Photography
A few weeks ago David Laietta hosted the monthly MeetUp of WordPress Orlando that featured the title “The Business of Blogging“. There is a large community here in Central Florida that are bloggers and use WordPress so this particular MeetUp was anticipated not just for the topic but for the guest speakers.
The speakers were Bess Auer, Angel Yard, and Gloria Rand. While I won’t get too much into what they talked about, I would rather point you to the MeetUp website and see for yourself here. For now, check out some of the photos I shot from the event.
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Content & Copywriting, Entertainment, Marketing, Product Reviews, Social Media
Ah, the beauty of a New England fall season…The crisp air, apple cider donuts and many trees display the multifaceted colors of fall. Content consumption trends this fall are just as varied as trees lining I-90 to the Berkshires. As a device dependent nation, the consumers of content have pushed both manufacturers and marketers to infinite boundaries – a flurry of multifaceted demands to have everything we want (or think we need) at our fingertips all hours of every day. So for mobile technology, Fall 2013 is blowing in with many winds of change for the content consumption marketplace.
Will the PC become obsolete? According to Digital Trends, “research firms have been informing us for some time now that sales of desktops and laptops are on the decline, with consumers turning increasingly to reasonably priced tablets and smartphones that do more than enough to keep them happy.” Even Morgan Stanley analysts have predicted that mobile web use will outgrow stationary device browsing by 2015. This is great news for mobile device makers while stationary PC’s and even laptops sales may continue to fall to below expectation when it comes to content utilization. With the impending November 29th, 2013 Black Friday and Cyber Monday on December 2nd just around the corner, its predicted that consumers’ choices are definitely shifting from PCs to handheld tablets for daily content consumption.
What’s everyone humming about? Yes it is finally arrived – Google Hummingbird. By replacing the old algorithm, Google has answered the call for easy search queries for people on-the-go. Hummingbird is essentially an entirely new ranking algorithm that understands the relationships and relevance of words and phrases, instead of just considering a bunch of individual words. Thus, making it more “human friendly” than ever. So it focuses on ranking information based on more intelligent and naturalistic search requests – providing more useful, intelligent and higher quality content in the digital world.
Seemingly Unlikely Bedfellows – Adobe & Data Analytics? Adobe Marketing Cloud is the latest user interface and in the new Adobe Analytics with an iOS operating system for mobile devices reports the baseline norm from historical user trends and then identifies data points that fall outside that norm. This super smart app offers real-time reporting capabilities to give marketers and copywriters/editors solid intel on readers content consumption, marketing campaign success and on-site conversion as it happens. An SDK mobile app will provide unparalleled opportunity analyze data collected from mobile apps in Adobe Analytics, giving marketers the ability to serve location-specific content to customers based on their location when they access a mobile app. I noticed this most recently while on Pandora. An audible ad, that was specific to my location, popped up to gain my buy-in on their services. This is perfect for true lead generation efforts and capturing the right demographic for a successful campaign.
Branding, Media Style
This fall, many companies are beginning to understand that they need to think more like publishers and not just marketers. Connecting brands with online audiences is essential for true consumer, marketing integration and growth. More brands will use sizeably more video and mobile-friendly content in response to the growing number of smartphones and tablets. Media integration helps businesses generates revenue and strengthens customer relationships by leveraging the latest technology and draw on a full range media marketing resources. Since content consumption is at an all time high, using social video resources like Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, or Vine ads flavorful social content that reaches your audience in quick and impactful ways.
Content Curation Marketing
For those who don’t know, content curation goes way beyond just making sure website content is both up-to-date and SEO rich. Content curation is the process of connecting content creators, i.e. marketers, bloggers and writers, to easily and quickly target relevant content. Since content is king, content curators oversee and manage the entire landscape of content – from driving product development and marketing strategies to social networking integration, Notably, this is a fantastic tool to boost social media presence and true engagement for key target audiences.
So there you have it folks – all things content and dominant trends for the Fall season of 2013.
What do you think? Are there other content trends you see fading like the leaves of fall or flourishing in full bloom for 2014?
Blog, Branding, Content & Copywriting, Product Reviews
Summer is here and it’s not the time for cool, mediocre content on your blogs or website. Send your content and website hits soaring with these successful tips to keep your rankings and indexing climbing to the top of the charts.
#1 Consider what sells you on eBay — A good description of a product as well as the imagery selected creates the motivation to buy the item, right? So it’s no different with your product or service description. Want to heat up the return on your investment of time, money and effort expended on building your business, brand or blog? You have to engage and inform in such a way that ignites the audience to take action.
#2 Yes, Sweat the Small Stuff — I don’t like saying the “devil’s in the details” but the small, sweat drops of critical points are what’s going to take the success of your content sky-high! Remember, in the online world, all your competitors are just a few clicks away. Give them more than just a simple photo and bland product dimensions; engage them visually and then close the deal.
#3 Hot Headlines & Following the News in Your Niche — News is a great source to turn up the heat on your content . You’d be surprised where great ideas can be formulated when derived from the media’s ‘hot topics’ and headlines promoted on Yahoo, CNN and various websites as well as TV. This technique can effectively increase the exposure of your content and be just what you need to jump-start your creative juices and typing fingers. For example, while on my LinkedIn page, I saw an article about choosing the red vs. the blue pill in ‘Happiness Is Not the Most Important Thing at Work.’ It made me consider a future blog topic about the power of engaging headlines and questioning your audience within your content to fully-engage them.
#4 Test the waters with a Blog Aggregator – A what? You read it correctly – a blog aggregator. It’s a website that keeps track of blog posts and where bloggers go for idea sharing with other bloggers in your niche. This is a great way to be inspired, share ideas and even professionally debate a topic. I recently wrote an article on Triberr, one of the prominent blog aggregators today. Not only were people engaged, but one of the founders of the company commented on my blog to address some of the points I made. Engagement accomplished!
#5 Window Shopping & People Watching – Most of us are out & about more than usual during the summer months. Whether at the beach, tanning poolside or BBQing in the backyard–watching others can give way to some pretty cool topics for blogging. Window shopping and long walks about town can also be the catalyst for thoughts on a product or service, from or for your own business. Also, by watching how someone reacts to various stimuli can strike the right match to turn up creative thought within you.
I hope this ignited some inspiration in you with some great insights to consider when writing and posting your content. I’d love to hear what other piping hot tips you have to share with me!
Blog, Branding, Content & Copywriting, Marketing, Product Reviews
We all know that blogs have practically taken the place of television now-yes even “reality” TV is green with envy. Every moment of every day someone is blogging. It’s actually estimated that currently there are “about 450 million active English language blogs right now from when Technorati estimated over 200 million blogs at the start of 2009. That’s some exponential growth and these numbers change every day as new blogs are started by the thousands (or tens of thousands) every day.”
So that’s a lot of people opining on every topic/issue and many, with a sharp business acumen and talented tapping tips (fingertips that is & suggestive ones too) that we can all learn or gleen from. So today I pay homage to my fellow bloggers and thought you’d enjoy some of my picks for sound advice from some trendy and noteworthy fellow bloggers who I follow and are part of my Go-To sourcebook for information and inspiration.
