Content marketing is quickly becoming a primary focus on the Web. The expansion of blogs and websites that use content as a main format make it a hot topic for any marketer and content creator. But it is an adapting field like any other, and you might be worried that you’re not exploiting the method as much as you should be.

Content Strategy Versus Content Marketing

There has been a lot of talk lately about content marketing, especially since blogs have become so ingrained with other social media. There has also been a lot of talk about content strategy. The obvious question becomes: What is the difference between the two? Are content marketing and content strategy the same thing?

Not really. A better way to explain the way the two differ is to say that content strategy is the process of developing a plan for marketing a product, website or concept. Content marketing, on the other hand, is a tool that can be used to carry out that strategy.

Developing Your Content Strategy

The process of developing a content strategy begins by understanding the parameters of that strategy. You have to find what your target demographic is, keywords that are relevant and beneficial for use, what kind of content will rate highest with users and ways that you can push content and increase visibility.

It will include a rundown of popular platforms that you will utilize in the course of your strategy. These platforms might include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Flickr, YouTube, your blog and anything else you find useful. Each should have their own form of content production and distribution.

Another part of developing this strategy will be finding ways to engage your users. Which is where content marketing comes in.

Using Content Marketing

This is one of the tools that relates to your overall content strategy. There are many ways in which you can use it to your benefit, but the basics are:

• Creating high quality content for various sources.
• Using various forms of content, such as video, images, podcasts, blog posts, social media lists, ebooks, webinars and more.
• Utilizing social media to push this content.
• Making connections with others to share content, such as guest blogging or guesting on podcasts.

Remember that content marketing is all about how you package and present content for the user to enjoy.

Further Education: Content Marketing Books

The best thing you can do is get the advise of an expert on the topic. Below are some good content marketing books.

1. Content Strategy For The Web

Kristina Halvorson is not only an accomplished author of some very informative books on marketing, she is also the CEO and Founder of Brain Traffic.

Being well known for her content marketing strategies, which she has incorporated into her own successful company, Content Strategy For The Web brings all of that expertise into one place.

The second edition is now out, so check it out.

2. Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy (2nd Edition)

Another book that has been released in second edition, this fantastic guide on content strategy was written by two experts in the field.

Ann Rockley is the Founder and President of The Rockley Group, and Charles Cooper is an accomplished author with quite a few books under his name.

This book not only covers the importance of content, but also a unified strategy for exploiting new platforms for viewing it, such as mobile Web technology.

3. Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content

When considering Web influence, there is a good chance your mind goes immediately to more modern social media, such as Facebook or Twitter.

As it should, since this is a primary means of both increasing and establishing influence around the Internet. But content is also an important factor and one that is often neglected.

Colleen Jones discusses the importance of content in the world of online clout.

4. Content Rules

Do you want to know how to make content of all kinds, no matter what the medium?

Ann Handley and C.C Chapman have you covered with this extensive guide. Learn the ‘rules’ for creating great blog posts, podcasts, videos, ebooks, webinars, conferences and much more than have a focus of engaging customers for business growth.

5. Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy

Another great book by Ann Rockley, this book looks at the way that social media and other Web platforms have changed the way users search for and view content. Then it presents simple guidelines to improving your own content to match this demand.

To the point, thorough and well written, this is a must for any content marketer’s reading list.

6. Get Content Get Customers: Turn Prospects into Buyers with Content Marketing

This unique partnership created a very unique book. Joe Pulizzi is obsessed with all things content marketing and he swears by its effectiveness.

Newt Barret is a marketing veteran. Everything here is less about visibility and more about using content marketing for direct sales.

It is great for ecommerce use of content marketing.

7. The Elements of Content Strategy

You can get this book cheap in ebook form, which is one of many of its benefits. Written by Erin Kissane, it breaks content marketing down into more manageable explanations, looking at the overall strategy of its use.

You will get a true understanding of what content marketing is, how it became popular, why it should be used today and how to do it properly.

Do you know of any good content marketing books out there?

Content Photo via Shutterstock

The post Books On Content Marketing: Seven Good Choices appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Luckily, there are a wide variety of tools out there that can help make that job easier, keeping track of your comings and goings so that you don’t have to.

