I came across this great presentation by Karen McGrane who talks about “Adaptive Content”. Content that can make its way onto various different devices and platforms more effectively to get more value out of it.

So… “Responsive Design” maybe? Well, kind of but Karen puts more of an emphasis on platforms and APIs. Citing NPR’s approach to getting their content everywhere, they called it COPE — “Create Once and Publish Everywhere”. NPR uses a CMS that has an appropriate amount of structure that allows them to provide meaningful metadata that allows the content to be re-used in a variety of formats: web, podcast, iOS, Android, and Radio.

→ Read more

Buffer is a fantastic social media sharing tool for scheduling your posts throughout the day. This means you can post consistently, to multiple destinations, and not have to think about it. So instead of sharing 5 interesting articles all at once in the morning, Buffer will post those throughout the day (or week) automatically for you.

It’s awesome sauce.

But what if you have a difficult time keeping your Buffer full?

Don’t worry, it happens to all of us and that’s why we’ve integrated Buffer within Intigi.

Now you can take all that highly-relevant content that Intigi suggests for you (every. single. day.) and fill your Buffer up. → Read more

In the last decade, the number of social media platforms has exploded. There are the mass market social networks (Facebook and Twitter), professional networks (LinkedIn), news aggregators (Reddit), video sites (YouTube), photosharing sites (Pinterest), review sites (Yelp), and on and on.

An important question for businesses is: where should they invest their very limited time and resources given this explosion of marketing channels?  Should they choose a site because of its mass market appeal? Or should they choose a platform because their social media tools integrate with that platform? Or should they focus on a platform because their competitors have a significant presence on that platform? Simply put, no.

If these are the not the right reasons for selecting a platform, then what should drive the decision? → Read more

“Even the dumbest possible implementation of [lifecycle emails] prints money in my experience” – Patrick McKenzie

Lifecycle emails (sometimes referred to as “drip marketing” or “email marketing automation”) are a progression of emails that you send to potential customers to increase their engagement with your offering and, in turn, increase conversion rates. → Read more

There are many articles on best practices for using Twitter. In this article I just want to focus on what’s worked for us at Intigi, as we’ve grown our Twitter following over time. Generally speaking, our approach is to share a lot of excellent curated content, mixing in our original content from time to time. → Read more

Since Gen Y connects with traditionalists (i.e., individuals born before 1946), it may make sense to include traditionalist content creators in your planning…

Link: 5 Content Marketing Tips When Targeting Generation Y via www.contentmarketinginstitute.com

What also struck me is they say that Gen Ys also connect more with “Traditionalists” (over age 66) than “Baby Boomers” and have the least connection to Gen Xers.

Being a Gen Y myself I like to think that I connect with everybody equally; however as I get older I do find that my connections to elders strengthen and I place increasing value in their wealth of knowledge.

At any rate, it’s interesting to think about your content marketing efforts not as a one-size-fits-all methodology and that age and other demographics are an important consideration.

This video by PBS Off Book pieces together the recent history and evolution of online viral video. At about the 3:50 mark they talk about how advertising embraces viral culture and some of the bigger success stories like Evian, Old Spice or the Dollar Shave Club.

Quote from the video by Michael Learmonth of Advertising Age:

What’s interesting are startups out there — and some established companies — that are using video as their only marketing strategy. The dollar shave club launched, basically, on a funny video.

→ Read more

The Intigi API lets you tap into your interests and pull in article recommendations into your app, website or blog. To demonstrate the functionality of the API I created a curated news page that displays relevant articles based on my interests.

The image above comes from my personal curated news page which features a particular flavor of startup news that interests me. What I do is ping Intigi each morning to fetch all article recommendations and store them to a database. I then check the article’s popularity using the Topsy Trackbacks API and if it passes a popularity threshold that I specify then it automatically gets added to the news stream.

Another Example: Intigi’s Content Marketing News

Because I had already built my own curated news page it was a breeze to set up one more. Below is a screenshot taken from news.intigi.com where we feature news on content marketing. Keep an eye on this page because a lot of these articles make it onto our @intigi twitter feed

Lots Of Possibilities

This curated news page is just one idea for using the Intigi API. Here are some other ideas one could build with the API:

• Build related news into your iPhone app that would be relevant to your users.
• Add niche news alongside your blog’s original content.
• Host filtered content from the Hacker News frontpage on your site relating to your specialty.
• Use Intigi & IFTTT to auto-tweet popular articles via Buffer.
• Use Twitter’s API to auto-suggest people to follow based on articles that Intigi finds for you.
• Use Mailchimp’s RSS-to-email features to automatically send industry news to your subscribers.
• Include relevant articles alongside of your Campaign Monitor e-mail newsletters.

