1.  Can you COPE? COPE, as in Create Once Publish Everywhere. Originally this phrase was simply a sell for clever publishing software. It’s now become shorthand for planning and creating content that can be published and re-used across many platforms, ideally cutting the cost of creation, production and (especially) translation and localisation. Lately we’ve heard it bandied about a lot in editorial meetings. Obviously if you are going to publish the same content (or elements of the same content) across many platforms, you’ll need to indulge in some pretty sophisticated content planning work first. If your company operates in a series of content silos, with one team ‘doing email’ and another responsible for ‘social’, you’ll struggle to get this off the ground. But if you can join your internal content owners up to develop a truly inclusive content strategy, then COPE may well prove efficient for you. On a practical level, for written content, this will usually mean coming up with highly adaptive modular copy formats that everyone signs off on and subscribes to. Cue stakeholder pistols at dawn…  2. Post-Panda SEO for peanuts? You can’t stuff your content with keywords any more. So what now? Those whose businesses stand or fall on their search results are out there trying to source content that will both keep customers engaged and satisfy a Google algorithm that rewards content quality. But how much are they willing to invest in it really? As far as we can see, the SEO copywriting market has polarised. While we can report a recent large influx of clients prepared to invest in quality copywriting, along with the editorial planning, format work and quality control that requires, we also notice a proliferation of extremely low-cost content providers. There will always be people prepared to churn out repurposed gobbledegook for buttons (£6.50 for 700 words, anyone?) and also those who insist that software could “seriously, like, replace Shakespeare”. But the truth is that anyone who is prepared to write you an on-brand, optimised, customer-facing, usable piece of content, mapped to your business objectives, legally compliant, sub-edited and proofread for a fiver, is either living in a country where that’s a day’s wages, living off a trust fund or has repurposed it from someone else’s work. Really good content costs. Sorry. 3. Micro-content fixes The rise of the copy nudge. The double-dip has forced companies to focus even more on the bottom line. So what content gives the greatest return on investment? Last year we started suggesting that budget-strapped content owners identified quick copy fixes with high ROI. After all, if your conversions increase as a result of your emails, then why not focus on a more compelling email sign-up, or on messages which dissuade customers from unsubscribing? Re-working a key call to action, a button, or split-testing the benefits on a product page is quick to do, requires minimal design input and can produce instant results. The king of all quick copy fixes is the online form. We have case studies showing up to a 35% increase in conversions from fixing the reassurance and instructional text in transactional areas. So maybe instead of that big ambitious content migration, you should simply ‘sweat the small stuff’ instead? 4.  Mobile, tablet and yet more mobile Making content mobile and tablet friendly is definitely what’s keeping content owners up at night. Last year, Jakob Nielsen revealed that content is twice as hard to understand on a mobile device. "When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores," he reported. So what is the answer? In short: write short, clear sentences. What’s the problem? This is very hard to do well, especially when summarising the terms and conditions of a home contents insurance policy. And what about tablet? While we’re still in learning mode as to what works best, certain content issues are already pretty clear. Overly-long lists and menus, information ‘too small to tap’ and serving up splash screens are all out. It appears you do need a distinct content approach for tablet after all… 5. Govern or be damned "Quality is doing it right when no one is looking," said Henry Ford. Unfortunately, all the best editorial set-ups rely on lots of people looking. Looking, editing, checking, and then looking again in fact. While most content teams weren’t initially set up with anything like this kind of QA process in place, we are seeing a rise in demand for content training and guidelines which support governance and help benchmark content quality. For many clients this is ensuring that (a) best-practice samples and execution guidelines exist for each content typeand (b) someone is making sure they actually get followed. For others, this means regular content auditing followed up by training and mentoring. It’s fantastic to finally see the old-school rigour of print publishing being embraced by the digital world. Better content should come of it. 6. Content ideas brainstorm boom The trend to embrace content marketing as a discipline in itself continues apace. But this is primarily an editorial endeavour. And great editorial depends on an ongoing flow of high-quality ideas. When the ideas run out, it’s all over. As original ideas can be hard to find (especially for the more complex B2B brands), the ability to brainstorm clever content ideas, formats and executions has become powerful content-marketing currency. What marketers are after is ‘ideas with legs’, workable series of content that can be replicated week after week without flagging. Content mapped to customer needs and interests that is truly useful, usable and builds long-tail relationships. In his post-Panda blog post  Google fellow Amit Singhal advises content owners to avoid ‘mass produced’ content that is ‘shallow in nature’, and to strive for high-quality ‘original content’. He urges us to produce articles full of ‘interesting information that is beyond obvious’ and remove low-quality content from our websites. And this is the biggest content trend of all: the culling of poor-quality content is finally beginning to happen. And we can’t wait to see the results...  

