key to edging out your competitors in the search engine results pages and by using multiple blog engines to broadcast that fresh content you will increase That competitive advantage.

Well written articles will position your brand as an industry leader and posting topics that connect you with your market will demonstrate your knowledge of your business, service or product.

Blogs provide another way to develop better customer relationships by connecting directly with them on your website where your site visitors are able to get to know your business or product from the comfort of your online real estate.

Multiple Blogs, Multiple Results

Blogs improve SEO, attract and engage visitors and promote sales but success isn’t a singular idea. Instead it’s multi-faceted, with countless elements drawn together to attract the necessary clients. Letting just one blog dictate the tone, message and branding of your website is a mistake.

Having a multiple blog engine platform, each with its own search visibility, gives you a big advantage over the competition. Each of these blogs highlights an element of the company (such as sales events, product data and category topics). These elements are then offered SEO infused content, bolstering both their relevancy and their search engine rankings which is essential in today’s competitive landscape.
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Through the social integration process, each of these blogs offers consistent content to the right networks. They contribute information that both entices and educates, encouraging readers to return again and again. This increases traffic and, more importantly, it increases sales

Socially Integrated Blogs

Social SEO (search engine optimization) shines a bright light back to your web platform, increasing your online visibility and connecting you to your entire target audience and beyond but even with a diligent blogging schedule, limiting your strategy to focus solely on site updates leaves you in the fog, invisible to your network of socially plugged-in customer base.

Automated integration of your blogs with multiple social networks enables your content to hit the sweet spot of the virtual world, instantly delivering your latest news to your customers via both search and social vectors while saving you valuable time.

Writing quality blog content is a great start toward running a successful blog, but the hard part is getting that content discovered and having the right technology to do it with is essential.

Your brand needs to be on point each and every day and blogs are a key component and to do this you must have the technology that will breath life into your brand.

A key component of any successful plan is the foundation on which it is built and provides the framework that is going to drive that success.

 

Blog Data Touch Points

 

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LinkedIn is the most recently added API not listed in this PDF along with the ability to post to over 300 Social sites.
 

William Cosgrove

 

When it comes to content marketing, the majority of business-to-business (B2B) marketers we surveyed last month are not as mature as they think.

Roughly half of respondents (52%) are in the early stages of assembling a content strategy and executing against it. We call this early majority "aspiring editors," and while their practices are often inconsistent or not fully embraced across the organization, these marketers are busy laying the foundation upon which to build an editorial point of view that gives their buyers something useful and valuable to read, watch, or interact with. 

In a new report, published today (subscription required), we took a closer look at the maturity of content marketing practices among 113 B2B marketing professionals. Half of our respondents hail from companies with 1,000 employees or more, and 41% occupy senior marketing positions including the title of CMO or senior vice president. When compared to peers, most (51%) believe their practices are very mature.  

But that bar is not very high when an overwhelming 85% can't connect content activity to business value and, as a result, fail to create those intimate long-term relationships that will form the primary source of competitive advantage in business from now on.

Our content marketing benchmark shows that B2B marketers have more work to do when it comes to consistently delivering a valuable exchange of information with prospects and customers. Key findings include:

• Content is not marketing's job No. 1. A startling 72% of surveyed marketers say less than half of their marketing staff plays a primary role in content marketing today — leaving content to quickly devolve to talk of products and features, rather than interesting insights buyers crave. It's not a surprise, then, that 87% say they struggle to produce content that truly engages their buyers.
• Marketers produce content simply to fill the channel. Sixty-two percent admit to producing content on a campaign-by-campaign basis, while 47% said that they focus primarily on creating content for distribution channels like their company website, online advertising, email, and social media. Another 16% said they mainly develop sales collateral. Altogether, this data shows an acute focus on acquisition that practically ignores the remainder of the customer life cycle. 
• They fail to highlight how they help customers become successful. While 71% of surveyed marketers say their content features case studies or customer stories, only 3% admit this is a primary focus of their efforts. 
• Content lacks insight that buyers can turn into action. Only 12% of respondents make publishing research and perspectives the main focus of their content marketing, and no one said they engage external experts to validate those ideas.
• Marketers focus on creating deals, not on building relationships. While more than three-quarters of respondents say they frequently communicate to their customer base, only 5% make this a priority, proving that marketers are too focused on acquisition rather than creating long-term loyalty. 

To overcome these deficiencies, and others we detail in the report, CMOs will need to take a hard look at skills, staff, and creative resources directed at content production — because it's clear that staying the current course will not be productive long-term. In the survey, we found just 4% of those we surveyed are true masters of content marketing. We were lucky enough to speak to a few at companies like Computer Sciences Corp, Deltek, Kapost, Sungard Availability Services, and Verizon — you can learn more about their practices and successes in the research. Survey participants who are members of the Business Marketing Association or Online Marketing Institute can apply for a copy of the report here. You can also read the Advertising Age coverage here to get an additional perspective.

