December, 2017

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How to write amazing product descriptions

Tina Dubinsky

To write product descriptions well, you need to differentiate your product. Typing the same descriptive words used by your competitors lacks originality. And writing unoriginal text is boring. Your customers have read it before. Do you copy the text from packaging and supplier’s product brochures directly onto your website? Well you’re probably shooting yourself in.

Writing 130
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Are You Ready for Content Marketing in 2018? 60+ Predictions

Content Marketing Institute

It’s hard to believe that, after 10 years, this will be the last time I share my annual list of content marketing predictions for CMI. Not to get all sentimental or anything, but looking into the future of our industry and anticipating the content and media trends most likely to impact our businesses has always been a favorite part of the job … and it will be one of CMI’s content experiences I’ll miss the most as I retire from CMI this month. .

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5 Bloggers Who Started a Blog in 2017 and Survived

ProBlogger

When you start a blog, you understandably look for advice from experts to help get you started. You look at countless blogs in your niche – ones that have probably been going for a while and enjoying various types of success. It can be quite overwhelming, and sets you up for the comparison game and ‘perfection paralysis’ – not wanting to hit publish until your blog looks perfect.

Blogger 49
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How to Find Guest Writers for Your Blog Even if It’s Brand New

ThemeIsle

As your blog’s audience grows, you’ll often need to start publishing more content if you want to keep your visitors engaged. The problem is that there’s only so much a single person can do. To remedy that problem, you could add new authors to your staff, which can be a complex process, or you could. The post How to Find Guest Writers for Your Blog Even if It’s Brand New appeared first on Themeisle Blog.

Brand 52
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How to Leverage Behavioral Science Insights for Direct Mail Success

Speaker: Neal Boornazian, President and Nancy Harhut, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer - HBT Marketing

Direct mail has consistently remained a powerful tool in the marketer's arsenal, but in an age of digital dominance, its effectiveness hinges on the strategic integration of behavioral science. 💡 When you incorporate powerful behavioral science principles into your direct mail marketing strategies, you can prompt the hardwired decision-making shortcuts your audience relies on — and that automatically unlocks new avenues for engagement, conversion, and brand loyalty.

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Are B2C Content Marketing Teams Getting What They Need to Succeed? [New Research]

Content Marketing Institute

We’ve all known (and probably been part of) small, focused teams that seem to produce incredible results. Unless these teams hang on to their tight focus, though, even the most impressive typically hit a wall. The organizational pressure to do more too often outpaces the team’s ability to keep up. B2C marketers may be about to hit that stage given the signs that popped up as we read through the survey data and fill-in responses to the latest annual content marketing research.

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This Goal-Setting Activity That Made All the Difference

Content Marketing Institute

This is my last article for a while, so I really wanted this one to make an impact and stay with you. Even though the amazing CMI editorial team wanted me to write about marketing, I wrote this instead (ha). Occasionally, I’ll do an interview where someone will ask: “What’s the one thing you did that made the greatest impact to where you are at now?”.

Insurance 109

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The Zen of Content Marketing: Higher Consciousness, Better Performance

Content Marketing Institute

Week after week since January 2015, CMI has sent a Content Strategy for Marketers e-newsletter written by CMI Chief Strategy Advisor Robert Rose. In this newsletter, Robert delivers marketing insights through a zen sensibility, leaving many of us inspired as businesspeople and as people. (Since December, the Content Strategy Newsletter merged with the weekly newsletter, bringing Robert’s thoughts to even more subscribers.).

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Publishing Frequency: Why (and How) We’re Changing Things Up

Content Marketing Institute

How often do you read the weekend posts on Content Marketing Institute the day they’re published? We can tell from traffic the answer is “sometimes” for many of you. Before I joined the CMI editorial team in September, the same was true for me. The daily alert went to my work inbox, which I monitored on the weekend only for urgent communications. Most of the time, as valuable as the CMI articles are, they didn’t qualify as urgent.

