3 reasons why infographics can attract traffic to your site

Marcela De Vivo at SocialFish says::

Other than it being a way to simplify concepts and ideas for your readers, there are several other reasons to use infographics on your site.

1. Readers are drawn to your site. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to explain—when people see fun graphics, they are instantly more prone to look at your site.
2. Using infographics increases backlinks. If you want to be the site that others link to for your easy explanations of complex ideas, start using well-designed infographics. This gets your page a lot more recognition.
3. You can be a more useful site. Every site should want to be useful to their readers, and infographics are a great way to do this. The easier people are able to understand who you are, the more readers come back.

5 reasons why a story is better than a list

Andy Crestodina makes his case at Copyblogger:

Our minds are wired for stories. They are fundamental to human experience and understanding. When’s the last time you read a list that made you laugh or cry?

1. Stories create a feeling of discovery. They can surprise and delight readers. Andrew Stanton of Pixar tells us in his TED Talk to “Make the audience put things together. Don’t give them four. Give them 2+2.
2. Stories have conflict and resolution. This structure creates suspense and holds readers’ attention.
3. Stories have characters. This humanizes the topic through voice and personality.
4. Stories make people care. By answering the all-important why questions, stories have the power to inspire readers. Why do you do what you do? Why do you love it?
5. Stories allow the reader to empathize. This creates a connection between the audience and the content that is otherwise impossible.

My take: Surprising and delighting audiences is all well and good. You can make them laugh. You can make them cry. But if your stories fail to contribute to selling them something, then you are going to have a very short life as a copywriter for paying clients. Lists sell better than stories. The exception is the case study, which can (when properly designed) convert prospects into customers.

Stop writing for Google and start writing for people

Arnie Kuenn at the Content Marketing Institute blogs:

First and foremost, your website content should always be written to provide value for your audience. If you’re still writing for search engines, you may be making the following errors:

• Focusing on high-volume keywords: If you’re a little fish in the sea of your industry, it doesn’t make sense to compete against the big sharks. Small businesses have a much harder time gaining traction with high-volume keywords, as the competition is so fierce. To overcome this, focus on long-tail keywords (keyword phrases with three or more words) that still have a respectable search volume.

• Elevating your keyword density: When it comes to keywords, less can be more. Stuffing keywords into every other sentence may have worked in the past, but now, it’s definitely frowned upon. Add keywords where it makes sense, but don’t focus on achieving a certain density percentage.

• Creating content in “production mode:” Many businesses say that producing enough content is one of their top challenges but, again, “less” can sometimes offer more when it comes to creating content. Churning out content left and right isn’t sustainable and will most likely result in mediocre content, at best. Instead, focus on creating fewer content pieces that are of higher quality, and build that evergreen content for more durable reach and engagement.

Why you should optimize your site for both search engines and mobile devices

Matthew Young writes on the Bruce Clay Inc blog:

A recent study on mobile search activity showed that 1 in 3 mobile queries are local, and after looking up local business on a smartphone, 61 percent of users called a business and 59 percent actually visited a business. 

Other telling statistics from the report include:

• 79 percent of smartphone users use their smartphones to help with shopping.
• 71 percent of smartphone users that see TV, press or online ad, do a mobile search for more information, but 79 percent of large online advertisers still do not have a mobile optimized site.

There is marketing power in these statistics and even Google is getting on board mobile SEO in a big way. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to know that if Google is an advocate, then we should be too.

Why you learned everything you need to know about storytelling from Cinderella

Sean D'Souze at Copyblogger uses the story of Cinderella to illustrate how to write a a story that your audiences will actually read and remember:

If we examine the Cinderella story closely we see three basic elements …

1. The sequence
2. The suspense
3. The roller coaster

I argue that these same elements exist in every great story, and that it’s crucial that you write and use stories in your content marketing efforts as a way to differentiate yourself from the mass of mediocre media publishers out there.

To read more, click here.

