Stefan Wolpers's List: Content

By far, the most popular post we have ever published at the Content Marketing Institute is 10 Must-Have Templates for Content Marketers. Though this post is almost two years old, our readers still seem to clamor for this type of information and advice. To that end, we wanted to provide a refresher on the most popular templates and checklists shared by the CMI team and our guest contributors. Some of these are “oldies but goodies” that we included in the first list, and others are new. All are intended to simplify some part of the content marketing process — and all can be customized to your particular needs.

You can’t escape having a content style guide for very long. While it’s easy to share standards between one or two content marketers, it’s very hard to scale without a system in place. If your organization is among the 45% of companies with plans to expand their budget for content marketing and inbound practices in 2013, there’s no better time than the present to start brainstorming a style guide for blogging:

In June, EContent announced it was accepting votes for a new list recognizing the best and brightest in the content marketing industry. We asked for your nominations, and you obliged. With just under a week left in the nominating process, we had received 123 submissions and 53 nominees via Twitter. By the time the nomination process finally closed we had received several more names. Now, your votes have been counted, sorted through, and double-checked.  

Altimeter continues our coverage on Content Marketing by Rebecca Lieb (who’s working in conjunction with me on this post and coverage), researcher Jessica Groopman and our co-authored report on Converged Media (Paid, Owned, and Earned). In our research reports, we both identified the market pains, definitions, workflows, and solutions brands are and want to achieve. As part of this ongoing coverage to look at all the elements of the people, process, and technology,

Content Discovery is a really important part to Social Media Marketing.  You need to find and share great content which sometimes includes your own!
But finding great content is so time consuming and time is a luxury we cannot afford!
In this article we discuss 3 very useful tools we use on a daily basis that helps us find great content worth sharing.

Companies are defined today by their unique story. Anyone can sell a product but why buy that product over another? Creating radio spots and billboard ads are not enough in today’s consumer centric marketplace to connect with customers, it’s content that helps craft a story about your business, drive home your unique value and inform potential customers why they should buy your product or service over others.

I can't tell you how many times people have asked me, "How the heck does HubSpot crank out such a high volume of content?!" Well, content lovers, today I'd like to share some of our content tips and secrets with you, so you too can create a well-oiled content machine.
First things first: To "do" inbound marketing, you also need to "do" content. Be careful here. Content is not your entire inbound marketing strategy. Yes, content is a vital, irrefutable part -- but so is social media, SEO, email marketing, lead nurturing, and so on.

With recent comments by Matt Cutts and the ongoing need for links, infographics have continued to be a trending topic. This prompted me to want to dig into a large amount of infographic sites, several admittedly taken from one of Paddy Moogan’s extremely resourceful posts.

Can we please come up with some better terminology for the concept of 'link bait,' already? It just sounds so ... slimy. For me, it conjures up thoughts of those evil bait-and-switch advertising schemes.
But I'm going to say it loud and proud -- "Not all link bait is bad!" So while it may get a bad rap as low-quality, lazy, or misleading content, I'll admit that I support the creation of an awesome, white-hat link bait post from time to time. And heck ... so does Google's own Matt Cutts himself!

In our experience, we’ve discovered that we usually have to ease our clients into the realities of organic web marketing. They can get behind the groundwork of SEO easily enough; user experience and integrating the right keywords: these are not totally alien concepts to anyone who’s been around the marketing scene for more than three seconds.
But when we get into the truth of how much time and effort goes into the actual work of raising their web visibility--that it’s an ongoing process that will require them to generate content and build relationships--we often see some reluctance.
To combat that reluctance, we’ve put a lot of thought into how we conduct and explain our particular version of content marketing.

In-depth Guide To Content Creation [With Infographic]

A lot of people struggle when it comes to coming up with good content ideas for their blog posts. Obviously they all can’t be winners, but everyone feels the pressure to come up with something worthwhile, meaningful, and engaging. At the end of the day, that’s what blogging is all about, right? I, too, have been in the hot seat with a mind running on empty, and I’ve developed a few easy tricks to help me come up with good content.

9 More Content Development Ideas For Increased Visibility

The Ark is that outstanding content someone has produced and that no other will be able to see again, because it is forgotten and hidden between gazillions of other contents.




Apart from the gigantic volume of pages present in the Internet, for a long time, search spam has been making the discovery of reliable sources difficult; and – let's be honest – Social Media has enhanced this issue, because it added even more noise and dispersion. Actually, as Mitchel Kapor said once, getting information off the Internet is like having a drink from a fire hydrant.

Ah, the wonderfully overused statement that makes me want to throw my monitor at the wall and then hang my head in shame because it’s actually true. I feel like I can safely assume that we can all agree on the increasing importance of awesome content. Recently, it seems like everyone is championing for companies to evolve the way in which they approach creating content. (Ie. Coca-Cola’s 2020 content strategy. If you haven’t watched these videos, I’d highly recommend investing 20 minutes in order to see how big brands are changing the way they think about a cohesive marketing strategy) Here in the Distilled NYC office, I’m surrounded by Tom Critchlow and John Doherty who are single handedly pushing companies to have inspired content and changing marketers mindsets.