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by Michael Stuart

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The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare

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In 2016, SlideShare had over 70 million unique visitors per day, and it was listed by Alexa as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. At its peak, it was such a powerhouse that Obama used the network to post his birth certificate. It also stood for years as a premier B2B social channel: In 2015, author and marketing expert Jay Baer referred to it as “content marketing’s secret weapon.”

 
 
Power users have been dropping the SlideShare channel.
 
  • Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
  • HubSpot, the content marketing powerhouse that posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, has posted only once in 2018, reaching a total of just over 1,000 users.
  • So what has caused this exodus of power users and decline in social-media prominence? A perfect storm of shifting parent-company priorities, insufficient revenues, and a user base largely outside of the US.
 
Despite SlideShare’s massive fan base, loyal users, and billions of impressions, a once-powerful channel is all but dead, and here’s why.
 
The Loss of Human Touch
The rapid growth of SlideShare from a small startup to a top website began in 2009, in a tiny room in India, when Amit Rajan, Rashmi Sinha, and Jonathan Boutelle saw the need for a “YouTube for presentations.” Within a few years, they had built a network of 38 million registered users by providing a desperately needed tool—and a new social channel for presentations.  But the key to their success wasn’t the tool, it was the human touch it added to the presentations.
 
SlideShare didn’t have a marketing team fueling its rapid growth. It relied on loyal fans. Its fans were the content creators, and to ensure the best content was featured, the team at SlideShare would manually curate the site each day, ensuring that the best presentations were prominently featured.
  • Kit Seeborg, author of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business, was responsible for most of the content curation the users loved, she stressed how important human curation was to SlideShare.
  • The curated content was a huge hit. It was also one of the drivers of SlideShare’s email list, which, at the time of LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare in 2012, was growing by 250,000 new subscribers each week. After the sale to LinkedIn, the curation process remained a critical part of community-building, until 2016, when the program was ended. Since then, the homepage has changed very little, which was a major clue to marketing insiders that LinkedIn was giving up on SlideShare.
  • During 2016, the team of editors who had been curators for SlideShare were moved off the product to support other LinkedIn projects, such as Pulse. The SlideShare company page on LinkedIn is now blank, with only a few remaining engineers listed as employees.
 
Some alternatives to SlideShare:
  1. Host your own content. There are new plugins for websites which allow you to host your slides on your own website and allow easy sharing and embedding. 
  2. Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365. That is speculation, but now that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and with the recent move to put Office in the Cloud, we could potentially see a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future. 
  3. Use Prezi. It’s an alternative to SlideShare, but it does require you create content in Prezi’s own software rather than in PowerPoint; that requirement can be a pain for some.
  4. Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
As we are continually bombarded with new marketing channels, tactics, and tools, one thing is clear: Slides are not going away. Events seem to give brands the personal touch the digital world just can’t, and slides are usually the No.1 content type at events.
 
The “YouTube of presentations” was at one point the number one destination for business owners and managers. It sported better demographics and site visitor loyalty than even LinkedIn. It was one of the top 100 most visited websites on the planet. Maybe that’s why LinkedIn bought it for $119 million in 2012, padding the nest eggs of serial investors and Slideshare backers Mark Cuban and Dave McClure, among others.
 
The 3 Biggest Slideshare Problems Today
 
  1. First, traffic to Slideshare has fallen off considerably. This is despite the fact that three-quarters of all content marketers are creating more content than ever, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. To be sure not all of that content is in the form of presentations and ebooks that are found on Slideshare. 
  2. Second, Slideshare has jettisoned their editorial team, for the most part. At its apex, part of Slideshare’s appeal was its curation, including regular promotion of new and interesting presentations to the site’s home page in the “Today’s Top Slideshares,” “Featured Slideshares,” or “Trending in Social Media” sections.
  3. Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
 
Slideshare’s coming passing comes on the heels of the death of Squidoo and Scribd, among others.
 
 
 

Audience First then You’ll Know What Products to Sell

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When You’ve Built an Audience You’ll Know What Product to Sell

Don’t know what product or service you should be selling? That’s actually fine, says Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of the new book Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses.




“In most cases [early on], you don’t have the product or service right, anyway,” he says.

Instead, he recommends that entrepreneurs “flip the model on its head” and build an audience first, and only then figure out what to sell them. “What if you spent the time and understood the audience better than anyone else? It’s basically a future list of your customers,” he told me during a recent interview in New York City. “That audience knows, likes and trusts you more. And they’ll actually tell you what to sell [to them].” That means when you do start to sell, it’s a faster, easier and more lucrative process.

