Web Ink Now

How to Pitch a Blogger

I get several hundred pitches a week from well-meaning PR people.

Conversations with other bloggers suggest this is the norm, so now it is as tough to reach a blogger as it is to reach a mainstream journalist. It may be even more difficult since most of us work part-time on our blogs and we devote less time to wading though pitches as journalists.

Sadly, nearly all of the pitches I get are just plain spam.

But the good news is that I do pay attention to things that people send me. I occasionally write about them. So how do you increase your chances of getting a blogger like me to talk about you or your clients? Here are some ideas:

Don't pitch your product.
This is by far the worst thing to do. I may be interested in how people solve problems by using your product or service. But I don’t care about the product itself.

Keep in mind most bloggers have other ways to talk you up.
Don't limit your pitch to only the person's blog. Share what you think the person will be interested in, but realize you may be rewarded in a different way. In my case, I might tweet it. Or maybe it is a story is worth adding to a book I'm working on or as a riff in a speech. Don't limit yourself.

Remember, we're not journalists.
Bloggers write about whatever we feel like and we aren't obligated to "tell both sides of a story" or "cover your news." The best blogs are written by people who are passionate about a topic. Read the blog, discover the passion, and send something that the blogger will be interested in.

Don't offer guest posts unless the blogger runs them.
In nearly a decade of writing my blog, I've never run a post by a guest author. While I'm not prepared to say I never will, offering to write one for me is a sure way to have your email deleted. Make sure a blog runs guest posts before you pitch that as an idea.

Broadcast pitches are spam.
I love hearing about something interesting before others. If you've got a great example of marketing success, tell me! But don’t send me something that you also send to hundreds of others.

Never open with "Dear Blogger".
Dear Blogger tells people that you don't care enough about them to read their blog and learn their name. It's much better if you personalize your pitch with an appropriate greeting and some detail about why they were selected.

Make it short.
I won't read a long email. A few sentences about what you're pitching and why is great. If I want more information, I'll ask for it.

Never send an email attachment.
Links are okay but attachments are not.

Take care with the subject line.
Make your subject line specific. Something like "Example of newsjacking success" is a great subject line for me.

Twitter is good. Telephone is not.
It's fine to send a pitch via Twitter Direct Message or to include a blogger's Twitter ID in a tweet. The 140-character limit forces you to get to the point. But bloggers I've spoken with do not appreciate phone calls.

I've had many discussions with bloggers in recent years and most of us do like to get a well-crafted pitch targeted especially to us. We want you to reach out! Do it well, and we may write about you.

Not Another Junky Blog

Tania Venn, director of PR at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, the largest full-service professional junk removal company in the world, oversees a team that creates content with a focus to reach customers who may not think that they need a junk removal service.

“Once they hear about what junk removal could do for them and how it could impact their lives, they become interested in our service,” Tania says.

Tania and her colleagues focus on what information would be valuable for buyers as they create content for the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Not Another Junky Blog and then use their Facebook page and Twitter feed @1800GOTJUNK to let their followers know of new posts.

Making junk interesting

I hear all the time from marketers who tell me something like "My business is boring. Nobody cares about what we do so how can I create content?"

Tania's example shows any market or company can be made to be interesting. We're talking about junk removal here, people!

"We think about what’s relevant," she says. "That could be tips and suggestions for people on getting their space back. It could be about decluttering and how to do a garage sale. We also focus on environmental sustainability, what happens to the stuff we haul away and creative ways to reuse junk." Right on the homepage there is a counter showing the number of pounds 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has saved from landfills. As of this writing, the ticker reads 2.264937 billion pounds.

They also create content about what's timely, either because it is in the news or tied with the time of year. "With the holidays coming up we'll post about making space to have your in-laws over and making room for new things you might get as gifts," Tania says. "And with New Years, everyone has resolutions. We know that the top ten New Year's resolutions includes 'getting organized' and 'simplifying'. We also look at what's trending. For example, there is a trend called trashion, when people make fashion out of trash, so we'll write about that."

Writing for buyers

Unlike when a blog is written from an egotistical perspective and turns into a bunch of advertising messages, Not Another Junky Blog, because it is written for buyers, focuses on real problems that people have with junk in the home.

