Content is the foundation of smart online marketing, but social media sharing of that content is the catalyst to success. It’s the publicity engine that helps you build your audience and attract the links that get you ranked well in search engines.

So, how do you make that happen?

Ever heard of Upworthy? It’s a site dedicated to resharing stories with social impact (think Buzzfeed, except way less shallow). And, although it’s barely a year old, it’s being called the fastest growing media site of all time — racking up 10.4 million unique visitors a month at the time of this writing.

What’s their secret?

Well, it boils down to three time-tested concepts that have always worked when it comes to creating something remarkable. And, remarkable content is exactly what gets shared on social networks.

These three things are what have worked for Upworthy — and they’ll work for you, as well.

1. Compelling Headlines

Upworthy writers create twenty-five different headlines for each piece of curated content they find. Why? Because the headline makes all the difference when it comes to whether content is shared or ignored.

To the extent that you’re able to get people to see your headline, odds are that most people won’t bother to click through for the full story — that is, unless you maximize the desire of that person to spend time with you.

“If you write the perfect thing and no one sees it, it really doesn’t matter. It’s like giving a speech to an empty room,” says Eli Pariser, co-founder of Upworthy.

He’s right.

Remember though, your headline is a promise. If you content doesn’t deliver on that promise, you lose much more than if you were simply ignored.

2. Emotional Impact

Upworthy editorial director Sara Critchfield goes to great lengths to say that emotion is more important than logic when it comes to content that gets shared. And, to the tech culture of the relatively young Internet world, I guess that’s a necessary reminder.

Engineers tend to believe that people think like they do, and that certainly pervades the Silicon Valley culture. But marketers, filmmakers, novelists, advertisers, and human beings in general realize that those Spock-like engineers are often completely out of touch with the more Captain Kirk-like nature of human emotion.

Consider this: your content is always sparking some sort of emotion. Unfortunately, that emotion might be boredom, apathy, or indifference — feelings which definitely do not encourage social sharing.

You need to create content that makes people care…which brings us to the all-important key number three.

3. Strong Positioning

Upworthy isn’t shy about what it stands for. It’s an unabashedly liberal enterprise. Eli Pariser also founded MoveOn, the progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee.

From a marketing perspective, positioning is all about your place in the prospect’s mind. From the old school unique selling proposition to Seth Godin’s purple cow concept, positioning is all about how you differentiate your brand from the pack and stand out in the eyes of the prospective customer or client.

At this point, in a world of undifferentiated offerings, positioning has become about what you stand for and believe in. To make some people love your brand, you’ll naturally make others indifferent or even hostile to you. And that’s okay.

Abercrombie & Fitch succeeds by alienating entire segments of the population (even if the rest of us find it reprehensible). So does Fox News. And so does Upworthy — which is why its growth has been so meteoric from social sharing.

Your positioning informs your headlines. It also fuels the emotional aspect of your content. In other words, your positioning is the glue that holds a content marketing strategy together — and provides the spark to social sharing by the right people.

What Do You Stand For?

Your positioning doesn’t have to be political. It doesn’t even have to be overtly controversial. Affirmatively standing for anything will bring both fans and foes — it’s just the nature of an extremely factional society that’s only become more so, thanks to the Internet.

It comes down to answering three basic questions:

1. What does your company truly stand for?
2. Are you willing to state what you stand for without reservation?
3. Are you ready to ignore the pushback from people who don’t matter?

After answering these three questions, you’ll have an important start to a content marketing strategy that works — one that attracts the type of prospective customer or client you’re looking for and which, in turn, leads to even higher rates of word-of-mouth social sharing.

That’s why the recent research report I published, Organizing for Content, proposes six real world organizational structures for companies grappling with the need to feed the beast from an operational perspective. These models are deliberately presented in a non-hierarchical fashion. The point is to push companies into doing something constructive and collaborative to promote content collaboration, production, workflow, and strategy.

These organizational models matter for another very important reason: they can help create, or at least to flow, budget into content operations and initiatives.

The “Free” Fallacy

Image used by permission from Shutterstock.com

Content marketing operated under an enormous fallacy just a few short years ago. Marketers dove into content initiatives head first because they’re…. free! Blogs? Free. Facebook? Free! Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, all free, free, free.

For a delirious moment or two, content marketing seemed to be the marketing equivalent of an all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet: perhaps a bit lacking in the quality department, but abundant and bountiful in every other respect.

The only thing wrong with all this “free” is that it isn’t. Content costs time, energy and resources, even when it’s “only” blogging. Particularly if it’s good blogging.  Moreover, content costs are escalating, not only in terms of engaging the creative talent to execute, but also in investments in infrastructure, channels and technology.

When I conducted research last year into content investments, I spoke with 57 major brand marketers, many at Fortune 100 companies. An overwhelming trend is a move away from more inexpensive forms of content (i.e., anything involving the written word: blogs, email, newsletters, press releases, white papers, etc.) and into more technically complex channels: mobile, video and multimedia.

All these require deeper investment in technology and talent than that hackneyed “hire an unemployed journalist” strategy.

Content Marketing Needs Its Own Budget

There are new reasons why content needs its own budget (aside from the fact that CMSs cost money, too).

Currently we’re conducting research on native advertising. In working to define a very murky term, something is becoming crystal clear. Native advertising is a form of converged media: owned media (content) + paid media (advertising).

Again and again in the interview process, we’re asking stakeholders in the native advertising ecosystem where campaigns start. Who, in the constellation of publishers, agencies, brands and software vendors, is the go-to person for native advertising buys, executions, and creative?

Again and again, all the constituents are pointing to “content.” Not agency media or creative departments, not social media, and not those people traditionally associated with “campaigns” on the brand side.

