Perhaps you hadn't known or guessed that Edwin Perkins, overcoming obstacles, invented Kool-Aid. Every ecommerce business will face problems and setbacks. But a problem doesn't have to lead to failure.
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You’ve done it. You’ve landed an internship, which is bound to give you plenty of job knowledge, valuable work experience and a ton of networking opportunities that are worth their weight in gold.
You feel elated. And you should be. After all, you hustled your way into it. It’s about time you slapped an S on your chest and sat back, right? Wrong. Getting an internship isn’t rocket science if you’re smart and ambitious, which of course you are. The tricky part, however, is to prove your worth.
Your employer took a chance on you. They’re going to spend their time and energy helping you navigate the content marketing industry and imparting a great deal of their knowledge. And you’re expected to assure them that the day they decided to hire you was the best day of their life.
That sounds like a challenge, huh?
Don’t worry, though. If you follow the tips below, you’ll learn how to kill it in your content marketing internship.
Meet your supervisor, Emma. She’s the one responsible for you. She’ll either make your internship experience exceptional or horrible.
After all, Emma is snowed under running all sorts of projects. And although the company decided to hire you to relieve other employees from the workload, Emma might have difficulty delegating some meaningful work to you. Worse, she might even treat you as another to-do item on her daily list of tasks, like getting you to make the coffee runs for her.
The good news is that it’s in your power to take charge of your internship and make it great even if your supervisor isn’t leveraging your skills. How? Walk the extra mile to support Emma in her day-to-day tasks and offer your help whenever you can. Give your best effort when delivering on mini-missions and build up your reputation as a reliable and trustworthy person.
Over time, Emma will tap into your strength and present you with increasingly challenging opportunities, making your internship rife with professional achievements you can later put on your resume:
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In your content marketing internship, there are going to be several major things to take away:
It’s critical for you to set achievable and measurable goals before you even start your internship because you want to max out your professional value to prospective employers.
Unless, of course, you want to end up putting a point on your resume saying, Got the overhead projector ready prior to marketing meetings. In which case, you’ve completely blown your chance to use the internship to boost your value as a professional in the job market.
Setting the right goals for your internship sounds easy – until you have to sit down and come up with them. Here are a few points and examples to inspire you and get the ball rolling.
You can send a song to a person, but you can’t make them dance to it. In other words, there’s no point setting goals to which you can’t hold yourself accountable.
It’s best to avoid setting goals which you can’t measure since you’ll never know if you’ve achieved your goal. Make your goals quantifiable by making them specific.
The whole idea behind setting goals is to help you accomplish more than you would otherwise, so make sure you set goals that really push you to your limit. Playing safe can only take you so far.
Your goals should be beneficial both to you and the company. If they don’t go hand in hand, most likely your efforts won’t have much of an impact on the company’s bottom line.
Once you’ve come up with your own internship goals, make sure you run them by your supervisor.
Once you are all set with your goals, it’s a good practice to set milestones and check continually if you’re on track. Let’s say your output target for writing articles is eight per month. So that means you need to produce two articles per week.
To help you set milestones, you can split the writing process into three parts: research, outline, and writing.
If you want to streamline the tracking process and avoid confusion, you can use a tool like Trello.
The best thing about Trello is that it lets you organize your project in a visual way to help you stay on top of things. You can set deadlines, keep notes and tag a person (e.g. Emma, for approval) in it. Pretty sweet, huh?
Also, if you have trouble delivering on your goals, don’t sit around and whine. Be proactive, try to do things differently, and experiment. Or, of course, you can always ask Emma to give you some advice. 😉
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In all probability, you lack both the experience and skills in content marketing (metrics analysis, SEO, inbound marketing, etc.) compared to the other employees. This means you’re not as efficient and you can’t deliver on certain tasks. And that’s okay because you’re an intern merely making your way up. Nobody has high expectations for you.
But the question is, do you want to be just an okay intern or do you want to be the best intern the company has ever hired? If it’s the latter, you’ll need to make up for your lack of knowledge and skills with effort.
Show up in the office before everyone else does. Usually you can go in an hour earlier to get a sizable chunk of your work done and set your priorities for the day. Same goes for evenings. Make sure you spend an extra hour of your time in the office before heading home.
You’ll feel respected by Emma as well as your colleagues. And even if you don’t deliver on your tasks and goals in full, no one will blame you because hey, you’ve done the best job you possibly could.
The key to making your internship a success is being proactive. After all, companies want to hire someone who can contribute without being told exactly how to do it on every single project. Setting yourself a limit and stopping when a task is done won’t make you a rockstar content marketing intern. Nobody wants to approach an intern’s desk and find them scrolling on their smartphones.
The problem is that you don’t have the right mix of experience and knowledge, so how can you possibly know how to be in control of things? There’s always a way.
Look for signs that your team needs a hand and offer your help. Oftentimes, you’ll hear your team members say something along the lines of, It’d be really nice if we had someone to do a competitor backlink analysis for our next campaign. And if you don’t hear anyone say that, ask how you can help them. This is your chance to jump at the opportunity and fill in the gaps.
Picture this: your supervisor, Emma, assigns you a project to complete. You look it over and think you’ll be able to do it. And so you do. You deliver on everything that was asked of you, expecting nothing less than gratitude and admiration from your supervisor. In response, you get a casual thank you from Emma and are sent back into the mix to work on yet another project.
