Rillara Topical News

Why Your Strength Within Lies Without

Danny — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:56:17 +0000

“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong… And yet, a person can perform only from strength.” Peter Drucker. None of us like to admit we’re weak. None of us like to present the potential of fear to our opponents, always waiting in the wings for us to slip up. And yet… Our opponents are just as fearful. Just as cautious. Just as secretive and unwilling to admit to weaknesses too. Sometimes they hide...

Why Your Strength Within Lies Without originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.

Fear And Loathing In Advertising

Mitch Joel — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:33:24 +0000

What a long, strange trip it's been. There are many who think that advertising as we have known it to date is going to rapidly change in our new media world. There are days when I feel this way (and you've read about it here), but there are days when ...

Giving and Getting the Most Out of Your Brand’s Cause Marketing [CONVO]

neilglassman — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:16:09 +0000

One of the benefits of social media changing the nature of brands' conversations with their customers is the increase in many companies' philanthropic efforts. In this conversation, I speak with author Rachel Armbruster, known for her work as...

Director, Digital Engagement, Alumni Affairs Team at Teach For America (New York, New York)

Web Strategy and Social Media Jobs Job Site — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:40:31 +0000

Position Summary With over 23,000 alumni and thousands more corps members, Teach For America is seeking a Director of Digital Alumni Engagement to help leverage social media to connect, support and e...

Why Every Business Blog Needs Evergreen Content

Pamela Vaughan — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:30:00 +0000

When it comes to the different types of content you can publish on a business blog, there is a world of possibilities. But among all those variations of blog content is a very important one that often gets overlooked. That, my friend, is evergreen content, and every blog could use some. In this article, we'll dive into what evergreen content is (and isn't), why it's so important to the success of a blog, and how you can effectively leverage it for your business.

What Is Evergreen Blog Content?

Just like the name indicates, evergreen blog content stays useful season to season, year to year with little or no need for upkeep. It can be referenced long after it was originally published, and even then, it's still valuable to the reader. If you're wondering what makes blog content 'evergreen,' it typically encompasses the following three characteristics:

Timeless: As mentioned, content that is evergreen stands the test of time. With the exception of sometimes needing a few tweaks here and there, evergreen content won't change much and is practically everlasting.
Valuable and High Quality: In order to reap the true benefits of being evergreen (which we'll cover in the next section of this post), blog content must be valuable and high quality enough to get noticed. If a piece of blog content that you intended to be evergreen isn't valuable to your readers and doesn't attract substantial views when it's first published, it will never become evergreen.
Canonical: Evergreen content is usually the canonical, or definitive, piece of content your business has on that given topic. It's in-depth, detailed, and it likely took you a lot longer to create than some of your other, non-evergreen blog content.

But we're talking about the web here, right? Where things change lightning fast? Depending on the speed at which your industry changes, it may be more or less difficult to create evergreen content. The important thing to remember is that, on the web, content that lasts even a year or two could be considered fairly evergreen for your particular industry.

Why Evergreen Content Is Crucial

Okay, so now you have a better sense of what makes certain blog content 'evergreen,' but you're probably still wondering what all the fuss is about. Why is evergreen content so valuable to a business? There are three main benefits that evergreen content can provide for a blog:

High Search Engine Rankings: Because of the quality and timelessness of evergreen blog content, it will typically rank very well in search engines over time. This makes it critical for bloggers to make sure evergreen content is well-optimized with the keywords for which they're trying to rank in search engines.
High Traffic: Because evergreen content typically achieves high ranking positions in search engines, it gets found more, which means it contributes a steady, continuous amount of traffic into your blog and website, even long after it was initially published.
Continues to Generate Leads: As a result of the continuous traffic it generates, evergreen content that is optimized for lead generation also has a powerful capacity to continually generate leads over time. The HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog, for example, which has published nearly 3,000 articles to date, can credit a lot of the day-to-day leads it generates to articles that were published months and even years ago.

In other words, the reason evergreen content is so valuable is because it continues to work for you long after you publish it. That's why a blog that incorporates evergreen content into its strategy is at an advantage. If you took a news-centric approach to your content creation and only published content about breaking industry news, your blog content would become outdated and irrelevant quickly, and it wouldn't generate long-lasting traffic.

Evergreen content, on the other hand, guarantees SEO, traffic, and leads over time. And in today's marketing world where regular and consistent content creation is a marketer's job, who wouldn't appreciate the timeless benefits of content that's evergreen?

