Producing great content is no easy feat. It requires a lot of time and brainpower, and many people are left wondering after they publish a post if the return was worth the investment. So what’s the secret to successful content? The answer is that there isn’t just one secret; there are many. Which means, sadly, there are many ways your content can fail. But you can vastly increase your success rate with a strategic approach. To cut through the mystery — and simplify what it takes to produce...

Water is fundamental to health, but 1.8 billion people in the world drink from contaminated sources. This makes water sanitation among the most pressing global health priorities. A new initiative aims to provide 500,000 people in the developing world with safe drinking water by 2017 through brilliantly simple proprietary technology backed by cutting-edge design, collaboration and financing. Seattle-based MSR, a maker of high-tech mountaineering gear that is part of Cascade Designs, is...

Is content marketing dead? Content shock and what to do about it Just a couple of years ago, content marketing was king online. If you ran a business and didn’t provide high-quality, free content through a blog, social media or some other avenue, you could consider yourself DOA. But marketing professionals began to warn that “content shock,” also called content fatigue, was looming. This concept, introduced by Mark Schaefer in 2014, describes “when exponentially increasing volumes of content...

These days, the phrase “content is king” still holds true (to an extent). But the rules surrounding content production as well as our understanding of it as marketers has changed. No longer is it about having content in spades, it’s all about quality. Having one great piece of content is always going to be better than 10 second-rate pieces that don’t add any value for readers. However, if you can consistently produce great content on a regular basis, that’s enough to dominate the online...

This article by Sasha LaFerte/Content Marketing Institute offers a good overview and starting place for developing a brand style guide. CK Sometimes branding fails are caused by something getting lost in translation. For example, when Coors translated its slogan, “Turn It Loose,” into Spanish, it used a colloquial term for diarrhea. More often, though, branding fails happen because of a lack of a clear style guide, which can result in inconsistency or miscommunication among your content...