Month: January 2016

3 Resources to Help Invigorate Your Standard Content Routine

You’re probably familiar with “art imitating life” and “life imitating art.” I know I am.
We can apply this idea to content marketing, as well.
Your content may imitate life if it’s engaging, entertaining, and useful. You take recognizable, relatable elements from life and infuse them into your content to connect with your audience members’ worldviews.
But how can life imitate your content?
Well, winning content marketing is often the product of trying different experiments to see what works best for your message and your business. These experiments help you get to know your audience better and may help you uncover a new, more effective content strategy.
You see this in life when you try a new activity and broaden your outlook of what you thought was possible.
Today, we’re going to focus on techniques that could expand the types of content you offer your audience. This week’s Copyblogger Collection is a series of three handpicked articles that will show you:

How to use content marketing to sell your creative work
How to take your Pinterest marketing to the next level
How to determine if you should publish a curated email newsletter

As you work your way through the material below, think of the following lessons as a mini content creation course.

A Simple Content Marketing Strategy for Creative Folks

In A Simple Content Marketing Strategy for Creative Folks, Rafal Tomal admits that he promoted his business the wrong way for a long time.
Just like many designers and artists, he built a portfolio and posted his

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Introducing The Digital CMO: Corporate Marketing for Those Who Live in the Future

It was somewhere in the middle of a conversation with Brian Clark at one of Content Marketing World’s parties when it all became clear to me:
While Rainmaker.FM has tremendous educational and inspirational assets for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and most general marketers, there’s no podcast that caters to the corporate marketer.
That’s not just true on Rainmaker.FM. In general, there isn’t a lot of blogging and podcasting in the corporate marketing space — whether that’s because of a gag order from the legal department or the time it takes to wrangle multiple agencies and channels.
But corporate marketers need help too.
Corporate content marketing strategies that work
In my day job, I run Speakeasy, a content marketing, social media, and promotions agency. Every day I talk with corporate marketers whose challenges and opportunities multiply with every new technique and channel available to them.
Whether it’s programmatic advertising; synthesizing content, SEO, and conversion; attribution modeling; or just getting all seven of their specialist agencies marching in the same general direction — today’s corporate marketer needs a lot of information and doesn’t necessarily have time to seek it out or consume it.
The corner office, or even the cube with a little window, can be a lonely place.
Engage with top corporate marketers
On The Digital CMO we’re going to make it a little less lonely by helping you engage with top corporate marketers in a wide variety of B2C and B2B companies.
We’ll celebrate their wins, learn from their struggles, and

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The Hubcast 79: HubSpot A/B Testing, Accredited Trainers, & Inbound ROI

The Hubcast 79: HubSpot A/B Testing, Accredited Trainers, & Inbound ROI Welcome back to The Hubcast, folks: A weekly podcast all about HubSpot news, tips, and tricks. Please also note the extensive show notes below, including …
The post The Hubcast 79: HubSpot A/B Testing, Accredited Trainers, & Inbound ROI appeared first on The Sales Lion by Marcus Sheridan.

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The Best Writing Apps, Tools & Books to Improve Your Content Marketing

This week has been super fun for me. One of the things I love doing at The Sales Lion is working with team members on creating great stuff. This week Kevin Phillips (The Sales Lion Writer – Content Ninja) and I worked on this very …
The post The Best Writing Apps, Tools & Books to Improve Your Content Marketing appeared first on The Sales Lion by Marcus Sheridan.