Below are five tools, along with event examples of events in a variety of niches, to help you to create your own event calendar through the spring/summer of 2013. (Check out more events to add to the calendar here.)

5 Tools to Create Your Event Calendar

1. April 2013: Google Calendar / Google Docs and Pubcon

It’s easy to mention Google Calendar as our first entry, even if only because it is one of the most well-used online calendars in the world, allowing you to have private calendars, calendars that are shared with friends and colleagues and the all-important reminders to help to keep you on your toes about what’s up next.

Google Docs is another great tool to use here. Here’s a good example of conferences in the Google Doc (courtesy of StateOfSearch):

When filling in your Google Calendar for April 2013, consider adding a stop at Pubcon New Orleans conference, the place to be for learning about the present and future of Internet Marketing – and how your business endeavors can benefit from it.

2. May 2013: CalendarsQuick and Mom 2.0 Summit

If online calendars aren’t your thing, CalendarsQuick offers you the ability to quickly and easily design your own calendars to print, allowing you to fill them in with every imaginable bit of information before making it available to grace your wall.

Before you hit the print button on your May 2013 calendar, be sure to include the Mom 2.0 Summit on your to-do list, an event that aims to bring together women and mothers of all stripes to learn about how to take their professional endeavors to new heights, networking all the while.

3. June 2013: ReminderFox and EmMeCon

If a full-fledged calendar application simply falls outside of your humble means, the ReminderFox plugin for Firefox is an excellent tool that gets right to the business of giving you a heads up about a given event, without the need to add anything other than a title, a date and a time.

For your June entry, everyone in business should think about the possibility of attending EmMeCon 2013 in San Francisco, a place where business leaders and the technologists who provide them with the tools for success congregate to exchange expertise and contact information.

4. July 2013: RSSCalendar and MozCon

In some cases – as a blogger, for example – you may want to make your event itinerary available to your readers. For these cases, RSSCalendar is exactly the tool that you need. Via a slick and easy to use interface, you can create simple event listings for yourself, then instantly republish them for the world to see in an RSS feed.

If there is only a single event entry in your calendar for July 2013, it should most definitely be MozCon, a Seattle-based conference that will bring together the best minds in SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing) and social media to discuss the direction of the Web, and how businesses can best climb aboard for the ride.

5. August 2013: Outlook and An Event Apart

Deserving of at least an honorable mention is the well-used calendar functionality to be found in Microsoft Outlook, a piece of software that most of us use, but few of us really give the credit it deserves.

Tack on the use of Office 365, a cloud-based technology from Microsoft that many businesses are implementing, and you’ve got the ability to collaborate with others as you keep track of the events you’ll be attending, all from within your email client.

Finally, to top off your summer with style, check out An Event Apart in Washington, DC, a gathering strictly aimed at people who design for the Web. Workshops, keynotes and hands-on sessions will abound, helping you to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving business of making beautiful, functional designs.

The post 5 Tools to Create Your 2013 Spring and Summer Event Calendar appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Because of that, many people think that the whole Twitter marketing thing is all hype. After all, they seem to be doing everything right but they have nothing to show for it except for a lot of wasted time, and more aggravation than it was worth.

Of course, interaction is not easy to build. Many people give up earlier than achieving it. One of the first steps to take: Learn more about your followers.

For those who are experiencing the same problem as I described above, below are some great apps that will let you get the proper stats to start engaging your followers in a real and dynamic way.

Research Your Twitter Followers’ Demographics

1. SalesForce Marketing Cloud

This is a full marketing service aimed at professionals who need something a little more extensive than the average analytics app. It has a full social listening feature that will help to break down your overall Twitter follower use, as well as all data coming from your profiles.

Find out the conversation going on surrounding your brand, then find context within those conversations for better targeting of your marketing campaign. Additionally, SalesForce Marketing Cloud also has social content, engagement, social ads, workflow and automation, measurement, and packages for basic, professional, corporate and enterprise use.

2. SoDash

Another large social monitoring app, you can find out who is following you and how to engage them, all while looking after the competition and generating leads. Their brand management tool is incredibly easy to use, and everything is put within a single dashboard for you to view at any time.