Get your content out there It’s all too easy to talk about content, but very few businesses actually get it written and published. If you want content success you need to have a plan and complete it. List what you want to write and when, and then stick to that plan. Even the simplest editorial calendar will help you achieve more. If Benjamin hadn’t finished the book, there wouldn’t have been a movie and his Zoo wouldn’t have had the publicity. Be honest, have you been failing to see your content through to completion? Tell a story with your content A story is often more interesting than a technical piece of writing. Yes, even if you’re in a tech industry. Great content is easy to follow, has a clear start, middle and end and most importantly takes the reader on a journey. The desired destination is a place that’s helpful, inspiring or interesting for the reader. Enjoy what you’re writing You need to have a passion for what you’re writing. There’s no point tasking an agency or a member of staff to write your content if they’re not passionate about it. You can always get your work edited after you’ve written it; I couldn’t survive without our editors. Just focus on sharing your passion and let someone else worry about dotting the i’s and crossing t’s. Make the most of your successes If you’re lucky enough to get a few bites, just like Benjamin Mee did — no pun intended — you’ll need to make the most of them. Sometimes your content can get you PR and you may even set out with that intention. If you get success, make the most of it. Dartmoor Zoo have the book featured on their homepage, they have additional web pages explaining their story, it’s available to purchase in the shop and Benjamin does as many interviews as he can. He was even smart enough to get pictures of movie star Matt Damon wearing a DZP (Dartmoor Zoological Park) t-shirt. Make your content work harder Writing the content is just the start. The key to success is getting it in front of your target audience. Share your content on your website, emails, social media, at events and anything else you can think of. You need to make it work hard. You should also think about how your content helps your SEO. Wherever possible optimise your content even if you’re just adding a few keyword rich links to other pages on your site. When you find something that works don’t be scared to do it again. Everyone loves a sequel right? Following up on interesting content can be very successful. Focus on your business but be creative There’s no point writing content about subjects that are completely unrelated to your business. Benjamin wrote about a Zoo, that makes sense right? However, you should also think about what interests your audience. A great example of this is the Skull Candy App. Skull Candy make headphones, so what kind of content do they have in their app? It’s not about headphones, it’s snow, surf and skate-related content. This is the content that interests their customers and more importantly their potential customers. Your business should provide content that helps your customers and prospects and encourages them to reach out and share it with other like-minded people. That’s successful content.

Can you tell me about the Digital Certificate in SEO?  Okay, that's a deceptively simple question with some big issues underlying it. Let's start by exploring just what SEO is and how, in an ideal world, we should approach training and professional development for new SEO practitioners.   Firstly, there IS a science of SEO,  we have a systematic understanding of how search engines work and what changes to websites and the links between them tend to increase and decrease organic search engine performance. Is our scientific understanding of SEO incomplete? Of course it is! Our scientific understanding of physics is incomplete but nobody ever suggests we shouldn't teach, or offer qualifications in physics because of it.   The science of SEO is, however, complex. Far too complex for the application of a few rules to guarantee success. This doesn't devalue the science, it simply means that professional development is required to discover how best to apply the scientific principles to a competitive business environment. Again, this is no different from any other science.   Part of this professional development involves learning how best to make decisions on the basis of incomplete knowledge (e.g. is Google's semantic 'entity and attribute mapping' influencing all topics in the search marketplace or just some) or incomplete data (e.g. what is the relative value of links from high and low authority domains). This is what some people refer to as the Art of SEO. I disagree. I think it has a lot more in common with engineering than art, the creation of fit-for-purpose solutions, at affordable cost and with sufficient optimisation to deliver competitive advantage.  New SEO practitioners, therefore, need two types of education and training:  They need to get up to speed with SEO knowledge, how search engines work, what factors influence search rank and how can we best use data to manage organic search performance?  They need to learn how to apply that knowledge in a practical and effective way, SEO professional development.  The Digital Certificate in SEO aims to deliver the core of SEO knowledge and help participants make their first strides down the path of SEO professional development. Why do you think there is a need for accreditation in this area?  It is really hard to tell the difference between people who know what they are doing in SEO from those that don't. There are enough 'smoke and mirrors' surrounding SEO that a little knowledge can go a long way in an interview.   This Digital Certificate in SEO is ground breaking by being the first reputable qualification on the subject in the UK. For the first people with the qualification, it will be highly distinctive - a badge of honour in SEO. As the qualification becomes established, I would like to think it becomes a filter for recruiters. Candidates without this type of qualification will need to prove they have the knowledge to underpin professional SEO practice in other ways.    Do the doubters and opponents of such qualifications have a point? I hear all sorts of grumbles and complaints about a Certificate in SEO not being any guarantee that they will be able to do the job. No, and it never claimed to be!  It sets out to give the knowledge and practical skills to underpin professional development.   