Ouch, that hurt!
Let’s see what happened here. Emma already expects you to deliver on your project. There’s nothing exceptional in your being able to complete your task. All good interns can do that. If you want to stand out, you need to over-deliver. On a regular basis.
A great way to exceed your supervisor’s expectations is to:
Doing your job well and completing your assignment makes you a good intern. Exceeding your supervisor’s expectations and going above and beyond makes you an extraordinary intern.
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One of the benefits of an internship that you can easily tap into is learning about content marketing through the knowledge and experience of your seasoned colleagues. You’ll get to learn about the cutting-edge tools that content marketers use and how you can leverage them in your future career.
While it’s easier to be a wallflower and stick to other interns, make a point to communicate with the company employees (e.g., over lunch or a cup of coffee in the kitchen) to get a real sense of what it’s like to work in content marketing or other departments like product or sales.
Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions — you’ll ask them anyway. But here’s a nice quote to remember:
The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life. ― Confucius
Still, asking questions doesn’t come easily to most interns. Because it means you have to admit that there’s something you don’t know. This could be particularly difficult if you’re surrounded by smart people whom you don’t want to think that you’re dense.
That’s a mistake. By not asking questions, you miss out on an opportunity to learn and build skills that will propel your content marketing career much faster. Most people would love to share insights and solid advice acquired over the years with someone who’s curious to learn. And genuine curiosity isn’t something that’s going to annoy your supervisor.
So dive in ― ask questions ― and learn as much as you humanly can.
Learn More:
The best way you can improve professionally is through receiving feedback. Still, being an intern, you might feel anxious about asking your supervisor to give you sound feedback on your performance.
Sure, you can avoid speaking up and let the problems fester for weeks, which will deprive you of growing as a professional. Worse, your supervisor might think you lack a proactive approach and that you’re not looking for ways to improve in the workplace.
This is okay for most interns. But not you.
If you want to max out your internship experience, you need to ask for meaningul feedback on a monthly basis. How? Write an email to your supervisor to schedule a one-on-one meeting. This way you give your supervisor the chance to think about it and give you some balanced and specific guidance on how you can improve.
Here’s what you can write.
Oh, and when you hear Emma mention there’s something you could improve about your performance, make sure you don’t let it slip. Set up a timeframe (30 days) to track how you’re improving on each point she gives you.
As a content marketing intern, you need to make it your priority to solicit feedback from your supervisor on a weekly basis. This way, you’ll allow for continuous self-improvement and professional growth.
Well, there you have it. Completing a content marketing internship is a great first step to jumpstart your career in the digital marketing field. It lets you gain some essential skills and get access to a ton of knowledge from your colleagues.
In return, be prepared to work hard and exceed the organization’s expectations if you really want to be a superb intern!
The post How to Get Max ROI on Your Content Marketing Internship appeared first on Single Grain.
It’s that time of the year again: reflecting on the year that’s past as we prepare for 2019 lurking around the corner. In this article, we have a roundup of some of our fan favorite pieces from 2018 on news and trends from the search industry.
From alternative search engines to future trends, best online courses to algorithm updates, these were some of our highlights from the past year.
We also have a roundup of our top articles on SEO tips and tricks here.
While many of us use “googling” synonymously with “searching,” there are indeed a number of viable alternatives out there. In this article, we try to give some love to 12 alternative search engines.
Most of us can name the next few: Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo.
But some on the list may surprise you — how about Ecosia, a Co2-neutral search engine? With every search made, the social business uses the revenue generated to plant trees. On average, 45 searches gets one more tree for our little planet.
2019 might be a year for a little more time spent with some G alternatives.
Human beings process visuals faster than they do text. So it makes sense that in the last decade, the number of images on the internet has ballooned.
In this post, we compare the best search engines for conducting three categories of image search on the web.
First, general / traditional image search, looking at Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Then, reverse image search, looking at TinEye, Google, and Pinterest.
Third, free-to-use image search, looking at EveryPixel, Librestock, and the Creative Commons.
As all good SEOs know, this is a never-ending process. The SEO world seems to be constantly evolving, and nearly everyone in the field has learned their snuff largely through online material.
For anyone who’s new to the scene, this can be an encouraging thought. We all started mostly just poking around on the interwebs to see what to do next. And happily, a lot of the best SEO material is freely available for all.
In this article, we look at the best online, free SEO training courses. From Google to Moz to QuickSprout and more, these are fundamentals that anyone can start with.
We also highlight a number of individuals and businesses to follow in the industry.
One third of all time spent online is accounted for by watching video. And, it’s predicted that 80% of all internet traffic will come from video in 2019.
This year was further proof that videos engage growing numbers of users and consequently have an impact on the SERPs. In fact, video has been seen to boost traffic from organic listings by as much as 157%.
In this article, we explore how the ways in which we search for video are changing. From YouTube to Google Search, Facebook to Vimeo, video — and how we interact with video content online — has seen some interesting changes.
Sneak peak: this one starts out with, “What a useless article! Anyone worth their salt in the SEO industry knows that a blinkered focus on keywords in 2018 is a recipe for disaster.”
We go on to explore why focusing on just keywords is outdated, how various algorithm updates have changed the game, and what we should do now instead.