It is all based on machine learning and smart tagging, which gives it a unique format that has been boosting its popularity over the last couple of months.

3. Birdsong

Do a quick analytics search of any social media profile and find out exactly what conversations your brand is generating. That includes through followers, who you can target more efficiently while still improving your visibility for reaching out to new demographics.

This tool will connect with third parties to get a more complete picture of your social media use and reach. Then, it will tell you what you need to do to be more effective and efficient, all through an easy to read pie chart. There are four different tool options: agencies, brands, journalists and small businesses.

4. KnowYourFollowers

Break down your followers into just the information you need to know. Get stats on country, U.S. state, gender, interests, who else they follow, their jobs and more. All of these demographics are broken down by both numbers and percentages, so you can see how to better customize your content to appeal to those segments.

You can even find out their marital status, number of children, income levels, education…everything you could possibly need. There is a small map showing the city locations of followers, though it isn’t that extensive in that regard.

5. Ad.ly

Target your ads by follower using celebrity endorsement as the driving force. This advertising service works by leveraging the content that your followers share or read in order to optimize results. It will use ads designed specifically around their chosen celebrities to create a conversation between the celeb and the user.

Your brand’s visibility will be the end result. Very cool idea, and very effective. They have the largest digital celebrity network, as well.

Do you have a tool that should be on this list?

The post 5 Tools to Research the Demographics of Your Twitter Followers appeared first on Small Business Trends.

So where do you start?

Perhaps the best way to figure out your own growth strategy is to see the successes of others and how they achieved it. Below are some success stories and growth tactics that can be derived from big names that all had to start right where you are.

4 Growth Tactics and Success Stories

Facebook

Facebook is regularly changing up their growth strategy too match the current trends and acquire new users. So pinpointing which was their most successful is very hard to do at this point.

Suffice to say, they have had a great deal of success in each phase of their user growth. This was further fueled by their general visibility and expansion as they began to take over the realm of social media more aggressively.

But their first major growth tactic was in the beginning of their full launch. They had begun as a campus based program and slowly started to allow others to join. There was a touch of exclusivity that was the result, despite the growing hype. The first million users were among a larger group of people who desperately wanted to join but had to wait until it opened up to their network.

Growth tactic: Provide a touch of exclusivity.

Reddit

Reddit is one site that I think truly benefited from the demise of another. While Digg was busy dousing the flames after their disastrous redesign and the massive problems that surfaced due to their elitist user structure, Reddit was gaining traction.

Mostly by doing everything that Digg users were saying they wanted in a content sharing site.

While they took these elements, which undoubtedly gave a boost to their user growth in a big way, they also had their own unique style.

They gave complete power of subreddits to users, made sign up almost laughably easy, and don’t cause grief over throwaway accounts.

Growth tactic: Give complete power to the people.

Instagram

I have heard a certain amount of argument over what strategy managed to launch Instagram into a mainstream photo app.

While I am sure the public nature of the initial galleries was a big part of it, I think it was more the way they styled their platform after Twitter.

This gave a way to quickly share photos and speed seems to be the whole point behind using Instagram.

Using something more thorough like Facebook would have been a misstep.

Ultimately, their choice paid off.

Growth tactic: Ease of sharing.

Pinterest

Another site that has sparked controversy over which tactic hacked their way into rapid expansion, their exclusivity, auto-follow and unending scroll features were the silver bullets.

I personally believe it was the unique format of a social networking site based entirely around images, their style of pinboards’ instead of albums, and the fact that they saw their demographic leaning more towards women and encouraged it rather than attempting to push another user base. A move that would have potentially alienated the users it already had.

Pinterest is quickly becoming one of the most popular social media sites ever created. So they are definitely doing something right.

Growth tactic: Target your core audience (not trying to be too good to everyone).

Conclusion

Any site or business that has made it big will have their own story. A surprising number of them are nothing but money from a larger company being thrown their way, such as in a buyout. But many others are tales of ingenuity, perseverance and that one idea that let them hack their way into the mainstream.

What are some of your favorite user growth success stories and tactics?

