 Your new post is loading...
When a veteran stand-up comic is also funny on Twitter, it doesn’t exactly come as a shock. When an unknown phenom makes you physically choke on guffaws, though, it’s a revelation and also something of an extended audition. ...After catching the attention of the comedy cognoscenti in 2010, the then recent Harvard graduate soon got jobs writing on the Oscars and Disney’sA.N.T. Farm., before moving to a staff writer position at NBC’s ensemble sitcom Parks and Recreation. (The show was just renewed for a sixth season.) The in-demand writer is also an accomplished poet who’s writing asatirical guide to science for ladies. Megan Amram’s frothy blend of dark humor and smart, surreal sillinesshas found more than 356,000 followers on Twitter so far. Although not everybody trying to generate laughs online is doing so for the same reasons, or with the same twisted flair, Amram’s consistent comedic quality is enviable for anyone trying to make their mark with brief bursts of humor. The multidiscipline writer recently spoke with Co.Create about puns, poetry, and how to be funny on Twitter altogether....
BuzzFeed gets free content, users get exposure, we get 11 Engagement Photos That Will Make You Happy You’re Single. ... The department devoted to creating this “old school” content is known as BuzzTeam. Their focus is anything shareable — lists, animals, nostalgia. The kind of content that BuzzFeed’s loyal readers have become hyper-familiar with. Many, in fact, have consumed so many such BuzzFeed posts that they’ve become adept at mimicking both their tone and their viral success. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed’s editors took a step toward giving those faithful followers a little more of the spotlight they crave. Shepherd, along with a staff of four, now run BuzzFeed Community, a content-producing vertical of its very own, complete with featured posts by community members and a leaderboard with the latest on who’s posts are getting the most traffic, likes, comments, and badges. It’s a competitive place, and anyone can join and enter the fray....
If you are serious about turning a blog into income and then your business, then laying the right foundations is important. It means sitting down and doing some planning. It means asking some questions What am I going to focus on? What should the branding and design be like? What should I develop it on? The list goes on. If you do mean business then you need to create the right framework and foundation for your blog. A framework for the future Sometimes a little thought, the right framework and resources can be time saving and stress relieving in the long run. Here are 10 key building blocks to get you started....
This is not a blog post about writing. This is a blog post about creation. Creating content that actually matters. If you’re writing to increase conversion rates, then, yes, SEO matters. Proper grammar matters. Page layout matters. Verbal flourish might matter. But those are all details – aspects of content writing that come only after you’ve answered the more fundamental questions. Whether you’re developing a content strategy for the first time or you’ve been writing to increase those conversion rates for years, it’s time to touch on some fundamentals. Before whipping up that next blog post, ask yourself these seven questions, and start creating content that actually impacts your audience!...
It’s hard to imagine a world without Twitter. It was the faster-growing social network in 2012, and 1/5 of all US Internet users are also active on Twitter.* For bloggers especially, the world would be very different without Twitter. But maybe there’s something we can learn from that. Twitter is an amazing way to reach your community, but it can perhaps cloud our vision. By thinking about what the world would be like without Twitter, we can perhaps find some new opportunities for our blogs. Here’s how blogging would be different if Twitter did not exist...
How to get better social marketing and content marketing results... A lot of our digital generation publishers are enjoying the benefit of the large audience created for them by their prominence in the social media. Notwithstanding, some are still trying to find their feet. They aren't able to strategize properly, execute and incorporate their plan into a unified program. Here are eight social media questions that publishers should be asking themselves....
Blogging for business can be a lucrative investment for companies of all sizes. Find out what blogging means, who uses blogs, and which brands are doing it right.... According to a recent NM Incite report, there are over 181 million blogs around the world. The way many companies treat blogs in their content marketing mix is to incorporate blogs into their website as a section or subdomain, or host them on their own domain name as we do. With that kind of popularity, you would think everyone in business would know what a blog is and would be using them to their maximum advantage. Trust me, I’m in the content business and they don’t. In fact, brands split just 11% of their total social media budget between blogging and influencer outreach. So just to clear up any ambiguity and to follow the format for this series, here goes:...
