Effective Content Marketing [SKIL] Who cares? How can you tell?

Tourists do not come to New York, London or Paris for the animals, they come to shop and see shows

When you get down to bottom line results, all the writing, editing, drawing, promoting and selling comes down to: who cares? What is all the effort yielding? Are you making sales? Are you informing or influencing people? Are people commenting, contributing, correcting or even criticizing? For the most part, most of the writing and graphics designed for the internet is not effective. In the marketing world, this is bad news. A big part of ineffective marketing is in the quality and relevance. Quality is not an easy problem to solve. For the most part, high quality marketing content is created by efforts from product developers, marketers, feedback from the market (real potential customers) and channels (reps, resellers, field sales). The internet gives us the benefit of reaching customers directly, this is what we can do where print and broadcast simply can not. We have the ability to evoke feedback quickly and directly. The difficulty does not lie simply in the writing and editing. It is a bigger problem of coordinating messages, testing relevancy and clarity, improving the content and eventually tracking it back to the customer's response. Closing the communication loop is what we need to do. If nobody cares and they don't understand, it's like talking to the wall.

How Hard Can It Be? [OBSRV] Coping with the learning curve

Mark Pilgrim in "Dive into HTML5" estimates 99% of web sites have HTML errors - can you cope with this?

One of the advantages freelance work affords me, is seeing a broad range of people. One clear observation recently is how people react to certain content marketing (i.e. editing, copy writing, graphic design) work. Sometimes I assume people new to the field will eventually learn. With learning and experience also comes confidence and maturity. Sometimes, the confidence show up as the ability to handle pressure, change and even failure. Handling difficult situations is the most valued quality in an experienced professional. Just ask a surgeon who opens up a chest and "suddenly" finds a "complication". Or a lawyer facing a new fact from a witness during a trial. Sounds a bit over the top? Yet this is what I see on a daily basis. It comes in small ways. Small coding mistakes (HTML Tags), language and actual product description mistakes, navigation mistakes (buttons that don't work), and finally, problems with large functions like plug-ins and JavaScript functions. The mistakes are not necessarily going to influence a reader's impression, most times they are not even visible. Yet, some people react in strange or extreme manner.

Content Marketing In Demand [KNWLG] The next PPC, UI/UX, or HTML/CSS?

Michelangelo's Daniel with an early "content marketing" depiction... are we reliving history?

To find demand for Content Marketing, start talking with business and technical professionals. From ones who simply need a web site to support their marketing efforts, to ones building highly technical product and want to leave their content completely up to a marketing writer. Content Marketing is getting attention. Not too long ago focus was on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. Just before social media a trend of blogging was all the rage. Before blogging, we saw simply a pleasing graphic design or informative product site in demand. Somewhere in parallel there were corporate trends in e-commerce (eBay, Amazon) and SEO/PPC (Google, AdWords) with strong emphasis on massive content writing and link building. Somewhere along the way there are less predominant phases of interest in affiliate marketing and advertising (especially in niche products). All these internet marketing trends rely on writing effective texts. Some need more quantity and some need more convincing or alluring copyrighting. But until recently, content played a minor role in the business of internet marketing. The position of the lowly writer, editor and copy optimizer seems to be changing for the better.