Next up? A deeper look at why content marketing needs to look beyond the top of the funnel to deliver more impact to the business. And, in August, I'll bring this content marketing insight together during theForrester Webinar "Four Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing Maturity" on August 7th.

In the meantime, let me know if you have any interesting content marketing successes to share. Take the assessment yourself and let me know how you score. I look forward to meeting more content masters who deliver the information and insight that buyers value and share.

Originally Posted on Forrester

3 Myths About Duplicate Content By Andy Crestodina

Link building, done correctly, is hard work. It's laborious and filled with lots of rejection. In many ways, it's like telemarketing – nobody likes it, but it pays off. In fact, link building still works better than anything else to boost organic rankings.

Google's Matt Cutts recently confirmed the continuing value of links here and here. The key quotes:

...backlinks…are a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results ... backlink relevance still really, really helps in making sure we return the best, most relevant, most topical set of search results.

...backlinks still have many, many years left in them ... over time backlinks will become a little less important ... we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and websites.

So what are the takeaways from these videos? Most commenters picked up on natural language processing and authorship, as probable ranking factors moving forward, without acknowledging the core message of the videos – links still matter a lot. And they will continue to matter for many years.

I don't blame anyone for chalking these videos up to Google FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), but the evidence doesn't stop there. I'm sure that you're familiar with the Penguin algorithm. How about manual penalties, for unnatural links? If links didn't matter, would there be an entire industry dedicated to link audits and sanitizing backlink profiles? Would Google spend so much time and resources battling spammy links? Of course not.

Still, there is a whole contingency of "link deniers" proclaiming that "link building is dead." These folks are just as fervent in their beliefs as the "truthers" and "birthers" despite factual evidence that runs to the contrary. (There's a pretty good chance you will read their comments, below.)

So why are so many people running away from the single most important task in building organic rankings? The answer is pretty simple. Not only is link building hard, but if done improperly, it can result in a penalty and in the most extreme cases can even get you sued!

Can you blame SEO professionals for running away from that hot mess? Of course you can – and you should.

Every marketing campaign focused on building organic rankings needs a link building component. Thousands, if not millions, of pages of great content are published on the web daily – most will never be seen by human eyes. Great content alone, in a competitive niche, rarely ranks without links.

There's a big difference between link building (baiting, earning) and link spamming. The kinds of links that matter are the ones that are editorially given. Links with innate value, not necessarily SEO value. These links require human intervention for placement. A link that can be dropped automatically by anyone has little value and often leads to abuse and trouble.

So, what are some effective techniques for building links in 2014? Actually, the same strategies advised by Cutts way back on March 4, 2010 still hold up today:

• Create controversy: Use it sparingly like spice. The occasional rant is best and if over-used, loses its effectiveness.
• Use humor: Offered as a "softer" alternative to controversy. Can be equally effective – especially if original. (The Oatmeal has built a franchise on funny)
• Participate in blog and forum communities: Not as a spammer, but as an interested community member who gives back to the community by answering questions that help people. This builds credibility and opens up opportunities to attract links.
• Publish original research: Doing a little work to dig into a subject can get a lot of links.
• Use social media: Think about where your target audience spends their time. Is it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? You need to be there as well. Like blog and forum communities, getting to know people via social media opens up link opportunities.
• Create a "Top X List": Like controversy, this is best used sparingly or it can get old fast
• Blog frequently and establish yourself as an authority in your field: If authorship had been in place when this video was produced, I'm sure that would have been mentioned, as well.
• Create how-tos and tutorials: They may not attract a ton of links, but a few good links can have a huge impact – especially on the long tail. These are also a natural for video.
• Create a useful product and give it away for free: Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions, WordPress plugins, anything open source.

According to Crowdtap, partnered with Ipsos Media surveying 839 millennial men and women online, millennials reported spending roughly 18 hours of their day engaged with media, often viewing multiple devices simultaneously. Whether it’s called peer-created content, consumer content or user generated content (UGC), the research found that millennials spend 30% of their media consumption time with content that is created by their peers.

This exceeds television consumption and is rivaled only by the time spent with all traditional media types (TV, print, radio), a combined 33%. Millennials are also committed to engaging with social media on a daily basis above all other media types.

Millennials spend more time with User Generated Content than with TV

Millennials prioritize social networking above other media:

Given millennials’ advertising savvy and skepticism around media, it is important to deliver a message through trusted sources, says the report. Millennials report that information they receive through UGC is highly trustworthy and trusted 40% more than information they get from traditional media sources (TV, print & radio), including newspapers and magazines.

Specifically, conversations with friends and family are the most trusted UGC format, followed by peer reviews. Conversations with friends and family are trusted 2:1 over TV and radio and almost 4:1 over banner ads. Brands looking for consumers to trust their marketing can no longer rely on tradi­tional media to communicate their messages to consumers. In today’s landscape, it’s peer-created content, or “consumer to consumer marketing,” that drives trust.

The correlation between trust and influence is revealed in the 2013 Annual Edelman Trust Barometer Study, says the report, which finds that trust leads to influence. The more trusted the source of a message, the more likely it will have a positive impact.

