How-to guides, worksheets, and strategies and tactics to help you map out your marketing. Plus the odd philosophical musing on the digital world.

Target Marketing recently published my “Marketing Schul” piece about using content to nurture leads. As I say in the opening, “The difference between just publishing a blog and content marketing is less about what you create than it is about how you use what you create.” The article also touches on integrating your content marketing…MORE >

Last week we walked through general ideas behind creating content that encourages action, since the goal of content marketing should always be to move prospects through their buying process toward a purchase decision. Encouraging prospects to take steps along that journey requires content that provides useful information as they evaluate their options – and provides evidence…MORE >

Every piece of content you create as a content marketer must pass through one key filter: what action am I hoping to encourage when a prospect consumes this content? The more precisely and specifically your answer to that question, the more likely your content is to succeed. If your answer is something like, “to raise…MORE >

We spend a lot of time talking about the product of all our hard work – the content we create and the activity it encourages – but much less time talking about the process. (AKA the hard work itself!) But process is an important part of the equation because the more efficient a process we can…MORE >

If you’re a fan of the old saying, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut,” you may be skeptical about a web developer helping you decide whether you need a new website. You may be surprised at what you’ll find below. Of the six common complaints we hear about websites, only one is…MORE >

You don’t have to create material for your content marketing on your own. Not only can you look to those who have gone before you for inspiration, you can actually build your content around their content. For example, as you are researching a topic, you may find an article that outlines the argument you want…MORE >

Your website had 16,000 visitors last month. Great news, right? Not if you typically average 40,000 monthly visits. Nor if they only visited on page on the site before bouncing, spent less than 20 seconds on the site, and didn’t interact with the site in any way. Unless, of course, those numbers are all better…MORE >

If you look at the data a certain way, you might think that all digital marketing channels are mediocre. The data looks that way because digital marketers typically try a number of channels before finding the small handful that work well for them and their audience. When polled, of course they’re going to rate those…MORE >

Are media publishers doomed? I’m certainly not the first person to ask that question, and I’ll say right up front that I absolutely do not have the answer. But it is an interesting question to consider from a content marketing perspective. Think about the music industry and how it’s changed in the past few years:…MORE >