According to a research report by Junta42 and MarketingProfs, the number one content marketing challenge is producing engaging content. It’s an age-old marketing truism that the key to engaging customers is relevance, which comes from a deeper understanding of customer behavior and sentiment. However, as our customers are becoming more social, and as the business and personal worlds continue to converge, the tools and tactics we employ to get to know and engage our target customers are changin...

The traditional advertising model is under pressure. Advertising is evolving towards content marketing: instead of a big bang, campaign-only, approach, companies should evolve to an always-on model in

Screen share instantly and for free using Screenleap.

This proves that conversions can happen from mobile devices, and you need to be ready for it.

While consumers and developers welcome Friday’s launch of the new iPad, design sales site Fab.com has a special interest in Apple’s tablet, which is powering more and more of its total sales. CEO Jason Goldberg shared with me some statistics on the potency of its iPad app users, who represent 15 percent of its customer base but make up 25 percent of all revenue. The company has been trying to get its head around the impact of mobile shopping since it launched its first mobile apps in October 2011. It’s found that now 40 percent of daily visits come from its mobile apps on iPhone, iPad, and Androiddevices, up from 30 percent two months ago. But it’s the iPad that is standing out as the true money maker. Using software-as-a-service Custora to analyze historical user and order data, Fab created a model that found that 40 percent of iPad app users make a purchase within three months, and 70 percent will make their first transaction within seven months of joining.

Based on the stats published by Luke, "In the first six months of 2007, consumers opened 19% of the retail emails they received and clicked through to the website 3.9% of the time."... "By the first half of 2011, those numbers shrank to 12.5% and 2.8%, respectively."

Not good for retail.

However, mobile email open rates are increasing AND over 40% of Americans&are checking their emails on their mobile... that means they possibly click links... this means they possibly go to your site... this means (are you getting it yet?) your site needs to be mobile friendly.

A couple of days ago I noticed a significant increase of traffic to my article 15 Free Ebooks about User Experience and Interface Design. Needless to say it triggered my curiosity. I quickly opened Google Analytics to look for the source and came up with Reddit.com. I found out that someone was so kind to leave a comment on the website saying how he noticed that there was no sight of publication date on my articles.

I like the section about calculating the bounce rate.

It only takes a few seconds for your site to make an impression on a visitor. If it hasn’t loaded in that time, then they might be gone, baby, gone. Since you already know that a fast website increases conversions, then it’s obvious that a slow site does just the opposite. The question is, how do you fix a slow site?

Really good post. Must read. A keeper.

Self hosted is not for everybody IMO.

But I like the Step #7,&

Scatter Strategy:

1. Submit the post to Triberr
2. Submit the post to BlogEngage
3. Submit the post to Blokube
4. Submit the post to BizSugar
5. Submit the post to HackerNews (if it relates to that audience)
6. Send out a Tweet
7. Post it on Facebook
8. Share it on Goole Plus
9. Pin the Image on Pinterest
10. Submit the post to StumbleUpon
11. Post it on Quora
12. Share the post on Inbound.org
13. Leave 5 comments on Top Blogs
14. Send a Tweet to anyone I mentioned within the post
15. Finally, I email my subscribers about it.

Everyone knows that getting more e-mail subscriptions is every serious blogger’s number one goal. If you’re looking to grow your blog, getting more subscribers by e-mail is the way to go. So how can you optimize your site to get more subscribers? How can you tweak your design to get a greater percentage of visitors to subscribe? The answer to those questions is different for every website, but this post will show you six tweaks the pros use to get more e-mail subscriptions. Many bloggers make the mistake of placing their e-mail opt-in box in the middle of the right-hand sidebar. For some reason they think that categories or calendars are more important than getting more people to sign up. That’s just not true.

I really like the&Tweak #2: The e-mail feature box:

It’s a box that sits above the main blog feed and collects e-mail addresses from site visitors. Due to the prominent placement, it’s an excellent way to get more subscriptions, and it’s becoming more and more popular as a way to increase e-mail subscriptions for blogs.

Why not!

I love apps, but the heart of sharing in mobile is mobile web. It flows everywhere.

— Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) March 3, 2012

If your platform is a sharing platform, you need to build and optimize the experience so a desktop user can share to an android user, who in turn passes the content to a tablet user.

Jon Steinberg (President&BuzzFeed)

Well said.

We talk frequently about testing subject lines in email marketing to determine which is the best performing. We talk about doing multivariate testing to determine which creative is the best performing.

Setting up Google Analytics is nothing easy, and many times publisers' goals are not necessarily monetization, but simple metrics like improving click through rate, time on site/page, user or newsletter signups.

This article focuses on the subject line, because this is what decides someone to click the link from the newsletter you sent, but what happens next, does your content convert to whatever key metrics are important to you.