With 18 hours of media consumption a day, across multiple screens, with channel flipping, tabbing and page turning, it’s a wonder anything stands out and makes a lasting impression, notes the report. Marketers rely on creative to break through the clutter, but often it’s a combination of creative and the right delivery channel. For millennials, user generated content is more memorable than non-user gener­ated content, with peer-created content, including conversations with friends/family and peer reviews standing out the most.

UGC uniquely provides marketers greater access to millennials’ time, a trusted channel to deliver brand messages and a memorable experience. The combination to deliver all three makes UGC more influential on millennials’ product choices and purchase decisions than traditional media.

Percent of millennials who say media type has influence on purchase decision:

• User Generated Content   53%
• Traditional Media   44%
• Banner Ads   23%

Concluding, the report says that professional influencers have the reach and resources to create and share quality content. Consumer influencers have personal relationships that enable their recommendations to carry weight. Together, this combination can drive both reach and powerful influence. As brands continue to aggregate types of influencers and refine their strengths, these programs will likely become a fundamental component of most marketing strategies.

By Jack Loechner,
Center for media Research

What do E.T., Jimmy Kimmel, Mashable and The Washington Post have in common?

They all used native advertising.

Also known as sponsored content, native advertising allows businesses to include branded content that resembles journalistic content in a publication’s pages.

The paid content will never match the credibility and value of earned media, but it can still amplify earned or owned messages, according to Edelman Chief Content Strategist Steve Rubel.

In Steve’s Sponsored Content Report he breaks down the ins and outs of native advertising.

This article highlights Steve’s findings about why native advertising’s popularity has surged and how brands and publications use it.

Why Now?

Native advertising has existed in some form for decades.

Recently, though, major news publications that had once shunned branded content from its pages have become open to it.

Here are three reasons why:

1. Vanishing revenue streams

It’s no secret that U.S. news media outlets need new sources of revenue.

Even since the beginning of 2013, advertising prices have dropped sharply because of increased content accessibility, fewer banner clicks due to increased mobile usage, and digital ad exchanges providing real-time ad inventory trading.

At the same time, few consumers have shown a willingness to pay for news.

2. Evolving reader behavior

Twitter and Facebook pioneered chronological news consumption with its layouts that include ads and personal content alongside editorial news.

People generally accept advertising in social networks (and search engines) because they understand that’s the cost of a free service.

Having paid, owned and earned content next to each other has potentially changed how audiences feel about “the permeability between advertising and editorial (e.g. the so-called church-state wall),” Steve writes.

Wrestling with native advertising? Register for Steve’s free webinar now!

3. Brands focusing on content

Fifty-five percent of B2C content marketers said spending on content would increase over the next 12 months, according to a 2012 study.

The continued growth of content marketing—which allows marketers to tell their brand story on their own websites, mobile apps and social channels—creates stiff competition for prospects’ attention.

Marketers joining forces with news executives “may enable sponsored content to thrive,” Steve writes.

What Do Native Ads Look Like?

Just as content types differ, so do the types of native advertising. Steve’s research has show three common approaches.

Steve suggests that more forms of native advertising will emerge as the practice becomes more widespread, ethical dilemmas are resolved and publishers differentiate offerings.

Here are three of today’s most popular methods:

1. Paid syndication

Currently the most common format, paid syndication places clearly labeled branded articles, videos, slideshows and infographics in the news section.

Paid syndication has potential pitfalls, though. Clearly labeling content as a “sponsored post” could drive readers away.

Other times, it can frustrate readers. In January 2013, The Atlantic published native advertising by The Church of Scientology and came under fire as its audience found it too self-serving. The backlash forced them to take down the article 11 hours later.

AOL, Slate, NBC News, and Gawker Media are some news outlets that run paid-syndicated posts.

2. Paid integration

Steve compared this tactic to TV product placement, where a publication weaves a brand into a narrative.

BuzzFeed, for example, uses this tactic by creating a post centered around a “sponsor’s ideals” with a brand message weaved in, Steve says.

Other publications will integrate native ads into posts but do so more overtly. For example, a top 10 list will have a sponsor listed as number 11.

3. Paid co-creation

The future of native advertising may be paid co-creation, Steve says. It has the potential to benefit readers, marketers and publishers while being “ethically safer.”

With the tactic, a brand funds the development and staffing of a new site, news section or app. Though a marketing team guides the new platform’s direction, the publication typically controls the editorial content.

Mashable, for example, has teamed its content creators with marketers to develop a series of feature articles that relate to the brand’s values or themes.

Conclusion

Steve writes that native advertising continues to evolve and provides the PR industry an opportunity to expand its relationship with media outlets. However, unknowns, including solutions to ethical issues, remain.

The onus of resolving the pitfalls of native advertising does not belong to publishers only, though.

“The PR industry can play a key role in the development of this new advertising format,” Steve writes. “Experimentation should be encouraged. And just as the social media revolution expanded the profession’s remit, so may sponsored content – but perhaps in a much more profound and accelerated way.”

BY BRIAN CONLIN