Is this only for people new to SEO or is it also of value if you have worked as an SEO for years? This would be a great start for anyone new to SEO. I wish there had been a course like this 11 years ago when I started as an online consultant, it would have saved me years of struggle working out, the hard way, the difference between good and bad practice in SEO.   For people who have worked in SEO for some time, there is still huge value in the course.  Everyone needs professional development and the narrower your experience of SEO the greater the need to refresh your knowledge and skills.   I've been very fortunate in having such a wide experience of SEO, from setting the SEO strategy of major multi-national corporations and recruiting some of the top agencies for clients all the way to keyword analysis, copywriting and link building for start-ups.   I've had the opportunity to learn both from my own mistakes and from some of the best brains in the business. If, on the other hand, you have been a solo SEO within an organisation or have learned your trade mostly from a single specialist, this course could be your opportunity to see where the gaps in your knowledge lie and whether your understanding is quite as up to date as you hope it is. How will you help people to adapt to the constant changes to Google's algorithm and ranking factors? SEO is an arms race between the search engines trying to present results of most relevance to searchers and websites trying to achieve the greatest prominence for their own content.   Arms races are fought by changes to the rules keeping disruptive influences in check. For SEO practitioners, therefore, rulechanges are a fact of life. Where best-practice SEO gains advantage in relation to rule changes is alertness (knowing about changes as early as possible) and resilience (designing SEO tactics to minimise damage to organic search performance in the event of foreseeable rule-changes).   Both of these topics (alertness and resilience) will be covered in the Certificate.  What are the major challenges for SEOs at the moment? One of the biggest challenges for SEO professionals is that there are more challenges to be overcome. Search is diversifying (social search, local search, mobile search, shopping search) and the SEO data is becoming harder to interpret (SSL search and personalised search). Another challenge is that SEO is becoming increasingly competitive. As search marketing, overall, approaches maturity SEO features somewhere on every online marketer's to-do list. Where, a few years ago, it was sufficient to just be doing SEO, now, you need to be doing it better than your competitors and have the KPIs to prove it. How do you think SEO will change over the next few years?  The main change I expect is one that has been predicted for many years but which will, I believe, finally happen quite soon - this is semantic search.   Until recently, search engines have worked simply by keyword matching. Search for 'car insurance' and you get results containing the words car insurance. Synonyms were used for frequently searched terms (so car insurance would be matched to motor insurance in the UK and auto insurance in the USA) but beyond this search engines took keywords at face value.   Semantic search is different. It takes the keyword searched for, identifies the underlying meaning or meanings indicated by that keyword and returns the most meaningful results.   A search for Keane, for example would recognise this as the name of a band and offer results for that band's album (keyword='strangeland'), songs (keywords='silenced by the night'), videos (keywords='360 sessions') and tour dates / tickets (keyword='O2 academy').   Again, it will make SEO a more complex and challenging profession but one where in-depth knowledge will be of even greater competitive advantage than it is today. The Econsultancy Digital Certificate in SEO is suitable for those interested in having a solid practical understanding of SEO. Apply before Monday 21 May to start on 11 June 2012. 

Don’t try to be a jack of all trades There are so many different areas and disciplines in digital marketing, that it can be overwhelming if you feel you have to be knowledgeable about everything.  Instead, it's best to focus on a few areas that you are interested in and can be knowledgeable in. In my case, thanks to reading our reports written by people like Dr Mike Baxter, I focused on e-commerce and user experience, as well as being fascinated by SEO, email, mobile, social media and more.  This doesn't mean you should ignore all other topics (as Editor, I do have to know a little about affiliate marketing, online ad networks, etc) but it's better to specialise where possible, and it's more enjoyable to write about topics you care about.  Learn from the experts Fortunately this industry is full of talented people who know their stuff and are prepared to share what they have learned.  As well as my colleagues at Econsultancy, industry experts such as Craig Sullivan, Andrew Girdwood, Matty Curry and many more have been willing to lend their opinions and the odd quote when I've needed it.  In addition, I've learned loads from some of the excellent speakers at Econsultancy events such as the Future of Digital Marketing and JUMP. There are some other great conferences out there too, including - most recently - BrightonSEO.  Don’t rely on spellcheck I'm as guilty as anyone for making mistakes on blog posts, and in the early days I placed rather too much faith in spellcheckers. They're great for catching obvious mistakes, but there's no substitute for checking things yourself.  Even better, a second pair of eyes can find the mistakes you may have missed even after reading a few times. Check and doublecheck, then check some more. Keep it simple There are some complex concepts in digital marketing, and it would be easy to baffle readers with terminology like RTB, demand-side platforms, and so on.  Of course, some terminology is useful, and industry jargon is unavoidable to a certain degree, but I've always tried to avoid too much this and explain ideas to readers as clearly and simply as possible.  Avoid jargon  Although I'm guilty of using some at times, I really hate jargon, especially since it's normally possible to convey meaning in plain English.  We do have a list of banned words in our blog style guide, including such crimes against language as:  Leverage Synergies Learnings Holistic Actionable Kill them with fire.  The importance of headlines  Headlines are key when writing for the web. A good headllne can make the difference between hundreds and many thousands of page views, and can give you a real advantage in the search rankings.  