Publisher 100
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How Tom’s of Maine Found Success in Micro-Influencer Marketing

Content Marketing Institute

Influencer marketing is about growing your audience and leveraging the voice of well-connected people … but using influencers with the biggest audiences isn’t always the answer. Tom’s of Maine uses a micro-influencer model to get the word out about its line of natural products. Bridget Burns, community manager for Tom’s of Maine, explains in this Q&A how micro-influencer marketing works for a brand that values substance over sizzle.

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Unsolicited Advice: How to Avoid 4 Content Marketing Blunders

Content Marketing Institute

Have you hit that moment in the holiday season yet? You know, when the fairy dust has settled to the floor next to bits of dried pine needles, crumbs of joyously consumed (now vaguely regretted) treats, and the hair of the dog that may or may not have bitten you (but almost certainly needs a walk). I tend to get that bah-humbug feeling a couple of days before the new year brightens things again.

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SME Relationships: Proven Solutions for Seamless Collaboration and Success

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

💢 Do you find yourself stuck in never-ending review cycles? Are you wondering if your Subject Matter Expert actually got that last review request? Are you having trouble trying to decipher impractical or conflicting feedback? 💢 If any of these scenarios sounds familiar, you may benefit from a crash course on managing SME relationships!

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Less Brand, More Identity: The Zombie Business Cure

Content Marketing Institute

No company wants to be a zombie – an uncaring, brainless, ruthless, inhuman thing that does whatever it takes to keep going. Yet examples abound of companies that behave in zombie-like ways, often paying the price in lost sales and damaged reputations. How does a business cure itself of a case of the zombies? That’s the question that content strategist and UX specialist Melissa Eggleston answers in her Content Marketing World talk, Zombies All Look the Same: Using Identity-based Content Strategy

Brand 95
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Content Syndication: More Than a Traffic Boost

Content Marketing Institute

I learned content distribution, syndication, and SEO very much by accident. Here’s the backstory: In 2005 I was firmly rooted in the world of documentaries. I worked on projects for ABC News, HBO, The New York Times and Frontline – always as a freelancer. I worked on films about terrorism in Europe, Abu Ghraib, Americans preparing for the apocalypse, and more.

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A Year Full of ‘No Way!?’ Moments for CCO Magazine

Content Marketing Institute

2017 will go down as the year contributors to the magazine repeatedly blew my mind. Most editors like to think they have at least a modest (if not better) grasp of the industry they cover. After all, to be a good editor you must be able to tease out the ideas that will educate or delight your readers most – and identifying those requires a baseline of subject matter expertise.

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This Old Marketing Farewell Episode: Sometimes the End Is a Beginning

Content Marketing Institute

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher. . In our grand finale episode, Robert kicks things off by pondering the decision to end something, so that something else can begin. We answer listener-submitted queries, and ask a few of our own; then we sign off with a final farewell inspired by a few of the greats.

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The Resurgence of Direct Mail as a Growth Marketing Strategy

Speaker: Jeff Tarran, COO, Gunderson Direct & Margaret Pepe, Executive Director of Product Management, U.S. Postal Service

Learn the secrets to direct mail success for growth marketers! Industry veterans Jeff Tarran and Margaret Pepe are here to delve into how direct mail has completely evolved in recent years, and has rightfully earned a seat at the table alongside the email and digital marketing plans of SMBs, enterprise companies, and agencies as they look into strategy for 2024 and beyond.

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Teach Students to Write for Real-Life Contexts

Content Marketing Institute

Today's students have to learn to shift their writing styles to meet different real-life purposes, says ELA teacher-author Jeremy Hyler. Teachers should understand the different contexts (school, work, and personal) and help students learn to "code switch" as needed.

Writing 77
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Fallacy of the Day

Content Marketing Institute

Estimation is pretentious rationalism, where rationalism does not serve us well (extremistan)(sic) Take only risks you can survive. Pretentious rationalism is defined as a type of ultimate explanation—announced at one time as final truth—which is termed a system. This is a term used by Taleb in the context of macroeconomic models. The use of estimating in software development project mandates those estimates be updated with actual performance data to have any credibility in the construction of

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220: What You Should Include in Your Email Newsletters

ProBlogger

What You Should Include in Your Email Newsletters (and Answers to 4 FAQs About Email). Do you email your blog readers regularly? Maybe you put ‘set up email newsletter’ on your ‘someday’ list ages ago, but still haven’t done it. Or maybe you have a newsletter list, but you haven’t sent one in months. You might think it’s optional – something you can do once you’ve finished everything else on your to-do list.

