Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
Introduction
Today, every company has become a de facto publisher, creating content that's valued by those they want
cultivate a base of fans, arouse passion for your products or services, and, ultimately, ignite your business.
This book demystifies the publishing process and shares the secrets of creating remarkable blogs, podcasts, webinars, e-books, and other web content that will attract would-be customers to you.
We're in the clarity business, simplifying people's convoluted ideas
In business, people love to complicate concepts with their own lexicons. So we wind up with text that tends to obfuscate rather than illuminate or with copy that feels off-putting instead of friendly.
Chapter 1: The Case for Content
It's both efficient and increasingly imperative that companies create online content as a cornerstone of their marketing—
Creating brand awareness through buying mass media or begging some attention from the newspapers, magazines, or other media that cover your market is selling your brand short.
Potential customers are going online to search for information about the stuff you sell:
Everyone is the media. Everyone is a publisher.
Businesses can reach their customers directly with relatively little cost.
Content is a broad term that refers to anything created and uploaded to a website: the words, images, tools, and other things that reside there.
Creating and sharing relevant, valuable information that attracts people to you and creates trust, credibility, and authority
converts visitors and browsers into buyers.
frequent and regular contact builds a relationship,"
Content drives conversations. Conversation engages your customers.
stir up interest, further engagement, and invite connection.
Chapter 2: The Content Rules
[Your content must be ] concise and easy-to-share
Chapter 3: Insight Inspires Originality >
What do you want the content to achieve?
How will you measure their behavior and define the success of [your content]
Anticipate and meet their needs [as] a trusted source of information they need, and not as someone who just wants to sell them stuff.
[Create a] publishing schedule
Foster your community and give them a reason to tell others about you
The more unique pieces of content combined with the more links you have to your site from other websites (inbound links), the higher your search ranking will be.
Every time someone shares a link to your site in some fashion (by blogging about you or sharing a link on Twitter, for example), it boosts your search ranking.
Chapter 4: Who Are You?
Your brand is simply who people think you are.
Consider Pawn Stars, a popular show on the History Channel, and compare it with Antiques Roadshow, which
airs on PBS. Both shows are essentially the same: appraising antiques, memorabilia, Americana, and the like. But the approaches are vastly different, and so are the brands: Pawn Stars is colorfully gritty and blunt; Antiques Roadshow is highbrow and well spoken. Which brings us to our next point handily. . . Differentiate from the pack of bland.
Take a stand. Voice isn't just about how you write; it's also about the perspective you bring.
By taking a stand, we are stimulating conversation.
capture what's real about your product or service.
Chapter 5: Reimagine; Don't Recycle > Page 55
View all of the pieces of content you plan to create as expressions of a single bigger idea.
[With] the rise of the social web, the lines between marketing, public relations, and customer service are blurring.
Creating a system— wrapping it around a regular schedule or so-called editorial calendar— can make its creation a whole lot more manageable, too.
Rather than repurposing, try reimagining.
Chapter 6: Share or Solve; Don't Shill
"No one cares about your products or services," says Brian Kardon, former head of marketing at Eloqua, a marketing services company based in Vienna, Virginia. Far better, he says, is for companies "to start viewing themselves as sources of information." Such altruism, he adds, pays you back.
[Show readers how your brad] adds value to the lives of your customers, eases their troubles, and meets their needs.
Express the gist of a piece of content in a single sentence.
Be specific enough to be believable and universal enough to be relevant.
Passion is contagious.
Arouse curiosity or surprise your readers.
If you want to remain relevant and top of mind, you need to find a way to converse much more frequently than only when you have big news.
Configure your blog to work with Flickr so that you can upload photos from industry events, meetups, or other gatherings.
"People love how-to posts, and they are frequently shared
Once you start highlighting your audience members, you might spark more participation by others who hope that they too might get a spotlight shone on them.
something you've written about in the past could be updated and become useful again.
Invite guests
It's okay to compliment competitors who create something you find well done. Praise them for creating
Shine a spotlight on the people who make your company what it is.
Leave stuff undone. Every piece of content you create doesn't have to be perfectly crafted, nicely argued, or well said. In fact, sometimes it's okay to look a little untidy— it's downright preferable.
[According to a]content strategy consultancy in Minneapolis. "It's a people problem. People are creating content in silos. They're launching content and then forgetting about it. They're publishing content online without any real, measurable objective."
"That lack of content ownership— accompanied by a lack of content policies or guidelines— effectively ends up landing organizations in a Wild, Wild West of content."
The chief content officer might act more as a functional editor, producing content himself or herself as well as working directly with internal or outside contributing writers.
Convey your company's true story in a compelling way,
Uncovering the stories about your brand and how your customers are using it; narrating them in a human, accessible way; and sparking conversation about your company, its customers, or its employees.
Someone who creates content for the love of it will likely have the necessary passion to do the same for your company.
They build and nurture relationships, and they know how to use these relationships to spread their own content, without abusing them." In other words, look for folks who are social butterflies
Sourcing content from elsewhere is another way to augment or feed your content machine.
Content curation can fit into an organization's content strategy nicely. By finding, filtering, and sharing the timeliest, most relevant, and most stimulating online content, curation can [provide a great deal,]... But Don't rely exclusively on either handpicked or automated content curation services to feed your own hungry belly.
Ultimately, you'll want to produce your own original content rather than adopt a "what she said" content strategy.
The MarketingProfs Daily Fix group blog (www.mpdailyfix.com), which publishes marketing commentary from a wide variety of industry contributors, is an example of a cocreated site.
Cocreating content can allow you to tap into a built-in audience and gain some high-profile, unique perspectives.
[User created content is content] produced by your customers or by people who visit your site, as opposed to professional writers, content creators, or production companies.
Be prepared for the undesirable.
Licensed content is content that's licensed from content producers— sometimes for a fee, or sometimes in exchange for attribution (see AskPatty.com,
But licensed content might be an option if you want to create an exhaustive, deep library of online information for your audience.
Chapter 7: Stoke the Campfire
The moment you stop publishing is the moment you start losing your community. "If you aren't out there consistently, you'll get left behind," says Frank Days, director of social media for Novell.