A few key points for headline writing:  Use adjectives. This turns a dull headline into something that will catch the eye and get people clicking. For example, '25 brilliant examples of Facebook brand pages' is about the most popular post of the last year or so on this blog, and this is thanks to the combination of a popular topic, useful examples, and that adjective. Oh, and it's a list.   Lists work. Chris Lake explains this in more detail here, but list posts work because of a number of factors. They're easy to scan and read, people want to know what did and didn't make the list, and it forms the basis for debate in the comments.   Consider search. We try to make sure headlines will rank well and try to secure a spot in the rankings for phrases which relate to our reports and content, like 'checkout optimisation', 'SEO best practice' and so on. It makes sense to check Google first to see what people are searching for and, within reason, adapt your headlines accordingly.   Make headlines descriptive. You often have just one chance to convince people to click a headline as they see it in their Twitter feed, in the SERPs, or in a newsletter. The headline should describe what the article is about:   Keep the length of headlines down. Headlines need to be short enough to work as email subject lines, allow for easy retweeting, so they appear in full in search results, and so on. We have a 65 character rule for headlines, which is the perfect length.  Internal linking Internal linking is very important, especially if, as on Econsultancy, you have an archive of useful content.  It's useful for readers. If someone has come to your site attracted by an article on a particular topic, then it makes sense that they may want to read related content, so give them some ideas for further reading. It may be that you have written a news article on a topic which you have covered in more detail previously. Internal links reduce bounce rates. If people arrive at an article and you give them some related content and somewhere else to go once they have read it, then it gives them a reason to stay on the site a little longer. For us, we not only want to show visitors our other posts, but also for them to see our reports, details of events, training and so on.   It helps Google to crawl your site, as links are a great way to help Googlebot through your site. Here's Matt Cutts on the subject.   They can help you to make a point. For example, if I'm writing about checkout optimisation, and I want to refer to the reasons customers bail out of purchases, then I can link to a post like this one. Normally I'd use better anchor text but that's another story...  They send traffic to older posts. A decent chunk of our blog traffic is generated by archive posts, and now and again older articles do the rounds on Twitter, as someone discovers them via search or a link from a newer article and decides to share them.   It helps you to rank for certain keywords. You can use anchor text contain a key phrase you'd like to rank for when linking to older posts. For example, I can link to an interview with the ICO using the keyphrase EU cookie law in the hope that this will help bump it up from position 18 in Google.  Create readable content  Even if they have been enticed to your post by the title and subject matter, readers can still be deterred if the article is badly formatted.  Huge swathes of text with huge paragraphs, little formatting, and no images would be enough to make most readers bail.  Instead, you need to break up blocks of text with headings and sub-headings, use short paragraphs, highlight key points and stats, and use images and charts, both to illustrate the points you are making, but also to make the article easier to read.  For example, this post on how marketers can target tablet users is almost 3,000 words, a bit on the long side for a blog post. To counter this, I've used headers, sub-headers, lists, charts and highlighting to make it seem less of an effort to read it:    Original content works best There are thousands of marketing blogs out there, and lots of them are just writing the same articles, which are often straight write ups of the same press releases which reached my inbox.  This is not to say there's no value in press releases, or that we never just write about a survey or a piece of news we've seen, as these posts can be useful sometimes.  However, the best content, and that which is most popular on the blog, and keeps traffic coming in long after being published, is that which is original.  If you look at the 25 most popular posts from this blog last year, you'll see a mixture of curated lists (top ten e-commerce infographics etc), great stats, and original posts full of useful tips, such as Kelvin Newman's Ultimate guide to the Facebook algorithm. Link to other bloggers  Of course, you want to promote your own content, but it's also important to link to other bloggers, to give credit where it's due, and to share some of that link juice. In return, you are far more likely to get links back from other sites. It also allows you to debate issues and bounce ideas off each other. For example, while looking for more reasons to link internally for this article (I could only think of four) I found this great post full of blogging tips on SEOMoz. Do lots of reading I have to write a certain number of posts and reports, but it's vital that you keep some time aside just to read and digest as much information as you can.  When I started, I worked my way through Econsultancy's best practice guides, but you also learn a lot by reading other bloggers.  For example, as someone who likes to write about e-commerce and user experience, sites like Smashing Magazine, UX Booth and Get Elastic's blog are fantastic resources for inspiration and insight.  Dealing with the trolls Fortunately, though we do get plenty of comment spam, we don't get too many trolls on this blog. This is how to deal with them: Listen to feedback I love to hear feedback, good and bad, on blog posts. Well, if I'm honest, good is much better, but you should learn from both.  This helps you to avoid making the same mistakes again and again, and helps you improve as a writer.   Don’t blog for the sake of it This is a tricky one. Some days you just have fewer ideas for blog posts than others and you're tempted to write anything just to get something up on the site.  Far better to wait until you have something better to write about, and to make a note of the ideas you have when you're in the mood, so you have a reserve to fall back on.  