Examples of Evergreen Blog Content

Still confused about what types of blog content you can consider evergreen? Considering the three characteristics we discussed above, here are some examples of blog content with evergreen potential:

Resource lists of curated content (e.g. 36 Awesome Social Media Blogs Everyone Should Read)
Your business' everlasting stance on an industry issue (e.g. 6 Reasons Every Small Business Should Be Blogging)
Answers to frequently asked questions in your industry (e.g. When Lead Scoring is a Marketer's Waste of Time)
Historical accounts (e.g. The History of Marketing: An Exhaustive Timeline [INFOGRAPHIC])
How-to guides/tutorials on topics that don't change (e.g. How to Create a Facebook Business Page in 5 Simple Steps [With Video!])

With that in mind, here are some examples of content that wouldn't be considered evergreen:

Date/time/situational-specific content (e.g. Brian Halligan's 2010 Marketing Wish List)
Breaking news (e.g. BREAKING: Facebook Announces New Subscribe Button)
Data and statistics (e.g. 25 Eye-Popping Internet Marketing Statistics for 2012)
Speculative content/Opinions about news (e.g. How Path is Making 'Small' the New 'Big' in Social Media)
Content about specific events (e.g. The FIFA World Cup: The Biggest Event in Social Media Yet?)

In general, topics that don't change (or change very little) over time are a good indication they'll have evergreen potential. The ultimate question to ask yourself when trying to decide: Will people still read this and think it's interesting a year from now?

4 Steps for Evergreen Content Maintenance

While content that is truly evergreen won't need very much maintenance over time, it's a good call to audit your evergreen content every once in a while (say, every 6 months) to look for opportunities for improvement. Because your evergreen content will continue to generate traffic and leads, you'll want it to stay as fresh as possible.

Step 1: Identify Your Evergreen Content

The first thing to do is identify your existing evergreen content. For this, you'll need to consult your blog analytics. First, sort your articles by top views. This will help to eliminate the content that isn't evergreen. To narrow your list down even further, eliminate articles in that top views category whose topics aren't evergreen (e.g. news, event-specific, etc.). Now take a look at which of your remaining posts are still generating leads for your business. You can also look at your keyword metrics to determine if any of these top posts rank highly for specific keywords you're trying to rank for. From this exercise, you should be able to come up with a list of evergreen blog content that you should audit -- and add to -- over time.

Step 2: Update Content

Your next step should be to update the content you've identified as evergreen. Have there been any recent developments on the topic that would make a great addition to the post? Do any examples or statistics (maybe you have more compelling ones now) need updating since you last visited the post? Does anything that no longer applies need to be deleted from it? Make the appropriate adjustments. The important thing to remember is that you want to update the existing post rather than create a completely new one. This is because you want to keep leveraging the SEO benefits the post has already built up, not start from scratch. If it's been a while since the post was originally published and you'd like to give it more attention than what it gets from search alone, consider republishing the post as new -- just use this tactic sparingly.

Step 3: Keep CTAs Fresh

When conducting your evergreen content audit, pay attention to each post's call-to-action (Each post does have one, right?). Is that CTA the best CTA for this particular post? If the post is already generating a lot of traffic, you want to serve people with the best possible CTA. Select your high-performing offers for the CTAs of these posts to get the most bang for that post's lead generation.

If it's been months since you updated the post, it's possible you've created a new ebook, webinar, or another relevant offer that is fresher that the CTA you used originally. Or perhaps you've just updated your CTA design since then, and you need to replace the stale one with your new design. For HubSpot customers, the CTA Module makes it very easy to update CTAs, allowing you to automatically replace an old CTA design with the new one for every blog post for which it was used.

Step 4: Make Sure Posts are Search Engine Optimized

If you're a regular and consistent content creator, chances are you probably aren't nitpicking every single blog post you publish for the best possible SEO. Search engine optimization takes time and careful consideration, so it's understandable that you might get lazy here. But when it comes to evergreen content, making these posts search engine optimized as best as possible is very valuable. If a post is already generating a high level of traffic, you'll benefit from spending the time to help it rank for some other keywords that you also want to rank for. Read through your post and identify opportunities to include these keywords and link that anchor text to the pages you want to rank for that particular keyword.

