Nirvanic Marketing

Give birth to a thought that preempts all other thoughts. The goal is to achieve nirvana.

An incomplete nirvana to be sure, but a form of immediate or instant gratification. In marketing terms, this instant gratification impulse, or thought, is the goal.

By making the reader/viewer stop on a dime and buy your product or service.

Doing a good job, a fantastic job, of marketing to the nirvanic impulse means being totally honest and transparent about that which you are selling. The transparency of your efforts must be completely honest. You must completely believe in the product through experience, otherwise the viewer will instantly see through the effort and click away.

Curating Content

Content curation, or maintenance, is more important for regular web sites than it is for blogs sites. Why?
Even though you may use a content management system (CMS), the content for the main “static” pages can become dated.

Blog are more “news” oriented so the expectations of readers is lower. The older the content is, the less likely it is to be read. Back links to earlier posts are less newsworthy.

Maintaining a blog, however, is sometimes necessary to keep a theme, or idea, moving over a long period. Series of articles, or a contest, may need to be updated to remind and update readers as to the happenings since they were written.

Do you really care about your readers?

Three points:

• Are you honestly selling what you blog about?
• Are you making your content clearly accessible?
• Are your advertisements related to the posts? 

I live in Washington State. We have some strong laws about unsolicited commercial email, and personally, I think we don’t need any unsolicited commercial advertising, either.

My point is: Your readers don’t need junk advertising, either. I have seen many spammy blogs, and that is what those bloggers are exposing us to, unsolicited commercial junk advertising. Do such bloggers really care about their customers (readers)? 

One of the reasons I moved my blog off Blogger.com was to disassociate myself from the spammy sites on that platform. Some of them are so cluttered with advertising that the content is completely irrelevant even though it is the ummm, point of their existence.

One such blog, one I sort of mentioned in the “3 Tools to Check Your Writing” post, is a prime example. This blogger was upset because another one had allegedly ripped off his content. I have to ask myself, what content? The site takes so long to load and the advertisements and propaganda in the right column are so distracting …. Who is he to cry wolf, come on now, really? Not having seen the unmentioned, and apparently unnamable, blog that ripped off his material, is there really a difference?

Point 3
Another blog, one that claims to give advice on content marketing, and is apparently somewhat popular for it, made me page down twice, that’s way below the fold, to get to the post I wanted to read. The first two pages were the small masthead and totally unrelated and irrelevant junk advertisements. Was the post informative? No. I wasted my time and got exposed to other peoples’ stuff, not the post writers’. How can that blogger care about his readers?

Point 2
Another point to keep in mind, on the content end, is: Are your posts relevant to the ads? Or, ask it another way: Are the ads relevant to your posts? I see many posts that claim to be about family history, but are really about medical conditions. There is not much connection between the two, as far as I am concerned. My guess is that the writers are trying to capitalize on the genealogy pastime and make a buck. Or, are they totally ignorant of what the term “family history” means?

Point 1
Are you honestly selling what you are blogging about or are you selling something else? Quite a few sites claim to be about genealogy, but the writers of the posts on those sites are not genealogists. They are marketing something totally unrelated, and that is their own private religious beliefs. Do you do that, wear your religion on your shoulder so blatantly, or are your beliefs a private, personal matter, like they should be?

How do you fix the problem? Curate your content. 

• Go through all the advertising on your blog.
• Go through all the content on your blog. 

Ask yourself: Are the ads specifically related to the content? If not, scrap one or the other, whichever one is less important to you. If you scrap the irrelevant ads, great, you will do your customer a favor. If you 

scrap the irrelevant content, do you have any left? 

Focus your content on what you really want to make a point about. 

Ask yourself: Are you selling what you blog about, or are you just blogging to sell other stuff? If you are trying to sell other stuff by using a blogging platform, get a sales job, that’s where you belong. It probably pays better, too. If you are blogging for a business: blog about what your businesses is selling and get rid of the irrelevant advertisements.

If the customer wants more, they will be back. If not, either they did not find what they came for, or they got spammed.

Think about it.

NPM 

© 2012 N. P. Maling – Zen C&S MM

Writing for Content Marketing

The first question is: “Is it useful?” The second question is: “Is it worth it?”

These two questions put together, subject matter and value, are keys to great content. Is the article news to the reader? Does the article offer readers something to consider trying on their own? Can the reader find sources for help within the article? In other words, does the article promote who or what you are selling? If yes, then the content is marketing you or your brand. 

Results from content marketing are long-term investments, by the creator and by the customer. If what you are selling or promoting is just a short-term project then content marketing is not necessary. If you are looking to build your brand, then content marketing is mandatory. Can the writer you hire do the job? Only time will tell. 

Knowing what to write about in the first place takes a subject matter expert, someone who knows the field or the product in depth and who communicates that knowledge in an understandable way. The expert also needs to know what other relevant subjects might be interesting to the reader. Context and originality go together in making a valuable content marketing strategy. 

Using random articles cobbled together from other web sites is poor business practice. Avoid the cheap brokers and scammers like you find on freelancer.com or guru.com when you put together a content marketing strategy. Just saying “I need x number of articles about ….” is poor business practice. You cannot expect the creators of those junky articles to be experts without giving them unique and original information about your business. Your potential customers reading the articles will not become experts, either, if the topic is presented poorly. 

This is where a curator comes in. A subject matter expert curates the content on your website like a museum curator manages her exhibits and collections. Having subjects written about in an original way means hiring someone who can test the existing landscape of a subject, the trends and popularity of the material to be exhibited, and the lasting value of that writing. Only someone who knows the ins-and-outs of a particular business or professional field can do that.

Making the most of the content takes time for finding, organizing, and presenting the material. Would you trust that someone you do not know knows the field to write about it? Checking the curator’s ability takes a little of your own expertise and feeds it back into the community. By knowing the curator’s expertise compared to your own, you can be assured of quality content. Having some unknown writer, who knows where, provide your content is a risky business.

This is where someone like Alvin Toffler has described comes in; someone who can learn, unlearn, and relearn a field. Your investment in a content curator will pay off if you hire someone who can do those things; someone who has experience in several fields. Hiring someone who has interests other than what she (or he), is writing about helps, too. Focusing so tightly on one subject limits the curator’s perspective on the larger context of your customers’ life.

NPM

© 2012 N. P. Maling – Zen C&SMM

Welcome!

Zen Content & Social Media Marketing Management is a new endeavor of mine and I hope to share with you as much as I know of the business and how it works.

I'll be posting a couple of times a week, at least to begin, so look for more soon.

Thanks,
NPM