"We know there’s an emotional component to getting rid of the stuff that you have," Tania says. "Our customers have an emotional release and an amazing magical feeling of 'that crap is not there anymore' when their junk is taken away. They don't realize until it's gone how good it feels. We hear it time and time and time again from our customers. So we build that into our blog because it answers what customers are looking for." The 1-800-GOT-JUNK? business is a franchise model, so the content they create also appeals to franchisees who learn about clever ways to market in their local area.

When you focus on buyers' problems as you create content, frequently you'll write about something that doesn't have anything to do with what your organization actually does. This is true at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.

"We might talk about how to set up your own garage sale," Tania says. "That wouldn't get us business necessarily, but we’ve got the experience and we can share that with people. We know that readers may not be able to afford our service right now, but some day they will be able to. They'll have learned something from us that can help them out, something that can help them get rid of some of their junk, but they can do it themselves."

Measuring success

It's not just the billions of pounds of junk that the company saves from landfills that's measured. Tania knows that the content published in Not Another Junky Blog and shared on Facebook and Twitter is working because she uses analytics to measure content success too.

"I look at how many people view our blog on a daily basis and a weekly basis," she says, also paying attention to any content that becomes particularly popular with readers. "We've learned that we need to create content in order to be recognized on the web. It's a way of engaging with customers. It's a great way to get information directly to who you want to reach rather than going through the media."

Hey, if Tania can make junk interesting, there's no excuse for you not making your company interesting!

Full video of my Inbound 2012 keynote featuring Cyndi Lauper

Several months ago I kicked off HubSpot's Inbound 2012 conference in Boston with a keynote titled "Inbound Now" detailing how to get found as people search for products and services on the Web and mobile devices like Androids and iPads. The video of the talk is now available.

The presentation to 2,500+ entrepreneurs and marketing professionals focused on the 4 ways to create the information that search engines rank highly and that people share on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Featuring Q&A with and a live performance by Cyndi Lauper!

Being a live music geek, I played off the conference theme Inbound Rocks to use music examples - including the Grateful Dead, Amanda Palmer, the Avett Brothers, STS9, and Cyndi Lauper - throughout the talk and was thrilled to interview Cyndi live on stage.

Direct link to David Meerman Scott keynotes Inbound 2012 featuring Cyndi Lauper on Vimeo.

At about 7:45 is a one-minute video interview I did with Amanda Palmer. Amanda talks about how she engages with her fans on social networks. Amanda crowdsourced the funding of her latest album on Kickstarter in what is the most successful music funding effort in Kickstarter history.

At about 31:50 I go into the audience to show how the Grateful Dead engaged fans. I find out how many people are Grateful Dead fans and who in the audience has attended multiple Dead shows. This is to prove the "true fans come back for more & spend lots of money" idea. In 2,500-person audience, about 100 had seen the band live. About 10 had seen more than 50 shows. Three over 100 shows and the most was 173 times.

At about 40:30 I interview Cyndi Lauper live. We talk about how she stays relevant and engages with fans through social media. First thing out of Cyndi's mouth (after she compared our shirts): "I stopped listening to the record company."

And at 45:30 Cyndi and her band did a killer live performance of "Crossroads." Her band featured blues harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite.

Metrics to Show How a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Drives New Business

This is the third in a three part series on how professional services firm Sales Benchmark Index has made the transition from traditional outbound marketing like cold calls to a content-driven marketing approach using blogs, twitter, ebooks, and videos. I conduced several lengthy interviews with I love the approach Greg Alexander, CEO of the company to learn the inside scoop. If you haven’t done so, read the first installment Professional Services Firm Grows 50% through Switch from Outbound to Inbound Marketing and the second How to Target Buyer Personas with the Right Content Created Especially for Them.

Content based on the buyers' business

Greg knows from his buyer persona research that 75 percent of his US potential clients are on a calendar-based planning cycle. "July through October is when they go through their annual operating plan," he says. This is the time that buyers are most receptive to Sales Benchmark Index services and when the majority of sales tales place. "They are trying to figure out things like how many sales people do I need? How should I place the territories? What should the quotas be? How should I pay them? A lot of the research is centered around those issues."

Because Greg's sales happen July through October, he has a calendar-based approach to content creation.

"From November through June the approach is to give away lots and lots of intellectual property to build up the subscriber base," Greg says. "We believe that permission to have a conversation with buyers is a valuable asset. Within the blog we will write about a problem. We'll offer up a tool that we used with one of our clients to solve that specific problem. All we ask is that they click on the link. We put it behind a form, and then they get the tool for free. During the November through June time period, we don’t bombard them with follow up marketing activity."