People hardly buy anything without seeing it. Usually they also want to touch it, hold it and take it for a spin. You really can’t do those things online (unless it’s web based software). So to compensate for all of that, you need to work twice as hard to make your products come alive via excellent photography and graphics.

&To date email marketing still returns one of the highest ROIs. It's:

• inexpensive
• easy
• trackable
• testable

Good simple overview.&

Must read.

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto&Stop Stealing Dreams&and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”

So this is going to be challenging for affliates and publishers trying to include links in their ebooks.

Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.

Finally Seth's advice to the ebook stores:

I think that Amazon and Apple and BN need to take a deep breath and make a decision on principle: what’s inside the book shouldn’t be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace. [...]&These stores can’t have it both ways. The web works because it’s open. The stores (all three of them) need to be too.

I personnally think it's pretty useless not being able to link to sources of content on the web from an ebook. Ebooks can be kept up to date easily and links to new sources curated by the author. Not being to include links takes away one of the benefits of digital books...

The future is flexible, and we’re bending with it. From responsive web design to futurefriend.ly thinking, we’re moving quickly toward a web that’s more fluid, less fixed, and more easily accessed on a multitude of devices. As we embrace this shift, we need to relinquish control of our content as well, setting it free from the boundaries of a traditional webpage to flow as needed through varied displays and contexts. In the words of futurefriend.ly’s Brad Frost, “get your content ready to go anywhere because it’s going to go everywhere.”

Different elements build content:

The specific elements you’ll need to consider will vary greatly depending on the type of content you’re working with, so start by identifying all the content chunks you can find in a given type of information. These could be things like titles, teasers, body content, ingredient lists, reviews, pull quotes, excerpts, images, videos, captions, related articles, bylines, directions, addresses, and many more.

Get comfortable with&XML, DITA, microdata, RDF:

Technology can’t help you make good decisions; it can only help you implement them. But content elements must eventually become code, so even if writing markup isn’t your job, we could all stand to get more comfortable with the tools out there to do it.

Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences.

• After the Panda update, the guys who really came out on top... were the ones who were focusing on creating quality engaging content. Focus on rewarding quality and engaging content.
• Authorship: linking all your profiles together - tagging content by who wrote it so Google knows where you publish&
• Universal search: nowadays, a killer piece of content is about bringing all elements together, no more longform, bring videos, pictures, links together - differentiate yourself by becoming unique
• Freshness, unique content, focus on different format of content and channels.
• Enable marketers to reach their audience. Who are the brand influencers (blogs/publishers)? Define who you should be engaging.
• Education process, teach publishers how to write content (HubPages). Help them choose what they write about, then monetize, become influencers in small circles. Help build substancial income.

Value proposition is the #1 thing that determines whether people will bother reading more about your product or hit the back button. It’s also the main thing you need to test – if you get it right, it will be a huge boost. If I could give you only one piece of conversion advice , “test your value proposition” would be it.

• Clarity! It’s easy to understand.
• It communicates&the concrete results a customer will get from purchasing and using your products and/or services.
• It says how it’s different or better than the competitor’s offer.
• It avoids hype (like ‘never seen before amazing miracle product’), superlatives (‘best’) and business jargon (‘value-added interactions’).
• It can be read and understood in about 5 seconds.

&

• The average cost-per-lead for businesses using primarily outbound marketing tactics is $346. For businesses using primarily inbound marketing tactics, it’s just $135. That’s a 61% percent decrease.
• Nearly 90% of businesses plan to increase or maintain their inbound marketing budgets in 2012.
• Companies are budgeting more than twice as much for company blogs and social media than they did in 2009.
• Small businesses plan to spend 43% of their budget on inbound marketing in 2012 and 14% on outbound, while large businesses plan to spend 21% on inbound and 33% on outbound.
• 70% of marketers report they blog at least once a week and 25% describe their blog as “critical” to their business.
• Of those that blog, 57% have acquired a customer directly because of their blog.
• Of those that blog multiple times per day, 92% have acquired a customer because of their blog.
• 77% of business-to-customer companies have acquired a customer from Facebook, while 65% of business-to-business companies have acquired a customer from&LinkedIn.
• 40% of marketers said their use of&Google+&is useful or critical to their business.
• 62% of marketers report social media has become more important for them as a source of leads.

Fast and professional voices for any type of project.

• You determine the&price or royalties
• Use our site or our&API
• 100k+ talents and 50+ languages
• 100% money-back guarantee

PublishThis&is a new, on-demand content marketing platform that revolutionizes the discovery, collection, and delivery of relevant, real-time content to drive increased customer engagement loyalty.

PublishThis&helps Media Companies, Retailers and Brands&discover,&curate,&socialize&and&re-distributecontent to significantly improve customer acquisition, engagement, monetization, and sales.

PublishThis&lets marketers and editors easily curate content, making it simple for web audiences to follow their favorite topics and get the best content on the web, whenever and wherever they want.

