What Is a Content Marketer?

Long ago, copywriting legend John Carlton told me that the best copywriters didn't just master their own discipline; they also mastered related disciplines — like marketing, SEO, and negotiations.

This is true for content marketers, as well.

A content marketer is a master of many disciplines. But what exactly does that mean? What sort of disciplines and skills are we talking about? And what types of knowledge and experience are necessary to be a content marketer?

I'll answer those questions and more, but before I do, I'll first loosely define the term "content marketer."

Then, I'll tell you how I uncovered a successful content marketer's five essential skills.

A working definition of "content marketer"

A content marketer is responsible for the planning, creating, and sharing of valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content the content marketer shares depends upon what he sells. In other words, he educates people so that they know, like, and trust him enough to do business with him.

If a content marketer is responsible for marketing content, then let's look at the classic definition of marketing, which involves the four P's:

• Identify, select, and develop a product


• Set the price


• Select the distribution channel to reach the customer where she is (place)


• Plan and execute a promotion strategy

Using this model, content would be the product. The price could range from an email address (to receive blog updates, join an email newsletter) to payment for access to a content library, ebook, or online training course.

The place would be your blog/website, email list, and social media channels. And promotion would be how you share the product.

A content marketer is someone who understands how to position and promote content so that it reaches the widest audience and converts those people from prospects to subscribers to customers — and keeps them coming back.

Now, the art of content marketing has been with us for a while, but an actual person who is a content marketer is a rather new phenomenon.

To put this list together, I had to draw from my own experience, the wisdom of content marketing authorities, and I even reviewed about a dozen job descriptions for content marketing positions.

Let's explore five of the common core skills of content marketers.

1. Storytelling

First and foremost, a content marketer has a nose for a good story. She knows that a great marketing story involves a hero, mentor, goal, obstacle, and moral. And she can uncover her own business's story — and even help other organizations do the same.

This is important because, as C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley write in their book Content Rules, "[Good content] creates value by positioning you as a reliable and valuable source of vendor-agnostic information."

In other words, stories help an audience get to know you, like you, and, ultimately, trust you — before you sell them anything.

The content marketer studies the storytelling techniques of movie screenwriters, novelists, and short story writers, so that when she writes content (see skill number three below to learn more), she knows how to lift prospects out of their ordinary worlds and invite them to consider a journey that ultimately leads to a transaction.

One storytelling method we are quite fond of around here is the Hero's Journey. It’s content marketing that educates your audience through the storytelling arc.

2. Strategy

A great content marketer is also deliberate: she understands and communicates the overarching objective of an organization's content marketing strategy.

In addition, a professional content marketer will set editorial goals. She might:

• Work through these 13 questions


• Create an empathy map


• Put together a customer journey map

The content marketer will understand the need for buyer personas and create them, if necessary.

She will know how to audit a website in order to fix any broken, old, and neglected content.

And let's not forget that all content marketers have exceptional research skills.

Want to take a closer look at that last point?

As Ann Handley advises in her book, Everybody Writes:

"Think before you ink means finding your key point by asking three questions about every bit of content you're creating.

• Why am I creating this?


• What is my key take on this subject?


• Why does it matter to the people I am trying to reach?"

I'll add a fourth: Who are you writing to? Know your audience. That is research at its essence.

While it won't be her chief skill set, an adept content marketer can also manage a content project through planning to execution to promotion.

People skills, like empathy, listening, storytelling, and negotiating, help her navigate those tasks.

3. Writing content

Often, content marketers will not only direct strategy and storytelling, but they'll also be responsible for writing content for blogs/websites, ebooks, and infographics.

It pays to be a remarkable web writer — someone with essential traits like an:

• Average understanding of SEO


• Average understanding of usability


• Above average understanding of social media (see skill number four below to learn more)


• Outstanding understanding of copywriting (yes, copywriting is different from content marketing)

This is important because she will more than likely also be the one writing articles for other websites as a guest posting strategy.

A content marketer will master writing magnetic headlines, selecting old articles to update and republish, and reimagining old content in new formats (like flipping an infographic or blog post into a SlideShare).

She will naturally set and maintain the editorial tone and voice.

Since she's an excellent storyteller, you might find her reading a selection of unorthodox books to help hone her craft and inform her creativity.

4. Social media

Content marketers understand social media.

Some content marketers might even make this their speciality, meeting the rising demand in the number and variety of different platforms. But most content marketers master one or two platforms and have a basic understanding of others.

See, a content marketer likes to tinker with the new shiny social media objects that come out. This allows her to evaluate a new platform's potential and then translate this potential to the proper client.

She'll understand which type of content works best on each platform. For example, Twitter is good for promoting new content. Facebook is good for engaging your audience in discussions and surveys. Pinterest is excellent for sharing images.

Of course, a smart content marketer is also aware of the dangers of digital sharecropping — and not afraid to warn clients.

In addition, "don't waste time delivering content where your audiences don't actually want you to be," writes Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, authors of Content Strategy for the Web.

