Difference between static, dynamic and interactive content

Your content marketing strategy often needs to be a steady mix of static, dynamic and interactive content. Yes, content is of different types and every type of content has its own characteristics, and pros and cons. Let’s see how these individual types of content can help you take your content marketing forward.

Static content

Static content never or rarely changes. It remains there on your website for weeks, months and sometimes, even years. It may include your homepage, website pages, eBooks, case studies and white papers, landing pages, videos, PPC campaigns and social media profiles.

Wondering how come videos and social media profiles become static? By static content we don’t mean content that doesn’t move. Although in video things move, but once a video is published, it rarely goes through changes. It is the same story, the same visuals, the same sounds. No matter how many times a person watches your video, it is going to remain the same and eventually, people are going to stop watching it.

Social media/networking profile means the profile, the main page, not the feeds.

Advantages of static content

Easier to create.
Easier to distribute.
Low-cost.
Lets you focus on highly targeted groups for better conversion.

Disadvantages of static content

Has no repeat value, people soon get bored of it and stop consuming it.
Doesn’t get indexed by search engine crawlers repeatedly.
There is one-way communication with no intent to engage the audience.

Dynamic content

Dynamic content is constantly updated according to the latest trends, available information and user input. Some examples of dynamic content are your business blog, the RSS feeds, your social media feeds, email newsletters, personalised website content (the content changes if a person is logged in or if he or she has become your customer), A/B test landing pages and syndicated content.

Advantages of dynamic content

It keeps your visitors interested in what you have to say by continuously serving them latest and updated content.
It gives you higher conversion rate because dynamic content keeps people interested in your website and blog and keeps them coming back to your website repeatedly.
Interesting, relevant and evolving content increases audience loyalty.
Dynamic content is shared often on social media and social networking websites.
It improves your search engine rankings as search engines like Google prefer to visit freshly updated and dynamic content rather than static content that never changes.

Disadvantages of dynamic content

Dynamic content is costly compared to static content.
Requires complete change in marketing outlook as all your content becomes customer-centric from product-centric.
Requires constant analysis because it needs to change and adapt according to its metrics.

Interactive content

As the name suggests, it evolves according to user input. Interactive content is usually not prepared or created by a single person or a single agency and often you have little control over it. Examples of interactive content include your blog comments, people’s comments under your social networking and social media profiles, Facebook updates and tweets, online service, online games and mobile apps, multi-participant webinars, customer reviews and social sharing buttons. Some content marketers also prefer to call it “crowd sourced content”.

Advantages of interactive content

Low-cost and easy to set up, for example the commenting section on your blog. Similarly, once you create your social networking profiles and start interacting with people and increase the engagement level, people begin to participate in various conversations, generating interactive content in the process. After a certain threshold level, it is practically set on autopilot.
Gives you more social credibility. If more people are encouraged (feel encouraged) to spend time generating content for you it means they are serious about your brand or at least have some serious views (whether negative or positive). It is a social proof of your online reputation.
Increases brand loyalty. When people repeatedly interact with you in lieu of generating content for you their sense of loyalty towards your brand increases.

Disadvantages of interactive content

You have little control over the quality of the content.
Trolls can easily take over especially on social media and social networking websites.
Lots of spam can be generated making your entire content marketing counter-productive.
It can become resource-consuming in the long run because you need to closely monitor the quality of interactions.

What should you focus on? Static, dynamic interactive content?

It depends on your target audience. As mentioned above, it should be a heady mix of static, dynamic and interactive content and all types of content should follow a clearly-defined path of evolution. For example, you can begin your online presence with dynamic content which is needed to create your presence and improve your search engine rankings. Once you have generated decent amount of dynamic content, you should focus on increasing the number of pages containing static content for consistent information. Eventually, as you become more famous on the Internet, interactive content begins to manifest. When this happens, you not only have to keep up with the momentum, you also need to monitor the quality of your interactive content.

Looking for good content marketing writers? Here is what you should do

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The success of your content marketing depends on your writers whether you intend to use text content, video content or image content. Ultimately it is the written word that gets the message across and if you are unable to get the message across, your entire content marketing fails.