As the subscriber roles grow, Greg's team shifts focus during the selling season when buyers have a greater need for information because they are planning next year's budgets from July through October. "During that time period, we shift the focus of the blog to having subscribers participate in our annual research tour, which we call Make the Number: How Your Peers Plan on Allocating People, Money and Time for the Upcoming Year."

Make the Number allows potential clients to have a personal review of benchmarking data and research. "This is an onsite seminar," Greg says. "If you want access to all these tools, and you've been a subscriber of ours for months and sometimes years, one of our experts will come on site and give you a presentation for 90 minutes to the executive team on kind of a set of best practices heading into the New Year. So it allows somebody to compare and contrast the sales strategy before the New Year begins."

Greg has had tremendous success with the calendar approach to content creation. "Just to give you some stats here on the power of content marketing, in prior years we might do between 50 and 100 visits during the July to October period," he says. "But this year, we'll have done over 220 of them. We know that about half of them eventually, inside of six quarters, become clients of ours. When people buy a professional service like ours, it's intangible. So we use the Make the Number meetings to turn what we do into a tangible by actually introducing people face to face. It makes it easier for the buyer to buy."

Measuring success

I love how Greg's team measures every aspect of his content efforts. After all, this is a company that helps sales and marketing executives be more effective, so you can imagine how they focus on measuring the effectiveness of their own inbound marketing.

In fact, they measure down to the blog post level (something that they learned from HubSpot, whose marketing software Sales Benchmark Index uses). "We grade posts based on things like how closely each are related to the problems of our buyer personas," he says. "We count the number of words in sentences, targeting six and 14 words per sentence. And we grade the effectiveness of the title. Then there are the hard metrics like the number of comments and social shares and links generated, and view counts."

Greg also analyzes what he calls "branded versus non-branded keywords" looking at how many people come to the blog on a monthly basis for each. A branded keyword is when somebody hits the blog for a term like "sales benchmark index" (they entered the company name into Google). A non-branded word would be if somebody searched on "sales territory design".

"Important phrases for us include 'territory design,' 'lead management', and 'sales incentive compensation'," Greg says. Note how these terms are fairly specific, but not so long tail as to be obscure. They specifically target 'lead generation' as a term because the phrase is so competitive. "We go after 'lead management', and we’re doing better as a result of that. We're looking at the number of incoming links and we use the HubSpot Link Grader Search Engine Optimization Tool. This year we've generated 579 new domains linking to us with 27,780 individual links that came from those domains. The thing that I'm probably the happiest about is the quality of the links has gone up. HubSpot graded the links earlier in the year at 47 on a scale of zero to 100. Now the average link rate is 82."

I wanted to know about the ultimate success measure, so I asked Greg how revenue was tracking. "We're up over a little over 50 percent this year," he told me. "That's our revenue number and our head count, which in professional services is a key metric. In consulting, utilization numbers are really important, too and we're running at 80 percent utilized right now, which is great. I can directly attribute much of that gain to inbound marketing and content marketing."

Advice to other organizations on how to implement inbound marketing

With his measurable success, I wanted to know what advice Greg would offer to other CEOs interested in adopting an inbound marketing content strategy.

"This is a mental shift to realize that you're really in the publishing business," Greg says. "If you embrace publishing, then the transformation that we talked about here will happen. If you're a CEO and you still believe that you're in another business, I don't believe you're going to make that transition. Unless you grew up in the publishing world, there’s much to learn. It's a steep learning curve. I've spent my time studying how successful publishing companies build their business. I understood things like audience acquisition and things I never knew about before. It helped quite a bit. You've got to learn how to be an effective publisher."

Disclosures: Greg and I serve together on the Eloqua board of advisors, which is where we met. In addition, I am on HubSpot advisory board and serve as Marketer in Residence at HubSpot.

Professional Services Firm Grows 50% through Switch from Outbound to Inbound Marketing

I recently had several lengthy discussions with my friend Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index to learn how he made the switch from traditional outbound marketing like cold calls to a content-driven marketing approach using blogs, twitter, ebooks, and videos. The strategy has grown Greg's revenue 50% in the past year. Sales Benchmark Index has grown from a very small firm 6 years ago to a firm with dozens of consultants today.