Know where your audience hangs out. And get their permission to interact.

5. Subscription assets

Content marketers understand the need for building subscription assets, including email subscriber lists and private community memberships.

Not only will they be responsible for writing the content for these subscription models, but they may also need to have a firm understanding of how each one works — or even have the ability to manage, measure, and monitor each model.

For example, a small business might assign the responsibility of writing, editing, uploading, monitoring, and measuring the emails for their email marketing campaigns to just one content marketer.

So, dear content marketer, prioritize wisely. Otherwise, you'll spread yourself too thin.

Stay one step ahead of your customers' desires

Let me end with a quote from Catherine the Great, who took sole control of Russia in 1762 after deposing her husband, Emperor Peter III:

"One must govern in such a way that one's people think they themselves want to do what one commands them to do."

According to Robert Greene in his book The 48 Laws of Power, "to do this she had to be always a step ahead of their desires and to adapt to their resistance."

Now, while Catherine the Great is talking about governing citizens, the core concept here is leadership. Thus, I think this advice applies equally well to the content marketer, who is, in a sense, a leader — a leader of content.

As a leader, she must champion the cause of content and then rally resources to create that content — and ultimately, create content that her audience wants.

Are you up to the task?

So, content marketer, keep this in mind: we must be one step ahead of our customers' desires, and we achieve this by building an audience before creating a product.

And we must adapt to their resistance by becoming masters of empathy, which means understanding their hopes and fears. Stepping into their shoes.

Are you up to the task?

By the way, any characteristics of a content marketer you would put on this list?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The post What Is a Content Marketer? appeared first on Copyblogger.

Website 101: How to Grow Your Website Revenue With Native Ads by @megcabrera

Any website owner, whether you are a small start-up or a big one, would want to monetize the website in one way or another. There is no hard and fast rule in generating site revenue, and there are many ways to do it.

The post Website 101: How to Grow Your Website Revenue With Native Ads by @megcabrera appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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What's it Take to "Go Viral?" 11 Traits to Give Your Idea Wings

Posted by mattround

Before joining Distilled I worked for UsVsTh3m, an experimental Trinity Mirror project, where we created hundreds of games, quizzes and daft "toys." We had unprecedented freedom to try out new interactive formats, learning a great deal about what works… and what doesn’t.

The key to success was "viral" traffic. You’ve probably heard the term bandied about in reference to something popular, and might even have rolled your eyes; it’s a much-abused buzzword.

The idea is that online word-of-mouth can drive exponential traffic growth and broad media coverage with little or no traditional promotional support, but achieving this requires a certain way of thinking. This article focuses on interactive content, but many of the same principles will apply to other formats.

The viral life cycle

It’s useful to aim for interactive content to be…

1. Clickable — When someone sees a link and description (on social media or a site), it seems compelling enough to take a look.


2. Playable — The visitor sticks with it and finds it enjoyable or interesting.


3. Shareable — There’s a strong urge to tell others, often involving the visitor sharing their individual result/score.

You usually need all three aspects to be strong to get a viral hit. It’s easy to focus on one, an experienced team can usually achieve two, but it’s difficult to consistently get the full set.

Crudely, you can think of it in terms of losing potential sharers, ultimately needing to end up with more than one to start the next cycle(s). This image explains it nicely:

Congratulations, it’s going viral! That’s a massive simplification, but a helpful one.

11 ways to make it shareable

1. Attributes

Develop a concept that ties in with the player’s personal attributes: age, location, abilities, personality, etc. For example, measuring reaction time in milliseconds is fine… but if you can correlate it with age, then you’ve immediately got something far more compelling.

2. Tribes

Reinforce a sense of belonging; tribes can be regional, generational, interest-based, political, etc. Perhaps play different tribes off against each other so that your interactive content can address niche groups while having broad appeal overall.

3. Insights

It tells you something about yourself or, more likely, confirms a flattering/intriguing attribute, leading into...

4. Humblebrags

Sharing to make yourself look good… but without it seeming too blatant.

5. “One more go…”

Ensure the player is hooked and will want others to share in that. Although bear in mind that the best games often aren’t the most viral — adding multiple levels and features to a game tends to put off non-gamers and can actually reduce sharing (enthusiasm has a chance to ebb away, and the game will tend to end on a low note when the player finally fails or quits).

6. Topical

People are impressed by fast-turnaround topical content, and sharing it can show you’re up-to-date (perhaps even the first in your social circle to discover something). We regularly developed and launched games in half a day at UsVsTh3m, and more than once within an hour. This obviously isn’t feasible for most commercial projects, but with more agile development and approval processes you can reduce lead times.

7. Delight

Overwhelm the senses: strong use of music, dance, animation, spectacular explosions, anything that’s a straightforward pleasure.

8. Competition

“Can you beat this score?”

9. Comparison

“I got this result, how about you?” This is much "softer" than direct competition and typically more welcoming for a broad audience.