When pursuing content marketing both quality and quantity matter. Quantity matters because your competitors are continuously publishing tons of content and you are constantly in danger of getting drowned in the din.

Quality because, well, there is no content marketing without quality content. By the end of the day, your content needs to convert. It needs to make an impact. It should be well-written. It should be conversational. It should be able to reach out to your target audience and consequently, your target audience should feel like reaching out to you after getting exposed to your content. Your content should be so well-written and so well-produced that people should feel like sharing it without you having to prompt them to share it. How does this happen? This happens when you have good, experienced and creative content writers in your team.

This blog post at NewsCred lists the following ways you can find yourself good content writers:

Use your LinkedIn network:
Many professionals list themselves on LinkedIn and this includes content writers. In fact, these days I am extensively promoting myself on LinkedIn (I have also upgraded my account to Premium) but I mostly try to find clients. It is also a good place to look out for competent writers because as my work increases, I will need more writers.
Find good content writers among your own employees: You will be surprised to know that many of your employees have this hidden talent. Without putting extra pressure on them you can encourage some of your employees to come up with good blog post regarding your business. Even if they are unable to churn out complete blog posts and articles, they can create outlines using Google Docs or OneDrive and later on these outlines can be turned into full-fledged pieces of content.
Work with freelance content marketing writers: This might be one of the best options available to you because when you work with freelance content marketing writers, you enjoy unprecedented freedom. First of all you are not stuck with the writers that you have hired. They don’t use your office resources because most of the freelance content marketing writers work from their own respective locations. It is extremely easy to change the writers because all you have to do is approach someone else in case you don’t like the writers you are currently working with.

Of course it doesn’t just stop at finding good content marketing writers and working with them. As the article rightly mentions, you will need to vet these writers to make sure that you work only with the best. Initially you will need to hire and fire repeatedly and you may feel disenchanted but once you are working with the writers your content marketing strategy really needs, there will be no looking back.

What do you choose? Digital advertising or content marketing?

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There was a time when digital marketing was avant-garde. People swore by PPC and retargeting. These advertising campaigns use software algorithms to decide, according to your net browsing habits, what sort of advertising you should be exposed to when you visit various websites, even social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Small bits of information like some ad that you recently clicked or some article that you recently read, or something that you purchased on an e-commerce website, are used to calculate and predict you’re buying pattern.

According to this Bloomberg Business article, such PPC and retargeting campaigns are nothing but click frauds. Below I’m publishing a small portion of the article, you can read the entire article in the original link above.

Increasingly, digital ad viewers aren’t human. A study done last year in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers embedded billions of digital ads with code designed to determine who or what was seeing them. Eleven percent of display ads and almost a quarter of video ads were “viewed” by software, not people. According to the ANA study, which was conducted by the security firm White Ops and is titled The Bot Baseline: Fraud In Digital Advertising, fake traffic will cost advertisers $6.3 billion this year.

One ad tracked in the study was a video spot for Chrysler that ran last year on Saveur.tv, a site based on the food and travel lifestyle magazine. Only 2 percent of the ad views registered as human, according to a person who was briefed on data provided to the study’s participants. Chrysler, which doesn’t dispute the data, ceased buying ads on the site once it became aware of the “fraudulent activity,” says Eileen Wunderlich, the automaker’s spokeswoman. White Ops, which left out the names of the advertiser and website in its published study, declined to comment. Executives at Bonnier, the publishing company behind Saveur.tv, say they screen every impression and that the White Ops study looked at 5,700 ads, a very small number. They also say there are multiple methods for detecting nonhuman traffic, and that there’s no single standard used by the industry. “We weren’t aware of any problem or complaint. If it had been brought to our attention we would have fixed it,” says Perri Dorset, a Bonnier spokeswoman.

Fake traffic has become a commodity. There’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it. Some companies pay for it intentionally, some accidentally, and some prefer not to ask where their traffic comes from. It’s given rise to an industry of countermeasures, which inspire counter-countermeasures. “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole,” says Fernando Arriola, vice president for media and integration at ConAgra Foods. Consumers, meanwhile, to the extent they pay attention to targeted ads at all, hate them: The top paid iPhone app on Apple’s App Store is an ad blocker.