The wide ranging discussion was so chock full of valuable information I want to share with you, that I've decided to make it a series of three blog posts starting today and running tomorrow and the next day.

Sales Benchmark Index is a professional services firm, focused exclusively on B2B sales force effectiveness. Sales Benchmark Index helps large and small clients gain a competitive advantage through the way they engage with their clients, the sales process, and the effectiveness of their sales force so they make sales numbers faster and with less effort.

This is a particularly fascinating example of success because Greg's business – the services his company offers – is completely metrics driven. And that's how Greg markets and sells too, based on the metrics, so this is a case study chock full of ROI measurements!

Outbound Marketing stopped working

Prior to making the switch to Inbound Marketing, Sales Benchmark Index deployed classic outbound activity. "We hired telemarketing firms to cold call," Greg says. "We did batch and blast email. We did interruption-based marketing tactics of all kinds and for a period of time from 2006 to 2010, that approach met our needs. And our needs are really well defined: We know how many inquiries we need to generate all the way through to paying customers. Then early, the effectiveness of the outbound channels just stopped. It's like somebody slammed the doors shut."

Greg thinks that his outbound strategies stopped working because his target audience was super busy. "I wasn't competing against other companies," he says. "I was competing for buyers' attention."

How buyers solve problems

Greg has done a great deal of research on how his buyer personas solve problems. And that was the starting point of his efforts to switch to Inbound Marketing.

"When our target customer (the head of sales or the head of marketing in a B2B organization) has a problem or need in their business, the very first thing they do – and we've done a lot of research to support this – is start searching the Web and reading and educating themselves," Greg says. "They typically don't want to engage with a service provider, us or anybody else for that matter, for a long time. Through education on the Web, they develop a crisp, well-articulated problem statement. Then they reach out to a small number of people to ask for their assistance in how they might approach solving that problem. It's similar to the way somebody would hire a law firm or a strategy consulting firm or an advertising agency."

Building buyer persona profiles and buyer process maps

Once Greg and his team understood how buyers solved problems, the next step was to develop buyer persona profiles and buyer process maps.

"We wanted to understand the key business objectives of each target audience," Greg says "What was standing in the way of them accomplishing those objectives? What were the things that were important to them when they made a decision to hire a service provider? How were they measured? What would the definition of success be? Once we understood that, we mapped the buying process for each persona. We identified when information requests were happening in the buying process for example, and what those information requests were."

Greg quickly realized that he had to create a lot of new content assets so he chose to create what he calls an "internal content marketing agency."

I love the approach Greg has taken to building content. Since Sales Benchmark Index is a professional services firm with smart subject experts, they needed to create an environment to channel the expertise into the creation of blog posts, videos, and longer form content assets like ebooks.

I talked in detail in the second installment of the series about how his team creates content How to Target Buyer Personas with the Right Content Created Especially for Them. Then on Friday. I'll discuss how Greg measures success and provide his advice to other CEOs on how to get started with a inbound marketing content strategy.

Disclosure: Greg and I serve together on the Eloqua board of advisors, which is where we met.

Facebookjacking: When a company does not respond others win

Here's a fun Friday story that comes to us via Mark Copeman.

A 26-year-old named Thomas Cook posted a lighthearted message on the Thomas Cook UK Facebook page: "Seeing as I share the exact same name as your huge company, and because of this I have been ridiculed for as long as I can remember, I think it's only fair that you help compensate for this by giving me one of your lovely holidays."

When the big, famous travel agency (143,000+ Facebook likes) replied back to say "no" to the request, quick-thinking competitor lowcostholidays.com (81,000+ likes) jumped in to offer Thomas Cook (the person) a free trip to Paris.

"Here at lowcostholidays.com we completely sympathise with your suffering and if your name was “lowcostholidays.com” we would certainly have accepted your request to be sent away on a weekend in Paris,” Charlotte Hunt from lowcostholidays.com wrote. "...So how about we send you on that weekend in Paris?"

Thomas Cook (the person) took up lowcostholidays.com on the offer and then posted his experience. Media outlets in the UK including the Mirror picked up the story within the past 24 hours.

lowcostholidays.com has cleverly kept the meme alive with additional Facebook posts like After all this talk about Paris we thought we’d tell you a little more about why this city is so great...

Shall we call this Facebookjacking?

