In 2013, most businesses realise the importance of content. That’s why so many SEO agencies are repositioning themselves as content agencies, or at least offering it as a primary product. Our Content Marketing courses used to attract mainly bloggers, but since the Panda and Penguin Google updates we have seen a large increase in SEOs wanting to learn about content.

Yet this mass conversion to content brings up some issues – there is too much noise. Most businesses are still stuck in an outdated content strategy – regular, mediocre quality blog posts with little intent. The content is happening, but is it working?

With content at the forefront of so many marketing strategies, it seems at first glance that big businesses have a massive advantage. Whole in-house marketing teams as well as high profile agencies on hand to craft incredible content. How does a small business compete against this with a 1-3 person marketing team?

Big Evergreen Content

The idea for this post was sparked by Hannah Smith‘s talk at BrightonSEO ‘Go Big or Go Home’ (excellent write up on State of Search), which prompted me to revisit Dr. Pete’s SEOmoz post at the end of last year ‘Why Big Content Is Worth the Risk’. Both Hannah and Dr. Pete explain why big content is necessary and how it can help your business stand out in a very crowded world of below par blog posts:

“We all want the low-hanging fruit, but let’s be honest – the low-hanging fruit is rotten, bruised, and covered with the grubby fingerprints of all the other spoiled brats pawing at it.”

The consensus of both the talk and the post is that big content takes around 40 hours to produce. Hannah compared this to an average 12 hours for ‘small content’ but I think that’s a huge overestimation for the majority of businesses. James Carson recently alerted Twitter to the existence of a job ad for an agency looking for a Marketing Executive who for £18,000 a year had to write 25 blog posts a day. That’s well over 6,000 articles a year on a range of topics, written by somebody with little knowledge about the subject and obviously no research.

With that much noise, it’s important to be different to break through, and that’s where big content comes in. But I’m going to go a step further and ask you to consider another element - sustainability. Another popular topic at BrightonSEO, and a common phrase in marketing blogs at the moment is Evergreen Content.

In the rest of this post I’m going to try and convince you why your content should be both big and evergreen for the holy grail of content marketing.

Read the rest of "Big Wins that Last – Why Big Evergreen Content is the Best Content Strategy"

Posted by Craig Charley in Blogging & Content Marketing, News, SEO, Social Media on April 22nd, 2013| No Comments »

In this post, our blogging trainer Jakki guides you through the various ways to find ideas for your blog.

Blogging is a great way to generate free traffic to your website. What’s more, the more you blog, the more traffic you get.

Companies that blog 16-20 times a month generate twice as much traffic as those that blog only once a week.

However, finding fresh, engaging content ideas on a regular basis is a challenge. Here are some tools to help you fill the publishing schedule.

Blogging is covered in depth on our SEO Courses, why not try one?

1/ Study your Site Analytics

Site analytics should show which pages on your site are the most popular. They also show the exact search queries your visitors typed into the search engine when they found you.

Some of these may suggest ideas for new blog posts.

For example, I recently wrote a post on how to write business letters. I later discovered that many visitors to the page were actually searching for ‘how to write business apology letters’. So I wrote about that, and it’s now my top landing page! Read the rest of "How to Find Ideas for Great Blog Content"

Posted by Jakki in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News on December 26th, 2012| No Comments »

WordPress was originally blog software but it has come a long way from its origins and is now used as a content management system (CMS) for blogs and for websites. You can learn how to use WordPress as a CMS on our WordPress Training Course.

These days, with the rise of social media, most websites will have at least one blog section on them. WordPress enables you to create multiple blog-type sections of Posts as well as ‘static’ Pages. Most websites contain content which is suited to being either a Page or a Post and will usually have a mixture of the two.

How are WordPress Posts & Pages Different?

Pages

Pages are ‘static’. Like all WordPress content they are generated from a database but they are static in the sense that they are a single page with specific content, e.g. an “About” or Contact page. They originally provided background information about a blog and evolved as WordPress developed towards being used for complete sites rather than just blogs.

Want to learn how to customise your WordPress site? Try our Advanced WordPress Training. Read the rest of "What’s the Difference Between WordPress Posts & Pages?"

Posted by Giselle in Blogging & Content Marketing, News, WordPress on November 28th, 2012| No Comments »

On Tuesday 20th November we attended the first Content Marketing Show in London, a new offshoot of BrightonSEO. As you can probably guess, it was a day dedicated to content marketing in all shapes and sizes, with a diverse line-up of speakers giving insight into how to source, create and promote your business using content.

We decided that instead of the usual conference round-up post, we would compile the best advice from the day into a complete guide to content marketing. We’ve also added our own insight based on our experiences at Silicon Beach as well advice from top industry experts. Hopefully this will serve as a one-stop resource to learn about content marketing – but don’t forget that we do run regular content marketing workshops in Brighton! We also touch on content marketing from an SEO perspective on our SEO courses if you want to learn more about how content works as part of a wider marketing strategy.

We’ve picked our top 16 points, but if you feel we’ve missed anything then please let us know in the comments or tweet us @sbttraining and we’ll be happy to add it in.

