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Content Marketing

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There’s No “Best Time to Blog”

I’ll tell you now, you can ignore all of those articles that tell you when you should publish a blog post, send an email, or publish a tweet.

There is no best time to do any of those things.

That’s false thinking for a number of reasons:

  • The articles are usually based on a single case study of one company, usually themselves. “We saw a 40% increase in open rates by sending our email newsletter at 8:37 am on the third Tuesday of every month.”
  • It doesn’t take into account the quality of the content. Great content gets read, shitty gets ignored. You could scientifically determine the exact pinpoint moment to publish your post, but if it sucks, no one will read it.
  • Even if this actually did work, it’s a floating target. If an article says Monday mornings are the best time to send e-newsletters, everyone will start sending theirs on Monday mornings, which will drive down everyone’s willingness to read them. Then someone will find they have good luck on Wednesday nights, which will drive everyone to send theirs on Wednesday nights.

The best time to send email newsletters is whatever works for you. The best time to post Twitter messages is whenever you feel like it. The best time to blog is any time.

But the big secret is to make it interesting, valuable, and well-written. Without that, no one will care.

Blogs are like DVRs

A blog post is not like live television. You don’t schedule a blog post because everyone is going to flock to it at that exact moment. A blog post is more like the show you DVRed. Better yet, it’s more like Netflix.

You record a show so you can watch it later. I’ve got DVRed shows that are 5 months old (last episode of 30 Rock anyone?), and I only watch them when I have time. I’ve got even older shows on Netflix. They’re there when I need them, and I can happily discover new ones.

While a lot of your blog traffic is going to come from that immediate discovery when you promote your posts via social media, don’t forget the search engine traffic and the readers who clicked on a “similar post” link at the bottom of your page. I’ve got several blog posts that get more traffic weeks after the publication date than I got on the day I hit “Publish.”

One of my favorite rants against “Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours to be an expert,” because that’s not what he said. Click the image for a closer look.

For example, one of my more popular blog posts, What Malcolm Gladwell REALLY Said About The 10,000 Hour Rule only received 79 views the first day I published it. As of today, it’s been viewed 24,694 times, but it was published on March 15, 2012 at 9:00 am.

So either 9:00 am is an absolutely terrible time to publish a post, or the thing really started picking up steam three months later when it hit the top 5 on Google for “10,000 hour rule.”

I think it’s the latter. I wrote something that managed to get some decent attention, and it wasn’t because of the time of day, or the day of the week, or whether I was wearing a big yellow hat. The time of day had nothing to do with the success of the blog post. It was the subject matter and the quality of the writing.

The myth of the ideal publishing time is just that: a myth. It’s either always changing, only works for a few people, or does not consider the context and quality. You need to pay attention to whether your content is well-written, well-produced, and is interesting to your readers. If it’s not, nothing else is going to save you.

Special hat tip to Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer’s Unmarketing Podcast for the idea.

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There Is No ‘Future Of Content Marketing’

There is no Next Big Thing in content marketing.

I was asked about that at a talk this week. “What’s the future of content marketing?”

I told them, “Nothing is going to change. There will be no dramatic developments, or exciting new technology that will change what content marketing actually is.

Even on this thing, I can still create content. The only thing that’s changed is that my laptop is not as noisy.
“Content marketing is just marketing. It’s persuading people with words, images, and sounds.

“What major changes can you make with that?”

Oh sure, I’ll grant you that developing a written language was pretty major, because we could finally write our oral traditions and stories down on papyrus, like the Sumerian version of Epic of Gilgamesh in 2000 BC, making it one of the first examples of early literature. But even marketing goes back nearly that far, when Egyptians used to put sales messages on papyrus.

Then in 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, and we could produce books more quickly and cheaply, instead of carving pages out of blocks or wood, or copying them by hand. Advertising was done with town criers and posters containing images and not words, since citizens couldn’t read.

In 1978, at age 14, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email, and in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, launching the world’s first web server on a NeXT Computer, a company founded by Steve Jobs. With that, we could share words, and later, images and sounds, with the entire world, and then spam the bejeezus out of it.

The next big switch was the advent of smart mobile phones, but even that’s not a major change. It’s the Internet on your phone. It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s invention miniaturized.

We’ve created websites, blogs, Tumblr, and Twitter. Flickr, Picasa, and Instagram. YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, and Vine. Streaming audio, Internet radio, and podcasts. We get it all on our desktops, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. We create amazing new layouts, like Starbucks’ Instagram feed, the I Hear Of Sherlock Everywhere Flipboard magazine, or the Tuneage tumblog.