What Thomas Cook (the person) did was have some lighthearted fun on the Thomas Cook UK (travel company) Facebook page. In my opinion it was not a "demand" but just a way to poke some fun. Thomas Cook UK responded (which is good, they could have ignored it), but they failed to see the social media potential of the situation.

Kudos to lowcostholidays.com for monitoring the competitor's Facebook page and jumping in to seize the opportunity, thereby controlling the emerging meme. Maybe this should be called Facebookjacking?

When to respond. How to respond.

The challenge for companies in this new world is to figure out when to respond (and when to ignore). The number of people who request (or demand) stuff from you will increase as these sorts of stories go viral.

The basic rule to consider: Is this request thoughtful? How can we benefit from this? Or is the person making the request a bully or someone just out to score free goods or services?

If the person is thoughtful, they deserve a response.

But remember, you don’t always have to give someone exactly what they want. Thomas Cook UK could have sympathized with the person who shared a name with them and offered something else (even just a T-shirt) because that would show they cared.

When Dave Carroll posted United Breaks Guitars, United rightly didn't offer compensation (that would have opened up opportunities for thousands of people to demand similar treatment). But United missed a huge opportunity because they did not respond at all. Had they, for example, created their own video response (perhaps highlighting how bags are handled at O’Hare) they would have been seen as human and shared in Dave Carroll's triumph rather than being seen as the bad guys.

So if a situation like this happens to you, consider the request. Is it thoughtful? If so, respond! But respond with something equally clever.

Images via Imgur

NBC Digital scraps Madison Ave demographics in favor of personas

Douglas Burdett points us to a fascinating story in the Media Post NBC News Kills The Demographic, Personifies Its Viewers Instead written by Joe Mandese.

The Media Post piece talks about how NBC News Digital is abandoning the traditional Madison Avenue demographics approach that has been used for decades that uses attributes like age, income, race, sex, and other factors to cluster audiences. This demographic approach is how advertising space has been bought and sold for a generation.

The new buyer persona approach on is based on their actual behaviors rather than a list of attributes.

The Media Post article lists the four personas used by NBC Digital as:

• "Always On:" Consumers who are constantly connected to news feeds across multiple devices throughout their waking day.


• "Reporters:" A slightly smaller segment of "digital natives" who grew up consuming news via online and mobile media, and who have manifested the behaviors of news disseminators, taking pride in their ability to break important news to their friends via their own social media postings.


• "Skimmers:" Consumers who are not passionately connected to news.


• "Veterans:" Consumers who primarily rely on traditional media as a trusted source for news.

NBC Digital is using the personas both to develop new content and to pitch advertisers.

Buyer personas and your marketing

The idea of buyer personas is difficult for many people who are used to traditional demographics to grasp. In a New Marketing Masterclass I recently conducted for several dozen consumer marketers, we were discussing a brand of premium grooming products for men and as I probed the buyer personas they target with the product, I heard language like: "Upscale, young, urban men in their twenties." This is a classic Madison Avenue approach and not as effective as a persona based approach. When I pushed a little about the market and who buys the products, we ended up with language like: "Shy single men who spend lots of money on products to increase their chances of finding a girlfriend."

Now we're talking! It is tough to create marketing for "Upscale, young, urban men in their twenties," which is why so much advertising ends up focused on the product attributes. However, creating marketing for "Shy single men who spend lots of money on products to increase their chances of finding a girlfriend," would be fun!

I recommend that you actually name your buyer personas. With the example above, we could name the buyer persona "Shy Sam." Armed with this sort of persona, marketers can then create online content that appeals directly to them. How about an ebook with a title like: "How to get a close shave that women love."

They key here is to develop buyer personas using actual input from interviews. You can’t just make this stuff up. The nuggets of gold here is that "Shy Sam" is shy and has trouble finding a girlfriend. You don’t guess at that. Rather you learn from your interviews with 25 or so members of the Shy Sam persona.

Buyer personas will transform your marketing. Building your content strategy around buyer personas is much more effective than prattling on about what your products and services do. With a switch to buyer personas, many organizations have dramatically better marketing success.

My book The New Rules of Marketing & PR uses buyer personas as a fundamental starting point of great marketing. If you want even more, my friend Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute has great information.

I'm always looking for examples of buyer persona success. I'll be sharing an example from a professional services firm in the next week or two.

