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Content Marketing

STOP Building content right now and focus on Culture!

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Content2

Unless your content is in the top 10% of all content currently being produced, you may as well not bother.

In fact you may as well invest your money in cupcakes and give your copywriters a rest.

Which will mean you will have happy copywriters and wont have shoveled more mediocre web content online, for people to ignore.

Do you ever wonder why your stuff doesn’t get any social signals, when not even your own staff, whose very jobs depend on your success, ignore your content?

It’s very simple, and you don’t even have to hire me as a content strategist for me to give the benefit of my years of experience.

It’s because your content is mediocre.

Your content isn’t crap, because crap does get a reaction.

It’s just that it’s beige, bland, boring, something that few people in their right mind would even think of sharing with their friends. It’s not sexy content.

twitter moments

The thing is, your agency isn’t going to tell you because you pay them for the production and they don’t hae the skill set to be a kickass publisher of attention attracting content.

Your copywriter is not going to tell you. They are too worried that the 504th line of their epic poem they are writing about Ernest Hemmingway’s beard to worry too much about your misunderstanding of content marketing.

You do content, because you are told that is what you should do. You hear it at conferences, on blogs, from smooth talking salesmen from the local SEO content marketing agency.

But it’s not what you should be investing in.

Because good content comes from good culture.

What I mean by culture is you have to have an interesting story and be prepared to tell it. You have to be transparent about who you are. You can’t hide any more, people like to buy from people they like, they want to associate with people they aspire to be.

This age has changed from the an information age, because information is flowing as freely as the screams of joy from a Tennessee whore house (too much?).

information

It is now the age of culture.

Do you have the right culture?

What are you kidding me? You’re a human being, you can chose your culture, your brand, the way people feel emotionally about your business.

See it from the perspective of someone who does not know your business. Why should they care, what is it about you are your website that makes them excited, that connects with them on an emotional level.

Discover the essence of why someone would care about your business and there you have the secret formula.

Now, most of you wont get this and that’s fine. Connecting the dots in this new age of content shock, you will realise that content marketing is not a sustainable strategy and there needs to be a little secret sauce added to get things moving.

That secret is one of culture, some call it branding but I think it’s way more than that. It’s also about relationships and how you are as a human being.

This is a bit of a rambling blog post I know, and not honed and edited to maximise the readers experience. But this is written in one pass, because that’s my culture. It’s where the good stuff is. It may not even make sense to most, as someone said of my last post. “I need a sub-editor”, and that is true, but don’t let that get in the way of the message I am sending out here.

We are currently in a massive crisis in the content marketing world, except most don’t believe it or don’t want to believe it.

To summerise:
Make the best content you can that elbows its way into the top 10%
Build a culture within your business and content that resonates on an emotional level with your customer base.

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Why you should stop content marketing right now

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I’m being serious here, this is not clickbait. You should probably stop content marketing now and spend the money on Facebook ads instead.

The reason being you don’t really care about the people reading your content do you? Admit it. You only care about what they are going to do for you.

Well guess what, people know that.

You got into your business to make a bit of money, inspired by those blog posts with the dude in his hammock and a cool beverage, palm trees in the distance.

And you have made money, but you had to work hard for it and content marketing still does not work for you. Not even you or your boss retweets the content your SEO is pumping out.

That has to be bad doesn’t it, when the boss or CEO doesn’t even promote the content marketing the SEO agency is pushing out.

Hold on a minute.

Why are you outsourcing content marketing to an SEO company? That’s slightly worse than having a web design company doing but never as bad as getting a PR company to do it.

Most CEOs don’t tweet.

Other CEOs are so passionate about their business they seek every outlet to get the word out about how cool their company is.

You cannot outsource that.

If you want to invest in content marketing, understand that for it to work you and your company needs to get behind it and use it as a way for your passion to reach the wider public.

Your brand, your ethos, your integrity is what will drive a great content marketing strategy. If you don’t have these then I am not going to lie to you, it’s going to be hard. What content marketing does is amplify what you already have, if you have a cold, dead heart that is full of a black bile of cynicism. Then that is what is going to get amplified.