TL;DR - Tell Stories, Draw an Emotional Response, Everyone is Influential, Be Bold, Be Different, Be Nice, Know your Audience, Know yourself, Use the Tools at your Disposal, Use Data to Drive Content, Perfect your Briefs, Pitch it Right, Content Flows, and finally If in Doubt, Steal from the Experts. Read the rest of "How to do Content Marketing – (Almost) Everything you Need to Know"

Posted by Aaron Charlie in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News, SEO, Social Media, Web Analytics on November 23rd, 2012| 7 Comments »

After two excellent presentations from Lauren Pope on Agile Content Strategy and Ian Humphreys on the importance of Narrative, Tom Ewing from BrainJuicer explained “How to win at Pooh sticks”.

Tom argues that the dominant metaphor for the internet used to be the ‘page’; just a static visual. These days it’s now more like a ‘stream’. Content flows into your world, each individual piece of content is minimally significant but collectively it gushes down on us. This has been termed ‘nanoculture’.

This point is well-made: people no longer draw their content from one or two sources but have feeds from Twitter, Facebook, news-sites and any number of other social networks.

But while all social media makes up this flow of content it’s Twitter that is the obvious prime source.

News, pop-culture, politics, business and more all make up the content  but it’s not just the information that we receive but also how we interact with it that defines our individual stream.

Stock in Our Stream

Most of our stream flows past us and in days, weeks or months it will be forgotten. Content that sticks is termed ‘stock’ and yet what one person considers stock will merely be part of the stream for others.

The anthropologist Mimi Ito argues that it’s the culture not the features that defines a network, and therefore helps to define your stream.

Creation, replication and mutation is how the culture of a network is defined. Pinterest for example embraces a culture of creation and replication while memebase embraces mutation.

Feeling Machines

Antonio Damasio says “we are not thinking machines that feel but feeling machines that think” and so our stream will be defined by emotional not logical responses. Tapping into those emotional responses is where good content marketing lies.

You can’t divert or interrupt the stream but you can shape it. Alter the way people think about things by shaping the narrative of their stream: using a horoscope as an example – it doesn’t predict the future of an individual but instead shapes the way an individual thinks about their future.

Tapping into the Stream

Empowering an individual as well as entertaining them is a prime way to shape their flow.

Further to this, tapping into surprise as an emotional response can be used as a way to shape a person’s stream, what they share and therefore their behaviour. But surprise alone is not enough, it needs to be mixed with a little bit of happiness!

So the recognition of the need to shape an individual’s stream coupled with a knowledge of what emotional responses to try and trigger will allow a content marketer to create content that influences and sticks with their audience.

Overall Tom’s talk gives us some pertinent points to think about when creating our content: what emotions to target and how to tap into people’s streams.

Posted by Jackson Rawlings in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News, Social Media on November 20th, 2012| No Comments »

If you write for both a personal and a business blog you need to tailor your approach to suit a different audience or you’ll risk losing readers.

If you find yourself writing about your cat’s almost human-like facial expressions on your tech business blog more often than you find yourself writing about Apple or Facebook, you ought to read on.

Blogging is an important part of a broader SEO strategy which is why Blogging and Content Marketing Training is included as one of our SEO Training Courses.

These are the main differences between the two styles of blogging and why they are important to remember. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule. If your tech blog readers  like cats then you might be on to a winner.

Read the rest of "5 Differences Between Personal and Business Blogs"

Posted by Jackson Rawlings in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News on November 16th, 2012| No Comments »

It’s more important than ever to build strong relationships with influential bloggers, especially those who are considered experts in your field. It’s easy to send out blanket emails requesting opportunities to post on influential sites, clumsily fitting in a link to your site at the end of the post, but with the latest Google updates, this is no longer a technique that will get your rankings soaring, nor win you many fans.

Instead you must focus on the bigger picture which means you need to be thinking about more than just links. Brand awareness and quality over quantity is key. One great link can be worth a thousand low quality links. In this sense, making the most of your contacts and regularly building new ones is crucial for a successful strategy. This is something we emphasise on our SEO Training courses.

Imagine trying to sell a new energy drink that has no name, no logo or branding on the can and tastes exactly the same as every other energy drink on the market. Your only sales method is to shout at everyone you see in the street telling them that your energy drink is great and they’ll love it. Sure you might sell one or two but you’ll never get anyone coming back to buy it again.

A lot of guest blog requests are a bit like that: impersonal, badly written and no different to what everyone else is doing. Most bloggers will be receiving guest post requests on a daily basis, the overwhelming majority being from completely ‘cold’ sources, often written in broken English or with terrible grammar. Read the rest of "How to Catch a Blogger’s Attention"

Posted by Jackson Rawlings in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News, SEO on November 8th, 2012| 1 Comment »

Here at Silicon Beach Training we have a great offer on our SEO, Social Media & Internet Marketing courses in Brighton. We recognise that these disciplines overlap more than ever and a well rounded marketing team must have experience in all areas to succeed.

Our 5 day ‘Pick ‘n’ Mix’ deal is just £995 + vat. Pick from any of the courses below to create your own 5 day custom package:

You can take these courses at dates to suit you (visit the individual course pages for upcoming dates) or you can complete the training in the same week with one of our suggested packages. Call us on 01273 622272 to discuss availability.

Not sure which package to pick? Here is an overview of each course to help you understand how they work together as a complete online marketing package: Read the rest of "SEO, Social Media & Internet Marketing ‘Pick ‘n’ Mix’ Training Packages"

Posted by Aaron Charlie in Blogging & Content Marketing, Brighton, Email Marketing, Marketing, News, Offers, PPC, SEO, Social Media, Web Analytics, WordPress on May 9th, 2012| 1 Comment »