He recognizes that building an audience without a clear path to monetization may feel frightening to entrepreneurs watching the bottom line. “Is it a leap of faith? Sure. But I actually think it’s a less risky model as long as you’re patient and as long as you have the time.”

So how can you build an audience successfully? Pulizzi, not surprisingly, is a strong believer in the power of content creation. First, you have to specialize.

“Just take content marketing, for example. Now it’s such a crowded space. There’s no way you can cut to the clutter. You’ve got to find your content tilt,” which he defines as your unique niche and spin on a subject. “What is that area of little to no competition out there, where you actually have a fighting chance to break through?”

As an example, he cites a pet supplies company that originally considered blogging about pet supplies, which was way too broad. Instead, he urged them to drill down — first to the subject of “traveling with your pet,” and then “pet owners in Southwest Florida” who travel with their pets. Says Pulizzi, “Now you’ve got a chance. Now you can be the leading expert in the world on that.”

Next, you want to think carefully about the channel you use. “A blog, a podcast, and a video series are the first three options I’m going to be looking at when building my base,” says Pulizzi. You want to ask yourself, How would this story best be told to my audience? You should think about where your skills lie (perhaps you have a particular knack for writing), where your audience is already congregating, and whether your content is especially compelling in one format or another (if you’re frequently doing demonstrations, video may be optimal).

Finally, you need to produce consistent, high quality content. “It’s quality over quantity,” says Pulizzi. “That didn’t always used to be the case,” but Google has been steadily improving their algorithms to prioritize excellent work. You don’t necessarily need to post every day, but he argues that the minimum effective dose is “one fantastic piece per week.” You should also evaluate when you reach the point of diminishing returns; the Content Marketing Institute started with posts three times per week, and eventually increased their rate to posting three times per day. But their audience didn’t want much that frequency, and they ultimately settled on daily posts, instead.

Pulizzi believes that entrepreneurs are particularly well positioned to leverage content marketing. “I think small businesses and entrepreneurs are better suited for it because they are more patient [than large, established corporations],” he says. “When you’re going to the big companies it’s like, We need it right now. But a small company can say, This is a three-year tour and I’m going to make this work. It’s about putting in enough time, knowing that the benefits on the back side are going to be amazing.”

Building an audience requires patience and faith. But the trust and loyalty engendered are well worth the effort.

Source: entrepreneur.com/article/272585

Good marketing nowadays revolves around inbound marketing. And the good news is

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Good marketing nowadays revolves around inbound marketing. And the good news is that if you have a blog, you are already on your way toward creating a great inbound marketing strategy.
Iinternet marketing gameplan by http://www.1stonlinetech.com
Checklist for Launching an Inbound Marketing Plan in WordPress
1) Attract: Get to know your ideal target audience and create content that speaks directly to them by solving their biggest pain points and uses a language they can relate to.
2) Convert: Convert your visitors into leads by capturing their contact information
  • Include forms on your site where visitors can submit their information such as their name and email address.Tools: PopUp Pro, LeadIn, SideOffer
  • Include calls-to-action which will encourage visitors to take action such as share your content on social media, sign up for your free offer or download a free resource.Tools: MaxButtons, Inbound Now
  • Create dedicated landing pages where you can expand on your offer and describe all the benefits. Include a form where users submit their information.Tools: Unbounce Landing Pages, WordPress Landing Pages
3) Close: Convert leads into actual customers.
  • Use CRM software to keep track of all the important details and interactions with your contacts.Tools: HubSpot CRM
  • Analyze. Use analytics software such as Google Analytics or Crazy Egg to understand how visitors are interacting with your website and how well your sales team is doing.Tools: Google Analytics, CrazyEgg, KISSMetrics
  • Automate. Use email and marketing automation to further build trust with contacts who aren’t ready to buy yet and to target the right message that relates to the needs and the lifecycle stage of each lead.Tools: MailChimp, Active Campaign, ConvertKit
4) Delight: Continue to engage with your customers by creating new offers and gradually transform them into your loyal fans which will act as your promoters.
  • Use surveys . Ask for feedback to ensure you are giving your customers what they want.Tools: PollDaddy, SurveyMonkey
  • Use smart calls to action and smart content. Make sure your calls to action and your content is geared towards your ideal content based on their interests and their lifecycle stage.
  • Social Monitoring. Keep track of social conversations and reach out with relevant content when your customers ask a question.Tools: Hootsuite, Cyfe, Simply Measured