10. Collaborating

Things like global counters, polls, or territorial maps can create the sense of playing your part in a bigger cause. Even just clicking something to increment a number can be made hard to resist with the right "cause."

11. Quality

It’s still possible for something to succeed simply by being good, but in the absence of any other aspects it’d better be really good. Knock-your-socks-off good.

Of course, all of the above overlap and interrelate, and it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

Telling the world

Something that’s strongly viral can actually just be exposed to a few hundred people via Twitter or Facebook. It won’t need a big push; the viral mechanism will ensure it spreads and attracts media attention.

It’s often useful to accompany a launch with relevant press material, perhaps teasing out key angles or supplementary content/data to suit each type of media outlet. Don’t force a story if there isn’t one, though; you don’t want to jeopardize later coverage based around “this cool thing is going viral.”

If the stats are showing it’s strongly going viral (this should be obvious within minutes), you’re then in the fortunate position of planning for success. Keep an eye out for initial coverage that may benefit from additional material, and look to do a follow-up press campaign at a suitable milestone (e.g. at X million visitors, or when you have interesting data to share), broadening the coverage.

If it’s not going viral, stop and consider whether minor changes to wording might make it more clickable. Look at whether it needs to break into a niche audience or broaden its appeal, and retarget accordingly. Although Twitter drives far less traffic than Facebook, it offers more freedom to experiment, target influential individuals, and re-promote over time. If a topical angle may arise, perhaps wait and be ready to repackage and relaunch at a moment’s notice.

Case studies: Two simple games that went viral

The North-o-Meter

UsVsTh3m’s North-o-Meter (sadly, this is currently broken due to hosting issues) used multiple-choice questions to guesstimate how Northern/Southern you are. Despite being entirely UK-focused, within just 4 days of launch it had 3.6 million visitors, 1 million Likes, 1.1 million comments on Facebook, and 41,000 tweets. It went on to get millions more visits, virtually saturating the potential audience. Countless similar quizzes had used this topic before, so why did this one make such a big impact?

• It was clickable because the wording of tweets and Facebook posts worked well, teasing the Northern/Southern cultural identity element in a way that seemed intriguing and non-threatening.


• It was playable thanks to working well on mobile (people were playing and comparing scores late into Friday nights down the pub), being easy to play and giving constant visual feedback, unlike many similar things that simply ape static magazine personality quizzes.


• It was shareable by tapping into attributes (location/origin), tribes (north vs. south), insights (using mundane questions to infer something greater), competition, comparison, and quality (the visual feedback and often surprisingly accurate conclusions).


• Northern/Southern cultural identity is immensely strong in the UK. It’s a key part of how many people define themselves.


• The whole quiz was grounded in honest personal experience. One of our young journalists had written about moving to London, and the way it resonated with people led us to think about how to apply that to an interactive format.


• Naming a specific place to go with the percentage meant it sometimes got the player’s location/origin spot-on, so they were then likely to share it in a very enthusiastic way.

How Old Are Your Reactions?

How Old Are Your Reactions?, produced by Distilled for JustPark, is a simple web game where you stop a car with a tap/click. Your reaction time is then used to look up the corresponding age for that score, based on a survey of 2,000 players.

Our thinking beforehand was that it would work well due to the following aspects:

• It would be clickable by setting an intriguing personal challenge.


• It would be playable thanks to clear, quick gameplay and good presentation, including full mobile compatibility.


• It would be shareable due to attributes (age and reactions), insights (inferring age from reactions), humblebrags (impressively young age result), "one more go…" (few will play it just once), competition, comparison, and quality.


• Age is a key personal attribute, and age estimation prompts a great deal of conversation and comparison, whether the result is accurate or lower/higher than the player’s actual age. Lively conversations on Facebook help ensure visibility.


• Driving is a relevant, relatable way to dress the game up, particularly for this brand. A straightforward, bare-bones reactions test would have been "colder" and less engaging.


• The combination of elements would allow for multiple storytelling angles in coverage, to do with good-natured rivalry between generations, road safety, etc.

This all seems to have been borne out by the stats since launch: Over 3 million unique page views, nearly 300,000 social shares, and links from over 400 domains.

In summary…

Always ask yourself:

• How can we make it clickable, playable, and shareable? Judge your ideas harshly — you need all three.


• Which sharing impulses can it tap into? It should be possible to readily pick out a few motivations, or refine the concept to strengthen this aspect.


• What will be the best way to capitalize on success? Be ready to build a story around it, using popularity as the foundation for broad and varied coverage.

The way people share and interact is constantly changing, and reaching large audiences is always challenging, but the approaches I’ve outlined can help you to devise interactive content that’ll have a great shot at going viral.

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The post SearchCap: Google Presidential Candidate Cards, Valentine's Day Searches & Locksmith Woes appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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The post 10 Tips to Make Content Marketing Work for Small Budgets by @neilpatel appeared first on Search Engine Journal.