The problem in moving native advertising forward, goes the consensus, is that it’s difficult to identify who’s responsible for content: no content “departments” on the client side, nor deep content capabilities on the agency side of the equation.

Everyone’s scrambling to organize for content, and with good reason. With clickthrough rates plummeting and severe downward price pressure on traditional display advertising, the future of digital advertising may well depend on it.

Through this regular measurement, data is gathered that can be used to craft future content marketing endeavors that are truly aligned with audience needs. However, many marketers aren’t using this data to drive content development and marketing, even though they’re collecting it day in and day out.

Below are six types of data that can help you determine what an audience prefers, so you can focus your future efforts on the types of content most likely to be successful.

1. Traffic

Though people typically check their site traffic daily, many do not reference their most-viewed pages or blog posts. When a few pages or posts receive much more traffic (and, ideally, conversions, more on that below) than others, it is safe to infer that the audience connects to this type of content (unless the bounce rate is extremely high).

For example, say a career website publishes blog posts offering tips and tricks for job seekers. The blog features articles about job-hunting strategies; on writing a resume and cover letter; and about acing job interviews. However, posts about interviewing consistently have higher traffic than others.

The website owner can use this traffic data to inspire future blog posts about the interview process in specific business segments, as she now knows that interview-focused content brings in the most traffic.

2. Social Metrics 

When measuring the success of a content piece, marketers often record social metrics such as Facebook likes, Twitter favorites and retweets, LinkedIn shares, blog post comments and more. Though social data is not always the determining factor of success for a content piece, the data does provide a great deal of audience insight.

Take this example: you’re a website owner who produces multiple content pieces a month of varying types, including infographics, blog posts and free guides. When measuring social metrics, it becomes clear that infographics always get much more likes, retweets and shares compared to weekly blog posts and free guide offers. This data suggests that your audience prefers visual content to written content.

Other information to take into account when analyzing social data is who is digesting specific content. Are the people who are sharing content people who are likely to become customers, or are they just people who thought the content was interesting or amusing? Though volume of certain social metrics can illustrate content popularity, the actual people who are interacting with content tell an even bigger story.

3. Links

Links may be becoming less important for search engine rankings, but the number of links to a content piece can display how useful others find the content to be. Many times, the sheer number of links to a certain page provides insight, though digging deeper to see what types of sites are linking to the content is often more telling.

To start investigating the backlink profile for a specific page, use a backlink analyzer like Open Site Explorer or Backlink History to pull a list of links that are linking to that page. Next, view the sites (and pages) that are linking to pieces of content. A few questions to consider when studying links include:

• How is the content being referenced?
• How reputable are the sites linking to the content piece?
• How relevant are the sites and/or pages?

The answers to these questions can uncover who finds the content useful. From there, you can brainstorm ideas for similar content pieces  in hopes of appealing to a very similar audience.

4. Email Metrics

Whether a publisher sends out a monthly email newsletter or reserves email campaigns for special announcements, chances are the performance of sends can provide useful insight that can influence new content marketing projects. When measuring the success of an email campaign, deliverability, unsubscribes, opens and clicks are the main metrics analyzed.

Email deliverability not only illustrates the health of an email list (if more than five percent of contacts are labeled as hard bounces, the list should be scrubbed), it also indicates how many people marked the email as spam.

When a large number of people mark an email as spam, it becomes clear that the content was not in line with the audience’s expectations or needs. Similarly, when you note the number of unsubscribes a certain email campaign produces, you can determine which content was more appealing to subscribers than others.

Next, email opens can show the effectiveness of a subject line. Marketers can assess the open rates of previous campaigns to see which subject lines resulted in the most opens.

Once you’ve determined the emails with the highest open rate, you can look at the language used in the subject line so the next subject line can be crafted based on this data. Additionally, the number of click-throughs can be used to conduct data driven content marketing. By analyzing how many clicks certain links within an email produced, it becomes apparent which content the audience favored — as well as which calls-to-action are strongest.

5. Search & Keyword Data

Many websites have search boxes that allow users to search the website for the information they are looking for. Through analytics programs, site owners can see what terms people are searching for in the website’s search box, along with how often.

If one subject or term is constantly being searched for, this suggests that creating content around this topic will be beneficial to the audience. If content regarding the queries people are submitting to a search box are already available on the website, one might consider where that content is stored and how easy (or hard) it is to be found.

Similarly, keyword data can be used to inspire content projects. Through analytics programs, website owners can view what keywords led visitors to their website, and then create content based off of that data. It makes sense to create content around the keywords people are currently searching for to find a site, as the subject is obviously of interest to the audience.

Additionally, creating useful, relevant and compelling content around those keywords not only provides the audience with the content they want, but it can also help increase search engine rankings, which could lead to more targeted traffic. Though the amount of “not provided” data is increasing (because the search terms of Google users who are signed in are not being reported), the keyword data that is available is useful when brainstorming future content plans.

6. Conversion Rate

Most business marketing initiatives are put into place to increase revenue. To do that, campaigns need to drive website conversions. Though there usually are a number of different conversion points on any given website, a conversion can generally be defined as a visitor who takes an action on a website, beyond just viewing content.

By comparing conversion rates between landing pages, website owners can see what content and calls-to-action produce a higher rate. Once you’ve discovered the landing pages with the highest conversion rates, consider the following:

• What type of content is published on the highest converting landing pages?
• What calls to action are being used?
• Are there any patterns amongst the highest converting pages?
• What are the similarities?
• What are the differences?

Site owners can then reference this data when they’re ready to develop new content to encourage an increase in conversions.

What data do you find to be most effective in driving content marketing initiatives? Share your experience in the comment section below.