There are five core ideas behind inbound marketing:
  • Content Creation and Distribution. Creating content that is bound to attract your ideal clients by solving their immediate problems, concerns, and needs then sharing that content far and wide
  • Lifecycle Marketing. Ideally, you want your targeted leads to become your biggest fans who will go on to spread the word about you. However, they don’t just appear out of nowhere. Each lead you attract through inbound marketing will start off as a stranger. The goal is to transform each of those leads into a repeat visitor, who will become your customer and then promoter.
  • Personalization. We established that your content needs to speak to your ideal customer. As time progresses, you will learn more and more about their specific needs and then you can utilize that knowledge to further refine your content.
  • Multi-channel. Inbound marketing is not tied to one specific platform, rather it approaches people where they are, on the platform in which they feel most comfortable interacting with you.
  • Integration. Creating content, sharing the content across different channels and analyzing how well that content is doing – all that integrates together to allow you to put your focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.
By focusing your efforts on inbound marketing, you are no longer a noise they’ve learned to tune out. Instead, your message becomes something they want to hear, something they want to learn more about, and that’s hard to ignore.
How Does it Work?
When it comes to inbound marketing, there are 4 key actions you need to take to capitalize on your marketing strategy.
Attract Even though you might think you want to be found by as many people as possible that is not the right course of action. You want to be found by people who are most likely to become leads and ultimately, your ideal customers.
Some of the most important tools to attract them to your site include:
  • Blogging. If you already have a blog, then you have an excellent start. Blogging is one of the easiest methods to create content that speaks and educates your target audience.
  • SEO. In today’s day and age, each and every one of your customers will begin their search online — either to find out how to solve a particular problem, compare products and services, or to find out more about a particular product. As a website owner, you should focus your efforts on selecting the right keywords and then create content, build links, and optimize pages around those terms.
  • Pages. In correlation to blogging and SEO, the static pages on your website should be optimized for your target audience as well. Rather than simply stating what you offer in dry corporate–speak, you need to speak directly to your target audience by explaining how you can help solve their needs in a language that they can relate to.
  • Social Publishing. Social media should be a natural extension of your blog. This is where they get to see the face behind the brand so do your best to represent your website in the best light. Aside from sharing relevant and valuable content, share content you know your audience would benefit from and don’t forget to engage in the conversation. This means responding to any questions you might get on social media as well as encouraging and being a part of the conversation.
Convert Now that you have their attention, it’s time to convert those visitors into leads. This involves gathering their contact information. Ideally, you will have their full name, address, and email. At the very least, you can get by with just their email address.
When it comes to converting visitors to leads, the best assets include:
  • Forms. These are usually email signup forms where you ask for their email (most often their name, too) in exchange for a download. A good place to feature a signup form is below a blog post or in your sidebar, and to repeat it again in the footer of your website. As with anything, your forms should be easy to fill out and stand out from the rest of your content.
  • Calls-to-Action. Calls-to-Action or CTAs are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action with words such as “Download my Checklist to Complete XYZ” or “Sign up for a live workshop.” Sometimes they include a form, and often they lead to a separate form where visitors can submit their information.
  • Landing Pages. Landing pages serve a specific purpose–and that is to convert visitors to leads. This is where you expand on the offer in the call-to-action and where you include another form where the user can submit their information. The information submitted on the landing page can be as simple as a form including a name and an email field, or it can be somewhat longer including more specific information that can be used by your sales team. Landing pages should not include anything else other than your offer and the form so distractions are minimized.
Once your visitors have filled out the form on your site, they become contacts. It’s your responsibility to keep track of those leads in one place by using a custom marketing database. Make sure that every interaction you’ve had with your contacts is documented and that it makes sense for you. In the long run, that information can be used to optimize your future interactions with leads and visitors.
Close The next step in inbound marketing strategy is to convert your contacts into actual customers. This can be achieved through various marketing tools which include:
  • CRM Software. Customer Relationship Management software allows you to keep track of all the important details about all your contacts, companies, and deals in your sales pipeline. Above all, it makes it easy to get in touch with your ideal audience at the right time.
  • Closed-loop Reporting. This allows you to analyze your marketing efforts and see which one of those methods works best to bring in new leads, how well your sales team is doing to convert those leads into customers, and much more. When you integrate this with your CRM software you can have a snapshot of your marketing strategy at a glance at all times.
  • Email. If your visitors aren’t ready to become clients yet, email can be an effective tool to build trust and ease their decision to make a purchase.