It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t create anything new. With all new technological developments and all the different ways to use these tools, there is one constant: we’re sharing good writing, interesting images, and pleasant sounds.

You can change the tools, you can invent new tools, you can come up with new technology. You can invent a 6-word microblog. You can create a 3-second video app. You can build a website that’s filled with nothing but selfies and kitty pictures. (It’s called Facebook.)

But even 10, 20, or 100 years later, people will still want and share good writing, interesting images, and pleasant sounds.

There will be no major change in the content marketing world, because the need for good content has not changed in 4,000 years. The good writers always rise to the top, the good artists are always seen (even if it is decades after they died).

The only thing that will change about content marketing is the name. Someone will come up with some new name, and that will be it. In fact, that’s already happened; now we’re calling it Owned Media (affiliate link).

I don’t care what happens to the web. We could get it on our glasses. We could have it beamed directly to our brains. We could shut it off tomorrow. We will still need people to create the stuff that goes into the machine so we can read it, watch it, and listen to it.

So if you’re wondering what you should do to jump on the next wave of content marketing, forget it. Don’t try to capture the next wave. Focus instead on being a good writer, photographer, videographer, or sound producer. That will outlive every technological change for the next 4,000 years.

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Everything is NOT Content

We’re tossing “content” around a little too easily these days. It’s becoming another vague generic word like “stuff” or “crap.”

Not the adjective meaning fairly happy, but rather “items held within a larger container,” as the stuff in a book or a blog.

The Moz (formerly SEOMoz) is cheapening the word by telling us “Everything is content!”

Except it’s not.

In his latest blog post on The Moz Blog, “Why Local Businesses Don’t Need Big Budgets for Their Content Marketing, author Matthew Barby says, “Content is:”

  • the staff within your business.
  • the design of your shop/office.
  • your products and services.
  • the menus on your tables.
  • your company values.
  • your customers.
  • EVERYTHING.

Bullcontent!

As sick to death I am of the phrase “content is king,” I’ll tattoo that on my ass before I ever agree that “content is everything,” or even any of those things Barby named.

It is not, as Barby says, cupcakes, staff uniforms, foam art in your latte, or the barista’s smile as she hands over your cupcake and arty latte.

Unless you’re a writer, artist, videographer, photographer, podcaster, or musician, the stuff you do isn’t content either. And if you are, you probably don’t want to cheapen your work by calling it that.

Real creators it stories, art, videos, photos, podcasts, and music.

Most Things Are Not Content

From the early days of “paper content marketing.” Or as those poor fools from the 30s called it, “advertising.”

Do you know what content is? Words, images, and sounds. Stories, pictures, movies, podcasts, and music.

Do you know what it isn’t? Everything else. Everything other thing in the world that are not words, images, and sounds.

If I can’t read it, watch it, look at it, or listen to it, it’s not content.

If I can eat it, it’s not content. If it’s a person and his or her clothes, it’s not content. If it’s the squishy feeling we all get from maximizing our company’s potential to provide mission-critical customer satisfaction, it’s not content.

Using the word this way will eventually just cheapen the word and make it as useful and nebulous as “stuff.” I’m certainly not going to coin the phrase stuff marketing.

The word usually refers to material contained within another item — contents of a thermos, a book (hence the term Table of Contents), a speech. It has expanded to include video, audio, and photos, but that’s as far as I think people need to take it.

I’ll agree that the staff, their uniform, and latte foam art are features and reasons to like that business. But to call them “content” cheapens both them and the tenets of content marketing.

Do You Know What We Used To Call Content Marketing?

I blame the Content Marketing movement for starting this. They’re the ones who started calling “persuading people with information” content marketing.

Before then, we just called it marketing.

It was just a thing we did. It was brochures and trade shows. It was TV commercials and newspaper ads and CD-ROMs. It was corporate videos and scripts for radio commercials. Then one day, when I was as old as Kurt Cobain when he died, we started using this Internet thingy, and my company was the first in our industry to have a website.

The other companies laughed at us for getting suckered into this fad, until we started kicking their asses and taking away sales worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then they scrambled fast to catch up.

Do you know what we called doing marketing on the Internet back then?

Marketing.

And do you know what we called the text and the photos on our web pages?

Text and photos.