Entrenched music business hates free content (again) & blasts Amanda Palmer

In the past few hours, two friends – C.C. Chapman and Justin Cambria - who both know I have written and spoken about rocker Amanda Palmer alerted me to a dustup around how the rock star is putting together bands for her tour.

On her blog, Amanda writes WANTED: HORN-Y AND STRING-Y VOLUNTEERS FOR THE GRAND THEFT ORCHESTRA TOUR!!!!

Now there is an active discussion on Amanda's blog with nearly 200 comments as I write this, many negative. The people who are critical say that Amanda must pay her musicians and that it is not fair to ask people to play for free. Mainstream media has picked up on the story including this from the New York Times Rockers Playing for Beer: Fair Play? and from prefix Amanda Palmer 'Can't Afford' To Pay Her Backup Band.

New business models in the music business

I'm with Amanda on this one.

Because she specifically says "volunteers," it is perfectly clear what she is looking for. In other words, it is not a bait and switch of some kind. Importantly, this request was a post on her personal blog so she can tap her fan base – it wasn’t posted on a musicians' site or another outside forum.

Whenever new business models emerge, the people who work within the established system recoil in horror. That happened to me over the past decade as I talked up new ways to market products and services on the Web. Many traditional agency people hated the ideas and told me so, mocking that you can reach people on the Web for free.

The entrenched powers that be in the music business actively resist change. They shut down Napster. They sue kids who download music. To this day, many record labels forbid YouTube distribution of music which is crazy because having your song on YouTube is, as Bob Lefsetz says, "the new radio."

Amanda constantly pushes new models such as firing her label and self-funding her latest album via Kickstarter. She offers downloads of her new album Theatre is Evil on a pay what you want basis. Traditional record labels hate this stuff.

With change comes opportunity

Journalism is another example of new business models evolving where the entrenched fight change. I write for free for the Huffington Post. I do this because by posting on HuffPo, I can reach a new audience. Many old guard media folks hate this. They say journalists should be paid. They say I am not a valid writer because I have no formal training. Guilty. So don't read me on HuffPo then. You don't have to read this blog. I'm cool with that.

Here's another important point: As models change, new opportunities emerge. For example, I've talked about the tremendous opportunity that journalists have working for companies outside mainstream media. Professional journalists can apply their skills at organizations of all kinds to create content. Companies as diverse as as Eloqua, Boeing, Inova Health System , and HSBC have all hired full-time journalists. For a professional journalist, as one door closes a little another opens wide.

As music models change, musicians should look to the positive, not the negative. Isn't it cool that you can make a website, blog, or YouTube channel for free to promote your music? That opportunity didn't exist a few years ago.

Sure you're not getting paid for Amanda’s gig. But it is your choice to play or not. Should you be an up and coming player, you can have some fun, get a credit, score some stage photos, and publish a YouTube video of the whole thing. You can then spread these via social media to gain exposure. For free.

This is a controversial topic that’s playing out right now in real-time. What do you think?

How to create awesome web content and achieve top search engine rankings

This blog post highlights a very successful marketer - Larry Waight of The Lodge at Chaa Creek, an eco-resort in Western Belize - who has achieved high search engine rankings for many important keywords. This content marketing effort generates a remarkable 80% of new business for the Lodge. This important case example is among the best I've seen if you want to learn how content drives business. This is brand journalism at its finest.

As anyone who has built a web site knows, there is much more to think about than just the content. Design, color, navigation, and appropriate technology are all important aspects of a good web site. Unfortunately, in many organizations these other concerns dominate. Why is that? I think it’s easier to focus on a site's design or technology than on its content.

One of my favorite examples of sites with poor content but big budget design and technology are the global hotel chains. Go to any hotel property from the majors: Hilton, Sheraton, Marriott, or any others from around the world. They all look the same! They have almost no original content about that property!

Yes, appearance and navigation are important. But the best sites focus primarily on content to pull together their various buyers, markets, media, and products in one comprehensive place where content is not only king, but president and Pope as well.

Content drives action

Contrast the vast majority of hotel sites with that of The Lodge at Chaa Creek. I had an opportunity to stay at Chaa Creek a few weeks ago and I interviewed Larry Waight about how he creates his awesome content.

Direct link to the video How to create awesome web content and achieve top search engine rankings on YouTube.

Larry researches what people are searching on such as Belize honeymoon and Belize all inclusive. He then created content on his site or Belize Travel Blog specifically for these phrases which are ranked highly in the search engines.