Facebook Photo via Shutterstock

The post 4 Growth Tactics for Your Small Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Yes, social networking in particular has managed to open up our lives to the wider world in a way we never would have thought possible before the creation of the miracle known as the Internet. But it has also created a whole list of minor irritations and distractions that can build up and make life a little more stressful.

For me, the most irritating of these minor annoyances is social media notifications. Emails flooding my inbox about every little comment or activity on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is a hassle. With more social networks becoming a part of life, they can now also come from Pinterest, YouTube, StumbleUpon and a dozen other sites you just don’t need to be constantly updated on.

Here’s how I handle the email craziness:

• Use social media inboxes to get notified of social media interactions in a user-friendly, non-intrusive way (here are two tools to get productive).
• Stop certain types of social media updates to my main inbox. All I am usually interested in learning quickly is a DM or a private message. All other types of social media updates have to go. Otherwise, I’ll have no time for work.

However, it took me ages to realize that I could stop this. All it takes is a few alterations to your settings and you are free. Or just get one of the programs made to make it even easier.

Using Settings

All social media sites have an area of your settings, sometimes in your account settings, that lets you specify what you would like to be notified of.

Facebook

In Facebook, just simply go to Account Settings through the little gear in the top right hand corner of any Facebook page. On the left hand side will be a bar with options. Select Notifications > Email. You can choose to get all notifications except those specifically unsubscribed from, important notifications about you or activity or only notifications about problems with your account, security or privacy.

You can also select what text message notifications you get (if you are subscribed to mobile use). This includes comments on your profile, friend requests/confirmations and everything else. You may also set the times you get notifications if you don’t want them at certain hours of the night or morning.

Twitter

Twitter isn’t quite so customizable, but you can still specify what you want. Just go to your account, hit the gear button on the top header, then select Settings > Email Notifications. You can choose when you get an email and who it applies to on your list. You can also choose to get an email digest weekly, daily, etc.

Using Gmail Filter

Whether you want to avoid or better organize older social media updates that get archived in your inbox (to stop them from interfering with your inbox search) or to stop the clutter from the future ones, this Gmail search command will come in handy:

• Search: [from:noreply* OR from:do-not-reply* OR from:donotreply* OR from:notification*] This filters out most automated updates.

You can now set up a filter to send these emails to a separate folder, bypassing your inbox. Now just create a calendar reminder to check that folder once a day or a couple of times a week, depending on your workload.

Using Tools

Notify Me Not

If you want more thorough directions for changing your settings, or you want them for a different site than those above, you might want to check out Notify Me Not. They cover all the social networks, including those that are only social in a secondary way like Amazon.

Easy to follow, helpful and with a complete guide on the subject, it is the number one authority on banishing annoying emails to Hell, where they belong.

Unroll Me

Not only does this program allow you to get rid of unwanted emails, but it also rolls everything into a very simple, highly organized inbox for you. That means all of your emails are better formatted for easy sifting, reading and storage. Plus, it works for both Yahoo and Gmail, which means it isn’t compatible with other clients. But come on, who uses them anymore?

Know of any good programs or tips for stopping annoying social network notifications?

Image source: sps

The post Control Your Email Inbox: Stop Email Notifications From Twitter, Facebook appeared first on Small Business Trends.

We all know Pinterest can drive a lot of traffic; Therefore making sure your images will be pinned and (what’s more vital for this very article) re-pinned is well worth the effort.

Make Images Clear and Easy to Read: Size

Pinterest grabs all your friend’s images together, resizes them into thumbnails and throws them to your friend stream. Whenever you login and go to your home page, you just scan through those images as you scroll.

If there is anything blurry and unclear, you won’t probably waste your time on it. Therefore, make sure your image is readable when it’s 192 pixels wide.

Compare:

Pinteresting Image tip: When optimizing your images for web publishing, do a quick exercise by resizing your image to 192 pixels and make sure it looks good.

One point to add here: Of course, there’s no rule to fit all cases. I am pretty sure some blurry images are clicked because the user is just curious what’s there. However, clear image thumbnails are important if you care about your followers’ user experience and want more positive action on the image.