But we didn’t call customer service, uniforms, or any of that other stuff “marketing,” because it wasn’t. Our accountant wasn’t marketing. Our shipping coordinator wasn’t marketing. Our warehouse guy wasn’t marketing.

We certainly never would have called them content.

But now the latest jargony buzzword is Content Marketing, because we produce stuff to be consumed; Internet Marketing, because it’s marketing on the Internet; Digital Marketing, because it’s now happening via mobile apps and not just the Internet; and, urp. . . urp. . . barf.

Honestly, I don’t care if you debate the subtle nuances of calling it Digital versus Internet Marketing to 10 decimal places. It doesn’t matter. Because it’s still just marketing. It’s not special marketing. It’s not some new brand of marketing that no one has ever done before.

It’s still just persuasive words, pretty pictures, and pleasing sounds.

So can we just skip the happiness-and-rainbows fancy jargon, and stick with the areas we can control that actually persuade people to buy our, uh, stuff?

Because no one is going to walk into a content shop and ask the contentista for a half-caff content with light foam, and a chocolate content with extra sprinkles.

That would be stupid.

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The Two-Letter Word That Speaks With Authority: The Royal We

If you’re trying to achieve a sense of authority and credibility with you’re writing, there’s one little word you can use to convey that feeling, without ever actually stating it.

We.

Queen of England at William and Mary College

This week’s Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogarty) podcast, The Royal “We”, focuses on all the different usages of the first person plural of the word “we.”

There’s the:

  • Royal We, which the Queen uses;
  • Editorial We, which editorials will often employ to refer to a publication’s leadership;
  • Political We, which politicians use to refer to their campaign, and later their administration;
  • Urban We, which refers to Fogarty’s finding them in the Urban Dictionary; and,
  • Nanny Narrator, which a doctor might use (“how are we feeling today?”)

But there’s also the “We’re In It Together (WIIT) We,” which didn’t make Fogarty’s list, but I’m a big fan of.

Fogarty even uses it herself in the narrative:

Point of view signals the writer’s stance toward the information or events he or she is describing. We usually describe literary point of view as “the first-person” (the confessional I, the inclusive we, or the royal we), “the second-person” (the informal “you,” or the implied “you” in the bossy imperative mood) and “the third-person” (the objective he, she, it or they, the starchy “one”).

Did you see it? “We usually describe literary point of view…” Who is “we” here?

It’s the author and the reader. It’s you and me. The implication is that you and I agree. That right thinking people — that’s me, because I’m espousing this point of view, and you, because I want you to feel smart and special — believe this and do this regularly. Not like those people who are completely wrong-headed, nasty, and never call their mothers on their birthdays.

We, who are so knowledgeable about literary points of view, use these terms to describe them.

This WIIT We pulls the reader in and makes them feel like they’re on your side. It’s one thing to speak with that “Voice of God” tone, where the writer never uses “I” or “me,” but rather relay information as if it’s been handed down by God.

But it’s entirely another thing to put your arm around the reader’s shoulder and whisper in his or her ear, “I’ve got this cool idea, and I want to share it with you.” It’s almost empowering to the reader. It lets them know that if you’re right, then by definition, they’re right too, because they agree with you.

It’s a subtle, but powerful secret that can boost the level of your writing, without making any drastic changes, or even altering your regular writing voice.

If you want to add some authority and credibility to your writing, try sprinkling in the WIIT We a few times, and see if that makes a difference.

We believe one will be pleasantly surprised.

 

Photo credit: Physicist Erin (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Fastest Way to Stop Using Business Jargon? Stop Using Adjectives and Adverbs

You can always spot the new/bad writer — they’re the ones who fervently believe if they use dramatic, purple prose, with lots of flowery adjectives and fancy-schmancy words that end in -ly, the enthralled reader will be captivated by their breath-taking abilities.

No, it just makes me want to puke.

Similarly, you can tell the new/bad marketer, because they’re the ones who spew business jargon like a baby eating a cracker.

They also make me want to puke.

I found a slide deck on 15 marketing buzzwords (see below) we need to quit using now. I’m happy to say I don’t use 14 of them. (I still like to say “content marketing,” but now I feel guilty about it.)

But I also know that a lot of people create a lot of bullshit terms (check out the Dack.com bullshit generator here), and I realized what the problem was.

It’s adverbs and adjectives.

No, seriously!

Think about it. Ernest Hemingway is considered one of the greatest writers of our time, and it was a rare adjective that made its way into his prose. Same goes for adverbs. Why describe a verb, when you can just use a better verb?