Ps: the snarky take sticks throughout the read, along with the quality overview.
This was an interesting piece following an algorithm update from back in March. There were suspicions, Google SearchLiason tweeted a confirmation, and everyone had to reassess.
Via a simple query, “What’s the best toothpaste?” and the results Google outputted over the course of half a dozen weeks, we can trace certain changes.
What pages benefitted, what can those insights tell us about the update, and how do we handle when our content visibility nosedives?
Who couldn’t use one of these hanging around?
Google makes changes to its ranking algorithm almost every day. Sometimes (most times) we don’t know about them, sometimes they turn the SERPs upside down.
This cheat sheet gives the most important algorithm updates of the recent years, along with some handy tips for how to optimize for each of the updates.
Well, that’s it for SEW in 2018. See you next year!
The post Search industry news and trends: Best of 2018 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Here is a list of new and upcoming business books in 2019 for entrepreneurs, managers, and creative professionals. Follow the business strategies of a Silicon Valley guru, use mindfulness to enhance your productivity, explore your risk as an economist, and learn how to make big data and artificial intelligence work for you.
The post 14 New Business Books for 2019 appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
This text and the accompanying 30-minute video comes from my Content Marketing World 2018 keynote presentation. On Dec. 31, 2017, I “retired” from marketing and took a sabbatical for 2018 (which, as of this publishing, I’m still happily on).
I’ve given over 400 keynote speeches in 18 countries, but this one was the most personal. The team at CMI is nice enough to publish this so the entire CMI audience can watch and read it. I hope there is something here that will help you in your life or your marketing (hopefully both).
Yours in Content,
Joe
Hello Cleveland. It’s fantastic to be back here at Content Marketing World. Some of you may not know this, but I’ve been on a sabbatical for the last nine glorious months since leaving CMI.
In January, I spent 30 days electronics free. In February, I took my father to Sicily to see 60 cousins we’ve never met before, and the last six months, I’ve literally spent more time with my two boys than in the previous six years.
The Pulizzi family is notorious for using disclaimers. So for this speech, here’s my disclaimer. I’ll cover some marketing, but this is much more about you and your success. I care about each of you way too much to just give you marketing advice … I want to give you more. That said, you may not like it. I’m willing to live with that. So here goes.
I first came across the term “tabula rasa” in 1995 while studying rhetoric at Penn State University. Tabula rasa or “clean slate” is found in the writings of Aristotle, and is the belief that we are each born with a blank slate and everything we learn … our habits … our behaviors … comes from our experiences.
What if, right here and now, you had a clean slate? You could do or be anything you wanted. Nothing in this world could hold you back from your accomplishments.
Now I want you to fast forward exactly one year to this time in 2019. What’s different? What did you accomplish in the last 365 days?
What about five years from now?
Would you consider yourself a success? Have you made a positive impact on the world?
I’ve been studying success and successful people as long as I can remember … easily 30 years. As a young adult I kept a journal with me of all the things I wanted to do and accomplish, and listened to success audio tapes from Brian Tracy and Zig Zigler.
Even as I’ve been on this year-long sabbatical, I’ve kept this obsession about success.
Here’s the question: Why are some people successful and others are not? Is there a formula for success that put the odds in your favor?
What I’ve found is that most of us have conditioned our brains and have formed habits that preclude us from success. That means if we don’t change what we are doing, right now, the things you want to accomplish in 2019 or 2023 and beyond, both marketing and personal goals, will never happen.
Most of us have conditioned our brains & formed habits that preclude us from success, says @JoePulizzi.
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Not just me, but the most successful people in the world use this formula as well … which is, sadly, a very small percentage of people.
Record. Repeat. Remove. That’s the success formula for personal & professional success, says @JoePulizzi.
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And here’s the bonus … the same actions and behaviors that will make your personal dreams come true, will also define your success in marketing.
What does record mean? This means you document your desire. Depending on what research study you look at, less than 10% of all people write down and record their goals. And, those that do, accomplish more in their lives than the other 90% combined.
Let’s say you were going to build a house. If we treated building this house like we do building our lives, we would just call the contractors, the electrician, the plumber, the concrete guy, the drywall team, the roofers … have them get in a huddle and figure it out.
Can you imagine the chaos to building a house without a plan? But that’s what we do. We don’t plan for our desires to come true.
Our mental houses are falling down. Over the past 20 years I’ve asked hundreds of people what their success plan is. How they are going to get what they want out of life? Most people do not have any idea what they really want. And if they do, they certainly don’t write it down or believe they can achieve it.
Bruce Lee case study
In January of 1969, very few people ever heard of a man named Bruce Lee. Today, Bruce Lee is probably the most famous martial arts movie star who ever existed. Bruce had some major ambitions … and he penned this letter to himself:
My Definite Chief Aim
I, Bruce Lee, will be the first highest paid Oriental super star in the United States. In return I will give the most exciting performances and render the best of quality in the capacity of an actor. Starting 1970 I will achieve world fame and from then onward till the end of 1980 I will have in my possession $10,000,000. I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness.
Bruce Lee – Jan. 1969
Unfortunately, Bruce passed away just four years later, but not before accomplishing everything and more from this letter. Every day Bruce got out of his bed and had a crystal image of what success was to him, and what he needed to do that day to move the needle forward.
