Author: Tracy Gold

Tracy Gold is a Marketing and Content Associate at Right Source Marketing, a content marketing and marketing strategy firm. Please don’t hesitate to drop Tracy a comment on this post, and for more like this, follow me on Twitter @tracycgold or check out the Marketing Trenches blog. For a full take on content marketing best practices from the Right Source Marketing team, check out our webinar on magnetizing your content.

By rightsource published October 11, 2011

What Makes a Good Blog Post: 10 Tips for Corporate Bloggers

Uh oh,” you may be thinking. “The marketing department is talking about that whole blogging thing again. Last time we did this, it was a disaster. Worse, no one seemed to like my posts.”

Yikes! Stop right there! And think again!

Yes, a lot of corporate blogs are awful. But neither your company’s blog nor the posts you contribute to should bear a sense of impending doom. At Right Source, we spend a lot of time helping clients manage their blogs. This involves bringing together subject matter experts, sales reps, marketing employees, and executives — many of whom have unique ideas but have never written a blog post.

One of the first questions we get from new bloggers is, “What makes a good blog post?”  As we answer, the doom drifts out of the room and is replaced by the glowing light of nurturing leads and increasing sales. Cha-ching!

We thought we’d share our answer with our readers here. Continue Reading

By rightsource published September 15, 2011

A Food Pyramid for Content Marketing

At Right Source Marketing, we get a lot of questions about where to allocate content marketing resources.  On blog posts? Webinars? eBooks? The possibilities can be overwhelming. Yet knowing how to allocate resources is essential to successful content marketing. Even though the USDA’s food pyramid has transitioned to a food plate, content marketers would do well to consider a pyramid concept for balancing their use of the many content formats they use. While every content marketing program is different, I’ve created the below chart to show the basic portions of content that should keep most content marketing programs healthy and happy.

 

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By rightsource published September 7, 2011

The Rise of the SuperFans: Live from Content Marketing World

After Drew Davis’ fast paced Prezi talk on “Participation Creation,” Josh Richman, Vice President of Marketing, WGN America, and Keith Blanchard, Creative Director, Story Worldwide, took the stage to cover the “Rise of the SuperFans.”

Josh jumped in by disagreeing with Content Marketing World’s morning presenter, David Meerman Scott, when he shared his sentiment that, “No one cares about your product except you.” If your product is a TV show like How I Met Your Mother, Josh said, people care. And some people – SuperFans – even care enough to watch the episodes as many as 80 times.

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By rightsource published July 28, 2011

How Writing Better Emails Makes You a Better Content Marketer


Improving your skills in email communications improves your content marketing efforts, and vice versa, as an audience member (nonprofit technology consultant Kate Bladow) pointed out after a presentation I gave about writing for the web last week.

I couldn’t agree more. To follow on Kate’s point, here are five best practices to think about when you’re communicating with an audience, whether you’re organizing a team or writing for the company blog.Continue Reading

By rightsource published June 30, 2011

10 Ways to Write Like a Content Marketing Jedi

All content marketers can learn from what Yoda said to a young Anakin Skywalker: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” This very same destructive sequence, which turned Anakin into Darth Vader, all too frequently derails content marketing efforts.

Why? Because, horror of horrors, content marketing involves a large amount of writing, and for many people, writing is terrifying (they may say they hate writing, but thanks to Yoda, we know they’re just scared). Even worse, someone has to gingerly edit that writing without hurting psyches already fragile from the writing struggle. Particularly for content marketing campaigns that involve a lot of blogging, the fear and hatred of writing can cause complete content marketing paralysis.

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