But if you really care about your brand, your product, your service, and love your customers then that is what is going to be promoted. If you have these in abundance, then you absolutely need content marketing. Not the stuff you buy off the shelf from a black hearted, cynical, agency with an expensive office with exposed brick walls, pot plants and and bean bags.

Ideally it should be in-house, from the people who really care and know your business. Failing that, hire someone who is passionate about communication and hire them to tell the stories your business has, rather than doing content marketing just because you heard about it at the latest Chamber of Commerce meet up.

Thanks to Dennis for the Tweet inspiration.
The fantastic image was supplied by Greg Westfall

A New Year a new focus a new way of doing things

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Stay on target

 

And hopefully a new outcome.

Very glad to be closing the door on 2015, which was a mix of high stress and high excitement. I made incredible, boner mistakes, mixed with deft, clever moves which always left me thinking, “did I really do that”.

Whenever you do something brilliant, don’t question it, don’t deconstruct, just quickly move on to the next thing and hope no one noticed how surprised you were that you pulled it off.

The converse is also true, although much more can be learned from mistakes than my wins.

I put down the mistakes to putting more effort into things I am daggy at than things I am cool and froody with.

I’ve noticed I have become very good at strategic, content marketing thinking. This is probably down to my experience in working in the space,  clocking it at 17 years. Although I still feel I am just getting started.

It’s with that thinking in late December of the previous year I decided to change things a little.

No more content creation work.

More hiring out my brain for strategic content work, mostly for organisations needing an outside voice that has walked the path of experience.

A new focus on a new start up I am launching, which will help people develop their content. Right now the only thing holding it back is deciding on a name. This is going to be a lot of fun and something that is crafted to be incredibly useful to anyone trying to develop their content marketing. More of this in later post.

Less distraction from social media, and from those whose output is always negative. To this end I have completely burned down my Twitter account to rebuild, based on people I like, people I learn from and people who inspire me.
In the past I have hesitated because I felt that part of the reason I wanted to follow someone was to influence them. That thinking feels wrong and does not work for me.

Authenticity cannot be constructed, you have to follow what you feel is right. Intuition is an amazing thing, listening to what your sub-conscious is telling you can bring real benefits.

This year will be more about doing stuff. Making stuff happen and travelling with people who share that mindset.

May your year give you want you want and need.

 

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The Secret to Ranking a Website in Google

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This is a great time for people building great content on the web.

buils content

Delivering the content that people want will be the ultimate factor in whether or not a website will rank.

Yes of course there will still be those anomalies which a clever SEO can exploit, but it would be  foolish to base a business on hunting down the latest thing that Google has not yet fixed.

There is nothing really new in the interview, although it is a great interview and ties together a bunch of methodologies that have been working for sometime.

  1. We all know that we should have an effective social media following on places like Twitter.
  2. We all know that we need to be producing content that is better than any other content which is currently available to the reader.
  3. We all know we should create synergy between all content and online communication output.

So nothing new there.

But how many of us really implement this? When I want something to happen I write a blog post, do a bit of Tweeting, a bit of emailing, a bit of commenting etc., until I get the result.

I already have my processes set in place, I am already a member of various online social tribes – I have my own gang of trusted creative rebels on which I can call upon. I already know my market and what is needed and more importantly how to get people to be attracted, engaged and then what will get them to react.

Which of course I should know having been doing this for quite some time now and having the good fortune to work with some brilliant, clients in a variety of sectors. Getting the client to do what is needed is the hardest part of the equation as results are not obvious before the process begins.

Even though I can show that doing something very specific like producing an infographic on going to Mars can get high quality editorial links from the likes of Wired.com, Mashable.com etc. It still takes large amounts of energy to create presentations that leads the client along the path.

But the client thing is a tangent and not crucial to the core thing being discussed.

What is important

I think it helps if we think along the lines of publishing something popular, than creating quality content. Quality is a relative term and means different things to different people, whereas we can easily define popularity.

Popular content, not quality content.

This is my experience over the 15 years I have been creating web pages to get links out of people. It’s that you need to be creating content that people really, really want to consume.

Thing is, most of those in my industry are more interested in paying a writer £15 to produce an article than £1,500.

Which is absolutely fantastic, because you are competing with people who only have enough juice to get up half of the hill. If you “get it”, you can dominate. That is the secret.