Step 5: Create New Evergreen Content

Always look for new opportunities to create evergreen content. Is there a niche topic in your industry that has been written about very little which offers an opportunity for you to create a canonical, evergreen piece of blog content? Jump on it! Evergreen content is a powerful asset for your business, and being able to create more will only add to the everlasting benefits of your blog.

How to Leverage Evergreen Blog Content

Okay, so you've identified your existing evergreen content and you know how to start creating even more if it. But there are still a couple of other things you can do to maximize the benefits of your evergreen content.

Link to Evergreen Blog Content in Other Content: Because your evergreen content is virtually timeless and also likely some of your best content, it behooves you to link to it in the other content you create (e.g. other blog posts, ebooks, web pages, etc.). This will drive even more traffic to it and help you leverage the power of internal linking, which is an overlooked yet important part of search engine optimization.
Promote Evergreen Blog Content in Social Media: Evergreen content can be a great pool of content to fuel your social media promotion. It's some of your best content, and while search will naturally generate a lot of traffic for your evergreen content, social media can also help drive traffic. When HubSpot first started incorporating evergreen content into its social media strategy, our initial experiment more than doubled the amount of social media traffic we were sending to the blog. Today, the promotion of evergreen content is a regular part of HubSpot's social media strategy, and since we conducted our first evergreen promo experiment, we've seen even more tremendous growth in social media referral traffic to the blog.

Of course not all blog content you publish has to be evergreen. There are definitely benefits to having a healthy mix of both evergreen and newsworthy or timely content. Are you mixing evergreen content into your blogging strategy?

Image Credit: jonkriz

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The Rise of the Personality Cult in Marketing and its Pitfalls

David Amerland — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:00:37 +0000

Social media demands the personal touch and, inevitably, leads to the rise of the personal cult, but that is not without its pitfalls, it would seem.

Make Content Strategy the Foundation of Social Service Design

rohnjaymiller — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:48:31 +0000

"Content": isn't the same thing as "published information." We tend to think of it as separate from "sevices," when in fact it's a central component of online services--everything from shopping to research to ma...

Google Analytics – el primer artículo de una serie

Jesus De La Garza — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:14:55 +0000

Este es el primero de una serie de artículos que nos permitirán conocer mas detalles acerca del programa de Google Analytics, sus funciones y porque debemos utilizarlo para conocer y entender nuestra página web

Is your site optimized for pinning?

shel@holtz.com — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:12:29 +0000

The proliferation of Pinterest-like sites tells me that Pinterest has tapped into something basic, a desire to share images more easily and with more focused purpose than the traditional photo-sharing sites. Since Pinterest has become the social servic...

Plan to Respond: Using Social Media in a Crisis, pt. 3

ChrisSyme — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:41:02 +0000

Research indicates that organizations that plan and practice are more successful in navigating a crisis. According to the 2011 Crisis Preparedness Study by Burson-Marstellar, companies with a plan recover faster and lose less money in a crisis than tho...

I want my story out there…social media pioneers on what first inspired them.

Elastic Lab — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:15:51 +0000

"I want my story out there" features Matt Johnson, Sarah Weinstein, Pablo Schmitt, Craig Hickman, Damon Molloy, Noel Hidalgo, Andrea Mercado, David LaMorte, Dan Patterson, Jeff Hinz, CC Chapman and Sarah Vela. Part of Elastic Lab's Cultu...

As Facebook Timeline Comes to Brands, Will You Be Prepared?

marymanzo — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:10:26 +0000

News through the Facebook grapevine is that the social network will not only be releasing a mandatory Timeline update for all users but soon Facebook Pages will also be getting a makeover with a new look and feel. Make sure your brand is ready!

Why Ratings and Reviews Suck and How to Save Them

AugieRay1 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:09:00 +0000

If you are an authentic marketer and really want to get your blood boiling, check out fiverr.com, where people compete to write paid reviews. One person promises "I will leave 3 Amazon reviews from unique accounts that YOU write for $5," and ...

What a Brand Manager Can Learn from a Violin Player – A Social Experiment

steve olenski — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:33:14 +0000

As much as our world continues to change and evolve, there are some things that will never change in the eyes of a consumer. One of them is the fact that perception often is reality. And brand managers and brand marketers alike should never lose sight ...

Five Things You Can Learn From Glock

Matthew Grant — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:18:07 +0000

In this week’s episode of the Marketing Smarts podcast, I interview Paul Barrett, assistant managing editor and senior feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and author of the recently released GLOCK: The Rise of America’s Gun. After reading the book and discussing the astonishing success of this unconventional sidearm with Paul, I realized that there were at [...]