Draw User’s Attention to Your Images: Faces

Whenever your Pinterest friends go to their Pinterest homepage, all they see is the collection of images. One of these images is yours.

Do you want to stand out?

Many eye-tracking heatmap studies (including a Pinterest-specific one) will offer you a solution: a human face will draw the most attention.

Pinteresting image tips:

1. Brand your business team faces: Create lots of team pictures and incorporate them into your blog and content strategy. This way, more and more faces will make it to your pinners’ streams (which may result in more re-pins and better branding):

2. If you create infographics, make sure they contain clear faces pointing your reader’s attention in the right direction:

Prompt Action: Pinteresting Colors

Color theory is not easy: There are a lot of “it depends” factors to keep in mind. Color preferences may depend on age, country, niche and even current mood of the viewer. But one color proves to work in most cases: orange.

Orange has long been considered the most effective call-to-action color: Whenever you want a person to act (click, like, re-pin), try using orange.

Pinteresting Image tip: Use these search by color tools to get orange inspired. There’s no need to make all your images orange, but it’s something worth testing.

Do you have any tips to make your pins stand out and increase their click-through and “viral” potential?

The post Pinteresting Image Optimization Tips When Using Pinterest for Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

There is occasionally a story of a blogger who managed to get back the rights to their content – but it’s more like fighting the windmills. You kill one scraping blog and dozens of them get born overnight. Therefore it is much better to try to prevent scraping (or at least get labeled as the original author) rather than rely on being one of those rare successes.

Plugins to Prevent Web Scraping

1. Google Plus Authorship

Google has been trying to fight scrapers for ages and one of its patents (which is part of AuthorRank patents) suggest using authorship to:

 “. . .detect and protect against revision of content after it has been posted by a person or entity.”

Implementing Google Authorship is much easier nowadays (here’s a quick guide), but on many blog set-ups (where there’s no author byline, for example), it can still cause confusion. In these cases, this plugin will help.

It allows you to add a G+ profile picture to search results, confirm authorship, and even grant authorship to multiple authors. It works on a three step system that is very easy to follow, and there are no bugs to worry about.

2. Feed Delay

Half the risk to a small to medium sized blog is having a scraper bot picking up content, publishing it without attribution and then getting the page indexed first (weirdly enough, Google hasn’t been able to knock these sites off or even find the original owner of the content).

Since there are probably at least a couple of bots hiding in your RSS subscriptions, your best bet is to delay feed from being reposted. This plugin will do that for you.

3. Anti Feed-Scraper Message

Most scraping is done by bots, without any actual oversight from humans. So they have no control over what content is published, or how. This is a major plus for you, as you can add a link to your blog in all content, which will show up upon reposting.

Anti Feed-Scraper Message does this, showing Google and all readers where the post originally came from. It also keeps any accusations from the message, so protects you from scandal claims by the scrapers. The message reads: [Post Name] originally appeared on [Site Name] on [Post Date].

4. Copyright Proof

Along with the one above, this plugin can be used. It allows you to digitally certify your ownership at the time of publication, making a certificate that you can show in the case of someone stealing your content. It has a copyright, licensing and attribution license at every post, as well. There is an additional feature for anti-theft if you choose to use it.

Do you know of a good plugin for protecting content against Scrapers? What about outside of WordPress?

The post 4 WordPress Plugins to Fight Content Scrapers appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The content should be claimed by the author in order for this to work.

The photo is being grabbed from the author’s Google Plus profile, which brings us to a good question:  How huge is an impact that your photo makes when the user is browsing Google search results and chooses which result to click?

They say, the impact is huge. In this case study, Cyrus was able to achieve a 30% higher click-through and he didn’t even try that much.  There are plenty of variables (the main one being the topic) but it doesn’t mean we can’t invent interesting theories.

My own theory is based on heatmap case studies. A heatmap is an aggregate graphic showing overall eye activity on an image (red-orange areas indicate the most eye activity).

1. “You Look Where They Look”

There’s an absolutely hilarious article by James Breeze on how the direction of people’s eyes in the photo influences where we look.  We all know that photos of babies make us stop and look. But did you know that if a baby looks at text (instead of straight in the camera), the photo will also make us “read.”

