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 Most businesses are still stuck in an outdated content strategy – regular, mediocre quality blog posts with little intent.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 »

Content Marketing is the in thing. Businesses are beginning to realise that in order to appeal to their target audience, they need to have a strong presence and content output on the web.

The trouble is, it’s all too easy to get bogged down in posting to a blog or sharing ‘inspiring’ images on facebook. A really successful content strategy employs multiple platforms and varied media.

eBooks are a perfect part of this.

You might think that creating eBooks isn’t right for your business but you’d be surprised at how effective they can be at driving engagement with an audience. If you’re already convinced then try our eBooks Training with InDesign to get you making expert looking eBooks in no time, otherwise, read on to find out more about why you really should be creating eBooks to maximise your business’ marketing potential.

Quality Content

Blog posts, images, videos – they’re all essential parts of a content strategy, but eBooks offer up something different to the user. In a time when most content on the web gets a few seconds’ gaze, an eBook stands out out as a more permanent, tangible offering.

To put it simply – an eBook is better content than a simple article or funny gif. Time and effort are often reflected in the quality of the end product and better quality content means a more interested and engaged audience. Read the rest of "Make eBooks Part of Your Content Strategy"

Posted by Aaron Charlie in Blogging & Content Marketing, eBooks, Marketing, News on January 23rd, 2013| No Comments »

With 2012 over, everyone has started making predicting about what lies ahead for SEO in 2013, so here are ours.

First prediction: SEO will be have two hundred new definitions by the end of the year – after 2012 it’s already known as inbound marketing, content strategy and even growth hacking (?!)

Second prediction: It will still be as important as ever!

That’s it for our predictions. No one can guess exactly what’s going to happen this year so instead, here are our thoughts as to which SEO trends you should be paying attention to right now.

If you’d like learn more about SEO and what you should be doing with it in 2013, come on one of our SEO Courses.

Semantic Search

Entities

It’s right there as Google’s mission statement: they aim to organise, and make accessible and useful, all of the world’s information. With these goals in mind, it’s little wonder that the focus of SEO has turned to a more semantic categorising of the web.

Where there were once pages and their relations there are now entities and their relations. In other words, we are seeing a greater emergence of an internet of things. Read the rest of "What You Need To Know About SEO In 2013"

Posted by Jackson Rawlings in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News, SEO on January 3rd, 2013| 2 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 »

Today we’re at the first Content Marketing Show at Conway Hall in London enjoying a day dedicated to content marketing, now linked closely to SEO and social. Throughout the day we’ll be writing up our favourite talks and getting them up on the blog as quick as possible!

First up was Philip Sheldrake, who believes we’re all influential, even if most of the room didn’t think they were when asked (except one brave soul at the front).

If you don’t feel influential, then consider that we are more influenced by 150 of our nearest and dearest than by the other 7 billion people in the world combined. So you’re influential after all!

Going back 100 years, Philip took us through a history of content, from early newspapers up to the modern day which he describes as thousands of monkeys churning out words. Reminds me of a few guest post requests we’ve received…

Something a lot of marketers will agree with is that you can’t ‘do’ viral content, no matter how much a client or stakeholder wants you to. Things either go viral or don’t, it’s up to us to look at what does go viral and what doesn’t and work out what can be repeated to make viral more likely. But you can’t just make something go viral.

You must be looking at content outcome metrics – how has content helped the business? This is needed to communicate the benefits of content to those not in content – saying tweets have increased by 3 times in the past years doesn’t help anyone.

Highlighting a growing trend, not all content marketing is ‘human-to-human’, machined media has growing potential influence. Content sourced, presented and published by machines for humans. Think the BBC Olympics coverage – all auto-generated, but humans interacted with it by reading, sharing and engaging with it.

This new approach could be a possible way of producing content for businesses who don’t believe they have the resources to generate enough human created content.

Actionable takeaways:

• Content should be for humans and for machines
• You can’t ‘do’ viral, it either happens or doesn’t
• Content has to be justified by ‘outcome metrics’
• Content doesn’t have to be ‘human-to-human’
• Everyone is influential!

Posted by Craig Charley in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News on November 20th, 2012| No Comments »

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 »