Think and Grow Rich case study
When I was in college, I read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. In the 1930s, Mr. Hill interviewed 500 high achievers like Ford, Roosevelt, and Carnegie to find out why they were so successful. He found, actually, that the key similarity for these high achievers was incredibly simple. They wrote down their desires.
The common thread among high achievers? They write down their desires, says Napoleon Hill & @JoePulizzi.
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But what kind of goals and desires?
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett says, “If you are going to try to bat 1,000%, you won’t accomplish many things of importance. If you’re willing to strike out a few times, you can change the world.”
So I’m not talking about small goals here … we are talking about I’m Gonna Change the World goals.
We do this remembering three components. Let’s look at Bruce Lee’s desire. First, it’s totally unreasonable. This is a Big Big Goal. No person had ever brought martial arts to the mainstream.
Second, we need specifics. He wants to make $10 million by 1980. He had a specific amount and a specific year.
And the best goals ALSO serve others. He wanted to thrill audiences with his performances. And in exchange for delivering this value, he became a superstar.
Well, would you know that the exact same things hold true for your content marketing plan?
If your CMO approves your #contentmarketing plan the first time, it’s not big enough, says @JoePulizzi.
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What do we mean by repeat?
Every day in the morning, and every night in the evening, we are going to review this goal. We are going to take about 1% of our day – less than 15 minutes a day – to review our desires. The plan for our mental house.
In a 2009 study published by Dr. Phillipa Lally in the European Journal of Psychology, 96 people over a 12-week period were analyzed about changing behavior and habits. Each chose one new habit and reported each day on whether or not they did the behavior … and … when the behavior became automatic.
Some people chose simple habits like “drinking three bottles of water a day” or “no desserts.” Others chose more difficult tasks like “exercising for 15 minutes before dinner.” At the end of the 12 weeks, the researchers analyzed the data to determine how long it took each person to go from starting a new behavior to automatically doing it.
On average, it took 66 days before a new behavior became automatic. The range was 18 to 254 days.
This is exactly why you have to review your success goal every day over a long period of time. You have to condition your mind to believe that the goal is attainable. Remember … tabula rasa, clean slate … we have to reprogram our mind to accept that our goal is possible.
And here’s the big idea most people just don’t get: The MOST important thing to accomplishing your goal is to BELIEVE that it is possible. You don’t need more money, or skills, or abilities, or a better job or Robert Rose. The most important thing – as George Michael knew so well – is having faith.
The MOST important thing to accomplishing your goal is to BELIEVE that it is possible, says @JoePulizzi.
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Once you can condition the mind to your goal, your day starts to shape itself.
Let me give you an example … email. How many people checked email this morning? Most people do. But if you had a totally unreasonable success goal that you reviewed this morning, the same goal you reviewed the night before, you might start to believe that digging into email first thing in the morning won’t at all help you accomplish your goal.
Now let’s go back to our marketing fundamentals again.
There are two main reasons why content marketing programs fail. The first, is that the goal isn’t truly big enough … it doesn’t really affect the lives of the audience in a unique way.
The second comes down to this idea of repetition. If it takes 66 days to change a personal behavior, how many times are you going to need to consistently deliver your content to your audience to change their behavior?
In researching for my book Content Inc., we found that minimum time from start to driving revenue for content marketing was nine months. The average was 18 months of consistent delivery. Why? Because it takes time to build an audience.
If you aren’t delivering consistently to your audience, you are not content marketing.
If you aren’t delivering consistently to your audience, you are not #contentmarketing, says @JoePulizzi.
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In high school I read the book Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, which still to this day is my favorite book. Toward the beginning of the book Valentine Michael Smith, who was born on Mars, is learning to understand humans. Three of his caretakers were women, and each was practicing kissing Mike. Every time any of them kissed Mike, they fainted, out cold.
Jubal Harshaw, Mike’s main caretaker, asked one of the women why she fainted. She said this to Jubal:
Mike gives a kiss his total attention. I’ve been kissed by men who did a very good job. But they can’t give kissing their whole attention. No matter how hard they try parts of their minds are on something else. Missing the last bus – or their chances of making the gal … maybe worry about a job, or money … but when Mike kisses you he isn’t doing anything else. You’re his whole universe … just kissing you. It’s overwhelming.
I must confess that as a young man in high school I tried this technique, but the results were inconclusive.
This is all about focus. Clearing away all the clutter and just being focused on accomplishing something.
In order for record and repeat to work, we have to clear away all the garbage that is stopping us from accomplishing our desires.
Clear away all the garbage that stops you from accomplishing your desires, says @JoePulizzi.
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Microsoft founder Bill Gates didn’t really want to meet Warren Buffett. He didn’t think they’d have anything in common. But at the urging of Meg Greenfield, Washington Post editor, they met on July 5, 1991. Gates was nervous and he was dreading the meeting.
Greenfield gave both men a sheet of paper and asked each to write down the one word that is their key to success. Both, as it happened, wrote down the same word: Focus.
From that day, the two became best friends.
To be successful … we need focus, we need discipline … and we need to remove the distractions around us.
A few months ago, someone asked me to take a coffee meeting with them. He said he had some very important business model questions for me and thought I could help. We met at Panera Bread on the west side of Cleveland.