Here’s a combined heat map of 106 people looking at two pages: One with the baby looking into the camera and one with the baby looking at the heading of the page. Notice how much more exposure the heading and text gets when a baby is looking at it:

The important thing to remember here is that faces in the photos work great to “cuing” us to look at the key components of the page.  More evidence:

Google Plus avatar implementation: Based on the study above, it may be a smart idea to slightly turn your head to the left in your photo – to the search results. This way, searchers will not only stare back at you, but will actually notice your article (instead of being distracted, they will be directed) and might feel more willing to click your search result.

2. Closeups Are Better

The bigger the face, the better. Poynter often stresses high visibility of faces, but the following two screenshots caught my attention.

People lose attention if the face is not easy to see. Look at these screenshots containing photographs of people (both photos have headline type placed on top of them). However, in the first screenshot, people would not even look at the headline, while in the second one, the headline gets much more attention and the less clear photo is mostly ignored:

Google Plus avatar implementation: Make sure your avatar is a big, clear headshot of you. It’s better if it’s just a face, which is easy to “scan.” This way, it has a good chance to be the first to draw an eye – and thus your search listing will better stand out.

Mind that in-search pictures are tiny. It’s not easy to make a clear close-up, but it’s worth the effort:

3. A Smile Draws Closer Attention

The heatmap below clearly suggests that a smiling person is more thoroughly examined.  That may mean you will be better remembered from social media networks to search results.

Google Plus avatar implementation: Don’t underestimate the power of “being remembered.” Most search results are personalized nowadays, which means people that have you in their Google+ circles will most likely recognize your search result because they already know you.   (Here’s a case study featuring me). A smile plays a big role in that because it helps your headshot to be remembered.

Of course, no need to overdo: You don’t want to distract attention. Instead you want to draw and direct it. Thus a subtle, natural smile is best.

Get Creative!

Yes, we can read studies and draw necessary conclusions but it doesn’t mean we can’t get creative. Per my experience, a photo inside search results takes as little as one day to update (after you update your Google+ profile picture). So you have huge room for testing. Just keep experimenting, as Daniel Peris did:

Are there any other Google+ profile picture tricks you are aware of?

The post Heatmaps to Help Your Google+ Profile Image Appear in Search Results appeared first on Small Business Trends.

How do you find out your Pinfluence? Is there any way to figure out if your pinning efforts are gaining the reach you would expect as a return on such a campaign? Here are three analytics tools made specifically for Pinterest.

1. PinReach

In summary: See most popular pins and boards of yours based on the number of repins. See how popular you are (based on your PinReach Score.)

Price: Free

Best application: Identify your best-working pins and boards to get an idea of what seems to appeal to your following.

More cool features to check out:

Right away, you can see some useful information on the front page here. They have sections for highest reach, most popular pins, trending pins, trending members and more. On a site based entirely on sharing, this can all be very helpful when trying to find unoriginal content to boost your visibility on the site. You may also find current competitions, such as the Messy Desk Contest going on right now. At the very least, you can establish a pattern and come up with some ideas for your own pinning.

2. Pinalytics

In summary: Allow the tool to access your site Google Analytics data to pull all visits from Pinterest and see which page was pinned, who pinned it and how many visits the pin resulted in.

Price: Free

Best application: (1) Identify your site most successful pages on Pinterest to push them harder, (2) make friends with your site random promoters who seem to love your site!

More cool features to check out:

This UK based tool is really simple to use, but very effective. You can search for pins based on subject, keyword or category using their search engine. It is very helpful in seeing what kind of influence various pin topics have, and what specific images are currently trending. The great thing about Pinterest is that you will notice a trending pin making its way through the ranks for months, rather than days or weeks. So you can squeeze more out of it.

3. Reachli

In summary: Add new pins from inside the tool to enable campaign tracking. Track clicks, repins and likes that generate your pins.

Price: Free

Best application: Compare impact from various campaigns. The site shows time (!), day and date of each campaign making it easy to identify your most effective time to pin.

Note: I wish it could support pinning videos as well.