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225: How One Nutritionist Uses Her Blog to Grow Her Business

ProBlogger

How One Nutritionist Uses Her Blog to Help Grow Her Business. Here’s another episode where I hand the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. In today’s episode I’ve got Aussie blogger Nina—one of the attendees from our recent events in Australia. She came to our mastermind day, and I really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit of her story there.

Blog 41
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Lets Get Physical: How to Blend Direct Mail Marketing with Your Digital Strategy

Speaker: Akeel Jabber, B2B SaaS Investor and Growth Marketer at Horizen Capital

⭐ Are you ready to boost campaign success? Consider the untapped potential of integrating direct mail marketing seamlessly with digital marketing strategies. Combining the physical, tangible impact of direct mail with the dynamic reach of digital marketing can be a game-changer, significantly increasing your ROI when done right. Direct mail grabs attention, making it great for reaching your target audience 📩 Digital marketing keeps the momentum going, driving action 📲 So.

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How to Use Numbers Effectively in Your Blog Posts

ProBlogger

You’re a blogger, so hopefully you feel confident working with words. But words alone aren’t enough. Even if you haven’t been blogging for long (or are yet to start), you’ve probably noticed numbers coming up a lot in other people’s posts. You often find numbers in post titles such as: How I Made over $500,000 with the Amazon Affiliate Program (ProBlogger).

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224: From 5 to Over 1,000,000 Readers a Month – A Finance Blogger Tells His Story

ProBlogger

From 5 to Over 1,000,000 Monthly Readers – A Finance Blogger Shares His Story. Once again I’m handing the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. In today’s episode you’ll hear the story of Robert Farrington, a finance blogger. After a couple of fairly unfocused years where he made no money from his blog, Robert managed to turn things around through storytelling and taking his readers on a journey.

Finance 37
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219: I’d like to Feature YOU on the ProBlogger Podcast

ProBlogger

An Invitation for YOU to Be Featured on the ProBlogger Podcast. Today’s podcast is a little different. It’s an invitation for YOU to be featured in an upcoming episode of the ProBlogger podcast. Early next year we’ll be releasing a brand new free course for bloggers to help them launch their blogs. And in the lead up we want to feature stories and tips from ProBlogger listeners and readers who’ve already started their own blogs.

Blogger 36
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Is Your Marketing Ready for 2018?

Content Marketing Institute

After you put away the champagne flutes and flip the calendar to 2018, what will you set your sights on to take your marketing to the next level in the new year? What has 2017 taught you? One place to look for lessons is CMI’s two conferences – Content Marketing World and Intelligent Content Conference. As I review the blog posts I’ve written this year about the talks at those conferences, I’m struck by one big takeaway: Marketers need to expand their view of their role and their sense of how th

Marketing 111
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Is Training the Right Solution?

Speaker: Tim Buteyn

Let's set the scene: you’ve identified a critical performance gap in your organization and need to close that gap. A colleague suggests training, but you suspect there’s something going on that training can’t address. How can you determine if training is the right solution before you commit your budget and resources to a new training program? In this webinar, you will learn how to determine if training is the right solution using the Behavior Engineering Model.

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6 Content Marketing Ideas to Steal From the Awards Finalists of 2017

Content Marketing Institute

You’ve almost certainly heard this quote: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” But do you know who said it? Turns out, a lot of people. Steve Jobs attributed it to Pablo Picasso. A quick Google search shows variations attributed to many thinkers of varying levels of fame, including: Igor Stravinsky – “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”.