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook enjoy huge popularity, but blogs are still an important tool for small business marketing. Jennifer Bourn, Owner and Creative Director for Sacramento WordPress Web design and branding firm, Bourn Creative, claimed they are “no longer optional for small businesses” in a recent guest post at The Sacremento Business Journal. So if you don’t yet have a blog – start one. And if you do have one, apply the blog improvement steps below to kick it up a notch. If you have one, use these simple steps for overall blog improvement and increased visibility.
We decided to experiment with a new, super-long article format akin to "slow live blogging." When we looked at the traffic charts below, our jaws dropped. Here's what we learned about long form stories--and why quality, not velocity, is the future of online news. As web publishers we're obsessed with analytics. Any strategy that moves the needle gets our attention. So you can imagine my surprise when a new way of writing articles blew up my assumptions about how to drive traffic. Before I go on--looking at analytics is tricky. Because we have imperfect information about our audience, it can be difficult to translate aggregate reader behavior into real insights. We may see trends or correlations in the data, but they do not necessarily imply causation, and trying to analyze traffic too closely can coax editors and writers into an unhealthy diet of red herrings. Sometimes, though, a trend is so big and consistent that it's impossible not to engage in a little educated speculation. The last month of our traffic at FastCo.Labs has presented is with one such scenario....
...The infographic is a vertical timeline. Various different kinds of bloggers are introduced with some subtle humour throughout. My favourite quote from the infographic is: “The next generation of bloggers is believed to be the micro-blogging bloggers. These bloggers, mostly seen on Twitter, have taken what old bloggers would see in 12,000 words and condensed it down to 140 characters of pure emotion.”...
Do you want to become known as an industry expert, attract traffic to your website and boost sales? Blogging just once a month can deliver all that—and more. More than half of companies that blog at least once a month have acquired customers through their blog, according to HubSpot’s The 2012 State of Inbound Marketing. (Sixty-six percent of those who blog weekly, and 78 percent of those who blog daily, have gained new customers.) However much time you choose to invest, here are 10 tips for successful blogging....
Evan Williams sees Medium, the blogging platform that he and Biz Stone launched last year, as a modern-day magazine. When Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone launched Medium last year, their goal was for it to be a collaborative publishing tool that connected writers to a larger network. But that vision also hinges on quality, curation and, in some ways, a higher barrier to entry than platforms like Twitter. “We’re going to be a great place for professional writers to write,” Williams told Wired senior writer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference in New York on Tuesday. “The magazine is the analog for what we’re doing.”
Relevant content is key to reaching valuable audiences. Outlined are tools you can use to come up with blog ideas for posts to keep your content engaging. Content marketing is helping small businesses generate website traffic, online visibility and ultimately, sales leads. And a business blog is key to content marketing. But if you’re like many in a small business, you may find yourself wondering, “What do I blog about today?” If you have trouble coming up with blog ideas for posts, read on. We’ve collected 16 of our favorite tools that help us here at Small Business Trends generate ideas for blog posts. Try out some of these tools the next time you find yourself staring at a blank screen....
|
Many small businesses are using social media and content marketing to generate traffic and leads for their business. Being a small business helping other small businesses with their online marketing results, we have personal experiences with both. These are two great methods, but one in particular holds a lot more long-term value than the other. Do you know which one it is? (spoiler alert: look at the graph to the right) Let’s take a minute to discuss both of these methods and then you can make your own decision regarding which is more valuable....
The most popular way of building back links right now is guest blogging. Why is it so popular? Simple, it’s so effective at driving up keyword rankings – when it’s done consistently and when those guest posts are published on authoritative domains that are relevant. It’s been in the back of my mind for some time now, actually since the first iteration of the Google Penguin update, that guest blogging may become a target of Google. I believe that guest blogging will still continue to be effective after the next major Penguin update, however the way in which you build links through guest blogging will change. This is how I think guest bloggers will be impacted...
Everyone wants to cut the fat from their work flows. Good news: Applying lean methodology to your efforts is simple, and can result in more effective content marketing. Use these 6 steps to go lean...
Via Ally Greer
It goes without saying that if you don’t have a plan then you have a plan to fail. In this post I’m going to share with you a few of the generic pieces of advice that I see people sharing on social media and why you should not listen to such advice....