I recently took part in a round-table discussion on “the future of content” — not that I or anyone there has a crystal ball. At one point during the exchange it was suggested that stories written for print — that is, longer-form journalism — don’t work very well on digital platforms. I quickly took exception, knowing that 10 years ago I thought the same thing.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the data from more than 100 million articles on ReadItLater shows that consumers save articles consistently throughout the day. But here’s when they’re reading it: on computers, from 6pm-9pm; on iPhones, at 6am, 9am, 5pm to 6pm and 8pm-10pm (“the moments between tasks and locations”); and on iPads, predominantly from 8pm-10pm. And check out the ReadItLater graph just above that shows both time-shifting and device-shifting for iPad owners reading saved articles.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Its "safe harbor" provision is what draws the line between pirates and legally legitimate Web companies. That line isn't always crystal clear, as the ongoing saga of Grooveshark demonstrates. Few would call the DMCA perfect, but its attempt at modestly redefining copyright for the digital age has had a major impact on the way the Web works, and in many cases has enabled innovation to flourish. Without it, sites like YouTube might not be what they are today.

For any consumer application, email is an important tool to drive engagement. Last year, Fred Wilson went as far as calling it “Social Media’s Secret Weapon.” After optimizing the Hunch weekly recommendation emails for a few months last summer, I thought it might be useful to share some of the key lessons we learned to increase user engagement in emails and acquire new subscribers.

Pressly automatically makes online publications as beautiful and touchable as native apps when visited on tablet web browsers. Learn more Display cutting-edge ads built just for the tablet, leveraging touch, video, social sharing, geo-location and anything HTML5 can handle. All of it is seamlessly integrated with your analytics services. Pressly is endlessly flexible and passionate when it comes to customization. Our template engine makes it possible to have bespoke, branded layouts up and running in under 3 days.

Interesting concept. This app will turn any blog, i guess as long as it has a RSS feed, into a good looking media your read on tablet devices.

See, engagement is not defined through likes, comments, shares, RTs or impressions. This activity is simply a result of engagement. Focusing on soft metrics is at the detriment of the customer experience and is potentially a distraction away from developing more meaningful connections and relationships. Engagement is by design.

[...] engagement must mean something more to groom the community toward desired sentiment, outcomes, or to simply serve the needs of the community based on stated expectations or desires.

The ultimate measure however is now something more substantial, such as…

• Shift in sentiment
• Satisfaction
• Acquisition
• Referrals
• Conversion
• Leads
• Brand integrity/Reputation

PressJack creates digital magazines from RSS or blog feeds. Tell Pressjck the feeds, it creates and builds a beautiful digital magazine which your can be viewed online.

They have a free offer then a jump to $499... ouch.

Publishzer is a tool to create magazines out of content that inspires you.&&Billions of content pieces are created everyday on the internet and no way can I browse through all of them. So we asked to ourselves, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool to organize and share most of this content. A place to save all the amazing articles, photos and videos that inspires you online. Beside now you do not have to be sticked on feeds to keep up with the news.

Read their story here.

Free online meetings and webinars provided by MeetingBurner -- If you want fast, free, and easy meetings signup now and you can host your first meeting in minutes!

Quipol is social polling. Create simple & elegant one-question polls, embed them into your blog posts and webpages, and find out where your audience stands on virtually any topic.

Simple, clean polls you can embed on any site. I really like that one.

Hootsuite competitor, pretty affordable.

A lot of interesting reporting and analytics features are included.

Social media measurements to understand how social media impacts your business and what you need to do to measure them.

Conversion Rates

Growth Rate

Customer Acquisition Costs

Retention Rates

From sites with 10 posts to sites with 10,000 posts, our plugins will increase your traffic and make you money. We have a robust system already running on thousands of sites, and are responsible for millions of click-throughs every month.

Another "related articles" plugin Shareist site owners can use.

great presentation/layout of the items.

Engagement is becoming important in the online marketing world. It is important not only to create quality content, but find a way to distribute it, build and engage with an audience to build value and sustainable business.

This is one great post i recommend reading if you are an online marketer.

That Independent Web is where you get high engagement and a lot of passion. It is also where a lot of social action like tweets, shares and commenting takes place. Marketers are increasingly seeing those kinds of actions as indications of engagement and that’s what they’re looking for.

At this point, marketers have pivoted: they're not just putting their marketing next to content, but actually creating content themselves – or underwriting the creation of content. And then they encourage the sharing of that content and creating ecosystems where that content circulates. They're starting to see an ecosystem of paid, owned, and earned media that they're very interested in feeding through social interactions and content marketing.

We've found that you need a few things to make social interactions online meaningful and valuable to both marketers and our Federated Media Publishing community of publishers and sites. Number one, you need scale. But number two, you need a platform so that that scale can be gathered into a single place – an efficient place so a marketer doesn’t have to, for example, execute a thousand ad units on a thousand different sites.

