Content marketing is essential for B2B businesses providing both qualitative and quantitative returns.  And while 6 in 10 marketers are planning to increase content marketing spends this year, success-rates still vary greatly as it’s a new concept for most.

Maria Pergolino, director of marketing for Marketo (a TopRank Online Marketing client) shared a presentation at the Marketo User Summit on getting the message out, focused on social media and content marketing tips/tricks.

How do you succeed in content marketing?

• Create content that sells
• Create a content map
• Optimize content for search
• Repurpose content
• Learn to succeed even in situations with little or no content

We need content for nurturing, as a lead solution, for lead scoring and risk mitigation.  A lot of people don’t even consider the risk mitigation aspect – by publishing content and making people feel like your company is providing great information and is a leader, they’ll choose you.  Without content, you’ll never even have the chance to be found.

This was written and posted by Adam Singer at Top Rank Blog, for more on this story...read more.

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on how the next wave of social networks will change your business.

Three years ago, Twitter was barely known outside the geeky confines of San Francisco. Today, it's a marketer's dream: a free service with an audience of nearly 125 million people, who use it to keep tabs on friends, celebrities — and their favorite companies. Co-founder Biz Stone explains what's happening, where it's headed, and how entrepreneurs can take advantage. He recently spoke with Inc. senior writer Max Chafkin.

Which approaches to social media work especially well?

There are straightforward uses. A New York City bakery uses Twitter to tell customers when the cookies are coming out of the oven, and Dell uses it to tell people about deals on refurbished computers. And then there are companies that are blending together marketing and customer support and using it to build their brands. I once sent a tweet that said, "I'm getting on a JetBlue flight," and I got a reply from JetBlue's Twitter account that said, "You should try the smoked almonds." That's customer service, but, because our conversation happened in public, it's also branding. 

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If you have a website and you have relied on traffic that happens across your site you are doing yourself a terrible injustice. You should be seeing at least 1/2 of your traffic coming in through search engine traffic. Search engine traffic doesn’t just grow over time. You need to position your site with search engines through search engine registration and optimization, we call this the “organic search”. It is much cheaper than paying for ad clicks and should bring you a greater return over time. Here’s my top 10 list on Search engines and how they rely on the following items to find a site and help you gain good positioning:

1. Meta tag data – the keywords that place a customer or viewer to your site, required for every single page, 20 meta tags per page

2. Description tags – your site descriptions on every page of your site

3. Title tags – the titles that show up at the top of your windows

4. Content – the more pages the better, link your pages to each other and add relevant data throughout your site to gain better positioning. Make sure you have strategically placed the proper words throughout your pages that attract the right viewers

5. Site map - every site should have one, it will get you the positioning you are seeking for your website

6. Alt tags – make sure all of your images have been tagged with accurate names

7. Social networking – sign up for free sites like wordpress.com, twitter.com, facebook.com, myspace.com, linkedin.com, they bring much needed traffic and give you saturation in the marketplace, more is better

8. Monthly SEO services – this will help maintain positioning with the search engines and keep you at the top of the lists. This could run between $350 -$1500 per month

9. Tracking and reporting – Google Analytics is one of the best resources on the web today and it’s free to use.

10. Competitive analysis – Know what your competition is up to, look at their keywords and study the algorithms. A good SEO marketer can help you with this type of reporting

Search engine traffic doesn’t just grow over time. You need to position your site with search engines through search engine registration and optimization, we call this the “organic search”

There’s a lot more that can be done to improve your site, for instance, if you have an e-commerce site, is it built to attract an audience? Does it have all the tools mentioned above to allow it to be found by search engines? Have you taken the time to study the link popularity for your particular industry? If not than maybe you should consider an extreme web makeover….give me a call, I would welcome an opportunity to get your website to it’s rightful place of pulling it’s weight in the marketplace. Don’t waste another dollar on your site until it starts paying for itself!