What’s also interesting is that the regular business person finds it hard to get to grasps with the aspects of content marketing, yes I know there are success stories out there, but relative to their whole sector they are tiny. The second secret is that this will always be the case.

There will always be opportunity for those who can create popular content

People in my industry, and I am one of them, are always babbling on about the latest technological advancement in blogging or social media. It becomes this huge wall of noise, and mostly it’s relatively unimportant as it’s not the technology that attracts. It’s the content

It’s the content

It’s one thing of course to define and understand this, another thing completely to implement it in a fashion that delivers an effective ROI. Which is where I tap my 15 years experience in the industry, I have seen and studied huge numbers of real time campaigns that have both succeeded and failed in this time.

A very, very small percentage of websites out there currently implement best practice content marketing, seo, blogging, social media etc. You may not think so because you spend all your time only consuming the good stuff and so think that is all what exists.

Local is getting very tasty

When you talk to the people who are experts in local online marketing, it gets very interesting. As it doesn’t seem to take that much investment for a local business to get a good ROI out of local online marketing. Obviously this is because of the geographical parameters being fixed, and that is not going to change.

Local requires a change in the mind set, but at its basic it is a similar methodology to the huge corporate beast.

Learning from the Tabloids

To the people who I personally coach in this area, I tell them to think like the Economist and create like the Sun, newspaper. To be a dealer and not an addict. To think about the reader as being hungry for a specific type of content and simply creating that content and promoting it.

It’s simplistic, but the complexity is in the cultural awareness and defining the thing that people want at that specific time. It’s impossible for the business person running a plumbing supplies website for example. They do not have time to sit on Reddit, Twitter or consume the latest from Huffpo or find that smaller story that fits their niche perfectly.

You need an experienced, culturally aware individual who understands what gets people to link and create social signals and how that folds in to the websites brand development.

Even I can only count about 30 – 40 people who can do this to the required level.  Most of them are highly creative, maverick social rebels types. Most freelance and wouldn’t be caught dead working the 9-5 in house or for an agency. Not that in-house, or agency people can’t do this, but it’s not for people who crave security or who can only operate if they have a defined working structure.

The creativity needs to flow in an environment that is unstable from a business POV or at least looks wonky when you look at it through a business lens.

If you find one of these creative geniuses who can connect all the different parts and implement, delivering and effective ROI, make sure you give them what they want to work on your stuff. Do not let them go over to the opposition, because it’s really hard to find these types of people as they are rare.

If they are aware of their value then you will need to pay premium rates, but if your business model is set up to soak up extra business then it’s worth it. I cannot tell you how many client servers I have crashed because of all the traffic I send clients.

 

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What can Don Draper teach us about Creating Content

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Yes, I was a Mad Men fan. Everything that needs to be said about the show has already been said, by people with larger expense accounts than mine.

Seeing a distilled wisdom presented in the infographic below, I realise how much it told us about the creative process and you can easily apply this to modern content creation. Not only that but I like how it takes apart the process.

The thing that resonates with me, is “get in the frame of mind”. Storytelling is a natural, innate skill that most humans have buried just beneath the surface. It’s not so much mechanical as it is printed in our DNA, we simply need to feel it.

Of course, language is mechanical and rule based, but too many rules stifle the creativity. If Don Draper taught us anything it was that if you never break the rules, you will never fulfil your creativity.

Tribal Content will help your SEO

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Tribal Content

You need to get tribal with your content marketing.

No Longer is SEO about building that one massive link

And as I have been talking about for a while now, it’s about building your Tribe.

The tribe is your main focus, not links. Links come because of the tribe.

The tribe builds the brand. A tribe like model train enthusiasts such as at Gomodeltrains have helped build the Hornby brand.

The tribe in many ways is the brand.

Look at my post on cognitiveSEO regarding how Shopping Comparison sites are using various tribes to build out their content marketing strategy.

Their keyword is the BRAND.

You get people to talk about your brand.

The conversations I am having with other SEOs is that this is what Google is looking at. We need more research on this and I am definitely going to be looking more into it.

Conclusion

Find out what your tribe is about.
Use other tribes to increase the power of your own tribe.

In the meantime, smoke a peace pipe and chill.

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