The revelations are quite startling considering the fact that even big companies like Google depend on pay per click traffic.

The so-called revolutionary technology that drives digital advertising is turning out to be as ineffective as native advertising like TV and print. At least when it comes to advertising on TV and print it’s not the boards that are watching your ads – people are either watching them or not watching them. On the Internet, the views and clicks can be easily faked. If you are advertising on the Internet, you might be paying for bots clicking your ads. This is sad, but this is also a reality.

So what do you do if you want to promote your business online? It may seem like blowing my own horn, but when it comes to promoting your business online, nothing can beat, at least for the time being, content marketing. You cannot fake high quality content and the response it generates. Of course there is spamming and there are automatic content aggregators but such spurious content generation tactics never work or rarely work. It’s the original, relevant and valuable content that always does the trick.

10 tips to write high-quality content extremely fast

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Writing High-Quality Content Extremely Fast

If you want to use content marketing to promote your business online, the greatest hurdle can be writing high-quality content on an ongoing basis. This might not be a problem if you are a big business and you have a budget to achieve this. But if you are a small business, it might be a bit difficult to hire a full-time content writer and you may have to churn up something relevant on your own, preferably, every day.

According to this Content Marketing Institute report (it’s a PDF), 51% B2C content marketers face the challenge of producing enough high-quality content. 57% claim that they don’t have enough time to produce the sort of content that is actually effective. Predictably, larger companies, since they have more budget and they can hire the people who can produce quality content, don’t face much difficulty in producing high quality content compared to smaller companies.

Why do you need to write high-quality content on an ongoing basis?

There is lots of competition on the Internet. When you are not writing, scores of your competitors are. This is because people who take their content marketing seriously know that without content no marketing exists. Since everybody is producing content in one form or another, everybody tries to outdo each other. Although it would be impractical to outdo everybody, there is a certain degree of pace that you need to keep in order to remain visible and not get left behind. For example, if you are a small business I would suggest that you publish at least 3 blog posts every week on your business blog and then promote individual blog posts as much as you can using various channels available to you. This is an ongoing process. You can’t add 20 odd blog posts and articles in one go and think that your content marketing is over. In fact, it has just started. The search engines won’t even start crawling or indexing your content if you just have 20 blog posts. You need to continuously publish for at least a few months in order to get a decent presence on the Internet, compared to your competitors.

How do you write high-quality content extremely fast?

So how do you write high-quality content extremely fast so that you can fit in content marketing with your busy professional schedule? After all, writing content isn’t your main occupation. It is just one of the marketing activities and as you already know, there are many other promotional activities you will need to focus on in order to beat competition.