I sat down, put my coffee on the table. He sat down, put his coffee on the table, and his phone just on his left side face up. Throughout our chat, he kept looking at his phone. Instagram, Twitter, Messenger … all kinds of notifications. Clearly, he was not paying attention to me.
Obviously, what I was saying wasn’t very important to this person. Whenever I see someone with a phone face up or face down next to them during a meeting, I already know they have a focus problem.
After a bit of back and forth he asked me “What’s the first thing I should do?” I told him to take his smartphone and throw it in the garbage.
“I don’t have time to accomplish my goals.” I hear this all the time.
Did you know that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American still watches three hours of television per day?
That’s 1,100 hours watching TV per year. Let’s say you’re blessed enough to reach 80 years old and that was you. That means almost 10 years of total time, nonstop, is dedicated to watching TV.
That’s like turning the TV on when you’re 30 and never moving until you are 40. A lost decade.
Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t watch TV or YouTube videos or surf Facebook. I personally enjoy watching the Cleveland Browns lose most Sundays. But to be successful, you have to change your behavior and make time to do the great things.
I have one friend that says she doesn’t have time to do anything, and yet she hasn’t missed an episode of Big Brother in 20 years. If you’re curious, that’s 550 hours of watching time.
Now let’s go back to our marketing fundamentals again.
When Robert Rose and I go into consulting engagements, besides not having the BIG goal and delivering consistently, do you know what else we find? Content run amok.
Content is being created everywhere … blogs and podcasts and videos with no discernable strategy.
Great media and product brands that have loyal audiences start by doing one thing amazingly well to one audience … a newspaper, a podcast, a blog, a video series, Instagram, an email newsletter.
So you most likely need to go back and start killing some things and just do one thing amazingly well before you diversify into other content types. In this case, less is more.
Do one thing amazingly well before you diversify into other #content types, says @JoePulizzi.
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Record. Repeat. Remove – a simple formula that’s hard to execute. A marathon if you will … not a sprint.
This formula got me to this place, but I almost lost it all by not following it.
In 2007 I left an executive job in media to start a business. I had this great vision of a content marketing matching service between agencies and brands, that we dubbed the eHarmony of content marketing.
Now don’t laugh … at the time I thought it was brilliant.
My written desire was to have 100 paying customers by the end of 2009.
Over the next two years, we were struggling … burning through cash to pay for programming and marketing, increasing our debt. I was having doubts. Late summer 2009 was critically important. That was the time when we were approaching agencies in our system to see if they would pay for another year.
Most agencies were not re-signing to the $5,000 annual fee, and one in particular, our best case study where we delivered a multimillion-dollar client, still hadn’t signed up yet.
So I called the CEO on the phone. Let’s call her Paula. I said, ”Hey, hey Paula … for some reason your auto renew isn’t turned on in our system. Just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a problem.”
She said, “Oh yeah, about that … we decided not to renew.”
I said, “really … why is that?”
She said, “Well, we can get better ROI by doing some other things.”
And I said, “You can get better than 1,000% ROI somewhere else? What is it and I’ll sign up.”
There was silence for a bit … and she just said, “Sorry Joe, we’re not going to renew.”
And that was that.
I hung up the phone, went into my backyard, and just lost it. I couldn’t even close our best customer. I felt completely sorry for myself. A complete failure.
I couldn’t believe I had left a great job for nothing. I had an amazing wife and two small boys that I couldn’t take care of.
It took me a couple weeks to pull myself together. Secretly I’d already been peeking around to see if any full-time jobs were available, which actually made me feel even worse.
And then I went back to the success formula. I then noticed that all my goals were around selling a small product to help just a few people. Actually, my goals were quite small. They were also very “me” centric. There was nothing about adding value to others. Honestly, who cares if we reached 100 customers by 2009? No one. It was a terrible primary goal and didn’t follow any of what we are talking about here.
My career goal actually came to me while I was reading feedback from our blog subscribers. The requests were all around “our group needs training,” “are there other content marketing pros I can meet,” and “my CMO needs convincing.”
And I finally got it. Our audience needs education, not a hookup.
So we set the goal to be the world’s leading educational resource for content marketing to solve those audience issues. And we wanted to do this by the end of 2013.
And then I worked the formula. Recorded it … read and reviewed that goal first thing in the morning and before I went to bed and stopped doing everything else to focus on that.
My friends and loved ones thought I was crazy before. Now they thought I needed to be committed. I mean, still no one even knew what content marketing was and I was going “all in” with it?
Content Marketing Institute was born exactly nine months later in May of 2010 and the most amazing people in the world helped to join this new cause. The first ever Content Marketing World took place in Cleveland at the Renaissance Hotel in September 2011. We were hoping for 100 people to show up. Maybe 150 if we were really lucky. That year, 660 attendees showed up.
And by 2012, we accomplished our big, unreasonable goal. And today, here we are at Content Marketing World with 4,000 attendees.
There was no logical reason that we should have succeeded. There were dozens of other companies that should have created Content Marketing World. But we set the goal and worked the formula … just like Bruce Lee, like Warren Buffett, like Oprah.
You will do amazing things. You will change the world. But it’s a choice, and there is a process for making it happen.
Too many talented people I know decide to just swim down. It’s easier, it’s safe, it’s comfortable, and it’s seductive. But it doesn’t make the world a better place.