All images courtesy of VerticalMeasures.com

If we look back at the history of mass media, a certain process has played out time and time again. Print, radio and television have followed the same path from the original obsession with technology to the eventual love for the content that technological breakthroughs deliver.

Opportunity

With that shift now occurring in interactive media, the love for content has created a huge amount of opportunity. Content marketing has exploded in 2013 as businesses across the Web have moved to a content-led approach. You only need to look at search trends to realize how that shift is affecting the competitive landscape.

A strategy that consists of blog post, blog post, blog post (by the way, that’s no strategy!) simply won’t cut it anymore. With a deluge of new content hitting the Web every day, how do you find a way to see through the murk? Much more creative, well-thought-out strategies are required to stand out. That’s what I want to look at in this post.

Content-Led Semantic Microsite Strategy

Rather than battle head-to-head with our competitors, the smart thing to do is apply some lateral thinking. Look where they don’t. Win where they don’t play.

Increasingly, I have been looking once again at “other” ways of making content work, and in recent weeks, I have begun testing microsite strategies. These make a lot of sense in light of algorithmic changes in search that place extra emphasis on semantic association and content more generally.

Such a strategy has existed for many years. It is, however, something that should now resurface after a period in the shadows.

Why? For two main reasons:

1. Increasingly, we are moving to a more semantic Web and Google is focused on delivering it for us, promoting more relevant results wherever possible. This change also means that mapping your content to semantic opportunity is critical in ensuring you maximize the size of your footprint.
2. Recent changes, including the advent of rel=author and the Caffeine indexing system, as well as the explosion of social, have made content more valuable from a traffic-acquisition perspective.

The same “other” reasons for microsites still exist as well, of course. Because they are focused, they convert better, attract a better quality audience and are also easier to manage from a content perspective.

Creating The Strategy

So, where do you start when building out such a plan? Done properly, creating multiple sites is not something that should be undertaken lightly. Running them requires time, effort, people and/or money.

For this post, let’s use the flight/hotel booking niche as an example, so you can see exactly how the process works and how it can offer a fantastic way of growing into new areas and creating new revenue streams.

The Web, to date, has been pretty two dimensional in many respects, making it harder to grow into other niches, as search engines’ understanding of relevance was pretty basic.

But, over the past few years, Google has been very busy collecting data about how we search in a way that allows it to map relevance. It started with related search suggestions and predictive search and is developing now into works-in-progress, such as Author rank and Google Now. The search giant even hired renowned artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil to create a “computer brain” to power the company into its next phase.

Brains understand connections between stuff, and in hiring Kurzweil, Google grabbed the best in the business. You could say, therefore, that they have serious ambitions.

Data-Led Decisions

So, we know Google is planning to map together large tranches of data. That means that the Google system will be based on data, and using it to create your own strategy will be more important than ever.

So, that’s where we start. A deep dive into a few key data pots to inform our microsite strategy.

Understand Semantic Keywords

Semantic understanding is a critical component of any future-proofed digital strategy.

As discussed above, Google is embarking on multiple projects to understand associations between pages and sites — and that creates an opportunity for marketers.

By understanding how that relevance map works, you can leverage those connections to not only find related niches to profit from, but also to ensure that any investment in niche microsites benefits the main domain.

I wrote here in depth about how you can integrate this approach into your overall outreach strategy and why it is important; but, below are a few great tools to help you research your market and create said strategy:

1. LSIKeywords.com
2. Bottlenose.com
3. Tilde search operator

From this data you’ll easily see the areas your brand can extend into in a super relevant way. That doesn’t mean you cannot play elsewhere; but, if you are looking for that “halo effect” and want to kill two birds with one stone (new revenue stream + authority enhancement for the main site), then this data is priceless.

So, once you have a view on how ‘wide’ you can go for max effect, the next stage is looking a little deeper into the keyword data.

Keyword Volumes

If your background is SEO or you have several years of experience in the digital marketing industry, then chances are you have experience in how best to aggregate, sort and analyze keyword data.

I won’t deep dive into this much-covered topic. But, below is an overview of the process we use on a daily basis to create and refine existing strategies, and to make sure no stone has been left unturned.

This is the basic process we work through:

We will also use Google suggest-based tools such as Ubersuggest or Soovle to mine long-tail ideas and ensure they are included, as you can use these later as you begin to compile your content plan.

This awesome, preset Gdoc (courtesy of KISSmetrics) can really help you analyze those terms also once you have them imported. You can see exactly how to do that in this post.

This process gives us two things if you have gone wide enough with your data set:

• A high-level understanding of where the opportunities are and the competitors are not, which is useful for defining the site or sites you launch with initially
• The actual page-level strategy for those sites

With it, you will be able to choose those sites you want to launch with, create a priority order based on demand/opportunity, and also set the meta strategy for those sites.

We then move onto mining the social graph for insight into audience relevance.

Social Data

For me, right now, the social graph is where the party’s at. Search data is great, of course, but the richness of the social Web is going to be so much more insightful in time, as we marketers get our heads around analyzing its underbelly.

Social data is the qualitative to the quantitative of the link graph and, in the future, it will help us all build very thorough pictures of our audiences as people.

With our present capabilities, mining it is not easy, but good insight is still possible if you combine a variety of data sources.

As an example of what I mean and how it can help us in developing a microsite strategy, let’s just consider, for a moment, how much data Facebook holds about us.

Austrian student Max Schrems asked just that and, to his surprise, the Palo Alto company sent him back a 1,200 page PDF containing everything from ‘last known location’ to every click he had ever made on the site.

It’s pretty obvious then that being able to mine this data can really help understand audiences and the associations between the things they “Like.”