We’re excited to see what our customers will do with the Intigi API. If you have any questions about our API please e-mail api@intigi.com.

Grab The Sample Code

We’ve open sourced the code that drives our news.intigi.com curated news. If Ruby on Rails is your thing, go ahead and grab the code from Github.

Creating great content starts with an amazing editorial calendar. 79% of B2B marketers say that article and blog posting is the most popular content marketing tactic. With brand awareness (69%), customer acquisition (68%) and lead generation (67%) as the top three goals of content marketing, we ask a lot from our blogs. Is yours positioned to deliver the results you’re expecting?

Follow these steps to creating a killer three month blog editorial calendar just to be sure.

 1. Create Your Spreadsheet

Of course, an editorial calendar can be created in just about any format, but a spreadsheet allows for advanced formulas and easy collaboration. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume you’re working with a spreadsheet (either Excel or Numbers). The first step is to customize your tabs. You’ll want to create something like the following tabs: Blog Editorial Calendar, Work-back Schedule, Categories, Keywords, Top Posts, Guest Posting, Promotion Plan and Potential Writers.

For now, focus on the Blog Editorial Calendar tab. The other tabs will be covered in detail below. You’ll want to create seven columns: Title, Author, Status, Description, SEO Title, SEO Description, and Core Keyword.

It’s important that you have working titles for all of your posts. Of course, they may change over time and during the writing process, but a rough guideline is key. Assign each blog topic to an author, whether that’s a freelance writer or in-house writer. The status column will let you know how topics are developing.

Tip: Organize your topics within rows labeled “Complete”, “In Progress” and “Not Started” to further clarify the status.

Try to be as detailed with the descriptions as you possibly can. List examples, resources or suggestions. It helps ensure nothing is forgotten, especially since you’re building a three month calendar. Also, it will save time when it actually comes time to start writing.

The three final columns are based on the SEO WordPress plugin Yoast, which helps optimize blogs for search engines. Get a head-start by listing the title, description and core keyword of each topic in your calendar. The title should include the name of your blog (e.g. “How to Create a Killer Blog Editorial Calendar | Intigi”) and your core keyword. Your description should also include your core keyword once or twice.

Tip: Upload your spreadsheet to Google Docs for maximum collaboration.

2. Define Your Categories & Keywords

Keywords are the backbone of any content marketing strategy. If you don’t have a keyword list built yet, start by defining your core keywords. What three or four terms describe the value you provide to customers? For example, “customer acquisition”, “content marketing” and “startup PR” work for Onboardly.

These core keywords should be your blog categories as they’ll be the general topics you’ll be writing on. Simply list these categories and any subsequent subcategories in the Categories tab. For the sake of consistency and organization, you may want to assign categories to certain days. For example, Onboardly publishes startup PR posts on Mondays and Content Marketing posts on Thursdays.

To expand your list beyond your core keywords, use tools like Google’s Keyword Tool and UberSuggest. Simply enter your core keywords and look through the additional suggested keywords. You should be specifically looking for high volume, low competition keywords. Add these keywords to the Keywords tab.

Tip: Divide keywords into categories. For example, keywords resulting from the core keyword “customer acquisition” and keywords resulting from the core keyword “content marketing”. 

3. Spy on the Competition

Put your binoculars away! Spying on your competition just means evaluating their blogs and extracting the most popular content. Start by developing a list of 15-20 blogs catering to your audience. For example, Onboardly would list any blogs looking to cover customer acquisition, content marketing or startup PR. Then, record the URLs of their most popular posts. Doing this lets you get a better idea of the type of content your audience already likes to read and share. At Onboardly, we create ‘affinity blogs’ and source out 20 top competitive blogs to find their most popular posts. We do this to a) discover the content people like, and b) Get blog post topic ideas.

Fortunately, quite a few blogs make this easy by having their top posts proudly displayed. Others require that you define “top posts” for yourself. Does that mean the most commented? The most shared? The most viewed? Decide and record the top posts manually. When you’ve got a solid list, add all of that information to the Top Posts tab.