And one final thought … this odd quote from Bull Durham sums everything up:
If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you are!
This means, whatever you believe you are doing for whatever reason is true.
And if you believe you are failing because of … your education, your skills, your job, your significant other, then you are!
But if we can reprogram our minds for success, we will be successful.
Tabula rasa … today you have a clean slate … and you can choose to reprogram your brain … your lives …or not.
Just like content marketing is a new muscle for most organizations, success planning is a muscle we have to build and work on every day.
So, in 2019 …
Thank you!
Is your goal to become a better content marketer for your brand and your audience this year? Enroll in the winter semester of Content Marketing University and register for Content Marketing World 2019.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post 3 Life and Marketing Success Resolutions for 2019 appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
This is episode nine in my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up. For this interview, I spoke with Sven Raphael Schneider, founder of two businesses related to men's fashion: Gentleman's Gazette (an online magazine) and Fort Belvedere (clothing and accessories). We discussed his company's origins and the strategies he has used to attract millions of views on its YouTube channel.
The post Building an Ecommerce Business, Part 9: YouTube Tactics appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Producing quality videos is immensely difficult. It requires a clear vision from idea to finished product. This is episode nine in my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up.
The post Building an Ecommerce Business, Part 9: YouTube Strategy appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Keyword intent represents the user’s purpose for the search. It’s what the user is likely to do when searching for a particular phrase. Or, to be more precise, it’s what we think the user is likely to do since we cannot always be sure.
Keyword intent is undoubtedly the most important concept when it comes to keyword research. It helps you meet the users’ needs better and match your content and landing pages to their intentions. Analyzing keywords by intent is thus your first step when diagnosing conversion issues when it comes to search referrals.
Analyzing keywords by intent should be your first step when diagnosing conversion issues.
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There are four types of keyword intent:
Let’s quickly see what each of these means.
This type can also be referred to as “buy now” intent. It signifies a strong intention on the part of the searcher to act (to buy, join, subscribe, etc.). Usually, these will be keyword phrases containing the following modifiers:
People are most likely to commit to purchase as a result of these types of searches.
Informational intent, on the other hand, means that the searcher is willing to find out more about the concept. It’s probably not a good idea to try selling anything to them outright, but these could be good for developing “gated” content and collecting emails. Queries with purely informational intent could contain the following modifiers:
Transactional intent lies somewhere in the middle of commercial and informational intent. Simply put, these queries can represent both the purpose to buy and to read more about the concept. With the right content and setup, these searchers may buy things or be convinced to buy somewhere further into the conversion funnel. These queries can contain words like:
Keywords that contain brand names signal navigational intent, meaning a searcher knows exactly where they’re headed. Brand name searches are your assets. If a person types in your brand name when searching, they already know exactly what they want; you just need to give that to them.
What you need to do here is to make sure:
Pay close attention to search queries that contain your brand name, and monitor your site rankings for all of them.
In most cases, you’ll be able to use your common sense when determining the search query intent. In many cases, it’s pretty obvious whether a user intends to buy, research, or navigate to a particular website.
Google has been working on identifying user search intent in the best possible way for at least a decade now, so you’ll be able to pick up some cues by simply searching Google. Namely, Google’s so-called “Universal” search is the search giant’s attempt to meet the searcher’s needs and give them what they need right within the search results. In most cases, these types of search results will signal the user’s intent (as Google perceives it):
You can use Serpstat to see which types of “universal” search results from any given query triggers:
You can also use Serpstat filters to restrict your search to queries triggering a particular search type (and hence a particular intent):
This is a very useful trick when you are working on a specific marketing strategy. For example, when creating an editorial calendar, you can use Serpstat to research keywords triggering “People also ask” results, revealing obvious informational intent.
Being an integral part of keyword research, intent helps you create a more organized content strategy aiming at happier customers and better conversions. The first step is to organize keyword phrases by intent:
Next, organize your keyword lists further by a required action:
Finally, organize those keywords by landing page type. Informational and transactional queries may call for different types of content and landing page to better satisfy the users’ needs. For example, you can decide to create:
You can use Excel or Google Spreadsheets to organize your keywords using multiple labels. You can go through your keyword lists and organize them by intent, required action, and the type of the landing page you plan to create.
View and copy this template here.
You can then integrate those spreadsheets into a marketing dashboard or project management platform like Cyfe or Trello (or any of these other options) for easier sharing.
Working with keywords takes time, but it defines your future marketing strategy on many levels, so don’t rush things up! Targeting user intent when planning and optimizing your content makes your whole digital strategy much better organized and more conversion-oriented. With the above analysis, suddenly each of your web pages has a purpose.
The post How Keyword Intent Can Boost Your Conversion Rate appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.
It’s that time of the year again: reflecting on the year that’s past as we prepare for 2019 lurking around the corner. In this article, we have a roundup of some of our fan favorite pieces from 2018 on SEO.
From how to’s to tips to tools, these were some of our highlights from the past year. SEW spark notes, if you will.
If you missed these pieces throughout the year, they’ll be worth a read. And if you’ve already read them, never hurts to refresh!
On Monday, we’ll have a roundup of our top articles on search industry news and trends.