After all, if you are talking to an audience and you know “what else they like,” this can be hugely useful when designing content portals for them. It means you can market to the existing audience initially, knowing the new content will be relevant. This way, you immediately lower the cost of traffic acquisition from the get-go.

And, while tools can help you gather this info, it is still possible to get by with plenty of spare time, a snippet of analytical ability and Facebook’s Power Editor.

The editor is a tool few know exists; it allows you to group sets of people together to understand audience size based on “Likes.” From it, you can cross reference to see how many of them like X and also like Y.

This allows you to build out a complete picture of their interests and how that correlates with the Facebook audience generally. That way, you know if your audience is especially predisposed to certain other things, as compared to the average person.

Knowing this should tell you to build that niche into your potential list of microsites.

Other New Data Sources

This data can then be mixed in with similar quantitative interest-set data from an awesome Google tool set within the AdWords Display interface.

The AdGroup interface gives you more information about other things your audience is interested in. To see how Google currently “categorizes” you, log in and visit this link.

Another great and underutilized tool is the search giant’s Display Network Ad Planner. Its GDN Research Tool, or Audience Builder does not dive very deeply but provides easy access to data sets around specific interest points. You can work out potential audience sizes based on everything from location and language to specific interests and even sites.

Out of it come correlations that can inform a much more lateral approach, either to the creation of actual microsite sets or — once they’re built — to help improve their respective content strategies. Here’s an image from our tool that combines the ad planner data with Facebook data — the output gives us a clear view on other interest sets for our audience, indexed against the average.

The objective of all this work is to generate a list of potential options for your first content portal. In our earlier travel sector example, for instance, we have discovered that the audience also “Likes” several specific sports:

Non Travel-Related “Like” Correlations:

• Football
• Skiing
• Health and Beauty
• Golf

If we then research opportunity size using keyword data, we can see whether there is an audience there waiting to be tapped into. And, we already know that our existing audience would like content around these subjects.

Based on this, and awareness of other business objectives, we can build out a list of launch sites, as well as those that may be added in stage two, should the pilot prove successful.

There is also plenty to write about across these subjects and because of that, we know a content-led microsite would work well, which brings us nicely to the content strategy piece.

The Content Strategy

The challenge of a multiple platform approach is how to structure the content creation and planning process to maximize impact and minimize effort across a number of possible microsites.

If we go back to our example in the travel niche, our data has shown us that there is a large correlation between our existing data and a “Like” of sport.

If we then look at the opportunity at a keyword level, it is clear that there is a huge opportunity in this area to service a major sport ‘holiday’ requirement. If we just take golf, for example, we can see plenty of audience:

There is also a huge amount of traffic to long-tail phrases, and these can be expanded upon with the use of Ubersuggest

By then entering this into a semantic indexing tool, we can see further areas to target and create content around:

Social (and Google) data then adds further depth to the process, as explained in detail above. Here, in our live example, we can quickly gauge the size of the prize using Google’s Ad Planner tool.

Firstly, by mapping the potential audience reach, you can see what you’re aiming it. It’s quite clear so far that a golf website would be a great fit here.

What is critical, however, is that there should already be some affinity with the brand’s existing audience. This would mean there could be some quicker wins in audience growth and possible conversion improvement.

By mining their existing Facebook Page data, we can see other interests that their audience “Likes,” and, bingo, “golf” is right up there amongst some other areas that we could certainly exploit.

We can even look at stealing some strategy from the established players. It’s a relatively easy job by simply Googling those top terms.

But, if we go back to the Ad Planner tool again for a moment, there is a tab called ‘Search for Placements.’ It’s a brilliant and vastly underrated tool for extracting content marketing outreach targets — but for this, it helps us define a competitor list, such as you can see below:

From it, you can then enter each of those into a tool like SocialCrawlytics or SharesByUrl to work out what content is being shared the most across their sites. You end up with a list of content ideas that are ready-made for social success!

Pulling It Together

The above process may seem incredibly complex, but all of this can actually be pulled together quite quickly. The key is taking that raw data into a brainstorm and strategy session where you can then pull it all together.

I’ve written previously around how to plan content around a 6-month plan and a structured idea creation process that includes all of the elements mentioned above, which should supplement this process.

The one I use looks a little like this:

Why Split It Out?

Delivering successful content is obviously the key to a content-led semantic microsite strategy. In many ways it is the ultimate made-for-digital brand-as-publisher model, as it exploits opportunity created by general digital trends while also making best use of content.

And, by staying focused around specific areas, you ensure you deliver better content to a more targeted visitor, who will engage more with your output than he or she would have done without that structure.

The key pillars of any digital content strategy are two things – ideas and content flow. By creating a process and microsite structure that makes it easy to consistently deliver great content ideas over time in a way that provokes ongoing interest, you will get a positive return on any investment made.

Of course, there will be those thinking, “why not just do this on your main domain?” It’s a worthy question; and undoubtedly, there is value in doing so, in ensuring your key domain gets the lion’s share of content and resources.

The point, however, is that these smaller, focused-but-relevant sites could well pass more ‘”juice” back to the main domain in the future, as semantic associations are mapped more closely and given more weight.

We also know that Google is attempting to deliver more relevant results; and so, done correctly, small, focused sites led by great content can deliver that — and their effect is magnified.

And then there are the conversion rate optimization (CRO) and lifetime value of each user to consider. More focused content lowers cost of acquisition over the long term.

There are also CRO benefits once your user is on the site, as well, as he or she will have a higher propensity to convert if the service or product you are selling is related to the subject matter.

For our flight comparison business, that means being able to offer flight deals, hotels and packages on routes known for their golf tourism before taking a cookie-cutter approach to other relevant niches within their grasp.

