Nearly one-half of marketing executives (48%) now use content curation—the process of continually finding, organizing, and sharing relevant online content that caters to a specific audience—according to a survey from HiveFire. more

Did your marketing team slow down a bit during the dark days of January/February? If so, they probably weren't alone. Once peak marketing seasons ebb, "many companies stop their marketing activities with the rationale that they will spend on marketing during the next busy season," according to a Promo Direct ... more

A recent edition of "Which Test Won" recounts an A/B test in which DIYthemes, a template system for WordPress, invited visitors to sign up for email newsletters. Version A used the headline "Get Email Updates (it's free!)," and used social proof messaging to encourage registration: "Join 14,752 others and get ... more

Is duplicate content causing indexing issues for your site? In a recent post at the State of Search blog, Nichola Stott describes how multiple instances of similar pages, especially at the product level, are a common problem for larger sites. According to Stott, duplicate content doesn't necessarily mean that an exact ... more

It was an innocent mistake that had dramatic—and costly—consequences. Employees of Canadian copywriting company Webcopyplus believed that Web images without copyright notices were in the public domain. And, operating on that assumption, they used Google Images to source an unmarked scenic photo for a client's travel blog. Soon after publication, however, ... more

"Although content marketing is a widespread practice across industries and company sizes, B2B marketers recognize the need to improve the effectiveness of their efforts," Roy Young notes in a recent MarketingProfs article. Young offers key insights for B2B marketers from the new MarketingProfs report, What Works in 2011: Content Marketing, ... more

"The experts have apparently decided that content marketing is back for 2011," writes Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports. "The new (old) mantra is 'quality content.' And everyone should be producing it: publishers, retailers, service companies." If you're wondering what quality content is—and how it might differ from what you've ... more

"All content is not equal in relevance or usefulness to your prospects," writes Ardath Albee at Marketing Interactions. "The overwhelming amount of content available online generates a lot of clutter and noise that your prospects must sort through to find useful information that addresses their needs." That's why pageviews and ... more

Any successful B2B marketing strategy "involves the integration of email marketing," Maria Pergolino asserts in a post at the Marketo blog. Whether designed for lead generation or nurturing leads and repeat buyers, carefully crafted email campaigns and messages can still achieve optimal results, she notes. To help B2B marketers keep email as a ... more

Before you optimize your next piece of content, Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman have some advice. "Bust your content silos!" they write in their new book Content Rules. "Do you have a print newsletter? Do you produce a regular podcast? Run a version of a print article on the blog, ... more

One way to build trust is to position yourself as an authority on topics associated with your product or service. Blogging helps, but any blogger knows that expert blogging demands research, dedication of time, community management, consistent cross-marketing—and it can take months, even years, to gain an appreciative audience. So you say ... more

"In today's economic climate, content syndication is one of the lowest risk lead generation vehicles there is," writes Howard J. Sewell at The Point. "At our agency, the programs we negotiate for our clients are almost all performance-based," he says; that is, "they guarantee a minimum number of leads at ... more

Social media stories dominated the list of most popular marketing charts and articles in MarketingProfs in 2010. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Wikipedia, figured prominently in seven of the Top 10 articles, which also covered subjects such as email, mobile, marketing budgets, and content marketing. more

You've no doubt optimized your site and marketing materials for top keywords, but have you thought about the influence they can wield in less traditional ways? Consistently optimized messaging across all of your company content—from its name and description to your employees' titles to your site content—helps create an image ... more

Few things are more fun than learning about yourself, right? At least when the Net makes it easy. Consider the explosion of personality test apps on sites like Facebook or MySpace—or quizzes on their own hosted sites: You can learn what superhero you are, what your kissing style is, or what city ... more

You know online content should have a more conversational tone than other marketing materials. But remember that "informality" isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. "Conversational style has room for plenty of variation," says Rick Sloboda of Webcopyplus. "For example, a conversation with your banker will differ from a conversation with your spouse." To ... more

The forward to Harvey Mackay's bestselling Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive featured 15 solid pages of praise from VIPs like President Gerald Ford and the Reverend Billy Graham. "The kicker?" writes Hal Licino at MarketingProfs. "By the time the reader read those 15 pages, they were so ... more

When we write for company blogs, we tend to focus on timely information that's meant to be read sooner rather than later. But Rohit Bhargava suggests the creation of "content time bombs" that linger in your archive, just waiting for someone to find them and set them off. "Content Time Bombs ... more

In a recent post at Rick Short's B2B Marcom Blog, Short recounts receiving two useless B2B email promotions. The first never explained what the writer's business actually did; the second repeatedly used an acronym Short simply couldn't identify. He deleted the first, and sent a cryptic reply to the writer ... more

Whether you send e-newsletters on a weekly or monthly basis, it's a great way to connect with your customers and achieve a number of diverse goals. But is your newsletter as effective as it could be? Consider this advice from Damian Davila, writing at the Idaconcpts blog, on creating e-news that ... more

In a post at Email Marketing Reports, Mark Brownlow presents a screenshot that looks like a page from a 19th-century novel: lengthy paragraphs filled with sentences of uniform length. That, he notes emphatically, is not how your email messages should look. "In fact, you wouldn't read the words if that was ... more

At least once a day, writes Joe Pulizzi at the Junta 42 blog, he receives an email asking how much content marketing (print and online) should cost. The short answer: It depends. "Look at it this way," he says. "I can pay $12 dollars to play eighteen holes of golf ... more

According to Lee Odden, the SEO concept of "fresh content" has been distorted by a convoluted game of telephone—one person giving information to the next, each with his or her own interpretation, until the final person receives a definition quite unlike the original. "I'm sure the genesis was something like: Someone ... more

When it comes to SEO, writes Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing, "Publishers have it easy: Make some changes, site- or server-wide, and you're a hero." This isn't quite the case, though, for writers and editors. "Editorial staff," he continues, "have to apply sound SEO and online writing practices to every ... more

"Marketing doesn't fully understand how buyers use content," warns Paul McKeon in a Pro article at MarketingProfs. "B2B marketing is no longer just in the business of brand management and lead generation," he states. "It must serve a huge demand for content that spans buyers' needs, from pre-awareness to post-sale." ... more