Solving buyers problem with content

Most interesting to me is how Larry creates content that is about Belize, not just about the hotel.

This is an essential element of Chaa Creek's marketing success. Search terms such as Belize winter solstice 2012 and bird watching in Belize drive people to the lodge who were searching on general travel information. Brilliant.

On his Belize Travel Blog, Larry also writes not about the lodge itself but about Belize travel such as Ten reasons why Belize makes for Honeymoon Bliss.

Brand Journalism

One of my favorite examples of this technique of writing about the things people are interested in is how Larry has created a bunch of content about the local Mayan sites nearby the hotel such as Xunantunich Maya Temples. And, get this, he even writes about the Tikal Mayan site - which is in Guatemala – another country! - about two hours from Chaa Creek.

All this content drives people to the hotel site and blog through the search engines and many people will then choose to stay at The Lodge at Chaa Creek. Indeed, some 80% of new bookings to the Lodge are from this content marketing effort.

This is one of the best examples of content marketing I've seen. If you want to learn more about how Larry creates content, do take the time to watch the video.

It was Larry's introductions that got me to Belize which shows the power of connecting with people via social media. Thanks Larry! I'm planning on returning, with my family next time.

Disclosure (updated September 12, 2012): I connected with Larry several years ago through both Facebook and Twitter. This year we communicated via Facebook about a visit to Belize. To facilitate that, Larry introduced me to the Director of the Belize Tourism Industry Association who invited me to speak in Belize at the Belize Marketing Summit. Because I was going to be in Belize anyway, Larry invited me extend my visit and stay to The Lodge at Chaa Creek for a few days, covering part (but not all) of the costs of my hotel stay. However, this blog post is in no way a paid endorsement. I chose to write this because I truly believe the Lodge at Chaa Creek is a terrific example of success.

5 ideas for marketing and communications professors success in the classroom

Here in the United States, we’re just about to embark on a new academic year and therefore this is a good time for me to provide some ideas for instructors. If you know a professor who teaches marketing or communications (or a student taking a course in these areas), please pass this on.

It's exciting how far we've come in the area of marketing and public relations education at our colleges and universities worldwide. Just two years ago I found the state of university instruction generally so poor that I wrote a post titled Many marketing and communications professors are criminals. While I'm nowhere near as pessimistic as I was then, the academic world is very resistant to change (especially those with tenure), so there are definitely people who still resist teaching the new rules of marketing.

Here are some ideas I've learned from professors around the world that you might use in your classroom.

1. Care about your students

Take a look at this post from Bill Sledzik, Associate Professor, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Kent State University: Why we teach: Reflections on 20 years in the classroom.

Bill is someone who understood very early that we're going through a change towards digital. Because he cares about students, he implemented the ideas in the classroom before almost anyone else.

Here's an interview I did with Bill to learn more about what he does so well.

Direct link to Bill Sledzik discuses modern Public Relations education on YouTube.

2. Show, don't tell

One of the best ways to get students active with social media is to use popular platforms as tools in class. For example, you can use a blog as the course syllabus. Twitter could be the way people ask questions outside of class (longer answers could be posted somewhere with a link). Other platforms that could be used include Slideshare for presentations and Pinterest for links.

3. Encourage students to get away from the CV and resume

One of the most important things you can do for students is prepare them for the real world of job search. Starting right from the first year, students need to find internships. Upon graduation, they need full time work. Sadly, the vast majority of marketing and communications students still focus exclusively on the boring old plain text CV.

You should encourage students to start a personal blog as part of class. The blog will serve as a way to get them known to potential employers. For example, here's new Tufts graduate Lindsey Kirchoff's blog.

4. Pick a local nonprofit and do a pro-bono makeover of their online marketing

Having students work together to help a local organization is a good way to actually implement ideas. You can see the results in just one term and it will help a worthy cause.

5. Choose the right classroom materials

My book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, now in its third edition, is used in many hundreds of universities around the world. It's a primary or supplemental text in Marketing courses and Public Relations courses as well as MBA programs, entrepreneurial offerings and journalism classes.

My publishers, John Wiley & Sons, have put together a special resources page, which includes free instructor materials that you can use in class to supplement The New Rules of Marketing and PR. The materials are free, however, you need to register on the site to get access.

Are you a professor? What techniques do you use?

If you’re a student or recent graduate, what were some of the effective ways you were taught?