When Good Content is Better Than Great Content

Buffer

A lot of content marketers will tell you that your content has to be perfect. Outstanding. It really has to hit the mark.

Trouble is sometimes companies spend so long tweaking the content, talking to focus groups, trying to second think through every possible permutation that by the time something’s published it’s lost its initial momentum.

Don’t Just Climb the Mountain

Let’s say you’re launching a business blog to help drive traffic to your site and bring a less corporate feel to your online communications. You can spend a long time deciding on the right software (WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, ExpressionEngine, etc), the right design and, the right content but going with a simple self-hosted WordPress blog using a generic premium theme with a few tweaks to brand the blog can be enough to get you going and building page rank. Saving this extra time might just help you first to post compared to your competitors.

Climbing a mountain takes monumental effort but using the chair lift will usually get you pretty high up very quickly and with less effort. In business content marketing, sometimes getting ahead before the rest of the competition is a victory in itself and give you the edge over others.

Get it Out There

Look at Crisis Management. When a crisis hits a company they don’t waste time perfecting their response. They get a YouTube video with the CEO out in two hours, or a blog post up in minutes. The production quality is low because the content is needed quickly. In this way, good content actually becomes great because it gets the job done. It addresses the concerns and issues at hand in a timely fashion.
[Read more...]

Johnny Spence on How to Start a Business Website

Buffer

To succeed online you need a great business website. The trouble is it can be a minefield finding the right people to build it, the right content management system (CMS) to run it, and the right web strategy to help your business grow.

johnny spence

'There really isn't a wrong choice for a CMS,' says Johnny Spence

So to get the lowdown on buying a website and the more technical side of online communications, I talked to Johnny Spence, a web-developer who runs Oscarrweb! out of Barcelona.

As well as knowing his way around web code and developing great business sites, the great thing about Johnny is that he’s an awesome communicator and blogger. Vist his blog: The Freelance Rant

We chatted over email and twitter between Spain and Stockholm.

Jon: Getting started with online content marketing means you need a website. As a web programmer, what do you think a business should be looking for in a web site or CMS?

Johnny: There are thousands of possibilities for a business website with a budget to match. Rather than picking a CMS and going from there, you should ask yourself the following to start planning a website:

  • What is my budget?
  • What is the purpose of my business website (advertise, inform, both)?
  • Will I need to update my website on a regular basis?
  • Will I need to expand my website in the near future?
  • Will I need a blog?

Then the next step is to find a recommended web designer/developer and consult on a solution with the above needs in mind. Better yet, if you know of a freelance designer you communicate with on Twitter or other social media, hit one of them up.

Jon: There are SO many different kinds of CMS out there. How does a business user know what’s right for them? And how do they make the right choice?

Johnny: There really isn’t a wrong choice for a CMS whether it is a custom made or utilizes one of the widely available open-source softwares such as WordPress or Drupal. It does have to suit needs and for a website though. So, before deciding on one, you will want to have a test run with a similar CMS with a developer to see if you will be comfortable with what you will be using.

As a general rule, WordPress is great for a business website with an emphasis on a blogging platform and is the most cost friendly to implement since it is so popular. Drupal is good for a larger scale website, with or without a blog, but development costs can run higher. A custom CMS, however, can be made how you like it and is generally easier to use, not having all of the complexities of a commercial CMS.

Due to the custom and/or proprietary nature of a custom CMS, though, costs can run higher and, if you decide to migrate to a more commercial CMS in the future, you could incur more costs there as well.

Jon: Small businesses just starting out probably aren’t going to have a massive budget to develop their website. There’s always a battle between investing in the “visual stuff” and “technical stuff”. If you’re on a tight budget what’s essential if you’re looking to use a website as a place to market your company?
[Read more...]

Content marketing just got a whole lot harder

Buffer

Creating cool online content isn’t worth a thing if no one’s reading your business blog.

 Scribe logoEnter Scribe – the new WordPress plugin from Brian Clark and his team.

What is Scribe?

Geared to WordPress users who run themes like Thesis, Headway and Hybrid or the indispensable All in One SEO plugin, Scribe sits in your dashboard and tells you how to improve your writing for search engines.

As Brian Clark puts it “it’s like having an SEO expert as an editorial assistant.”

The idea is that now you can write your daily blog posts with an online buddy there to whisper SEO tips as you write.

Neat, huh?

So what do you get?

After struggling with some silly sign-up issues (I’m based in Stockholm, Sweden, after all), I managed to get hold of a copy today and my first impression is that this is a game-changer.

Once you’ve signed up you get a plugin that you upload to your Plugin directory in your installation of WordPress.

After that’s done you activate the plugin and enter the API Key you received when your subscription was confirmed.

Then all you have to do fire up a new post and you’ll immediately notice a new field on the right of the WordPress composition window geared to SEO.

Tweaking a post

To test things out, I analysed yesterday’s post: 5 Reasons Your Business Blog is Failing.

My initial SEO score was a measly 72%, even though I’m pretty adept at writing SEO copy if Google SERPs are anything to go on.

Anyway, my pride intact and my interest high, I glanced through Scribe’s summary.

seo copywriting

Not quite a perfect score, eh?


[Read more...]