Many content marketers don’t think beyond the corporate blog, or perhaps the occasional webinar or eBook. Yet if you look hard enough, you’ll find surprising ways to create effective, shareable content hiding right under your nose.

Here’s my quick list:

1. Job Posts—Especially with the difficult economy, people love job matchmaking, and are quick to share job posts. The funny thing is most job posts are awful: they’re poorly written, poorly formatted, and just plain boring.

This job post from a local company is a breath of fresh air. It combines videos, well designed text, and a lot of personality to clearly address the details, but also show why the job would be exciting. Unfortunately for anyone seeking, the job has been filled—but take a look at this post, enjoy, and be inspired for when you create your next job post (or go take it to your HR department).

Whether or not they show your company in the best light, people will share your job posts. You should be proud of them.

2. Unsubscription Confirmation Pages—A while back, Groupon’s unsubscription confirmation page made the viral rounds. Normally, these pages are boring and blank—if you’ve made it to the unsubscribe page, it’s clear that you’ve left the fold of treasured customers. Yet there’s value in creating an unsubscription page that leaves a smile on a former subscriber’s face. It’s likely that unsubscribers don’t hate your company, but just want off your email list. So it’s still in your best interest to make them happy.

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The following is one of the best-of from students in David Toliver’s Georgetown School of Continuing Studies Interactive Marketing class. The following post is by Stephanie Spano, Marketing and Communications Manager at Engility Corporation.

Web design is one of the aspects of marketing I enjoy the most. Working closely with graphic artists to develop new banners and graphics is a creative and fun way to visually promote company capabilities. Updating and creating new content keeps a website fresh, grabs the viewer’s attention, and ensures frequent re-visits. The creative side of web design lets the imagination run wild, like a seven-year-old kid pretending to live in Oz, not Kansas.

Since my days starting out as a Newbie Marketer, I have learned that there is a whole other side to web design besides creating engaging graphics and content. Sadly, it is not the actual Wizard of Oz behind the web design curtain. It is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Read on for a basic overview of the key ways to get this hidden force to work for your business.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a broad discipline of Internet Marketing used to promote websites. A popular and well known strategy within this discipline is SEO. Ever wonder why the results are displayed in a particular order when you conduct a search in Google, Yahoo! or Bing? SEO is the answer. SEO will help you promote your business by increasing your website’s visibility in search engines.  There are three basic “behind the curtain” aspects of SEO to keep in mind that will help you develop more effective graphics and content for your website to improve its ranking.

1. Not So Creepy Crawlers (Think Charlotte’s Web, not Arachnophobia)

Search Engines operate by sending out millions of bots, commonly known as “spiders,” to crawl the web’s 30+ billion pages and index its content. Information gathered by the spiders is stored in gigantic datacenters all across the world. When you conduct a search query, the indexed information is pulled from these datacenters in fractions of seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

The following post was initially published on the Content Marketing Institute Blog (October 11, 2011).

“Uh oh,” you may be thinking. “The marketing department is talking about that whole blogging thing again. Last time we did this, it was a disaster. Worse, no one seemed to like my posts.”

Yikes! Stop right there! And think again!

Yes, a lot of corporate blogs are awful. But neither your company’s blog nor the posts you contribute to should bear a sense of impending doom. We spend a lot of time helping clients manage their blogs. This involves bringing together subject matter experts, sales reps, marketing employees, and executives — many of whom have unique ideas but have never written a blog post.

One of the first questions we get from new bloggers is, “What makes a good blog post?“  As we answer, the doom drifts out of the room and is replaced by the glowing light of nurturing leads and increasing sales. Cha-ching!

We thought we’d share our answer with our readers here. 

1. Good blog posts speak to a target audience.

Figure out who is buying what you’re selling and write for them. If your company specializes in building mobile applications, you’re likely selling to executives and marketing departments, not mobile app developers. Your own developers can still write content for your blog, but they should keep content way less technical than it would be if they were writing to their peers.

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When I hear “fresh” I think of Will Smith and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (I’ve probably gotten the theme song stuck in your head now). In the late 80s and early 90s, “fresh” served as a synonym for cool, unique, or just all around great. Even more importantly, the Fresh Prince has grown up–when Will Smith makes a movie it consistently hits the top of the box office list. Fast forward to 2011 and there’s no doubt that whether we’re talking music, movies, meat, or beer born on date, fresh is still the way to go.

Freshness and Search Results

Google may not be as “fresh” as Will Smith or the MC Hammer Search Engine (yes, seriously). But, last week, Google added search results to the best-when-fresh list with a major update to its algorithm. For many sites Google is a kingmaker (or Fresh Prince maker?), and this update certainly affects all SEO, social media, and content marketers. The goal of the change was to give you fresher, more recent search results. On its official blog, Google estimates the changes will impact approximately 35% of searches, or 3.9 billion searches a month (according to September 2011 data). To put that in context, that is almost 3 times larger than the Panda update which impacted 12% of searches, and people are still talking about Panda’s impact. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is a guest post from our friend and colleague, Jamie Lacey-Moreira of PressComm PR, LLC.

The amount of material in one issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average 17^th century Englishman would have been exposed to in his or her lifetime, I recently read. The sheer volume of content in our everyday lives has caused a change in the basic transmission of information: far from having too little content, we are now bombarded with entirely too much.

How, then, do you sift through the overwhelming multitude of messages you are faced with each day to pick out what’s relevant? And then how do you leverage this information for both an effective content marketing program and other aspects of your business life? In other words, how do you become a trendspotter?

A trendspotter is someone who looks at his or her market or industry (e.g., Business, Politics, Fashion) and is able to identify – for lack of a better phrase – “What’s Hot, and What’s Not.” As someone who “trendspots” for my own public relations consulting firm as well as for clients whose interests span the health care sector, I’ve taken some basic steps to hone my trendspotting skills. Here are a few of them:

1. The first law of trendspotting is narrow down your general fields of interest. For example, I look for news and trends based upon my field of work (PR/strategic communications) and the industry I work within (health care/life sciences). Efficiency increases when irrelevant content is eliminated; so, focus on what is really important to the industry you are involved in and don’t get distracted by the rest of the information bombarding you.
2. The next step is to subscribe to emails from interest-related media outlets and/or trade organizations to receive the most up-to-date news and information within your field. For example, to find the latest trends in the health care and biotechnology industries, I subscribe to FierceBiotech and the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s BIO SmartBrief. Identify which news outlets, trade associations, and companies are producing and distributing the most relevant information in your field and then take advantage of their curating services! This is a simple step that allows you to stay informed without having to track down the material yourself. Read the rest of this entry »