[Editor's note: Happy Holidays! This week, the editorial team at Content Marketing Institute wanted to share some of the best content marketing blog posts we've seen from our CMI Consultants and executive staff. Today's post originally appeared as Joe Pulizzi's weekly column on Content Marketing Institute, on May 23, 2012.] One of the benefits of traveling around the world doing content marketing speeches is being able to talk to marketers first hand about their content challenges. Just in the last 45 days, I’ve done 19 presentations (including one in Pittsburgh on my birthday). Needless to say, I’ve talked to a ton of marketers that are having some painful issues with their content creation and distribution strategies.

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.

My takes - must-read:

Go to where your audience is. Another, equally important rule:&create strong and engaging content.

Consider the fact that nearly half of Americans get their news from as many as six media platforms on a typical day.

Good content is the cornerstone&– knowing how to curate it in this day and age? Well that’s when the magic can happen.

1. Find the best content
2. Add value
3. Attribute

&

I remember exactly when I decided to stop reading Mashable. I saw the headline Facebook Users Beware: Facebook’s New Feature Could Embarrass You on Twitter, clicked through, hunted for the words of the article among the sea of ads and social sharing

I’m sure the article was great for traffic, though. It is the perfect linkbait title backed up by a perfect SEO-ified URL (/new-facebook-feature).

I think I’ve finally hit the limit of my tolerance for web content that’s designed to make advertisers happy.

I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing (and to do it without selling your soul in the process).

All great points!

Ebook sales are expected to generate $9.7 billion worldwide in 2016, more than three times the $3.2 billion the category is expected to generate this year, according to one forecaster.

Nearly 30% of all ebooks in 2016 will be downloaded to tablets.

• Everybody is going become a publisher of some sort.
• New platforms, more and more, will allow self-expression (by creating or sharing content) and make it a simple process.
• Content delivery formats are going to radically change for magazine/newspaper/ebook formats more and more, it's inevitable and innovating there will go a long way.

There is an opportunity to:

• help anyone to become a publisher by making content creation accessible and simple
• let publishers publish their content in diverse formats: web, mobile, ebooks, pdf

Also read the bookmark i featured below about self-publishing.

Why did he do it?

• The time obligations of a traditional release were more than I was willing to undertake.
• Time is the most valuable asset I have. The amount of time required to give the publishers a chance to make their money bank wasn’t worth the money to me.
• This book is part of my publishing education.

1. Reviews
2. Mega Lists
3. How To’s
4. Experts and Thought Leader Interviews
5. Case Studies
6. Negative or Contratrian Stories
7. Facts, Figures and Statistics
8. News Stories
9. Research
10. Infographics

I see niches everywhere.

To appear on Techmeme, do this:

• Break a major story.
• Report/summarize/write up a big, developing story. Be early, or better: first (mindful that this doesn't trump other considerations).
• Got a press release or non-exclusive briefing? Write the very best take. Highlight what's important, what's fascinating. Be lucid and critical.
• Make sure your headline is clear and contains all major details (proper names, dollar amounts, dates, etc.) If you're posting on Google+, make sure the first line of your post functions as a headline.
• Link generously to stories on other sites to establish context and cite sources. Sometimes including a Techmeme permalink is the best way to do this. (Self-serving but true!)
• Articulate something lots of people are thinking, but not putting into words.
• Write the kind of story an Apple or Google exec would share with their fellow execs.
• Write the kind of story people will talk about at an industry cocktail party.
• Write the killer analysis piece that tech pundits can't help but to link to. Yes, be a "thought leader". If your post is linked enough, the automation behind Techmeme will notice and attempt to surface it.
• Tip Techmeme on Twitter. (Include "Tip @Techmeme" when you tweet your link.)
• Summarize a major story that's behind a paywall. Techmeme rarely features paywalled stories, but may link to you. Link prominently to the source story, of course.
• Say what you're going to say early in your post. The reader wants to know soon whether there's a payoff to reading, not 8 paragraphs in.
• Include relevant images, videos, or figures in your post.
• Time some analytical pieces for weekends and other slow times when they're easier for Techmeme to discover.

Last week, I wrote about the process of how I create a blog post from idea to promotion. Today, we’re going to focus in on what it takes for a post to achieve one specific goal: getting lots of shares on social media. If you want a post that is going to spread like wildfire, you have to consider the following when creating your content to ensure that your post will be given extra social media love. Your first goal in creating a post that has the potential to go viral on social media is to make the content easily consumable by the largest audience possible. This means you need to cater to beginners, intermediate, and advanced level readers in your industry – all in the same post!

This is an interesting startup, might need to connect with them to see if there is anything we could do together.

Nobody can deny that great money is there for the taking by ranking first for [your key phrase here]. But in my opinion, getting search traffic is the just tip of the iceberg. The real challenge isn’t to produce optimized content, but to produce memorable content. And for that reason, I’ve always believed sites like Ezine to be about as valuable to the end user as a third nipple on my face. So imagine the explosion in my pants then when I read just recently that the so-called Google Farmer update could bring an end to this madness.

Same feeling shared here. Now if they could only remove crappy keyword-rich domain sites sooner than later...

It’s possible to run high traffic websites without a shred or sniff of a first page on the Big G. You just need to be able to market your message in the right places to the right audience. The idea of abandoning search traffic altogether is, I would imagine, too much of a leap for most. So try looking at things in a different way.

That is true, that requires great creativity and a strong marketing strategy. Guys like @johnchow or @shoemoney did it.

Thx to @jeremypalmer for tweeting this article.

Brafton is a news content marketing agency. We write custom content optimized to your SEO strategy, provide social media services and comprehensively track analytics to maximize your content marketing strategy.

Setting up a social media marketing campaign involves many factors and all of it can get pretty daunting! Social media activities can go astray due to undefined goals, inappropriate content, executive glitches or other reasons leading to a low fan engagement and ROI.

Social Media Strategy Blog Social Media Consulting Social media and technology have changed business forever. Conventional social media marketing wisdom suggests that brands should avoid being overly self-promotional. Thus, brands seek to “be a part of the conversation” by sharing links that are relevant to their followers but often not specifically about their products and services. This act of finding good content and sharing it is known as content curation. Contrast this with another nugget of conventional social media marketing wisdom: that “content is king” – that the best thing that a social media marketer can do is create content that people find valuable enough to share with the world.