If you have launched a new website, updated a single page on your existing domain, or altered many pages and/or the structure of your site, you will likely want Google to display your latest content in its SERPs.
While Google’s crawlers are obviously pretty good at their job — indexing countless new pages simply from natural traffic and links from around the web — it never hurts to give Googlebot a little assistance.
In this article, we look at a few ways to alert Google’s crawlers to new URLs on your site.
Because one can never have enough Google Analytics insight, right?
One of the most useful features in GA, event tracking lets you capture all kinds of information about how people behave on your site.
In this article, we go step by step through two different ways you can set up event tracking: first, by adding the code manually, and second, by using Google Tag Manager.
This is a great tutorial for anyone looking to familiarize themselves with the task.
Meta tags help search engines and website visitors determine what the content of your page is about.
They’re placed in the <head> section of a HTML document and need to be coded into your CMS. Depending on the platform you use, this can be quite less intense than it sounds.
Many “out of the box” solutions provide extremely user-friendly, labelled sections such as “meta description” calling your attention to exactly what goes where.
In this article, we take a look at why meta tags are important, along with the six main types of meta tags to focus on for SEO.
For anyone who’s ever had questions about what SEOs should do with Single Page Applications (SPAs), this article is for you. Long, thorough, entertaining, and full of resources.
We start out looking at how the popularity of SPAs, Angular, and React have spiked in the last several years. Many developers eagerly embrace JavaScript for website development — and while that may have been rather inconsiderate of SEO ease (what else is new), it seems JS really is here to stay.
This article is bit of a coming to terms with that reality, accepting SPAs as part of our SEO future, and even dipping our toes in, if you will.
We look at what developers like about JS, how it was never intended for web page content delivery, common SEO problems of SPAs, and a host of other questions you might be asking.
Finally, we end with eleven recommendations for further reading — really, this could become the whole rest of your holiday break — on how Google treats SPAs, core principles of SEO for JS and for SPAs, and more information than you could want.
Domain Authority (DA) serves as a handy heuristic in the SEO industry. It helps tell us how likely a site is to rank for specific keywords, based on the SEO authority it holds.
Many SEOs use Domain Authority to sense-check the quality of their inbound links and to understand how these are affecting their own’s site’s SEO health.
In this article, we round up some of the best ways to check out domain authority. We look at what factors go into DA, and how these tools go about calculating it.
‘Domain Authority’ was devised by Moz and they have naturally taken ownership of this name. Their suite of tools (some of which are discussed in this article) will reveal the authority of particular domains, but dozens of other free tools use Moz’s API to show these scores too.
This is another quite popular deep dive into SEO tips. We know “improving search rankings” gets a lot of fluff, but this is not that.
Here, we look closely at what makes RankBrain tick, and 15 ways to use that to your fancy.
Sections cover tips around optimizing keywords, optimizing title tags, optimizing descriptions, and reducing bounce rates and dwell times. Fun fact: research by HubSpot and Outbrain found that titles with brackets performed 33 percent better than titles without.
Questions about how to add LSI keywords? How long should long-form content really be? Benefits of long-tail vs medium size keywords? How much difference in clicks will a few characters too long in a headline actually make? All of that and much more (along with lots of screenshots) here.
This article is a roundup of exactly what it sounds like — 30 ways to market your online business for free. It covers everything from emails to social media, from Google Analytics to Search Console, from forums to guest posting, from metadata to Schema.org.
While a few of the ways could be updated — posting to Google+, for instance, might be less helpful anymore — the list still provides some hefty inspiration to anyone needing a little boost of ideas for what to do online.
This was a quite recent article that has soared. As we know, for SEO these days we need content that includes related concepts, satisfies intent, and provides value. The days of exact keyword matching are far behind us.
In this article, we have four great tools to use when optimizing for related keywords — and of course, how to use them.
For instance, the first tool in the list is TextOptimizer. It takes a term you give it, looks at the Google search results page, extracts snippets, and applies semantic analysis.
With that, it ouputs a list of all the related topics, terms, and concepts that form your topic cluster. From that cluster, it recommends you choose 15-25 of the words for a higher rank.
Lest we forget: local search.
For those looking to rank higher in searches tied to a user’s location — i.e. users that might be quite near your store and itching to buy something — a Google My Business listing is an essential first step.
This article gives a how to guide for first setting up your listing, claiming and verifying your business, filling out the information, and adding photos. From there, we go over gathering reviews, posting updates, monitoring your profile, and tracking data from Insights.
Of all the many, many things to do in SEO, optimizing a Google My Business listing is very straightforward. It can have a profoundly positive effect on your SEO — a whole wealth of ranking opportunity up for grabs.
The post SEO tips, tools, and how to’s: Best of 2018 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Search engine optimization professionals may think of themselves as marketers but not salespeople. Nonetheless, a good salesperson can teach us at least four lessons related to the SEO process of obtaining backlinks.
The post 4 Sales Lessons for SEO Link Building appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Every week, I have the privilege of editing a column from CMI Chief Strategy Advisor Robert Rose. Each one contains a gem of wisdom – sometimes more than one. Giving each a final polish is one of my favorite tasks.
That’s because Robert’s columns challenge me to think beyond how to do a content marketing task and even beyond how to do things better. Instead, he makes me think about why we content marketers do what we do and about the role of content, the job of content marketing, and what success really feels like.
