Archives for August 2014

August 12 round up!

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If you subscribe to our newsletter, you would have received this post via email today. For everyone else, here’s a copy of our mid August news, thoughts and tips!

Made with MailChimp

This newsletter is coming to you from mailchimp, the same tool that we use for many client projects to manage and send email newsletters. Not only that but it’s been created solely on an iPad.

There’s a reason I’m telling you this.

September last year I wrote a post about the new mailchimp iPad app and since then have been using it a lot. The main reason for this is that during the week we are so busy at the moment that a lot of work on our own website and marketing gets done on on the weekend – on the lounge!

The point being tools like this enable you to do your marketing whereever you are.

Take a bus trip to work? There’s a newsletter a week just there!

Content Marketing for the uninitiated

Last week on the DMA blog this was the topic for the weekly post.

The idea was to introduce content marketing to those who are not yet familiar with the term. It’s a practice that’s gaining popularity and something that you’ll be reading more about from us.

If you’re interested in getting better SEO results for your site, engaging more with your audience and promoting yourself as a leader in your industry – check out Content Marketing for the uninitiated.

Thoughts from WordCamp Auckland

Some of the DMA team attended the recent WordCamp in Auckland.

WordCamps are held all over the world and bring together users, developers and lovers of WordPress. Auckland was a good day with a wide selection of sessions that did well to cater for the different segments of the audience.

One of my favourite sessions was presented by Bill Bennet, a Kiwi journalist who had some simple but well thought our tips for writing on your blog.

Read some of Bill’s tips here and more about WordCamp Auckland.

WordPress and SEO webinar

In June we ran another session of this popular webinar. At the time we promised to make the recording available on our blog. We’re going to post it in 2 separate videos as it was over an hour in length.

The first installment which focuses on where to place your keywords in your WordPress pages and posts is now available. Check out the blog post here to watch and review the presentation.

Enjoy the rest of hump day and have a great week!

Peter

Content Marketing for the uninitiated

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I often write here with tips on SEO for WordPress, how to setup your WordPress site so that it does well in search engines. Less time has been dedicated to what is also a very important topic: content marketing.

It’s not new, content marketing has been around as an idea and practice in the main stream for the past couple years at least.

What is it?

Well let’s start with a popular definition:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

In layman’s terms, it’s writing, valuable content and publishing it online – regularly.

Want and example?

Well you only have to look here at our very own blog. We try and write as often as possible, we share content that we think our audience will be interested in and regularly share educational material – sharing our knowledge.

Some key points to notice:

  • It’s not sales focused content, there’s very little if any sales angle
  • The content is focused on us demonstrating our competence in our field
  • Many of the blog posts introduce new ideas, things our audience can take away and do to make their own online presence more successful – it’s valuable

An interesting observation

This week, while talking to a client in the publishing industry he made this point:

“We all know print is in decline, interestingly though top 100 companies are snapping up the writers and editorial staff to work inside their marketing departments – creating content”. Companies large and small are on the band wagon – they know that getting eyeballs online is an important part of their success.

Content Marketing facts

Some of these stats are US based but still relevant.

  • 67% more leads per month for a business with an active blog – source
  • eMail marketing is still the most popular communications channel for B2B marketing – source
  • This last one is from a 2012 report so while a little old the message is still the same: Companies that blog 15 times a month get 5 times more web traffic than those that don’t blog

The benefits of a well run content marketing strategy

  • Regularly published content on your website is great for SEO – Google is hungry for fresh blog posts
  • A platform for you to stand out from the crowd, let people know you’re a specialist in your field
  • Good content will get shared, visitors to your site share quality content with their networks – putting you in front of even more eyeballs

WordPress, the centre piece of your content marketing strategy

Most sites that we launch for clients have a blog. The platform for their content marketing is right there.

WordPress has a number of tools that allow you to easily publish your new blog posts to your social media networks (think Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.. ) It’s also simple to add sharing buttons to a WordPress blog so that visitors can share your content to their social media networks.

We’ve written a lot about Mailchimp over the years, our eMail marketing tool of choice. It’s also very easy to integrate with WordPress.

A well setup WordPress blog should be the central tool for content marketing. Focus energy there creating new and valuable blog posts knowing that they are shared to your social network and / or eMail lists without much additional effort.

Ok, time to stop reading and start thinking about how to start using content marketing for your business.