3 things to do when your SEO isn't working

Happy Brooke says on the Moz Blog

1. Talk to your clients. Keep the relationship strong. Share your resilience with them. In no-rank land, they'll need it, too. Let their enthusiasm for and expertise in their field revitalize you.
2. Try new things. Be adventurous. Experiment with new content or approaches. Sometimes failure propels us out of the box we were stuck in when nothing else can.
3. Give yourself a break. Don't make yourself miserable by wallowing in continual blame and guilt. Everybody fails! But dwelling on it for too long will prevent you from moving forward.

If you can't create content, curate it

Rohit Bhargava says at the Influential Marketing Blog: 

Content curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing, or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue. 

Here is the best part about content curation, though. It doesn’t require you to be a writer, or a filmmaker, or an on-screen commentator. Curation is inherently behind the scenes. What it does require, though, is expertise. It requires the ability to think and collect. They are different skills sets than creation, but in a business environment – it is far more likely that you will find someone with deep subject matter expertise in a particular industry, topic or issue. They may not necessarily be gifted writers or documentarians, but their expertise is their strength and though creating original content may be an uphill battle – curating highly valuable content available elsewhere can be a much more realistic goal.

How to embed Instagram photos and videos -- without hacking!

Instagram now offers video as well as photos. But embed the content into your site requires some understanding of HTML coding ... until now.

In this post on Hubspot, Genny Soskey provides a step-by-step tutorial.

How to combine email with social media for maximum effect

David DeVore at Content Marketing Institute says:: 

Some marketers are under the misconception that they’ve nailed a social email content strategy by placing a few social sharing buttons in their email templates. But social sharing buttons don’t make email more social — great social media content does. The self-serving sales pitch you pasted into your email template isn’t going to spread like wildfire across the internet just because you embedded a social sharing button. 

The bottom line is that if your emails are not populated with noteworthy content that’s relevant to your audience, your social sharing button is a useless waste of kilobytes, attention, and time. 

I know what you’re thinking: “Where am I supposed to find remarkable content to populate my emails?” Well, the best part of content marketing is that great content works in any channel. 

Brands should be using the social media content they’re already creating — YouTube videos, Facebook updates, Tweets, Instagram photos, blog posts, etc. — to more deeply engage email subscribers. And just as brand-made social media content can (and should) be used to power email, so too can fan or user-generated content (UGC). Comments, likes, and recommendations — everything your fans are saying about your brand — are far more believable (and effective) than anything you can possibly say about yourself.

3 reasons to ask influencers to create content for your site

Kevin Cain at Convince & Convert says

We have spent the past few years building a substantial content factory that relies heavily on influencers. Our community site, OpenView Labs, features new content from influencers every week about the topics our target audience cares about, such as sales and marketing. The benefits of doing so are threefold:

1. Getting great content for free — We regularly ask influencers to write articles for us, record videos and podcasts, or simply contribute quotes and ideas to our eBooks and reports. It certainly doesn’t get any better (or easier) than posting great content that you’re getting for free.
2. Building our brand — By virtue of the fact that these influencers are choosing to publish content on our site, they are effectively signaling their approval of OpenView. Chances are that if industry influencers think we’re worth checking out, our target audience will too.
3. Expanding our reach — Because we have content from a wide range of influencers, each of whom shares their content with their diverse groups of followers, we get people coming to the site who probably otherwise wouldn’t. We get a steady stream of new visitors to our site every day.

Two ways your content can directly support your client's sales

John Hall blogs at Forbes:

Companies don’t often think about how valuable content is in lead generation or sales unless they have a strong background in online marketing. Let’s keep it simple:

1) Use content to nurture leads. There’s nothing better to further a relationship with a potential lead than to actually give her value. If your content is valuable, then it will help her out while simultaneously drawing positive attention to your company.

2) Use content for sales conversions. If you’re working on a sale, you should know what’s holding people back. Send them an article you’ve published that supports why they would want to move forward. For example, if somebody was worried about budgeting for content marketing, I would send him a link to this article and show him how thought leadership pieces can help other marketing channels, saving him money overall.

My take: A lot of folks talk about brand journalism as if it is above generating sales. If you believe that, get over it. Brand journalism has a small window in which to establish itself as a discipline for the long term. That window will slam shut at the next recession. That's when CEOs will carefully assess what is working (that is, what is making or saving money) and what is not. If brand journalism fails to help generate leads and convert sales, it will pass into oblivion.