4. Start Brainstorming

Now that your research is done, you can host your big brainstorming session. Gather everyone that will be contributing to the blog and ask them to start throwing out ideas. Just be sure the ideas are loosely based on all of the information you’ve gathered so far. Keep your keywords and competition in mind.

This should be a relatively quick process. Don’t weed out any ideas at this stage. The idea is to come up with as many topics as you possibly can. Right now, there’s no such thing as a bad or silly idea. Anything goes!

Keep all of these topics (titles only) stored on the Blog Editorial Calendar tab.

5. Get Strategic

The next step is throwing out any ideas that aren’t compelling. Develop your own ranking system. If a topic is less than an 8 out of 10 (Use your own internal team judgement), throw it out! Be sure keywords and the competition play into your ranking system somehow. This is where you get strategic about what will actually end up being published on your blog. It has to be content your customers (and potential customers) are dying to read.

Getting strategic also means filling in those other columns. This is where you start fleshing out the ultimate blog topics you’ve brainstormed. Who will write them? What will they cover exactly? Who has written on the topic intelligently before? Make a note of all this information, turning all of that brainstorming into a real content marketing plan.

Tip: Be strategic about posting dates and times as well. New research from Dan Zarrella  indicates that Mondays at 11 a.m. (EST), Thursdays at 7 a.m. (EST) and Saturdays at 9 a.m. (EST) are three of the best times to publish a new blog post.

6. Start Making Connections

With a boatload of strategic, well-developed blog topics on your hands, it’s time to figure out who will actually be writing the content. This means making a list of any freelance writers you’d like to engage. Start by adding their names, email addresses and Twitter profiles to the Potential Writers tab. Follow them on Twitter and start getting to know them. When you’re ready, reach out via email.

This is also a good time to consider guest posting. Who would you love to have contribute to your blog? What blogs would you love to contribute to? Start making lists, sourcing email addresses and engaging those people on social media. Your author column will be full in no time!

Most recently, Onboardly contributed a great piece called The Ultimate Startup Marketing Guide to the KISSMetrics blog. The post ‘blew up’ and it created some really great inbound traffic leads.  Make sure you source out publications relevant to your audience and industry and start contributing.

Getting a killer blog editorial calendar right the first time is tough, even with this guide. Success is different for everyone and each blog will have a different readership, which will respond differently to content. The key is to always be testing. The times Dan Zarrella highlighted might not be the best times for your blog. Experiment and see what yields the best results for you.

What has been missing from your blog editorial calendar?

About the Author: Renée Warren is the Co-Founder of Onboardly, a company focused on helping funded technology startups be more visible and acquire more customers. They do this through Content Marketing, startup PR and Social Media. Subscribe to their blog here!

Jay Baer over at Convince and Convert released an article on August 3, 2012 that brought up a really interesting question: Are Brands Overvaluing Facebook and Twitter?

The article went on to notify us that Jay is partnering with Edison Research on an upcoming report on how Americans use social media.  Convince and Convert ran a contest requesting specific questions from their readers, with the winners having their questions incorporated into the research going into the upcoming report.

One of the questions, from consultant Steve Dodd, was a powerful one:

When people research products and services they want to buy, where do they look? Facebook, Twitter (or other similar properties), blogs, user forums, reviews, [and/or] company websites?

Elaborating on his question, Dodd noted that many brands are focusing so much attention on the big social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, that they likely miss a huge number of smaller, niche networks where their target audience may very well be spending their time and making their buying decisions.

In short, this is a huge potential marketing boon that’s being largely ignored.

The question sparked a series of thoughts in my mind, and maybe they’re points you want to ponder too:

• Am I spending too much of my precious marketing time struggling to stand out among hundreds of millions of people on the huge sites, when I could be facing far less competition on smaller, niche sites?
• Do I even know what smaller sites my target audience may be using?
• Have I developed a “shot gun approach” with my social media, or are my efforts “laser targeted”, and therefore more effective?

It’s certainly food for thought, and helps us determine whether our strategy needs a refresh going forward.

—————–

This is a guest post by Justin P Lambert. Justin is a content marketing specialist and freelance copywriter. He is also a ghostwriter, speech writer and consultant.