Is your content and strategy driving any value?

Marketers have been very interested in understanding how their content is amplified in the past few years. Was it tweeted a lot? Did people comment on it a lot? Did people link to it from other blogs and so on? We started at first by counting all of that by hand and then reporting it back to the marketer. That is now becoming an industry standard earned media metric.

• Place your links about 25% of the way in the tweet
• via and @ get the most CTR (trust)
• "daily is out" creates hight CTR
• muser verbs, adverbs vs nouns and adjectives
• tweet later in the day or during the week ends

It's no secret that blogging is a game of page views. Without good analytics, blogging is all about watching, intuition and guesswork. After you've done some of that, you write some spaghetti posts, throw them at the wall and see what sticks. Dash gives publishers the motherlode of data about page views and how to get them. It shows them the past and the present of their site, and its ability to measure Web-wide trends offers a glimpse of the future.

Pars.ly has been impressive from the start. Google should eat them up and offer this for free, disrupt the blogging world by allowing anyone, and not only large companies with budgets who can afford this service (starts at $499/mth), access this information and put everybody in fair competition.

A tool like Dash gives a site a huge advantage in the short term. While some sites putter along without this kind of detailed feedback, the ones who have it could dominate. The ability to see exactly which topics and events need covering, and exactly how to cover them for a particular audience, is a sort of online omniscience.

ICE wraps changes and user-generated inserts and deletes inline in the DOM and stores a sufficient amount of data about each change in node attributes.

We went with the “inline” approach because other implementations, which use placeholders and store data (really metadata about a change or the content of deleted text) outside of the editor or in a reserved DOM element, had nasty bugs. With all of the data packed into each node, we used ranges, position markers in the DOM, to examine the change nodes and get an understanding of the current context — for example, are we in an insert or delete, and is it by the same user? — before adding more changes.

Where can ICE be used?

ICE can be initialized to listen for events and track changes on any HTML element that is content-editable. Since it is not a text editor itself, ICE has to be plugged into other text editors that provide the core text editing functionality. So far, we have developed plugins for TinyMCE and WordPress. Over the last several months, with great success, we have been piloting the TinyMCE plugin in our newsroom.

demo: http://nytd.github.com/ice/demo/

You can import from 18 popular sources, easily post your own updates, pick from a range of styles and create compelling stories from your content.

Easily post anything you find interesting, import your web 2.0 stuff and share your life online

This platform requires install like Wordpress.

Project Argo is collection of tools and best practices for building topic-focused sites in WordPress.

The code and tutorials that you find on this site were designed to enable a pilot group of 12 NPR member stations to curate and report on news about specific topics of local interest.

The 12 sites the Argo suite was built for encompassed a range of topics, from climate change to local music. Overall, the sites share several key characteristics: frequent publishing, often with several posts a day; robust use of images; and a mix of curatorial and original material. Any topic-focused site that matches these criteria might benefit from our methods, themes or plugins.

Even with the right tools, it's not obvious how to reach a robust audience for a topic. In this section, we share what we've learned during Project Argo, and what we recommend to anyone taking on a topical blogging project.

Apple on Thursday announced a new platform for creating and reading digital textbooks.

"In like five minutes flat, we created an e-book and deployed it to the iPad. I hope you find that as inspiring and empowering as I do," Apple's Phil Schiller said at a press conference at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, according to live blogs of the event posted online.

At the press conference, Schiller mocked paper textbooks, saying, "They're not portable, not durable, not interactive, not searchable." Books on the iPad are all of those things, he said.

Hear that, content marketers? That is the sound of inevitability ... the sound of you creating a Google+ page for your business. Here's why.

Building an audience on Google+ may be the smartest thing you do as a content marketer when it comes to improved search rankings. You still need to understand the language of your audience and reflect it back in your content, but Google will now have direct indications that you’re putting out quality stuff.

And yes, Google Plus is Google, it's that simple. So as a marketer, you have to be on Google Plus because it will affect your livelihood.

Basically, an RSSbox is an RSS reader widget - a rectangular area on your website or blog displaying text and images from RSS feeds. When creating a new RSSbox you decide on which type of layout and which RSS feeds to use. Convert RSS to HTML, convert RSS to Javascript, convert RSS to PHP and include RSS on Facebook.

• You field a weekly flood of pitches.
• People who don't know you make wildly inaccurate assumptions about things you say.
• You forget how to share with people who do know you.
• You get addicted to the approval of strangers.
• Your view of the world gets skewed.
• You're a spam magnet and a troll target.

A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process…

1. When you find something interesting,&click&handpick.
2. Pick the groups of people who&you know will appreciate it.
3. Links will be collected and emailed as a&single digest once a day/week.

Pretty neat tool