Here are some of the lessons that resonated with me long after the newsletters hit people’s inboxes. (Robert’s column is only available in CMI’s Weekly Alert. If you’re not subscribed, you can sign up here.)
Robert jets around the world, speaking at conferences, teaching master classes, leading workshops, and, it seems, writing columns while 30,000 feet over a different continent or body of water every week.
Despite (or maybe because of) his own busyness, he gives the side-eye to the notion of “the hustle” – hurrying to get ahead, rushing to try something different because it’s new, and always striving to reach unprecedented heights:
“By definition, no one can be remarkable every single day. If you were, the sheer uniformity of your remarkableness would make it unremarkable. Likewise, you can’t exponentially hustle more tomorrow than you hustled today: If you hustled only one hour on Monday, and then doubled your hustle every day thereafter, you’d be out of hustle hours by Thursday.”
A conversation with one of Robert’s clients prompted his observations about stepping out of the race. While talking about how to return joy to her work, she made this confession: “My favorite moment of the last week was sitting on my porch watching it snow,” she said in Robert’s recounting. “I savored every moment of that quiet, ordinary scene.”
Where some might have encouraged the client to come up with a work-related moment of joy, Robert saw something different. “It was her slowed-down absorption of the ordinary that gave her access to the extraordinary,” he wrote.
And, in fact, he found a lesson for all content marketers in that simple moment of reflection.
“We can access the extraordinary through the quiet, ordinariness of our work, too – if we’re willing to give up feeling superior (or inferior) to those around us. If we’re willing to be comfortable with ourselves. If we’re willing to find the ‘special’ inside ourselves, rather than solely in some external measurement of validation.”
When you find yourself daunted by the push to be remarkable all the time, try Robert’s suggestion:
“… do the equivalent of going outside and sitting on your porch to watch it snow: Give your full, unencumbered attention to your work in all its ordinariness. That’s when the extraordinary can emerge.”
Appreciate the ordinary so the extraordinary can emerge, says @Robert_Rose
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In the drive to automate everything. Robert says, we run the risk of unnecessarily complicating both our lives and our work.
In the drive to automate everything, we risk unnecessarily complicating things, says @Robert_Rose
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For examples from everyday life, he pointed to a New York Times article that listed analog products – like wristwatches, alarm clocks, and paper – that can outperform their digital equivalents.
For an example from the content world, he relayed the story of a conversation with a conference attendee. The man had spent months trying to redesign his content management system’s workflow so only certain people could push content live. The new tech solution would, he hoped, prevent the product team from publishing content before it was approved.
But when Robert suggested the attendee simply ask the team to stop publishing unapproved content, the conference-goer admitted he hadn’t thought of that simple approach.
Robert’s take?
“Sometimes we outsmart ourselves with our smart technology”
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“Your brand can be authentic, and still be distrusted.” That truth bomb grew from Robert’s work with a team at a large, well-known brand. The brand’s content team had found the audience didn’t trust the brand’s efforts to tell stories through its magazine and social channels.
It’s a struggle many brands (and people) face.
Robert brought up the “brew”-haha that arose when Starbucks introduced its #RaceTogether initiative in 2015. However well-intentioned, the decision to have baristas write “Race Together” on cups to encourage discussions about race just didn’t work. Starbucks simply hadn’t earned its audience’s trust on race relations.
People and brands who are trusted for one thing (coffee, for example) find they’re not automatically trusted for other things, Robert explained. To underscore the point, he gave examples of storytellers known for their authenticity who nevertheless struggled to earn an audience when they switched genres or formats. Think Garth Brooks’ alter ego Chris Gaines or YouTube star Casey Neistat’s failed digital news and opinion initiative for CNN.
A brand trusted for one thing is not automatically trusted for another, says @Robert_Rose
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The reason they struggled, Robert wrote, comes down to this:
“If your audience doesn’t believe in the storyteller, the story itself won’t matter.”
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In mid-2018, Robert traveled to South Korea to teach a content marketing master class. To prepare, he researched the differences in content marketing approaches, attitudes, and channels in Asia compared with Europe and North America.
Looking at his familiar presentation material with an eye toward a new audience stirred “lots of new ideas for the way we can demonstrate value with content marketing.” And those new ideas weren’t limited to the class in Korea. Instead, they stretched to other CMI classes, Robert’s consulting, story ideas, and more.
The change in perspective proved so inspiring, Robert suggested we all try it.
Change your perspective to inspire freshness in your editorial strategies, @Robert_Rose
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Of course, you might work in the same location day after day. But that doesn’t mean you can’t experience the benefits of a perspective shift. Robert offered suggestions for activities that might show your editorial strategies in a new light:
The key, Robert wrote, is to find new stories in the different.
“Let’s occasionally and purposely eject ourselves from our regular patterns and set down among the completely unfamiliar. We might be surprised at how good the stories we find there really are.”
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Do you have a favorite Robert Rose column? Maybe it’s the one about the purple duck. Or the one about the blue stripe. Or one that helped you and your team think about your content differently than before. I’d love to hear which ones stood out to you. Let me know in the comments.
Make sure you receive Robert Rose’s weekly gems of wisdom – subscribe to the Friday newsletter today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post 4 Content Marketing Gems to Inspire You and Your Strategy appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