However, about once a week or so, I really dig into the reports in my Associates Account. While most people are aware that they can see how much a tracking ID earned for any specific time frame, and they can see what products earned them a commission, many don’t know about a little hidden arrow button inside your reports that can really help you improve your promotions.

Let me show you where that hidden arrow is.

Uncheck Combined Reports

Once you are logged into your Amazon Associates Account, uncheck the button at the top left that says “combined reports.” You want your reports to be broken down at the tracking ID level so you can get more specific stats that will help you improve your promotions.

Orders Report

Now, choose the report type of “Orders Report” and isolate the time period to whatever you’d like. Then, click the “Display on Page” button and let the report generate.

At the top of the report, you will see the column titled “Items with Orders.” This shows all the products that were ordered via an Amazon Associate link with that specific tracking ID in it.

You can also see which products were ordered when someone clicked your link and bought the exact product you linked to. Additionally, you can see those products that were ordered once someone clicked an Amazon link of yours and browsed through the Amazon.com site to purchase a different product (i.e., not one you specifically linked to).

Once you get down to the end of the Items with the Orders report, you will see another orange header that says “Items with no orders.”

Underneath that are the words “Show all items” with a little down arrow icon to the left of it.

What many don’t know is that if you click that down arrow and let the report reload, you can scroll back down and see all the direct product links that were clicked with your tracking ID in it that were not purchased, as well as how many times they were clicked.

This hidden information in this report offers a wealth of information that can help you optimize your affiliate efforts.

Items With No Orders Report

Here is one way the Orders Report helped me recently with its “Items with no orders report.”

I have promoted a certain product from Amazon for years, and it always sold incredibly well. Recently, I noticed that I wasn’t making any sales of that product any longer.

When I clicked to see my “Items with no orders” report, I noticed a lot of clicks still going to the product page as normal; but, why weren’t they buying it anymore?

Turns out, once I clicked the product link from inside my report, I noticed that the product was no longer being sold on Amazon and only sold via an external website (and we don’t get commission for that).

That meant I was sending a lot of targeted “ready-to-buy” traffic to a site that offered me no commission. Once I changed my links to a very similar product that is sold on Amazon, my sales volume went right back to normal.

Another time this helps is when I am recommending a product and lots of people click through to see it, making a buying decision — but the “Items with no orders” report shows me that no one is buying it. That enables me to both see why the product might not be selling (bad reviews, price went up, item out of stock, etc.) and to also try a different product that they might like better based on what they are actually buying — which I can find out via the stats in my earnings reports.

This “Items with no orders” option in your Orders Report is a great little source of information for helping you increase your affiliate earnings with Amazon. Check it out next time you’re in your account.

Image via Shutterstock

We can safely say that Content Marketing is here to stay. According to the latest research from the Custom Content Council, more marketers are moving their budgets to the creation, management and distribution of content than ever before.

This year, spending on custom content was up to $44B, saw 9.2% YOY growth, and now commands over 39% of marketing budgets.

There is growing concern being voiced by critics of content marketing that with everyone on the content bandwagon, the demands for creating the volume and velocity of content to keep pace with an always-on consumer are increasing such that the quality of content and fidelity of message will ultimately suffer over time.

Put another way, some believe that everyday content marketers don’t have the capacity to create and deliver “high-quality” content of the length and substance that traditional publishers and exceptional content marketers do — and, therefore, they shouldn’t try.

This reminds me of the outdated notion that independent publishers, or professional, ad-supported blogs, couldn’t possibly create content or journalism of a quality that would equal that of traditional publishers. Furthermore, they couldn’t deliver the scale of audience and brand safety that would support brand advertiser campaigns.

Companies like Federated Media, BlogHer, and Glam built highly successful businesses by disproving this. And, publishers like TechCrunch, ArsTechnica, Dooce, Mashable, Business Insider, Gawker, The Awl, BuzzFeed, and Huffington Post have shown us that independent content creators are capable of developing audiences that rival traditional publications in terms of influence and scale.

I would posit that this dynamic is no different for content marketers. Content will always find an audience and be amplified if it is good enough. As more businesses begin to think and act as publishers and media companies, it’s important that they consider the appropriate strategies and metrics for efficient content creation.

Length Is Not A Proxy For Quality

One of my favorite quotes from Pascal is, “If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter” — suggesting that being concise is more challenging than not. New research from the Fast Company Labs team shows an increase in engagement with extensive topics being covered in a more piecemeal fashion versus as one long-form post.

As content marketers, it is important to be mindful of the length of content – in particular in relation to the medium in which it’s delivered. If anything, Twitter has shown us that a low character count can have just as much impact as a high one, provided there is sufficient density of information in the message. The often-discussed Oreo SuperBowl tweet is a great example of this.

Information Density Can Equal Utility

The latest research released last week by McKinsey shows that mobile platforms command a disproportionately small amount of time-spent for users who are consuming news — about 8% compared to 41% in TV and 35% in newspapers. To my mind, the insight here is not about time spent with legacy platforms vs. new ones – rather, it’s a question of efficiency in information delivery (density) and value to the end user (utility).

Lightweight services that efficiently deliver utility to end users have the capacity to become valuable platforms for content and community while providing deeper engagement. At the same time, metrics such as repeat usage and net promoter scores prove to be much more important than time spent.

A few noteworthy examples of lightweight branded services include AT&T’s MarkTheSpot application, the Nike+ platform, the Pepsi Pulse aggregator, The Content Marketing Institute’s How-To Guides and Urban Daddy’s TheNextMove application.

In the end, the quality of content marketing can be judged by the combined value and effect of the intent of the producer/creator, its utility to the end-user, and the medium through which it is distributed.