Austerity Measures and Raising the Bar Do Not Mix

Lisa Gerber — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:00:52 +0000

Today’s guest post is written by Lisa Gerber. I’ll never forget the day the Counselors Academy brochure arrived in the mail. It was Jan 2009, and my PR business was almost five years old. I had been growing it every year in double digits and had added an employee in 2008. And then it all [...]

How Social Media Can Help College Students

Jason Falls — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:00:37 +0000

Tips on how college students can leverage social media for career advancement.

The Pros and Cons of Form-Free Content (And Which to Choose)

Corey Eridon — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:30:00 +0000

There's one thing that absolutely all excellent inbound marketers have in common. Can you guess what it is?

It's that they are all remarkable content creators. That means they create and publish high quality content -- webinars, ebooks, blog posts, case studies, etc. -- and they do it on a consistent basis.

But where some inbound marketers start to diverge is in their decision to deploy that content behind a form, or keep it form-free for all the world to see with no exchange of information. There are pros and cons to each method, and inbound marketers are still discussing which method is best -- just watch this video debate between HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe and HubSpot Marketer in Residence David Meerman Scott on the subject. Let's outline the pros and cons of form-free content, and delineate when exactly it makes sense to choose one method over the other.

The Benefits of Form-Free Content

When your content isn't gated behind a form -- like this blog post, for example -- it is going to be consumed by more people. Why is that a good thing? Let's break down the benefits of more eyes on your content.

Enabling Content Evangelism: The more eyes you get on your content, the more people will share it socially and via email. Not just because the probability increases that someone will read your content in the first place -- thus a corresponding higher rate of sharing -- but because people are less likely to tweet, email, or post a link to a form for their friends and colleagues. It's not unheard of; it's just less likely. David Meerman Scott, an advocate of form-free content, has noticed that content assets actually have a 50x higher rate of download when they are form-free. This means your content and ideas will spread faster and further without the barrier of a form, and by extension so does your thought leadership.
Better SEO: Typically, marketers don't search engine optimize gated content, since the goal is visitor-to-lead conversion, not SEO ranking. But if you publish more form-free content, you'll have more keyword-optimized indexed pages that can appear in search engine results pages.
More Inbound Links: Other online publications are more likely to link to your content if it's form-free because they don't want to send visitors to a part of your site that requires them to fill out a form. And we all know why inbound links are important, right?
More Site Traffic: Better SEO and more content sharing means you're going to drive more traffic to your site -- both new and repeat visitors as your reach grows and you build a loyal audience.

The Drawbacks of Form-Free Content

More site traffic, better SEO, constant social sharing? Sounds great; let's do the form-free content, right? Well if the title of this section wasn't a dead giveaway, there are some drawbacks to the form-free marketing lifestyle. Consider these reasons why gated content may be the way to go.

Lower Quality Leads: You might be getting more, raw leads by keeping your content ungated -- that outcome is business-specific. But you're more likely to get qualified leads through gated content. There is a higher barrier to entry with content behind a form -- it has to be interesting enough for someone to want to give over their personal information to retrieve. But because of that, you know the lead is truly interested in your company's content. Like Mike Volpe notes in the video debate, what's the value of a view versus a contact? If your business runs on leads, 2,800 qualified contacts are more valuable than 50,000 views.
Inconsistent Lead Volume: It's harder to get a consistent volume of leads with form-free content, because you simply have fewer sources from which to collect leads. It's hard to be a marketing executive that not only can't set realistic lead generation goals, but also can't guarantee a set number of leads to the sales organization every month. No marketer wants to hope for successful lead generation -- gated content gives more opportunity for an accurate forecast that can be scientifically executed based on past performance.
Fewer Conversion Events Means Poorer Lead Intelligence: Every time a visitor or lead fills out a form, you have the opportunity to both confirm/update information you already have about them, and learn more about them. There's usually a higher lead-to-customer conversion rate for leads with multiple conversion events; part of that can be attributed to the fact that Sales has more information about the leads, and that information is more accurate. Knowing more about their leads lets them prioritize who to contact first based on which leads are more sales-ready, and historically have a higher likelihood of closing quickly at a high price point.
Less Control Over Lead Nurturing: With form-free content, you have to relinquish more lead nurturing control -- you didn't ask for their information, so how can you get back in touch with them unless they either bookmark your site (good job, your content must rock!) or passively come across your site again? That's often not enough control for a hungry inbound marketer looking to educate people who are interested in their company. When leads fill out a form, you can provide more educational content that is targeted to their needs so they move more swiftly through the sales funnel.