For the last year we’ve written about 2 blog posts each week on our blog LogMyCalls. We said we had a content strategy, but we really didn’t. Our blogs were read, but not all that much. It sort of felt like we were writing into an empty box. Then I came across a blog post by a guy who had written 50 blog posts in 25 days. His traffic went up, his organic traffic went up, his referral traffic went up. Everything went up. So, we decided to do something similar at LogMyCalls. We decided to write 150 blog posts in 50 days. We did this from Feb 3 until April 13. We only published blogs on weekdays, so the experiment lasted 10 weeks. Three blogs a day, 5 days a week. We wrote on marketing and call tracking related topics. The results of this test speak for themselves...
Business blogging: learn how businesses with top marketing blogs generate leads with social media and content marketing.... Does your business have a blog? Would you like your blog to bring in more leads for your business? You already know you need to create awesome blog content, but there’s more to business blogging than just that. You also need to include a few tactics to help you bring in the leads you want. Here are some useful tactics to entice and capture leads used by top marketing business blogs!...
Traditionally PR has concentrated more on earned media than paid media. We’ve used paid media for branding and positioning with advertorials or sponsored content. We placed ads to tell the brand’s side of a story when it was not getting covered by the media. Now we have owned media: we publish our content on blogs, Facebook pages and online newsrooms. Brands have indeed become the media. Some brands and agencies are going one step further – hiring journalists cut loose by the media layoffs and publishing industry news sites (brand journalism.) Earned media has morphed too – apart from the traditional mainstream media there are bloggers and industry influencers on Twitter with a large following who have to be included in your media relations plan.
As Chris Elliott, blogger and writer for National Geographic, said to me recently: the public decides who has credibility and they choose where they get their news and information. PR has concentrated more on earned media than paid media....
Today’s task for the 31 Day blogging project is to dig into your blog’s statistics. But not just to see where you’re at or how much things have changed since the last time you looked. While you’re there, you might as well learn how you can use those stats to help build a better blog. Here are some of the key metrics you’ll want to analyze...
Want to get more blog readers? Follow these easy-to-understand best practices as part of your corporate blogging efforts and you'll be amazed at the results.... One question I’m often asked when talking about blogging best practices is, “How do I get more blog readers?” My answer? Writing great content for your corporate blog is the easy part, getting it read is what takes skill. Understanding blog post optimization and doing your homework before you write your post can go a long way toward making sure your blog content attracts readers. Sometimes when I say that “writing is the easy part” thing, writers get all bristly (and yes, it’s a word if I say it is), but it’s true. There are lots of people out there writing some terrific stuff, but attracting readers often has nothing to do with how great your writing is. Knowing how to write for the web, which is completely different than other types of writing, knowing how to optimize your posts and understanding the importance of building your networks can make all the difference in the world. And that, my friends, is how you get more blog readers. Let’s talk about why....
With 105 million blogs and 49 billion posts, Tumblr, the free blog hosting and social networking site, is the 32ndmost popular site in the world. So if you’re not using Tumblr as part of your marketing efforts, you’re missing a very large boat. “Tumblr isn’t a blog platform like WordPress; it’s a social network that has a blogging platform.” says Neil Patel, co-founder of the Web analytics firm KISSmetrics. “The beautiful thing about Tumblr is that it makes it really easy to share your content with millions of Tumblr users… so you can get a big audience without spending a ton of money on marketing.” Here are Neil’s tips for marketing your business on Tumblr....
When people ask me the No. 1 change they should make to their website, I always the same thing: add a blog and update it often.... ... the reality is starting a blog for your local business comes with unique challenges that can prevent you from gaining the momentum you need for your blog take off. When done right, though, your blog can help you build an audience in your community and generate qualified leads for your business. Here are the traits you want to focus on in your local blog to help you get there....
I have less than 5 seconds to capture your attention with this post, so here goes - if you read the next 2,500 words or so, you'll learn how to write epic content that spreads naturally all over the blogosphere.... ...What is epic content? I’ll define epic content in a simple way. ...If a first time visitor takes a look at your blog and thinks - “Man.. this guy really knows what he is talking about”, that’s called epic content. Your content is the ONLY reason people read your blogs, buy your products, or hire you. When it’s epic, undoubtedly you can make your blog stand out from the remaining crowd.
Most epic content will match at least one of these: - which is full of actionable tips - clearly demonstrated with graphics, charts and diagrams - consist of massive list of tips and tactics - show facts and amazing stats that is freakishly long without any fluff - and which breaks all the blogging rules...
|