More cool features to check out:

Formerly, this tool was called Pinerly. It has since been rebranded, but the tool itself is the same. You measure your reach using basic analytics and come up with a blueprint for marketing your brand on Pinterest and through the wider social web. They have a great understanding of visual reach and the way you engage a target audience on Pinterest – which is much different than how you do it using any other social platform.

Do you know any good Pinterest tools? Let us know in the comments.

The post Pinterest: Really Useful Tools to Measure Each Pin Impact appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Work isn’t going to be stopping any time soon, so it is better to keep ahead of the game and get prepared now.

Already we are seeing certain content marketing trends that are turning heads and building a buzz. Content marketing is changing like it always does, and there are a couple of methods that will obviously be building steam over the next twelve months. Trends that you should be doing everything you can to follow and utilize early.

Trends That Are Still Going To Be True In 2013

Mobile Content

When was the last time you came across a phone without at least basic mobile web capabilities? It is a rarity, and a survey conducted by Nielsen found that the number of people who own smart phones has increased dramatically in just the past year alone. Nearly 50% of mobile phone users own a model of the smart phone variety!

Another study, conducted by Google and written about by Mobile Sales head Jason Spero showed that one billion people would be using their mobile phones as their primary internet source by the end of the year. A prediction that isn’t difficult to believe, when viewed in combination with the Nielsen report.

The consequence to companies and websites that are not converting their content to mobile-friendly formats will be severe. Just think of how much potential visibility you could be using if the estimation of a billion mobile web users is really correct.

Video Content

For those looking to create viral content (which I would assume is all of us), there is no better medium than video. Highly shareable, eye-grabbing and effective, you don’t have to look far to find clips that have become incredibly successful. Including from businesses, who have been able to generate a lot of visibility from even a single ad.

Even if it is only a rehashing of old content, or making something incredibly low budget, it is worth it. If something shot on a cellphone can go viral, then something you make for a little petty cash can, as well.

Content Curation

With so many channels to serve, collecting and promoting brand-relevant content is not an easy task. It has always been the general rule with social media marketing that you want to share as much of your own content as possible.

While there are some fan pages on Facebook or Twitter accounts dedicated to sharing only third party links and acting as a hub for a cause or purpose, most of us are more concerned with direct B2C marketing.

That being said, content curation is becoming increasingly more relevant to a modern marketing strategy. For those who don’t know, curation is when you:

“. . .collect and catalogue only the most interesting things about a subject so to share it for the common benefit.“

While it doesn’t replace your own content, it is an effective means of engaging your customers and inviting their attention.

It is also a potential way to catch the eye of their friends lists, as consumers share the links with others on their own social media pages.

Most Recently “Hot” Content Marketing Trends

AuthorRank

AuthorRank is nothing new. In fact, search marketers have been discussing it for years. However now that Google is talking more about AuthorRank and bloggers pick the topic up discussing the AgentRank patent, more and more focus will be put on personal author brands.

To make sure you are not missing out, here are a few content marketing tactics to start implementing in 2013:

• Identify and promote talented authors within your company;
• Make use of rel=”author” markup and Google Plus authorship information
• Identify most powerful authors in your niche and start building relationships with them now (here are few tips to approach journalists and authors using)

Content Marketing is for Everyone

Content has won. It has proved to be the most reliable and effective way to ensure stable web presence. Nowadays more and more industries realize the power of content. There are no boring niches that cannot produce generally popular content.

Today a plumber can maintain a great blog. Content marketing campaigns have become more creative while the scope is getting broader.

Content Re-Purposing

With content streams becoming multiple and content formats getting diverse, constantly providing great content to serve all available channels is hard. That’s where content format “re-purposing” comes into play. Via re-purposing you can use the existing research or stats data to create various formats of killer content: an article, a video, an inforgraphic and possibly a quiz, contest or other interactive mash-up.

Every piece of content can thus be promoted through a unique channel providing additional exposure.

Conclusion

Over the next couple of months you will definitely be seeing instances of the trends above growing and spreading. Not only that, but they have actually been gaining momentum for years, continuing on into the next year and bringing many benefits to those who jump on board.

That alone should be enough to convince you that watching these content marketing trends is a good idea.

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