Always be on the lookout for great writing ideas:
You should be sensitive towards receiving new content writing ideas because once you become sensitive, you will notice that such ideas are everywhere. While reading blog posts and articles, while going through your Facebook, Twitter and Google + news feeds and even while reading magazines and newspaper, once your mind becomes receptive, you will receive content writing ideas. There is a UK-based company for whom I’m writing content that is totally unrelated to its field, still I need to relate the content to its field and write interesting content. Now I wonder why I never did this for my own business.
Maintain an ideas bank:
Ideas come and when you don’t preserve them, they go vanish into the oblivion. So once they hit you, you need to save them somewhere. You can use something like Evernote to preserve your ideas. If Evernote is too bulky for you, you can use Google Keep.
Work on multiple content topics at the same time: Sometimes you feel stuck and when you feel stuck, it causes delay. When you start working on a blog post or an article for your website, don’t think that you need to publish it on the very same day (I used to get trapped in this rut). You need to practice patience. Let it simmer whenever you feel that you cannot move forward. Instead of wasting your time staring at the screen, move onto another topic. When you feel that you have something valuable to add to the previous blog post or article, come back to it and start writing again. Make use of all the technology tools available to you. Save your content writing documents on the cloud using services like Dropbox, Google Drive or even One Drive so that you can access your documents from anywhere, from any device.
Remain ahead of the schedule: It’s like, if you need to complete or publish something on Wednesday, don’t wait for Wednesday morning. Try to complete it on Tuesday, and if possible even on Monday. I’m trying to practice this with my content writing projects. Sometimes I used to feel very relaxed because hey, if you need to dispatch something on Wednesday, why worry on Monday, or even Tuesday. This creates crunch time and when it is crunch time, it’s difficult to be in a commanding position and for a writer, it’s very important to be in the commanding position.
Maintain and stick to an editorial calendar: Editorial calendar means deciding on which day you’re going to write and publish what. Maintaining an editorial calendar is a good way to keep your content writing juices flowing and also remain on schedule. If you don’t have an editorial calendar, you become relaxed. For example, if you were supposed to publish something on Wednesday and you didn’t, then there is a great chance you won’t publish it even on Thursday, or even on Friday. And then it becomes a pattern. You start missing days and then soon you realise, you aren’t publishing content at all. Having said that, my personal experience is that an editorial calendar works better for bigger businesses because they have dedicated teams of content writers to take care of the tight schedule. When it comes to small businesses, more than sticking to the editorial calendar, I stress on regularly publishing content, as often as you can, because this is far better than having no content.
Constantly save reference and research material: Just like you should preserve ideas, you should also preserve reference and research material somewhere. Again, my favourite tool for this is Evernote. You can create notebooks and within those notebooks you can create notes to save different stuff. This isn’t the best thing, the best thing is that you can attach tags to various notes. For example, if I have saved something and tagged it as “content marketing stats”, the next time I need to use some solid content marketing stats in one of my blog posts, I can quickly search the relevant tag and find the material that I need to use. Remember that it is not about saving your stats and other bits of information, it’s about finding them when you need them. Evernote is great in finding your saved information but I haven’t used Google Keep extensively (but considering it’s from Google, it might have faster searching and indexing mechanism). Another benefit of using Evernote is that you can get a browser plug-in that allows you to save information while you’re surfing the web which, right now, is not possible with Google Keep.
Develop your own unique voice: You can write high-quality content extremely fast if you don’t try to imitate someone. This is same as trying to walk like someone else – although for some time it might be fun, after a while you will get tired and you would like to resume your own way of working. The same goes with content writing, or for that matter any sort of writing. You need to develop your own unique voice, your own style, your own way of writing. When you have your own way of writing, you are extremely comfortable and when you’re comfortable, you write fast and fluently.
Continuously educate yourself: Continuous education is a must if you want to write high-quality content fast on an ongoing basis. The more you know, the more confident you feel and the more confident you feel, the easier the words come to you. If you don’t know something, how are you going to write about it? If you are not comfortable with the topic, you will need to do lots of research and you will need to write about stuff you don’t know much about. This makes your writing stiff. As a professional content writer, I’m used to writing on totally alien topics with great amount of ease but that is because I have gotten used to it. I have been writing content for different businesses for many years now so if I need to do some research and then write accordingly, I don’t face much problem, but then again, in order to come to this level, you need lots of practice and experience.
Cover a single topic in a single piece of content: You don’t want to pack everything into a single piece of content. For example, in this blog post I’m writing about how to write high-quality content extremely fast. I’m not writing about optimized content. I’m not trying to tell how to make your content social media friendly. I’m not telling here how to optimally use keywords in order to improve your search engine rankings with SEO content writing. No, I’m just talking about how to write lots of high-quality content in as fast a manner as possible.
Rewrite existing content: You can rewrite existing content faster than writing new content from scratch. If you have lots of blog posts, webpages and articles already published on your website, you can choose a subtopic and then expand upon it. Or, a lot must have changed since you wrote on that particular topic a couple of years ago. Why not write it with a completely new perspective, using the latest information that you have with you?

The tips mentioned above will help you create high-quality content quite fast but ultimately it depends on you whether you want to develop the mindset that helps you write quality content on a regular basis. It’s all about getting started and once you get used to it, you will discover that it is quite easy to regularly write and publish good content not just for your own blog or website, but also for various other websites where you can expand your presence.