It’s about quality not quantity It's very important to keep the articles coming to give people a reason to keep checking your blog, and to give Google's spiders some fresh content to crawl, but this shouldn't be at the expense of quality.  I'd rather see one or two detailed and insightful posts than a bunch of quick articles published just to keep the numbers up.   The value of social media  Social media is massively important for bloggers in three ways:  Getting ideas for new posts.  Encouraging debate around your blog posts.  Promoting your content.  To take Twitter as an example, I get plenty of ideas for posts from the people I follow sharing news, stats, and ideas, while I can always ask a question or two and get some useful background for posts.  We also promote posts on social media, and a good deal of our blog traffic comes from social sites.  The importance of analytics for blogging It's not always about numbers for us, if we have just a few hundred people view a post, but a decent proportion then go on and download a report, then this can be more valuable than getting 1,000 retweets and buckets of page views. However, we do like to know what works and what doesn't, and looking at the figures from analytics and learning the lessons is important.  For example, the stats below show a variety of bounce rates and time spent on site. The post on Zeebox and Dancing on Ice brought the traffic in thanks to people searching for news about the ITV show, but the bounce rate was 97.5%, meaning that these people probably weren't looking to visit an internet marketing blog.  Timing is everything The time and day you publlsh a post can make a big difference, and this is something we try to learn from. Generally speaking, posts will do better for us when published late in the morning and midweek, which is partly why this post has been published at 12pm on a Tuesday.  Different posts will work well at different times though, so we'll publish something we think is of value to UK and US users a little later for maximum exposure.  It's also why we'll publish lighter posts, such as this one showing 10 easter eggs hidden on websites, on a Friday when people are thinking of the weekend.   Comment on your own posts I like to see comments on our posts. If nothing else, it reassures you that something is actually reading them.  If you can get a good debate going, as on this post on the 'cookie law', then it means people are coming back to check replies to their own comments, they're more likely to be tweeting about it, and you can learn something from the comments people leave.  You can help to encourage this by joining in, answering questions and asking some of your own.  The value of timesaving tools and apps This is worthy of a post in its own right, so I'll just mention a few, but there are plenty of tools out there that make my job much easier.   Screenshot tools such as imgur are great, especially for reviewing websites. Twitter Search, for all its faults, can be very handy for real-time research.  Flickr Creative Commons is great for sourcing images.  Q&A sites like Quora or LinkedIn answers are great for finding elusive stats and case studies.  If you're interested, here are the other 1,999 articles if you have a spare month or two...

You've recently come out with your first book, Optimize. Why did you decide to write it and why now? I've resisted writing a book as I have a popular blog. We've been around 8 years and have 50,000 subscribers and it was achieving the kind of objectives that a book would have. But then I started to think a bit more about the process. I already had a channel with my blog but after talking to other authors, I thought writing a book would focus and challenge me to not only be factual but educational and entertaining at the same time. Really it was the right time and the right moment. I was at the BlogWorld conference and saw that Wiley was publishing all the good books on marketing. After a year of talking to me about writing a book for them, I decided to go for it. There is something about having that tangible book. I think I'm a little bit smarter by going through the writing process. It has helped me organize my thoughts in a different way and it has given me another platform to bring together my experience of 15 years in marketing. But what has really blown my mind is the number of people who have wanted to help promote it. They're coming to me in fact. Your book is about integrating SEO, social media and content marketing. Why do you think businesses aren't already doing this?  The integration angle has a couple of different perspectives. First of all, why are all these three elements not being used together in a marketing context? Well, the disciplines are divergent. In SEO, they've jumped on the content marketing bandwagon in response to the changes that came with the Penguin and Panda updates that Google put in place to bring good content to the forefront. But their approach is about the practicalities, such as adding more web pages that have more than 200 words. But content creators use content to guide readers through the sales cycle so the content is a lot more intentional. It's not just a hook in the water but it's a tour guide.  As for social media, SEO thinks social is a great distribution channel that will help to get more links while those in social media want to grow the network and build communities. This aspect of cross purposes is why integration may not be happening yet.  Some of it also has to do who is putting the money in. Content is often treated as just a subordinate to marketing and PR. But why wouldn't I in marketing have a process where I understand customers and be aware of what they need (to create better content for them) and keep them as a customer and maybe even turn them into an evangelist? We have to consider to what extent will search bring our target customers to our content. To what extent will social do that? More and more companies will go to this integrated approach in time.  