Narratives in long-form articles that share knowledge, short-form content that spreads relevant information, or branded services that add-value and deepen relationships with your community are always dependent on their quality of content. This will not necessarily be determined by traditional metrics like character count and time spent, but rather by fulfilling both the wants and needs of your intended audience as well as your brands’ objectives.

I came under fire last week because many people felt the research I quoted was too old, so I want to be clear up front that the rest of this article is filled with my opinions. These are time-tested, observationally effective, strategies, but they are not backed up with any empirical research.

Content Location, Location, Location

Where to put the informational content is just as important as having it at all. Too many sites cluster it all on the blog, creating an inconsistent voice and authority that unbalances the rest of their message.

Blogs are great, and most sites should have one, but they’re not the only informational content location available. It’s very simple to create a resource center or learning center, with how-to content, definition-based content, and other useful informational tidbits.

Content Case Study

Consider a doctor’s website we’ve been working with. They had many pages that contained primarily transactional content (i.e., they were trying to get potential patients to make an appointment) with a little bit of informational content thrown in. These pages were getting ok rankings and traffic from search engines, but they weren’t converting well — even through PPC.

The first step we took was detailed keyword research. We realized that potential patients were more interested in the how than in the what.

The next step was to look at the intention behind the searches. What we realized is that (as expected), the majority of searches were for informationally-oriented content. They wanted to know what was involved in the procedures, how long it took to complete, what the recovery time was like.

The doctor’s content had previously focused on himself: his certifications, experience, and style. While people wanted to feel confident that their surgeon was capable, that was secondary to answering other specific questions about the procedure.

Our first strategy was to add this information to the existing pages: how each procedure is approached, what the recovery times are, how much they cost, and before and after photos. The structure didn’t change much, and it looked something like this:

Keep in mind, these structures show only the portion of the site we were working with; a number of other pages, including “about,” “certifications,” “blog,” etc., were still also available.

While this strategy improved organic positioning (because we were actually using the keywords people were searching for), it didn’t improve conversion. For PPC listings, it actually reduced conversion. Something had gone terribly wrong, but what?

Using A Scalpel Rather Than A Sledgehammer

After detailed review of the website’s conversion paths, bounce rates, exit pages, page views and time on page, we started to see a different picture form. What had happened was that people’s actions indicated they liked the new content, but instead of convincing them to make an appointment, it was overwhelming or distracting many of them from making an appointment.

In a nutshell, the pages we had created were too long-form for the main portion of the website. What we realized was that the informational content we had added was good, but it wasn’t broken down enough.

Informational Content Has Its Place

Our next step was to go back to the keyword research and take another look. While it was true that the keywords indicated an intention for informational content, it wasn’t necessarily procedure-specific.

In other words, people were interested in recovery time for specific procedures, but not because they knew what procedure they wanted, but because they wanted to know what their options were.

We realized that what we needed was a procedure information center, where we broke down the different questions — not by procedure, but by question. So, instead of having one page that indicated how much it was for a specific procedure, we listed all of the options for that part of the body in one place.

Then, we carefully linked the main procedure page to this information so that whether people entered the site on a specific procedure page or the “how much it costs” page, they ultimately found whatever it was they were looking for. That structure looked more like this:

While it looks much more complicated (and it is to maintain!), this actually streamlines the client experience. By limiting the content on the main procedure pages to just a simple description and some quick links to what to expect, how much it costs, and recovery time, we found that people were likely to take one of two paths: (What to Expect -> Procedure -> Appointment OR Procedure -> What to Expect ->Procedure -> Appointment) through the site; but, both ended in a request for an appointment.

The key was to make use of page anchors to take the patient exactly to the part they requested (e.g., http://www.site.com/what-to-expect#procedure-1, for example) and then include a link at the end of that description back to the procedure page they had come from.

Think About The Medium As Well As The Message

Our next step after launching this was to consider some alternative ways of consuming content – videos, podcasts, infographics, etc., and determine what worked best for our audience. But that is another post entirely.

The key is to know your audience, to give them the right forms of informational content, and to present it on the website in a way that is easily accessible and useful.

Below are five key considerations when it comes to selecting a new network followed by a seven-step migration plan.

5 Questions To Ask When Evaluating A Network

Selecting the right performance marketing network is more than simply looking at the industry rankings or the size of the company. It comes down to finding the right fit for your business needs.

As you evaluate networks, explore the following five areas and then determine how the network’s answers map against your long-term business goals

1. Service: Ask whether you’ll have a dedicated account team, who is on it and what specifically they’ll do to help drive traffic and sales.
2. Compliance Policies: Understand how the network evaluates publishers and monitors and enforces compliance.  How much control will you have?
3. Technology: It’s worth it to bring along someone from your IT staff to ask about the network’s technology. Ask detailed questions related to your needs when it comes to commissioning and reporting. In addition, look for assurance that there is a strong technology backbone that keeps the network up and running, accurately tracks performance, keeps the dashboard updated in real time (or close to it), and one that supports mobile and tablet devices.
4. International And/Or Global Reach: Whether you currently service customers outside the U.S. or are considering expanding into new overseas markets , make sure your network has reach in the right countries that are aligned with your objectives and keep in mind that long-term, the majority of consumer growth will be in Asia, not just the Americas and Europe.
5. Educational & Networking Events: While performance marketing is an online business, there is tremendous value in being able to meet face-to-face with your community through in-person events and forums. Ask the network about their formal and informal networking opportunities.

Once you’ve determined which network is the right fit for your business, you’ll start the migration process. While much of it will happen on the back-end from a technical point of view, the following seven-step migration process is focused on your front-facing activities.

