IM Sphere

A great content marketing program can no longer be maintained with good writing alone. 

Content shock has created a glut of content that is outpacing demand. Content marketers have to work harder than ever to keep an edge over the competition, or risk starving while a more savvy competitor eats their lunch. 

To keep competitors at bay, or to surpass the competition, organizations sometimes forgo the fundamentals of a great content marketing program, and instead focus on new best practices and growth hacks. After all, they don’t want to wait for results. They want them now!

While the latest growth hack may sound like the future of content marketing, more often than not it’s a short-term fix to a long-term problem. Organizations latch onto a hack or a shortcut, only to find their content marketing program in disarray a few months later. It’s something we’ve seen over and over.

Here are just a few signs that a content marketing program is in trouble:

Content marketers struggle to prove the business value of their efforts
No one understands how new visitors move down the marketing funnel to a conversion
The executive team is considering reallocating content marketing budgets
User engagement on content is ver… Read More

Content performance can be a difficult thing to gauge because there is a pretty wide collection of factors you could measure it by.

Is it in leads for actual product sales? Organic traffic? Google ranking? Featured snippets? Social media shares? Increasing brand visibility? A mix of all of them?

But however you measure success, there is no denying the importance of establishing a solid content marketing plan and following through. As you go along, knowing how you are doing is a good way to find out what changes may be necessary to get even better results.

I like to keep a collection of tools at my disposal that help me to both monitor how I am doing and come up with ways to improve. These are my seven favorites and ones I think everyone should be using.

Before I start sharing the tools, let me tell you the most important criteria behind the list: All 10 tools are 100% FREE! I think free tools deserve all the publicity they can get and if, after reading this article, you’ll be able to save some money on buying expensive software, my mission will be accomplished!

That being said, I’ll share a paid (but cheap) alternative here and there (wh… Read More

Want to collaborate with social media influencers to promote your products and services? Wondering which influencers are a good fit for your business? In this article, you’ll find out how to get started with influencer marketing campaigns. #1: Identify Potential Social Media Influencers First, it’s helpful to understand what types of influencers you’ll encounter. While […]

The post How to Evaluate and Partner With Social Media Influencers appeared first on Social Media Examiner.

… Read More

Image: Freepik

Two every second: That’s how many people join LinkedIn as new members, many of whom hope to exploit the platform’s rich resource for industry contacts, new clients and partnership opportunities.

That means that by the time you finish reading this article, you’ll have on average 350 people and counting to compete with for the professional world’s attention. What you do with your LinkedIn profile can mean the difference between garnering views as compared to converting those views in taking the next step of building a relationship with you.

With over 1 billion searches per day for names and companies, LinkedIn is your opportunity to build your business reputation, expand your professional network and help companies and connections know who you are and what you do.

And with so many people fighting for attention, your first impression can most often be your best or last. Here is an excerpt from an infographic by linkhumans.com on Slideshare that shows the facts behind optimizing your profile on LinkedIn.