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Last Day to Get Inside Authority, our Advanced Content Marketing Training Program

At 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today, the doors to our advanced content marketing training program, Authority, close again. We won’t reopen them until later this year.
If you’ve considered getting the support, training, and feedback that’s available to you inside this program but you haven’t joined yet, you may have a few questions.
In today’s post, I’m providing quick answers to the most common questions we’ve heard. And I’m happy to answer any follow-up questions you may have: just ask in the comments section at the end of the post.
What will I learn inside Authority?
Officially, Authority is advanced content marketing training.
But it’s much more than that.
Authority is a community of people of all stripes who use content marketing to promote something.
Inside Authority, you’ll find content marketers from every corner of the career world. Professionals like:

Small business owners
Freelance writers
Content consultants
In-house content creators

Not to mention bloggers, authors, entrepreneurs, copywriters, designers, developers, and so on.
Members stay up to date with what works now. And they get the support, encouragement, and resources they need to build their businesses with effective content marketing.
How much time do I need to dedicate to Authority every week?
We know you’re busy, so we’ve made our Authority advanced content marketing training extremely flexible.
We offer a weekly live session you can attend while it’s broadcast, or you can catch the replay whenever it’s convenient for you.
Our forum is available 24/7 for you to get answers to your most pressing questions.
Some weeks, you may not check out the

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CAN-SPAM 101: A Crash Course in Bulk Email Regulations

I met a woman at a networking event last year. I’ll call her Nicki.
Nicki and I chatted for a few minutes, and she struck me as smart and motivated. I liked her.
That was six months ago, and now Nicki’s emails are driving me insane.
After that networking event, Nicki added my name and email address to her mailing list. She didn’t ask if I wanted to join her list — she just added me.
And since then, about once a month, Nicki has been copying me on bulk email messages she sends to hundreds of people using her email’s “BCC” field.
None of Nicki’s emails have an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom, so I can’t opt out of these emails without personally writing to her and saying, “Please stop emailing me!”
Nicki’s email marketing strategy is a CAN-SPAM nightmare. She’s breaking the law on a regular basis, and I’ll bet she has no idea she’s doing it. It even gets worse.
Nicki’s emails are also so annoying that I’ve decided I’m never doing business with her or sending her any referrals. She’s lost a potential relationship with me by breaking email marketing regulations.
Nicki could be charged thousands of dollars for every email she sends that isn’t CAN-SPAM compliant. The way I figure it, Nicki could be charged more than $95,000 just for the emails she’s sent me in the last six months.
Ouch.
Don’t become a CAN-SPAM nightmare. When you follow these simple regulations from

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Mad Marketing 86: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence, Influencer Marketing, and More

Hey folks, it’s podcast time again, and in this episode of The Mad Marketing Podcast I’ll be discussing the following: How Google’s Rankbrain and other AI are affecting search results online…and what businesses can do about it. How to gain product awareness through Influencer Marketing The power of traditional “snail mail” and “direct mail” as…
The post Mad Marketing 86: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence, Influencer Marketing, and More appeared first on The Sales Lion by Marcus Sheridan.

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Can You Spot the Expert? Test Your Knowledge of Google’s Content Quality Standards

Want to hear something scary? No, not scary like Five Nights at Freddy’s. More like disturbing. Alarming. Even depressing.
I used to write articles about:

How to protect yourself from necrotizing fasciitis
How to escape from an airplane safety slide
How to tell if you’ve been poisoned by sushi
Whether runners could benefit from platelet-rich plasma surgery
How much alcohol you should drink
Why the rate of concussions is higher among women

Now, what makes this admission scary is that I’m not a surgeon. And I’m not a nurse practitioner, physical therapist, or chiropractor.
In fact, I’ve never had any medical training in my life — nor have I ever slid down an airplane safety slide!
Horrified yet? Well, just wait. Because medical advice was not the only thing I used to freely dispense as a web writer.
I used to write articles about child injury law, start-up culture, buying an apartment in New York City, and so on. And I have absolutely no training, experience, or knowledge in any of those areas.
But what’s the big deal, you say? Journalists write about topics they’re not experts in all the time. They simply craft a story from expert sources and authoritative studies. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing.
However, the difference between what I was doing and what a journalist does is that I hardly had time to spell-check, let alone hunt down actual experts, studies, or statistics. Who would when you need to crank out 5 to 10 of these 500-word articles each week?
Sadly, the only knowledge I

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