The 7-Step Affiliate Network Migration Process

Step One: Create A Communications Plan

It doesn’t need to be lengthy; however, it should be tailored to your publisher community. Be sure to include specifics on the timing of the migration, provide assurance that the transition won’t impact the publisher’s commission structure, and proactively answer frequently asked questions.

As you develop the plan, be sure to review the terms of the contract with the existing network to determine when you can begin to communicate with publishers. Ideally, you’ll be able to coordinate the timing of messages so that there isn’t any confusion throughout the transition process.

Step Two: Gap Analysis

What publishers are in your program today that might not be in your new network? This analysis should also be supplemented by using third-party tools such as Hitwise to identify the publishers that are driving the most traffic and sales for you and your competitors.

As you undertake this assignment, be sure to look at SKU data, year-over-year results, and the publishers’ performance during the busiest seasonal shopping seasons — the winter holidays, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

Step Three: Identify The Top Performing Publishers

Know who your rock star publishers are and encourage them further. This can be done through personalized notes as well as working with your network account team to better understanding your publishers’ needs so you can drive stronger campaign results.

Step Four: Reinvigorate Or Eliminate Low Performing Publishers

Moving to a new network will present a great opportunity to revisit the publishers whose efforts may have been erratic or lackluster over the recent past.

In these situations, you may want to inspire them to jumpstart their efforts or stop working with them altogether. While it may be unsettling to think about losing a certain percentage of your publisher community, keep in mind that you will see greater results when you focus on engaging the strongest performers.

Step Five: Refresh Your Creative

A new campaign and fresh ads will reenergize your publishers and your brand.

Step Six: Update The Affiliate-Related Pages On Your Website

Given all the questions regarding GAN, it’s a good idea to update your affiliate pages and proactively address the most frequently asked questions.

Step Seven: Post Migration Follow-up

Make sure your publishers have everything they need to be successful by checking in with them after the migration is complete. This way, you can also address any issues before they interrupt productivity while also forming closer ties to your publishers.

Completing The Transition Process

Given the many variables in the migration process, some companies will be able to transition their programs in a matter of days while others may take a few weeks. A well-devised plan with a strong communication component can help expedite the process to ensure a seamless transition without a missing a beat when it comes to revenue.

What’s the biggest obstacle to effective content marketing?

Surveys consistently reveal that enterprises — large and small — feel that creating enough content is the biggest problem. But, I’m not sure that quantity is the real issue here.

The problem is quality. In other words, does the content that’s already getting created actually perform the intended function?

Quality online content marketing gets people to perform an action. Whether that’s social sharing, joining an email list, contacting a sales rep, or making an online purchase, people have to be persuaded to do something.

And, contrary to popular belief, persuasion is not about manipulating or tricking people. It’s about creating understanding.

• Your prospects need to understand the overall context in which their problem exists in order to best solve it.
• Your prospects need to understand the benefits of solving their problem in a particular way before appreciating the benefits of your product or service.
• And, often, your prospects need their perspective altered — from an educational standpoint — before committing to a purchase.

All three of these objectives can be easily achieved by simply increasing understanding — and you create that understanding by providing the appropriate context within your content marketing efforts.

Here are three ways to make that happen.

1. Don’t Miss The Forest For The Trees

Smart content marketing helps prospects understand the overall context involved in achieving what they want. Too often, businesses produce pieces of content with solid advice, yet lacking the proper context to make that advice truly actionable.

A good example of providing context can be found in my last column here at Marketing Land, The Mindset that Makes Online Marketing Work. That piece elicited a lot of “a-ha” moments by illustrating how content, social media, and SEO are part of one larger strategic process, rather than individual tactics that can somehow get you there alone.

It’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees with your content, because it’s easy to assume people understand things the way you do. They don’t, which is why they need your content, additional context, and ultimately your product or service.

One way to provide this crucial context is to develop cornerstone content around the topics people need to understand in order to do business with you. You can crosslink this cornerstone content from applicable pieces of content as you go forward, which enhances the usability of your site and helps Google better rank you.

Also consider creating a “big picture” resource that you can reference when necessary. Your prospects will better understand what you’re giving them with each piece of content, and your content marketing will be more effective.

2. Share The Benefits Of Knowledge

Smart content marketing helps prospects understand the benefits of solving their problem in a certain way. Simply understanding that you have a problem or desire is not the same thing as understanding the best way to deal with it.

Too often, businesses will use content to attract a prospect, and then immediately try to start selling the paid solution. People must first understand the benefit of doing things the way your solution operates, which means there needs to be an intermediate educational step.

In the context of selling your product or service, you take the features of what you’re selling and translate them into what that feature does for the buyer. But before you get there, you’ve got to express the benefits of doing things the way you advocate in the first place.

For example, I tell you that email marketing is still the highest converting online sales channel, and that building your list is still the central aspect of content marketing. And I educate you on how to do that within the context of a larger content marketing strategy.

At the same time, you’re wondering why you’re bothering with all of this other content and social media and SEO stuff. That means I also have to educate you on the incredible leverage and defensible position you create from taking that broader content marketing approach to building an email list.

3. Contrast To Change Perception

Smart content marketing alters the perspective of prospects so that they are more inclined to do business with you. You do this by providing contrast, because people naturally perceive facts in a relative comparison to other facts.

The power of perceptual contrast is amazing, because you can actually alter a person’s perception of those facts, and yet the facts have not changed at all. The technique works by getting into the reader’s head in such a way that a red light is switched to green.

Here’s an example: A company selling high-end hot tubs at $15,000 a pop contrasted the price of the tub with the cost of a room addition (which runs at least $30,000), thanks to customer feedback stating that the purchase felt like adding a room to the house. Sales increased by 500% with this simple contrast technique.

