Content Marketing Today

Even if you don't love Wal-Mart, you can learn a lot from them, just as conservative Republicans should learn a lot from Barack Obama's election victory. 

Small business marketers especially should pay attention to what this Arkansas giant can teach us about marketing. 

Part of the brilliance of Wal-Mart is their ability to manage a highly complex global supply chain that enables them to deliver an incredible range of inexpensive products to their customers in-store and online.

Equally important, however, is Wal-Mart's understanding of and responsiveness to their customer base.  You may not be able to replicate their supply chain expertise, but you can come very close to replicating the essence of their marketing. 

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Taking a Great Software Product from Good to Great.

MindManager 8 delivers a greatly enhanced set of mindmapping tools that enable one or more users to collaborate in person or online.

What is mindmapping and why should you care?  Basically, it is a way of organizing and illustrating information visually in the way that we actually think. 

Even for those who consider themselves non-visual, a MindMap represents information within an intuitively obvious structure consisting of a central idea or goal with branches of ideas and sub ideas. It enables users to grasp and to remember even complex concepts very quickly.

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Social Media Networking Site Can Add Power to Your Content Marketing Strategy

You may have trouble keeping up with all the social  media networking sites that find different ways of aggregating and engaging groups of people typically described as "friends."  You're probably also skeptical about your company's ability to leverage sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn to generate leads and to drive sales. 

If so, here's a great example of a small company that put Facebook to work that comes courtesy of a terrific content marketing site, Kari Rippetoe's The Caffeinated Blog.

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New Book Co-authored by David Meerman Scott Reinforces Content Marketing Principles

Too many companies develop products based on their own inward looking approach.  According to the new book "Tuned In," that's exactly backwards.

They offer as a delightfully disastrous example: The introduction of the Susan B. Anthony dollar in1979. Between the misguided efforts of the US Mint and vending machine lobbyists, the government managed to introduce a product nobody wanted.  In fact, as the authors point out, extensive research had showed that such a coin would be a colossal failure.  Why the failure?  Simple.  Nobody wanted a dollar coin, particularly one that would look almost exactly like a quarter.

To succeed with product development, it is essential to take the opposite approach.  Determine what your customers want and provide a product or service so compelling that your customers will sell it for you. Of course, this approach is at the very heart of successful content marketing best practices.

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Do what NextBus did. Put content marketing to work on your website!

NextBus is a dynamic high-tech company in the San Francisco Bay area.  Its sophisticated technology enables bus and train riders to do something important, but easy: they can determine exactly when the next bus is arriving so they can plan their travel intelligently.

Now NextBus has an equally sophisticated website which provides a rich variety of content relating directly to the problems and solutions critical to their customers.

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What your blog should borrow from the classic woman's mag and their newsstand cousins.

Sex sells.  And so do great headlines. Imagine for a moment that your blog is on a giant newsstand something like what you might find in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble.  As a magazine you are competing with hundreds of other magazines for the attention of prospective readers who are browsing quickly through the racks. The right headline can make all the difference. It sure does for Cosmo! Read More

Take 4 Minutes to Listen to Tips from Brilliant Venture Capital Veteran

Whether you are in start up mode or just needing to find a way through the recession, you will find John Doerr's advice invaluable.  You don't have to be a high tech company to benefit from his survival secrets. This brief video was shared at allthingsd.com and comes from Venture Beat's "How to manage your start-up in the downturn" roundtable discussion.

Doerr started out a top sales guy during Intel's very early days in the 1970s. He joined Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers in1980, and since then,  according to Wikipedia, has directed venture capital funding to some of the most successful technology companies in the world including Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, drugstore.com, Amazon.com, Intuit, and Google. He has been and is currently listed on Forbes Magazine's exclusive "Midas List" and is widely regarded as one of the top technology venture capitalists in the world.

How seriously should you take his advice?  Well, his 3rd point will give you a clue:

• Get 18 months or more of CASH in the business, based on very conservative revenue estimates.

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Sales Streak Past 1000 Copies. Online Marketing Guru Recommends Our Book.

One thousand copies pales in comparison to any of the Harry Potter books.

But, put into context, it suggests solid acceptance of Get Content. Get Customers. among business book buyers.  Here's what our book and every new book is up against in attempting to penetrate a very tough, competitive market(numbers from bookstatistics.com):

• In 1947, there were 357 publishers; in 2004 85,000 publishers
• 2.8 million books in print in 2006
• 291,920 books published in the U.S. in 2006
• average book sells 500 copies in U.S.
• 30% of books had print runs of less than 100
• only 20% of books sold more than 100 copies
• only 10% of books sold more than 1000

Thanks to so many of you and to the support of marketing experts like Shama Hyder, we have been able to beat the odds by exceeding the sales of 90% of all books published in the U.S.

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Big bucks squandered to insert content free DVD in magazine

You can be sure that an advertising sales rep did a great job convincing the Harding Poorman Group to insert a DVD in the October 2008 issue of Book Business.

While conceding that they do show off their packaging technology, they blew the opportunity to demonstrate to their prospects the kind of rich content that DVD could and should contain.  In other words, it all boils down to a missed content marketing opportunity.  Prospects are likely to say, "I loved your packaging, but you don't show me why I should invest big bucks to put a DVD in a magazine."

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Crank up your communications now.  Don't dial back your efforts.

The knee-jerk reaction for most companies when faced with the recession is to reduce their marketing efforts. However, decades of research show that those who maintain or increase their marketing will blow past their peers once the recession is over. If you accept this reality, you still may be faced with a shortage of spare cash to invest in marketing--particularly in traditional advertising.  What to do? You can and should focus on a content marketing strategy that will require a whole lot of thought and effort, but will not require a lot of money. Read More