  • Marketing Automation. This includes creating a series of automated email messages that relate to the needs and the lifecycle stage of each lead. The content of the messages will be different depending on where and when a visitor actually converted into a lead and that’s one of the biggest benefits of inbound marketing.
Delight At this stage of your inbound marketing plan, your tools should include:
  • Surveys. Asking your current customers for feedback is the best way to ensure you are providing them with what they are looking for instead of randomly guessing and hoping to hit the target.
  • Smart calls-to-action. By smart, I mean calls-to-action that are specific to your ideal customer depending on the lifecycle stage.
  • Smart content. Content that is geared towards your ideal customers’ interests and challenges written in a language that’s familiar to them.
  • Social Monitoring. This is also sometimes called Social Listening, which refers to actively keeping track of social conversations that matter to you, listening to customers’ questions and comments, and then reaching out to them with relevant content.
What Goes Into an Inbound Marketing Plan?
Creating remarkable content Long gone are the days when it was enough to churn out content filled with keywords. The competition is tough and you need to make sure your content stands out from the rest. This comes by creating content that is targeted to your ideal buyer persona – content that inspires, entertains, provokes, and educates.
Using the power of visuals In the age of short attention spans, images really do speak more than words. A number of studies have shown that the average attention span is just 8 seconds so make sure those 8 seconds count. Creating highly engaging visual content that begs to be shared is a good way to get the attention of your target audience. This includes not only photos but infographics, slideshows, videos – anything that will make you stand out from your competition.
Mastering CTA Your Calls-to-Action shouldn’t be ignored. Spend as much time on crafting compelling CTAs as you do on creating your content and your visuals. The last thing you want is to spend hours on an epic blog post and infographic only to have people leave your site because your CTA wasn’t clear, or worse, weak.
Utilizing the power of analytics You won’t know how it works unless you gather and measure data. It’s important to know which pages on your site brought in the most leads, where they clicked, and where they dropped off. Similarly, you want to know how many of your contacts actually turned into customers, at which point on your site they converted, and where they were when they left. You won’t know any of that without analytics software. Google Analytics is great for tracking your website and more sophisticated tools like CrazyEgg can show you exactly where your visitors are clicking.
Implement testing After you have results gathered from analytics, you can start testing different variations of your marketing strategy. This is often referred to as A/B testing and you can set up tests for almost anything, your headlines, your CTAs, content, the color of buttons, and so forth. This is a valuable part of any marketing plan because it lets you tweak until you get that perfect solution that is guaranteed to convert.
Getting the right people on your team As a website owner, you already wear many hats and not all of us are born marketers. Knowing when to bring people on your team to help with your marketing efforts is a smart decision. However, you should be careful to hire those whose skill set not only matches your strategy, but also those whose vision and value align with yours. They should also be ready to continually learn and improve so you can update your marketing plan as your goals grow.
SEO The best way to attract visitors to your site is by optimizing your SEO efforts. By that, I mean researching your keywords and then planning your content around them. However, your SEO efforts should be boosted by using a plugin such as our own SmartCrawl SEO plugin or All In One SEO.
Content Structure Another important factor when it comes to SEO is your content structure. This means setting up a customized permalink structure for your blog as well as creating categories for your content. You can then include categories in your permalinks since URLs are important factors in search rankings. By doing this you inform not only the search engines but your visitors as well how a particular blog post relates to other content on your site.
Image Optimization When it comes to image optimization for inbound marketing you need to make sure that your images are compressed and load fast and that their names include words that can help you get found online. It’s one of the most overlooked aspects of proper inbound marketing and yet the way you handle images matters for several reasons:
  • Image size affects page load time which in turn affects search engine results.
  • Properly named and tagged images can show up in image search results where there is often less competition.
  • Images increase engagement. According to a study done by MarketMeSuite content with images attracted 94% more pageviews than content without images.
  • Enter Media File Renamer. Media File Renamer is a plugin that automatically renames your media filenames depending on their titles. When files are renamed, the references to it such as posts, pages, custom types, and their metadata are also updated.
Social Media Integration Finally, no inbound marketing strategy would be complete without integrating social media. After all, you want your content not only to be found, but also shared on social media so your message can reach even more targeted leads.
  • For the last step, your WordPress website should include social media sharing buttons which make sure your content appears correctly no matter which social network your content gets shared on.
  • For a complete list of the best social media sharing plugins check out our ultimate collection of social media sharing plugins.
source: premium.wpmudev.org/blog/inbound-marketing-checklist/