Right now SEO is about rankings and traffic. Content folks think about press releases and blog posts, and how to get them out. Social is thinking about engagement. The main departments that produce content are often seen as HR, PR, marketing/sales and customer service. If we thought about SEO across content, we could get our social content seeded further or we could optimize job listings to further help HR find suitable candidates. One of the main content areas often neglected is customer service. A customer will probably first type an error into Google. So you should make sure support information is available through search or social using those key words. These are not revenue generators. But in the case of customer service, you are making the self serve option easier instead of tying up call centers. In the long view, this will save your company money. People search for all sorts of reasons and if you apply this holistically in your organization and make it part of content production, then you can extend your reach. Every piece of content is now a hook in the water. A job listing may not be a sale but it can help increase your search rankings overall. It's a pretty valuable thing. I think social shares and links are like electricity. The more that are happening, it's like adding more electricity to your site. It makes it shine for the search engines and for people in social networks and beyond. What are the first steps to starting the integration process? You first have to have a sense of what you want to achieve. What are your objectives? Sometimes people don't know what is possible. So you need to research. First start with an audit and competitive research. Look at search readiness, content and what your competition is doing to create a baseline. Further to auditing your company, also do research into your target audience and what their needs are. One of the first things to find out is the sense of what your customers want. You'll find out what the universe of the customer base is but then also look at how to segment them. What is the context that they would need your product? How would they use it, when would they want it, what would they get out of it? By answering those questions, you'll have an unbelievable content strategy. By understanding customer pain points and goals, you can define content. When content is defined, everything else can follow. It's also important to identify who the ideal customers are and who aren't. You don't want to optimize for those who will cost more money to get. By understanding customers, you can understand what is possible. What are some of the common mistakes companies make when developing an integration strategy? The main one is leading with SEO and tactics as opposed to leading with how you answer the question why. People tell stories about how they use specific tools or how they are planning on using it and have tactical questions about best practice. But once you start peeling back the onion, companies often realize they don't know why they want to use those tactics or tools. I'm all for experimentation. If you have a visually focused business (fabric or shoes, for example), it may make sense for you to try Pinterest. But you have to to know the difference between the tactical and the stuff you're just experimenting with. By not answering that why and understanding the connection between tactics and how that moves you toward your wider business goals, this will lead to costly mistakes.  One challenge organizations have is getting buy in. How can those teams in charge of social and search integrate themselves across the organization? This is one of the most common and important questions. People tend to see things in terms of what they already know. If an executive has a way in which to consume content or metrics, this is what they use to determine what works. So align an integrated initiative that affects those metrics and do things that will motivate them. If that senior staff member is all about revenue, work with sales and uncover low hanging fruit that can dramatically effect sales conversation. You could then get a lot more buy in to extend that approach. Emotions are also really powerful. Fear or embarrassment are not my favorites to use. But if you go in and say "Look at this gap, it's embarrassing and here is a plan to change that gap," it can be effective. I much prefer using opportunity: "Oh look what the competition are missing out on. Here is an opportunity for us." What are the metrics of success and how should teams measure this integrated approach? The main metrics are determined by key performance indicators (KPIs) and business outcomes. Business outcomes will be common across all the areas but KPIs have to be different.  SEO will most likely look at rankings, visits, and traffic from links while social look at engagement, links, citations, network size, and the rate of network growth. Content will look at syndication, propagation, and assigning value to content. A great benchmark measurement takes, for instance, the number of pages, the conversion rate from them and traffic. You can then calculate a measurement of what each new page will give depending on the type of content it contains. This will then enable you to do forecasting which is key.  You can overlay KPIs relevant to the different tactics you are using on top of key business outcomes over time. As these are all content producing areas that have different metrics and different audiences, this approach will help you improve the  effectiveness of what you are already doing. What's your top tip for search, social and content teams to apply? There is a lot of competition for people's time. It's not just companies that are vying for your customers attention but you're also competing against user generated content. Most of all you need empathy with customers and how they interact with content. I usually think of this happening in three steps: 1) Discovery: Understanding how your customers understand and interact with content  2) Consumption: Knowing what their preferences for content consumption are 3) Sharing: Comprehend what will lead them to action (i.e. to purchase or to share) and build your system to allow for this. One person who engages with your content may not be a purchaser but it could be shared with someone who does what to buy.   Further info: As the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, Odden has had 14 years of internet marketing under his belt specializing in the implementation of content, search, email and social media marketing. When not blogging on TopRank, he writes a column called “Social Media Smarts” for ClickZ.  If you are interested in reading more about how Lee Odden thinks we should integrate SEO, social media, and content, you can go to OptimizeBook.com for details on his new book.

This intensive two-day course is a great place to start your training. It gives marketers a complete overview of all the essential digital marketing disciplines, how they can work together in your marketing strategy and helps to highlight areas for further in-depth learning.