And yet we do that with a lot of our marketing jargon as well.

  • Best-of-breed
  • Cutting edge
  • Value-added
  • Revolutionary
  • Scalable
  • Epic

And so on.

Sadly, this won’t eliminate all of the business jargon, but I’m hoping that just by limiting yourself to nouns and verbs — “I love this coffee” instead of “This is epic coffee!” — it may jar your brain enough to start speaking like a normal person again.

If you could even do this with your writing, you’ll find it’s much easier to read and understand.

(And yes, I realize “easier” is an adverb. But then again, I’m not Ernest Hemingway.)

15 Marketing Buzzwords to Stop Using from MarketingProfs

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Content Marketing Versus SEO: Epic Rap Battles of Geekery

Let’s be honest, your customers think about you as often as you think about your own vendors.

Not at all.

You are not the first thing on your customers’ minds when they wake up in the morning, you’re not the last thing they think about when they go to bed, and you didn’t pop up anywhere in between either.

Your customers have a job to do, and they’re focused on getting it done. And until that thing you sell breaks or runs out, they don’t give you a second thought.

Which means, all your work and worry about being a thought leader in your industry, and writing blog posts that they’ll love and read aloud during departmental meetings before they’re posted on the break room fridge has all been for naught.

“But, but. . . the guy who wrote that book said we should do that. He said people were craving my content!”

Okay, yeah, I said that. But did you think about me at all until just now?

Let’s try this again: how much did you think about your middle-of-the-road vendor? Not the person who sells you your raw materials — the coffee for the coffee shop, or the #10 envelopes for the direct mail company — but the person who does the stuff you don’t think about until the bill comes in the mail?

Do you really think about your floor mats at the front door of your coffee shop? Do you yearn to read a 300th blog post on best accounting practices for direct marketing companies?

So why should your customers care about you?

They don’t. And you should stop caring about them. Stop writing for them. Stop trying to impress them. They’re the pretty girl from 5th grade who said you were best friends, but you had to be secret best friends.

They aren’t the ones you should be writing for.

You need to focus on the searchers. The people who are cruising Google and Bing trying to find a solution to their problems. Those are the people who have been coming to your website.

Don’t believe me? Check your Google Analytics, and see what percentage of returning visitors you have to your website. If it’s more than 50%, I’ll buy you lunch.

Everyone else, the remaining 85 – 90% (come on, who are we kidding?) are new visitors. They came there because they found you on one of the search engines, or they saw your blog post on Twitter, or a friend forwarded it to them on LinkedIn or Facebook.

That’s who you need to impress. They’re not your customers, but if you play your cards right, they could be.

If these people came from search engine traffic, what the hell are they searching for?! I write jokes about boogers and the Oxford comma!

Content Marketing + SEO = Big Dreamy Marketing Love

There’s been a big Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots argument in the online marketing world about which is more important, content marketing or SEO.

(It’s content marketing, but I say that with an asterisk.)

The debate comes down to this:

SEO pros: If it wasn’t for us, no one would know how to find you.
Content marketers: Oh yeah? If it wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t have anything decent to optimize. Not that that’s stopped you before.
SEO pros: Jerk!
Content marketers: Fartface!

Clearly — because I hate seeing the grown-ups fight — one is going to always beget the other, like a snake eating its tail. You can’t have SEO without content, but no one is going to find your content without SEO.

(Here’s the asterisk)* If I had to choose, I would always choose content, because you at least have a chance of people stumbling upon it. My No Bullshit Social Media co-author Jason Falls did not optimize any of his content until last spring, and still managed to garner as many as 30,000 site visitors per month, by writing good stuff. Compare that to a Midwest SEO pro we know who could barely crack 10,000. He also frequently has 50%+ returning visitors, and yes, I already bought him lunch.

So What Does That Mean For My Content Marketing?

It means write for search, but write well. It means produce your absolute best work, and then make sure people can find it.

The problem with an SEO-only strategy is that while it brings in visitors, none of them stick around and buy anything, because the content is crap.

That means, flex those writing muscles, and be a content superstar. Write the best content you can. Mold history, shape the world, change lives with your very words. As your analytics showed you, you’ve got one shot at impressing your visitors. Just because they showed up doesn’t guarantee they’ll be back. So give them your A material, and hope it’s enough to get them into your sales funnel, so you can turn them into regular paying customers, or get them to join the small percentage of people who read all of your content (and are not your mother).

So they can forget all about you too, until that thing you sell breaks or runs out.