The New York Times acquires influencer marketing agency HelloSociety

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The New York Times, like other local news organizations, is getting into the digital marketing game.
  • If you can’t beat them, join them, or buy them
The New York Times is expanding its native ad studio with the acquisition of HelloSociety, a digital marketing agency owned by Science, Inc.
Los Angeles-based Science both invest in startups and builds its own companies. It launched HelloSociety (which it fully owned) back in 2012 as an analytics platform for Pinterest marketers. Since then, it’s broadened beyond Pinterest to platforms like Instagram and YouTube, as well as turning into an agency that connects brands with influential social media users who can help promote their marketing efforts.
HelloSociety currently has more than 1,500 influencers in its network.
The companies say that the agency’s “tools, talent and approach” will become part of T Brand Studio, The Times’ native ad team. (Media companies aren’t the only ones wanting to move into this industry — Twitter acquired influencer marketing startup Niche.
“We now want to accelerate its development and broaden the range of creative and marketing services that we offer clients from content ideation and creation to distribution,” Thompson said. “The reach and results-driven tactics of HelloSociety are the ideal complements to our strategic vision for the future of T Brand Studio.”
Sebastian Tomich, The Times’ senior vice president of advertising and innovation, to learn more about the deal. He said that at T Brand, there’s been “a lot of demand for our services beyond the walls of the New York Times,” including some experiments with influencer marketing.
“There’s a broader vision to help brands think more like programmers and less like advertisers.“
The HelloSociety network consists of some of the most talented content creators on social media—photographers, chefs, stylists, DIY mavens whose unique skill sets are tied together by a common theme: an eye for all things beautiful and an intimate knowledge of what works well on their social platform.
HelloSociety influencers have created thousands of pieces of professional-quality, platform-optimized content for brands in a variety of categories: food, fashion, travel, entertainment, automotive, CPG and more. They’ve whipped up original recipes inspired by major motion pictures; they’ve shot editorial-style outfit inspiration for apparel lines of all kinds; they’ve even come up with wildly creative crafts centered around the popular spokeswoman of an auto insurance company. And because the content created by our influencers is so authentic and high quality, it’s no surprise that it performs an average of 77% better than content produced by the brands themselves.
source: social.techcrunch.com/2016/03/11/new-york-times-acquires-hellosociety
Featured Image: samchills/Flickr UNDER A CC BY 2.0 LICENSE

5 Steps to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

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You need to create content that’s unique-enough to create thought-leadership and compel organic sharing, but also make it relevant-enough to improve key marketing and business metrics.

Five steps to developing a content marketing strategy:

Here's an easy 5 step content marketing strategy approach you can use.

Step #1: What are Your Customer’s Problems and Obstacles?

The best business content is focused on addressing your customer’s problems, while positioning (explicitly or implicitly) your company, product and service as the solution.

What’s in it for them? Why should people need your widget at all?

The best way to get this information is straight from the customers themselves. Start with short surveys that ask people what their main objectives are and what’s stopping or preventing them. Then follow up personally to dig deeper and find out their existing process for improvement, or other struggles they’re experiencing.

Step #2: What are Your Product Results and Benefits?

People don’t purchase features or deliverables — they’re purchasing an outcome or end result.

Start by thinking about what customers/clients will get after using your product or service. More often than not, there will be many answers to this question.

The key here is to be as specific as possible. Don’t stop at the general cliches like “waste time and money”, because that’s what everyone else says. And the more potential customer segments you have, the vastly different motivators you’ll need to uncover.

Step #3: Determine Your Messaging, Categories and Structure

These categories relate to how your product specifically improves customer’s lives. And it establishes thought leadership while improving your brand positioning without directly referring to your product.

  • Test specific information (including common problems and frequently asked questions)
  • Life hacks (i.e. getting outsized results in studying, applying, productivity, etc.)
  • School/student life (to reach customers earlier in the lifecycle)
  • Proprietary data and research (that no competitor can claim or reproduce)
  • Business origin and product vision (so we can start with why)
  • Misc. product updates and events (to keep people up-to-date on improvements).

Step #4: Manage the Creation Process

You need a fluid, flexible way to keep track of new topic ideas, responsibility and projected dates.

Step #5: Create a Uniform Content Template

Here are some of the essential ingredients to each piece of content:

  • Headline: Play on psychology to capture attention by using a Headline Hack (threat, how-to, mistake, or list)
  • Hook/Lead: Build interest and anticipation through using an anecdote, intrigue , a surprising fact or humor.
  • Problem / Context: Explain common problem to create resonance and address underlying or unexpected issues involved
  • Solution: Provide solution to root cause and relieve tension
  • Conclusion / Wrap-Up: Highlight key takeaway, summarize main points, provide actionable tip, or use a call-to-action

Keep paragraphs shorter than 5 sentences, and don’t be afraid to write informally with simple words.

Source: moz.com/ugc/case-study-5-steps-to-create-a-killer-content-marketing-strategy