10 metrics that tell you content marketing is making a positive impact on your business

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It’s been now a few years since content marketing went mainstream. People no longer wonder what content marketing is although a majority of business owners, entrepreneurs and companies still have doubts regarding how it exactly works for businesses and companies that vouch for it. The problem with content marketing is most of the buzz in its favour is created by people who themselves are content marketers. There are few non-content-marketing companies that put forward case studies to show how it has impacted their businesses in a positive manner and improved their bottom lines. This is also because content marketing is also a relatively new phenomena (in terms of using it on the Internet, otherwise it has existed for centuries).

Why is it important to know the content marketing success metrics?

Because unless we know them, how do we know what works and what doesn’t work? Success stories of many businesses have proven repeatedly that content marketing is working for them, but it is not a copy/paste technique because every business is unique. If you want to use content marketing, you have to use according to the needs of your own business and according to the needs of your customers and clients. There are different dynamics involved. The metric that works for business “A” might not work for business “B” and vice-a-versa. But of course, there are some standard metrics that can be observed and monitored in order to know how well your content marketing is working, and some of these metrics are listed below.

Metrics that tell you that your content marketing is benefiting your business

The increase in traffic for the targeted keywords: Most of my content marketing and content writing clients approach me for this purpose – they want to increase search engine traffic for their targeted keywords. How many of these keyword-centric visitors actually turn into paying customers and clients is another issue, but if you see that since the beginning of your content marketing campaign your targeted search engine traffic has increased, it means your content marketing is working.
The amount of time people spend on your website or blog is increasing: The more they stay on your website or blog the more they buy from you. This maxim works for every website. If people are spending more time on your website it means your content marketing is working.
Your bounce rate is coming down:
Bounce rate means people leave your website immediately after coming to the page or blog post they landed on without checking out the other pages or block posts. The success indicator of your content marketing is that your bounce rate reduces and people tend to not just stay longer on your website but also go through other sections.
The number of unique visitors is increasing: If your content marketing is drawing people from various sources it means your presence on the Internet is being recognised and gaining traction.
The number of repeat visitors is increasing: People repeatedly come to your website when they find something valuable, whether it is your content or the products and services they are looking for. Again, the more they come to your website, the greater is the chance that they end up becoming your customers and clients.
Your email subscribers are increasing: Your mailing list is one of the most valuable marketing assets you have. It takes lots of effort to make people sign up for your regular updates and if your signups are increasing, it means people value your content and would like to repeatedly hear from you.
The number of inbound links is increasing: There are 2 reasons your website and blog need inbound links – to get diversified but targeted traffic and to increase your search engine rankings. When more people link to you it means they can easily find your content because unless they come to your content directly or via another source, they cannot link to it. If more reputed blogs and websites are linking to you your content marketing is yielding results.
More people are sharing your content on social media and social networking websites: Again, 2 things are happening – people are easily able to find your content and they consider your content valuable and useful. In terms of marketing, it is easier to publish valuable content but difficult to make it findable. This happens with strategic marketing. When people are finding your content links through other resources (not directly from you) and then they are sharing your links under their own social media and social networking profiles, this is a very healthy content marketing metrics although you may not realise how it brings direct business to you.
The number of leads are increasing: Your content marketing effort is showing results if the number of leads that you generate during a particular period is increasing. Surely you have some mechanism in place that tracks how many leads your website generates per week or per month. If you are observing an increase in the number of people showing direct interest in doing business with you after the initiation of your content marketing campaign, you’re getting positive results.
Your business is increasing: Your revenue has increased. You are making more sales. You are getting more clients. Your customers and clients are referring more customers and clients to your business. If you have been running a content marketing campaign and nothing else and you can see these results, it is one of the strongest metrics.

Please keep in mind that sometimes metrics can be misleading. If suddenly you see a spike in traffic you may believe that your content marketing efforts are working wonders but unless the traffic turns into business, you cannot rest assured of the efficacy of your content marketing efforts. This is why you need to analyse constantly. If you are getting traffic, what sort of traffic your content marketing is generating? Are you getting search engine traffic for the right keywords? Is your brand getting known for the right reasons? Are people lingering on your website for the right reasons?

Nevertheless, these 10 content marketing metrics can keep you focused.