Content Creation

Campaigns are key to marketing planning. And that includes every piece of content.

One way to learn any subject is to try and model success. Find people who you believe are successful, deconstruct their methods, adapt them and apply them to your situation. But ‘Success’ in marketing is to evaluate.

What is Success?

With marketing this can be hard:

• how do you know they are successful
• are they ‘popular’ or are they converting

‘Success’ in marketing is hard enough to evaluate anyway.

The new WordPress Block Based Editor makes working with widgets and layout much easier.

I have just merged 3 different blogs.

All the blogs covered a related niche - Software Testing, but from very specific aspects: programming, automating, technical testing.

Rather than maintaining 3 blogs I decided to convert the existing domains to landing page sites, and move all blog content into a single place.

Currently “Guest blog spam email” seems to be the bad marketing tool of choice in my inbox.

From which I’m taking lessons on How Not to Get A Guest Blog Spot.

The problem with social media I encounter is not ‘creating the content’, the problem is ‘finding the time to promote the content’.

I try and address this by:

• re-purposing content
• syndicating content

Marketing requires Attention.

Platforms provide ‘reach’.

Content is either curated or created. But we try to add value when we curate, so curation involves some creation.

I found myself this morning making a statement that summarised what I thought the fundamental difference was between Twitter and Instagram.

“Twitter is for sharing links to content. Instagram is for sharing content.”

Clearly that is too wild a summary but at a fundamental level…

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a service where ‘reporters’, or people looking for sources for quotes and content, can post a query, and then choose from response answers. If your answer is successful then your quote might appear in an article with a reciprocal link back to your content.

I think I might be flying in the face of conventional marketing wisdom, but I think you should have an RSS feed, and you should make it easy to find and subscribe to.

Sadly, looking at some ’top’ marketing blogs. Not everyone does this.

I noticed recently that my behaviour when reading and visiting other sites, was different from the behaviour that I was hoping for from my blog visitors. I’m starting to think that increased bounce rates might be the new normal.

As I learned to use Instagram, one of the first tactics I learned was to add my hashtags as my first comment on the post.

But I wasted time looking for a tool to do this. You don’t need a tool to do this.

We need to go beyond organic traffic and hashtags if we want to convert from a Marketing relationship, into a Sales relationship. One bridge for this transition is a Call to Action post.

I’m learning all of this as I go to support my business so I’m less concerned about formal definitions, and more concerned about practical application that achieves results.

But I still need to distinguish between terms like Sales, Marketing, Branding… so here we go.

I use a static site generator HuGo for Talotics.com.

This is an ongoing collection of tips, to remind me of amendments I’ve made when working with HuGo.

I use tools that monitor my social media accounts and send me emails about how I’m doing.

They do not auto tweet vanity metrics on my behalf. I suggest you switch off the vanity metric auto reporting.

I’ve noticed that many of the marketing companies that I see on Twitter and Instagram, particularly on Instagram, don’t create a lot of content.

I had to think about what they were doing, and the term Engagement Driven Marketing popped into my head. I’ll explain what I mean.

Sometimes you are operating without a specific campaign, or during a campaign you want to take a break from the main campaign but you still want to maintain awareness.

Engage in a Holding Pattern or a “Don’t Forget About Me Campaign”.

One of the aspects of starting Talotics.com that I have found interesting is the notion of “Starting from Scratch”.

You can pretty much move from any piece of content to any other piece of content.

Longer content (e.g. presentations, talks, ebooks, blog posts) are converted to smaller pieces of summary or promotional content.

Strategy is different from Tactics.

Strategy is your longer term aim and vision.

You can use multiple tactics for implementing a strategy. You can change your mind about what tactics you use and experiment with new approaches - all the while keeping to the same strategy.

The two main reasons why I unsubscribed from your content:

• You put out too much content
• You put out irrelevant content

Don’t do either of these (hopefully I haven’t done either here).

Every platform is a micro blogging platform if you view it in the right way.

Most people don’t use the description in Instagram for content very well. This is a missed opportunity.

People often associate a ‘blog post’ with blogs, and nothing else.

We need to get in the habit of looking at the features of each platform and considering them as content placeholders. By doing this, every platform becomes a micro blog post platform.

We need to experiment with content length to see what works for our audience.

Or do we?