It’s got to be the most frustrating scenario for any self-respecting content professional. You get an intelligent content brief agreed. You work hard to commission or create an on-brand, usable, search-friendly piece of digital copy. It’s mapped to user insights. It’s written in the customers’ language. There are clear calls to action. It’s scannable at speed even on the smallest of screens. It meets your stringent QA standards. Then it gets circulated to stakeholders for sign-off and hey presto, their combined and often conflicting feedback transforms a potentially effective piece of content into almost comical corporate gobbledegook. Sooner or later the content developers even start churning this out themselves as it’s ‘easier to get signed off’. Feedback rounds are rarely a joyful experience for stakeholders either. After all, checking and approving digital content is a whole new workstream that is often bolted on to the job spec of people who were already overloaded. It’s time consuming, difficult, usually required to tight deadlines and if they get it wrong, they might well get it in the neck. Content by committee never works. That’s why all the best print publishers operate a strict editorial hierarchy.  And yet I know that for many organisations, stripping out agonising rounds of stakeholder input is an impossible dream. So here are five tips for managing content feedback rounds. Limit stakeholders in number Three’s a crowd, five’s a crush. Any more than five is one of those cooks-and-broth-type situations in the making. You have to get those numbers down as far as possible, so challenge everyone’s true value to the project before you begin. Limit stakeholders in scope One stakeholder, one set of feedback. One for product, one for brand or marketing, one for legal and compliance, one for digital... If there are multiple stakeholders wanting to feedback on one area, then make them collate their feedback and deliver it to you as one (after all they should be in agreement and if they aren’t, it’s not your problem). And by the way, some search people like us to believe SEO is a dark art and requires its own feedback stream. Nah. Instead, get a clear SEO brief up front and make sure the person in charge of digital sign-off can check it’s been followed. Create an order of priority to feedback Does brand tone of voice trump product manager feedback? Does usability trump marketing? Does compliance trump them all? The time to have this argument is prior to any content being created, at your initial stakeholder briefing, when you’re agreeing how the project should be run and managed. What do you mean, you don’t have a stakeholder briefing? Let stakeholders in on your secrets You can’t blame a person whose job it is to stop your company being sued not appreciating why you’ve rewritten their verbose T&Cs as a bullet-pointed list. Give them a chance. We’ve recently started running short web copywriting sessions for content stakeholders prior to project kick-offs. Early indicators are that it can cut the feedback down dramatically. Permit (encourage) people to give very little or no feedback at all It’s an eternal truth that if you ask someone for feedback, they won’t feel they’ve done their job until they give you some. So they’ll find something to say.And then you’ll have to act on this. Stop setting yourself up for feedback failure. If you‘ve done your job well as an editor, got a good brief and followed it, subbed and proofed and checked the work, then really, feedback should be minimal. Take back editorial control and stop passing the work around like a hot potato. Communicate confidently with your stakeholders saying: "Here’s that piece of content for approval. I think it’s very strong and meets the brief for x, y and z reasons, so I hope you’ll feel able to sign off on it with limited or no amendments". And remind each stakeholder what the scope of their feedback should be (eg ‘please give me only product-related feedback as so-and-so is signing off for brand tone of voice’). You might be surprised how well this goes down and how much everyone actually enjoys the release from the nine circles of feedback hell.  

The most important question to ask: does your web site work for the press and analysts that visit it? I have been involved with press and media relations for over 25 years – wearing both hats, and have seen and experienced far too many sites that did not work and were extremely frustrating.  How much time and money does your company spend to promote your web site, your business, service and products to the media, magazines, blogs and industry trades? It is all wasted if you do not have an easy to find and easy to use pressroom and/or press page. So what are the top six steps to have an effective online press room? 1. Make your press room easy to find This is essential. Good web site designs are easy to navigate. Don't hide your press page or press room four or five clicks away from your homepage. If possible, put a link to it from the front page – labeling it as News, Press or even Press Room. Many companies hide it one layer down under the company info or “more about us” tabs. That's not as good a choice but can be OK. In addition, for good SEO results, make the page name and file name logical and searchable. Don't use odd symbols, letters and numbers in the file name or page title. Use a name that makes sense like www.yourdomain.com/pressroom and list it in your sitemap. Your web site designer or website management software may give you grief but a simple, descriptive title and file name is always best. 2. Press release index Obviously you want to include links to your press releases and announcements. However, make sure the list is up to date. I have worked for companies where the last three or four months of press releases had not yet been posted. Leave the dates on the releases so that a visiting writer has an idea of how fresh your news is. I have heard marketing folk justify not posting the releases because they don’t want the competition having access to them. If you have distributed the press releases and got some coverage, which is the whole point of PR, those releases and info should be available on the web anyhow. Some key things not to do: Don’t require an editor to fill out a contact form to retrieve your press releases. Not only does an editor not have the time for that, they will probably just give you a fake name and phone number anyhow.  Don’t post your press releases only as locked PDFs. Editors and writers need to be to easily cut and past from your press releases, data sheets and other online documents. Post them as straight text on the web page. You can provide a pdf download as well but don’t force editors to download a pdf before they can read it. They have to be able to read it online.  In the same vein, do not convert your text content into jpgs and images. Instead, make it easy for the press to access and “borrow” your content in order to promote your products and services. Not only does it make it easier for writers, it also makes your site a lot more search friendly, which means better search results. Plus text is easily searchable while images are not. Finally, you may have heard of the “Long Tail” as applied to products.This applies to press releases as well. Unless there is a compelling reason to remove them, keep all your old press releases up on your site and available via a press release archive. Also, as another reason to keep those old releases online, the more press releases and the more valuable content on your web site, the better SEO you will get for your site. And, if you have changed PR companies or PR contacts over the years, make sure that the PR contact information on the old press releases is current. 