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2018 Content Marketing Toolkit: Tips, Templates, and Checklists

Content Marketing Institute

Ready or not, 2018 is on its way. If you happened to catch our collection of content marketing predictions for the upcoming year, you may think you’re in for a bumpy ride. There are lots of big changes to manage on the horizon – the increasing impact of voice-activation, AI automation, and tighter consumer data regulation among them. But just because you likely need to work a bit harder to keep your content marketing maturity level on track with your competition and on pace with innovation

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How to Better Understand the Size and Composition of Your B2B Audience

Content Marketing Institute

In my corporate days, I asked this question of the marketing team on a weekly basis: “Who are these 20,000 people in our email newsletter database? Do they even fit our ideal client profile?”. I’m embarrassed to admit, instead of pushing for the answer, we stayed on the hamster wheel churning out a weekly newsletter featuring one staffer blog post, two curated industry articles, and one marketing meme.

Audience 101
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221: From 0 to 500,000 Page Views a Month – A DIY Blogger Shares Her Story

ProBlogger

Today is the first episode in a 12-part series we’re running on the ProBlogger podcast over the next few weeks. We’re handing the podcast over to you – the listeners and readers of ProBlogger – to tell your story of how you started your blog and what’s happened since. As I said a couple of weeks ago, in the second week of January we’ll be releasing a brand new (and completely free) course on how to start a blog.

Blogger 49
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Revitalizing Dry Content: A Lesson in Engagement

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

We’ve all been there. You’ve been given a pile of dry content and asked to create a compelling eLearning course. You’re determined to create something more engaging than the same old course that learners quickly click through, but how do you take this “boring” content and create something relevant and engaging? Many instructional designers will say, “Boring in means boring out.

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223: From 0 to Six-Figure Blogger in Two Years – A Recipe Blogger Tells Her Story

ProBlogger

From 0 to Six Figures in Two Years – A Recipe Blogger Shares Her Story. In today’s episode we continue our series of blogger stories where I hand the podcast over to you listeners to tell your stories and tips about starting and growing your blogs. We kicked off the series three episodes back with a DIY blogger, and yesterday we featured two tech/Microsoft bloggers.

Blogger 37
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Stock 2.0: What Savvy Marketers Need to Know About the Changing Rules of Visual Content

Content Marketing Institute

SPONSORED BY STORYBLOCKS. Back in 2015, Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, and Tom Wilkinson were featured in a series of parody stock photos to promote their upcoming movie Unfinished Business. The film has a 10% rating on RottenTomatoes.com, so don’t worry if you never saw it. The faux stock photos were the best part anyway. This series of images inserted the three actors’ heads into existing photos, creating a hilarious mockery of the genre.

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Pre-Event Content: 5 Tips for Creating Excitement (and a Bit of FOMO)

Content Marketing Institute

Next week I’ll join my counterparts from around the world in Berlin to talk about live event experiences. It’s an annual gathering where we can share ideas, successes, and challenges, and learn to better understand each other’s businesses. For many, creating pre-event content to build excitement (and maybe a bit of FOMO [fear of missing out]) for our events is a hot topic.

Content 107
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Amplify Your Top-Performing Assets With This 3-Step Curation Process

Content Marketing Institute

Admit it: When the stress and exhaustion of finding something uniquely delightful for every person on your holiday shopping list have brought you to the brink of madness, you’ve at least considered the idea of re-gifting. After all, that expensive orange scarf that sadly clashes with your skin tone, the never-opened kitchen mixer you got for your bridal shower, or that trendy toy your child never got around to playing with are all lovely gifts.

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Brain Fog HQ: Memory Enhancement Techniques for Professional Development

Speaker: Chester Santos – Author, International Keynote Speaker, Executive Coach, Corporate Trainer, Memory Expert, U.S. Memory Champion

In October, scientists discovered that 75% of patients who experienced brain fog had a lower quality of life at work than those who did not. At best, brain fog makes you slower and less efficient. At worst, your performance and cognitive functions are impaired, resulting in memory, management, and task completion problems. In this entertaining and interactive presentation, Chester Santos, "The International Man of Memory," will assist you in developing life-changing skills that will greatly enha