Another approach is to briefly mention a competing but less desirable approach to solving a problem — then go into great detail about the solution you want the reader to embrace (and one that aligns with your ultimate product or service). The contrast will make your solution seem that much more inviting.

A changed perspective is just a different way of characterizing a new understanding. Often the objections to buying from you can be eliminated by one illuminating shift in perspective.

Smart Content Marketing Empowers Prospects

Information is not knowledge. – Albert Einstein

Content marketing done poorly is the mere transmission of information. Content marketing done well creates understanding, and understanding leads to knowledge.

The statement “knowledge is power” may be cliché, but that doesn’t make it a false statement. When you empower your prospects with true understanding and knowledge, you knock down any remaining barriers and objections to doing business with you.

And that’s the goal, right?

Image used with permission from Shutterstock.com

There are many tools available to aid in finding industry-specific quality content that you can share with your audience to continually position your brand as an expert. Additionally, these content pieces can serve as inspiration for future content concepts. Below are nine tools and concepts to utilize for content curation:

Pinterest

Pinterest is best known as an image-sharing site, but it is so much more. Many companies use Pinterest to share their own content, but do not use it to its full potential for content curation.

There are a number of Pinterest boards pinned with excellent infographics, blog posts and articles specific to almost every industry. When you find these boards, not only can you repin these images to your own boards, but you can also follow the image through to the originating site, grab the link and share on your other networks.

Follow Hashtags & Keywords

Many of you are on Twitter, sharing your content and engaging with your brand’s followers. But, as you most likely only follow a portion of the people and brands in your industry, you may be missing out on quality content that is being shared.

To maximize your efforts, track keywords, hashtags and brand names so you constantly have a stream of content at your fingertips. Using a third-party application like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to set up saved searches for hashtags and keywords is an easy way to monitor industry blog posts, videos, infographics and more, so you can then share them with your audience.

Storify

Storytelling is an important part of content marketing, and Storify makes telling a story through social media fairly simple. Used by many journalists and news organizations, Storify allows you to easily curate online content centered on a specific event or niche in order to tell a story.

The tool allows you to aggregate text, documents, videos, images and social media posts to convey a narrative of a topic of your choosing. You can then share your story across all of your distribution channels.

LinkedIn Signal

As it is a professional social network, people use LinkedIn to share industry blog posts, news articles and more. When you log into LinkedIn, you can see all the content your network is sharing right on your home screen. However, what about the content shared by people in your industry whom you aren’t connected with?

LinkedIn Signal allows you to search content by keyword that is shared by your network, second connections, third connections and everyone. You can find Signal by navigating to the “News” tab from the main navigation, choosing “Signal” in the drop-down menu and entering a keyword.

List.ly

List-centric content is often popular on social networks, so using List.ly to create lists — about anything — is a no-brainer. You can make a list of the top influencers, tools, videos, infographics, etc., specific to any industry — users can then vote items up or down or add their own suggestions to your list.

Additionally, you (or anyone) can easily share lists through social networks and even embed lists to a website or blog post. List.ly is great for content curation, but it also adds a community aspect to the aggregation process, which is always a plus.

Subscribe To Newsletters & Blogs

Most websites and blogs have a way people can subscribe to have content delivered to them in some way. Some websites have a monthly newsletter that includes Web content, while blogs often offer readers a subscription to posts through email or via RSS feed.

Subscribe to newsletters offered by industry websites and to your favorite industry blogs, then share this content on your social channels. Chances are you will be getting newsletters and blog posts on varying days throughout the month, so you’ll be constantly supplied with fresh content.

Delicious

After going dark for a few years, Delicious is back up and running. What was once a simple bookmarking site is now a full-blown social sharing network, as you can now connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts and share on a variety of networks.

You can search for content through tags (keywords) and find links shared by your network and others. You can then save those links to your Delicious page — but you also have the option of sharing to Facebook, Twitter or Google+, making content aggregation and sharing a breeze.

Google

If you don’t already have Google Alerts, set up for top industry keywords and do so now, as it is the easiest way to have content delivered right to your inbox. Google Alerts will notify you via email when new blog posts, news articles, videos, etc., are released; so by setting up alerts for industry keywords, you’ll get new links every day.

Additionally, you can utilize Google News to aggregate industry-specific content. You can do so by setting up a saved keyword search in Google News, which allows you to easily find local and national news coverage on specific topics. Google Alerts and Google News are excellent ways to ensure you’re keeping up to date on the latest industry information available.

Curata

Curating content can take lots of time — time that some businesses don’t have. Luckily, there are tools like Curata that make gathering relevant, high-quality content a more efficient process. Not only does the tool allow you to find, organize and share content very easily, it learns your content preferences so the most relevant content (to you, personally) is presented first.

Additionally, with a bookmarklet browser plugin, it’s easy to add content found on the Web to your Curata account, so it can then be worked into your publishing plan. With dedicated support for users, even those who are just getting started with content curation can utilize Curata.

Summary

Overall, it is recommended to have a content curation plan as part of your content marketing strategy, as it is imperative to share content other than your own on your social networks and even on your website. Consider following the rule of thirds:

• Spend one third of your time posting your own blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, etc.
• Spend one third of your time sharing the content from an external source
• Spend one third of your time engaging in conversations and asking questions

The rule of thirds in social sharing ensures that you’re not just pushing content to your audience — and, that when you do share content, it comes from a variety of sources. When it comes to distributing content besides your own, consider using the above tools and concepts to discover quality content to share with your network.

What content curation tools do you use? Please let us know in the Comments below.

All images courtesy of Vertical Measures.