Deciding Whether to Put Content Behind a Form

One takeaway marketers could walk away with from this debate is that there are simply some content assets that lend themselves better to being form-free than others. And the rationale behind determining which assets to gate and which ones to leave ungated boils down to establishing a purpose behind each content asset. When you publish something -- a blog post, a case study, a whitepaper, an ebook, a webinar, a video -- what are you hoping to achieve with it? What's the point? Let's break down how to decide whether to keep your content assets form-free.

The clearest example of a content asset that should remain form-free is blog content. Unless your end goal for blogging is something other than site traffic, more indexed content, establishing a thought leadership position, and better SEO, blog content should remain ungated. Your blog is one of the most powerful tools you have for organic search success, and putting that content behind a form is seriously compromising your website's success. That being said, you don't need to sacrifice lead generation from your blog entirely. Just be sure to add relevant calls-to-action for your form gated, lead gen content to each blog post you publish -- as well as to the top and/or sidebar of your blog (for an example, just scroll to the bottom of this post).

There may be a few instances of businesses gating some of their product or service information -- and there might be a good reason (leave it in the comments!) for that decision. But content assets centered around your product or service like data sheets, FAQs, and case studies are more examples of content that should be available for everyone to read without a form. Do you really want to hinder someone's access to information about your company's solutions? Inbound marketers almost never get to talk about themselves -- this is your chance to do it guilt free, and to someone who actually wants to hear it! Don't make it harder for interested prospects to learn why they should become a customer of yours.

So when would you use a form? If you look at the content assets most often associated with the first and last stage of the buying cycle -- 'Awareness' and 'Purchase' -- they generally seem to align with the instances in which marketers should gate their content if they're in the business of generating a consistent volume of leads.

In the 'Awareness' stage, the content assets are purely educational, and not promotional of the company's product or service. Not everyone will want to provide their information in exchange for reading an ebook or watching a webinar, but the fact is, you're providing free education. Those that are invested enough in learning more about the solutions your company helps solve are going to be willing to fill out a form to retrieve that information. And that's what helps you distinguish who is a qualified lead, and who is still in the low-commitment phase of browsing your website, reading your blog, and checking out your social media accounts to get information.

In the 'Purchase' stage of the buying cycle, there's a little less gray area. You're offering high-commitment content that frankly requires the exchange of information. It's pretty hard to give a free estimate to someone, for example, without a form being filled out. Prospects understand that, and are more often than not willing to comply.

All this being said, inbound marketers know that this isn't an exact science. We wouldn't be debating it if it was. That's because some businesses sell a product or service that is more complex than others. In the video debate on this subject, Volpe and Scott discuss Dropbox as an example of a company successfully generating customers without using gated content. Leads simply sign up for a free trial, download Dropbox, and then decide whether to purchase after the trial expires. If you have a less complex product or service like Dropbox, this approach of largely form-free content may work. For companies whose products and services require more education and explanation -- often those with a longer buying cycle -- a mix of form-free and gated content is most appropriate. Form-free content drives the traffic, and gated content converts that traffic, multiple times, so Marketing and Sales can properly nurture and prioritize those leads.

Finally, keep in mind that using forms means your content should have a reputation for being consistently remarkable. Leads will be less and less willing to part with their personal information to redeem your content assets if there's not sufficient return in content quality.

On which side of the form-free content debate do you fall? Share your reasoning in the comments!

Image credit: garryknight

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Should Your Brand be on Pinterest?

Brett Greene — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:15:51 +0000

In less than two years since it's launch, Pinterest has blasted off to be one of the fastest growing social networks of all time. At the end of 2011 the site was listed by Hitwise as one of the top 10 social networks when it had grown to 11.7 million monthly unique visitors.

45 SEO and Social Media Tools #SESLondon

Lee Odden — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:13:53 +0000

I really lucked out after moderating the morning session at SES London on Social Media Tools by joining the SEO Tools of the Trade session that followed. Both sessions had great speakers and I’ve decided to combine my notes for both into one post about social media automation tools and SEO tools. The sources for [...]