Content marketing is fast-paced industry formed by a number of creative practitioners and results-orientated and savvy marketers. As a result, it evolves on a day-to-day basis. Here at Crowdbait we strive to keep our finger on the pulse of the content marketing sector, looking out for the latest audience trends and technological developments that affect the way we do our job. For our weekly Crowdbait mashup we scour the net in search of insightful opinions and informative news items on all things content marketing – helping us to keep abreast of industry changes and providing you with a window into the digital marketing world. This week we have a piece from the Huffington Post on the release of Kindle Worlds, a cutting-edge look at the old-skool world of email marketing courtesy of Copyblogger, news of the impending emergence of Twitter’s Amplify service and much more besides, so read on and start supercharging your content with advice from the experts!
Kindle Worlds: fan fiction or content marketing?
Fan fiction is often terrible, always niche and just occasionally excellent, but this hasn’t stopped Amazon from releasing a platform wholly devoted to the distribution of ‘fanfic’. In her excellent Huffington Post article ‘Is Kindle Worlds a pure content marketing move?’, Laxmi Hariharan argues that the new Kindle device will work as a free content marketing tool for authors and publishers everywhere – why produce your own content or pay someone else to do so when an army of fans will be happy to do the job for you? While few brands can boast the levels of pre-existing audience engagement of shows such as ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘The Vampire Diaries,’ Kindle Worlds represents an exciting content marketing platform for those in a position to take advantage of it.
Creating content methodically with Business2Community
In his post on the Business2Community blog, Ryan Farrell argues that digital marketers approach content creation in a far too haphazard fashion. Ryan says that suggesting to someone that they should ‘make great content’ is, at best, incomplete advice without the ‘how’ and the ‘what’. ‘A methodical approach to content marketing’, then, is Ryan’s attempt to produce a step-by-step guide to content creation that will really encourage engagement with your audience. Read it – there’s a lot of good advice in there!
A novel approach to content creation
If you’re talking about original content that truly engages the reader, you can’t look much further than the world of fiction writing. Pratik Dholakiya of Convince & Convert believes that the humble content marketer can learn a thing or two from the storytelling techniques of the world’s top authors, and in his blog post ‘7 things content marketers can learn from fiction writers’, he attempts to pinpoint what they are. Perhaps with Pratik’s advice more brands will be producing truly page-turning content in no time. We actually created a similar piece last September that offered advice in a different way; take a look at our post on four best-selling writing secrets from the world’s greatest authors to see how we explored the concept.
Antiviral content
While Ryan and Pratik have lent us some words of wisdom on how to create engaging content, Tom Treynor of Social Media Today has concerned himself with how not to get it wrong! In his post ‘6 reasons your blog content won’t go viral’, Tom examines some of the common mistakes that are holding people back in the pursuit of viral content. Tom’s pointers are particularly interesting as they concern the client side of content marketing, as well as the creative side – are you doing enough to encourage traffic once the content is live on your site?
Guest bloggers under fire
Guest blogging is one of the secret weapons in a content marketer’s arsenal, allowing them to build links successfully without producing content exclusively for a client’s native blog. According to Econsultancy’s Graham Charlton, however, guest blogging may not be such a golden goose forever. In his blog ‘is guest blogging becoming risky?’, Graham highlights the increased interest Google is now taking in the act of guest blogging, and asks how this could affect the content marketing industry in future. It’s something that we all need to be aware of…
How Penguin affects posting
Google has updated Penguin to a shiny new 2.0 version, and Quicksprout’s Neil Patel is intrigued to know what this could mean for the aforementioned guest blogger. In his article ‘Penguin 2.0: how guest blogging will be affected’ Neil examines the ways in which Penguin 2.0 has changed the face of Google, pushing the role of the guest blogger further into the limelight. Will your content marketing activities be affected by Penguin 2.0?
A blast from the past with email marketing
While content marketing often focuses on emerging platforms such as social media and digital technology, there’s still room in the marketer’s arsenal for the old-school tried and tested techniques. In her article ‘3 quick ways to perk up your email marketing efforts’, Beth Hayden examines the role that content marketing can play in a company’s direct mail campaigns. If you’ve not got a well-written, engaging and simple newsletter then now’s the time to produce one!
Newsworthy notes
While the bright young marketing experts mentioned above have been discussing all things content-related over the past few weeks, the industry itself has hardly stood still. As well as the aforementioned Penguin update Google has also revamped its voice search function (a development we covered in this article on the Crowdbait blog), allowing Chrome users to communicate with the search engine using naturalistic voice commands. Could this function be a sign of intelligent user interfaces to come?
Google isn’t the only company that’s been making strides in the content marketing sector, however. Twitter has been striving to better monetise its efforts for some time now, and the impending release of the Twitter Amplify function will allow the company’s media partners to utilise dual-screen functions to better reach their online fans. This article on the Forbes website discusses the practical attributes of Twitter Amplify in greater detail.
That’s it for this week’s Crowdbait mashup we’re afraid, but be sure to keep an eye on our blog to catch our summary of the latest developments in the content marketing industry this time next week!