3. PR Contacts You HAVE to have PR contact info. It should be easily found on your press room page. If you operate in various regions, i.e. US, EMEA, APAC, then list the press contacts for each area. If possible, list local phone numbers for each region. If your organization is very large with many divisions and product areas, you may want to have a separate PR contact page to make it easy for a writer to find the appropriate contact. This is important. Make sure that there is someone available to answer the emails or to pick up the phone for the press contact.  A quick response to an inquiry is essential. I have seen tech companies that list a press contact email or phone number which goes to a digital box somewhere that only gets checked once every other week or so. For good PR, you need to be responsive. If an editor or writer calls, you should be able to get back to them within 24 hours or less, and if it's during work hours, responses should ideally be within an hour. Most importantly, if the editor asks for some info or a document that is NOT readily available, respond back, confirm that you got the inquiry and tell them that you are working on it and give them a time frame for when you'll get back. Don’t leave them wondering if anyone is at home. This is especially important for companies that use a pr@domain.com address on their web site.As part of the contact area, and maybe on other pages as well, provide a RSS link and News Links so that the editors can sign up and get automatic updates to the press room and/or to recent press releases. Also provide a Public Relations List contact form to enable editors, writers, analysts to easily sign up to receive updates and new press releases. A good example of a top press room is on the Quality Claims Management site.  Simple in design, the link to the News & Resources page is on the top of their home page. The press page includes a list of recent press releases as well as links to various news articles, videos and regulatory updates. Especially effective is the Links for Editors button that provides short background, the press contact, executive bios, and downloadable photos and logos. 4. Photos, images and video Editors and writers love photos and images. Why do so many tech web sites make it so difficult to find and download logos, product images and charts to use in an article? If your press releases are product oriented, include a small thumbnail that links to a choice of product images of various sizes and angles. Have small gifs or jpgs for web and blog use. Have a large 300 dpi image for print purposes. If you have copyright worries, embed a small logo in the image.You may also want to create and maintain a standalone image library that includes company logos, company execs and managers, graphics and charts, in addition to product shots. Most tech editors prefer standalone shots of the product – without a person holding it or using it.Video is also becoming very important. If you are using video in your PR and marketing mix, post a small thumbnail with a good description with a link to the video. You can simply link to your video posted at YouTube or you can create and use a customized player that preserves your company's look and feel. Your video library can include webinars, podcasts, product demonstrations and b-roll, presentations and management speeches, and even commercials for your product. The writer might want to watch a commercial or a how to install it video. You never know. One of the best examples of a complete online press room is the Microsoft News Center site. Even though this is a big site that spans the world, their press page is very well thought out and easy to use. Almost everything a reporter could need is listed and is easily accessible including video clips and B-roll. 5. Background Information Your press room should also include links to white papers, company backgrounders and corporate information, organizational history, profiles of company leaders and management, a list of upcoming shows where the company will be exhibiting or is available for interviews, etc. If appropriate, include other technical documents, product descriptions, and data sheets. If you wish writers to try out, review and then write about your products and services, make it easy for them to find that info. Also include relevant user and reviewer guides for easy download.If you want to position yourself as THE thought leader in your industry, your company should create and post articles, blogs, and short columns about the latest trends, developments and standards that impact your industry sector. If you are in a highly technical space, you may want to create and link to your own wiki or a definition of terms important to your industry. Think how powerful it is when an editor cites your company as THE source for info about particular technology, product line or industry initiative?You can also include a listing of various industry and standards organizations that your company belongs to, as well as awards and recognition  6. Press Clips and Press Coverage Page As a PR professional and as a writer, I really like to see an archive of recent press coverage. As a PR pro, this vindicates the work done and demonstrates that the editorial community is picking up on the news. These press coverage lists can also be very useful to sales guys in the field to use as marketing collateral. “Check it out, XYZ Magazine is saying wonderful things about our company and solutions.” This helps the sales process. Your sales team will love you.For writers and editors, the list of press coverage demonstrates that other members of the community recognize the value of your company and its products and technologies. The press coverage page should include news articles written by third party editors and journalists, press release coverage, as well as white papers and articles that have been written by company representatives and then posted in important trade magazines. You don't need to list every online publication that posted a copy a copy of your press release. Instead, spotlight the publications and writers that have written something over and above what was said in the original release. When you post a press release to one of the wire services, it often gets picked up and posted by a number of sites, blogs and tweeters who simply copy it. You do not need to list each one of them. List the original wire URL and maybe one or two BIG NEWS sites that picked it up as well. Please do not copy a Google news search results list of press release pick ups to your online press room. Make it all work for you By creating an easy to access and easy to use online press room, your business will be able to more effectively leverage the work done by your PR and media relations group, as well as provide a modern outward looking face to the press. Don’t have a mystery site that ignores the needs of the world’s journalists.  Keep the press room updated – just don’t post the releases and press coverage and walk away. Make sure new press successes are added, new product information is uploaded and maybe most importantly, make sure that all editorial inquiries are handled promptly.

Content strategy became a key trend in 2011 and is on everyone's radar in 2012. As old digital platforms mature and many more emerge, content has finally found its place as a key differentiator for e-commerce and digital brand-building activities. This course will guide you through developing a content strategy and generating the content types, guidelines and editorial plans to support it.

Content strategy became a key trend in 2011 and is on everyone's radar in 2012. As old digital platforms mature and many more emerge, content has finally found its place as a key differentiator for e-commerce and digital brand-building activities. This course will guide you through developing a content strategy and generating the content types, guidelines and editorial plans to support it.