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…You Want The Truth! (Amplify Self-Serve Questions & Answers)

May 16, 2012 at 4:27 PM by Natalie Chan | No Comments

With more than 100 billion trillion blogs in the world, getting your content discovered can be tough, which is why we’re so pleased to be working with bloggers and small biz folks to ensure your content reaches new eyes and ears every day. Recently, we’ve been asked a ton of great questions about Outbrain’s Amplify Self-Serve platform and how to enhance content marketing success.

In this series, we’re sharing some of the questions we’ve received from actual Self-Serve users and our best advice for improving the work we’re doing together. Feel free to leave additional questions in the Comments section beneath the article if you’re interested in even more information.

Q: How does the CPC pricing model work? I want to ensure I’m not paying high CPCs

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Outbrain is Proud To Be ‘Made in New York’

May 15, 2012 at 4:53 PM by Juan Martinez | No Comments

Outbrain is proud to be one of more than 600 New York City startups, investors and co-working spaces named in the Made in New York Digital Map, which reveals the office locations of tech start-ups and the industry’s more than 1000 job opportunities. The map was conceived by Internet Week New York in conjunction with the Mayor’s Office and was revealed this morning during day two of Internet Week.

More than 320 companies boast more than 1,000 open positions. Right here in your backyard. Click here for ours!

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The Atlantic Doesn’t Fret Over SEO and Neither Should You

May 14, 2012 at 9:42 AM by Juan Martinez | No Comments

SEO’s stranglehold over content production is loosening a bit each day. On May 10, two editors of The Atlantic’s digital operation renounced the notion that quality journalism needs to be SEO-friendly. “Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company told Mashable. “Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.”

Havens said 40% of The Atlantic’s traffic comes from social media, which has forced the publisher to figure out how to capitalize on the growing importance of social networks, rather than search engines, according to the article.

Bob Cohn, the recently promoted editor of The Atlantic Digital, echoed Havens’s sentiments.  “We’re no longer writing to get the attention of Google algorithms,” Cohn said. “We’re writing to get you to share it, to digg it.”

Cohn also told Mashable that Atlantic writers author their own headlines before they are rewritten by channel editors and “sometimes tweaked” again by a homepage editor. When asked why he didn’t feed in a separate headline in the metadata, Cohn told Mashable that “it was no longer important enough to compensate for a boring headline, even in search results or on Google News,” according to the article.

Props to The Atlantic for shedding the weight of this commonly held mythology. We’ve been saying for a long, long time that being discoverable on search engines is important, but obsessing over SEO is not as important today as it was ten years ago. Publishers that focus on developing the best content for human beings will ultimately surpass those that develop content for search engines.

We’re not the only ones who’ve been preaching this philosophy. A recent Content Marketing Institute study found that 82% of marketers place a high value on content written for people and not search engines.

Macy’s Leads The Charge (This Week In Content Marketing)

May 10, 2012 at 12:31 PM by Juan Martinez | No Comments

Macy’s is in the process of a $400 million renovation of its flagship Herald Square location. Behind the scenes, the company is also developing a content marketing strategy that is likely to put it on par with some of the industry’s best brands. Find out what Jennifer Kasper, Macy’s group vice president for digital media and multicultural marketing, has to say about the brand’s strategy, and learn about the best and worst content strategies from some of the industry’s top thought leaders.

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An Airline Tragedy, A Killer Swan and A Murderous Nurse (30 Minutes with Outbrain)

May 9, 2012 at 2:01 PM by Juan Martinez | No Comments

30 Minutes with Outbrain is a regular feature of The Blog in which an Outbrain staffer or guest contributor chronicles his/her navigation of our company widget for a half-hour.

For the inaugural 30 Minutes with Outbrain blog post, I’ll start my journey on CNN.com where I will click on the most interesting article I can find. I’ll read the article, summarize the content and share my experience reading the content. Then I will click on the most intriguing Outbrain suggested link and repeat the process until my 30 minutes end.

Start your content discovery engines!

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Content Marketing: The $20 Billion Online Branding Opportunity (Guest Post on Forbes.com)

May 8, 2012 at 10:12 AM by Juan Martinez | 1 Comment

Be honest with me for a second: You don’t actually remember the best display ad you saw last night, do you? Do you even feel enough of an attachment to display ads to rank them? I don’t think so. But every once in a while a 60-second spot will hit you in the gut and make you feel something powerful. Last night, I got a little verklempt watching this doozy:

The reason we get attached to commercials is because they tell a story. We’re able to align ourselves with experiences and emotions — two things display ads are incapable of depicting. For some reason, however, digital advertisers continue to pour dollars into display ads, rather than leveraging content marketing to boost digital communications.

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…You Want The Truth! (13 Content Marketing Questions & Answers)

May 4, 2012 at 10:00 AM by Juan Martinez | 3 Comments

Last week, actionable marketing expert Heidi Cohen conducted a webinar on content marketing development, discovery and distribution. During the webinar, which was attended by 172 of you fine people, Heidi received more than a dozen shrewd questions. She provided answers to some of the queries during the webinar’s Q&A, but I thought I’d take a crack providing you with our perspective as well. To see an on-demand replay of the webinar, click here.

Q: Could you speak to microconversion and lead generation? Much of this [presentation] is built around sales and purchases.

A: Your content can function as an ideal introductory interaction with prospects and leads. Good content provides entertainment or informational value, but it also enables your audience to learn about your company’s strategies and principles. Use your blog, video and social media assets to inform people about what your company stands for and not just what your next product release will be. This, coupled with quality content, allows you to create a community of readers and audience members who will return to your site beyond the initial information gathering stage; in this manner you are actually developing a conversion funnel that brings readers from introductions to information gathering to participation to conversion.

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Tips, Tools, Lessons and Learnings (This Week in Content Marketing)

May 3, 2012 at 1:00 AM by Juan Martinez | No Comments

Twitter’s launch of a more personalized Discover tab helped bring content discovery to the forefront of the marketing and technology industries this week, while marketing media stalwarts continued to provide valuable insights on how to get content discovered by the right audiences.

13 Content Marketing Steps — ClickZ

Author Heidi Cohen offers seven tips on content production and six tips on content discovery and distribution. Check out Heidi’s ClickZ webinar for a more in-depth explanation.

Twitter Adds More Personalization On The ‘Discover’ Tab To Improve Content Discovery — Marketing Land

Matt McGee provides an in-depth explanation of the tab’s enhanced capabilities and what it might mean for content consumers. Increased personalization is always a good thing. I’m interested in whether the functionality fits into how the typical Twitter user discovers content.  

3 Tips for Increasing Your Content Productivity — Content Marketing Institute

Studying the right examples, choosing the right tools and mastering the right habits can help you to consistently create content that serves a productive marketing function. This is a can’t miss article for content marketing newbies.

12 Essential Tools for the Content Marketer — Mashable

Webinars, infographics and case studies are among the 12 essential weapons in every content marketer’s arsenal. You’d be surprised to see what else made the list.

What B-to-B Brands Are Learning About Content Marketing — Folio

Understanding the personas of your leads should influence the kind of content you’re using to target them. If you haven’t thought about diversifying your content to meet different audience segments, this article is perfect for you.

 Image Via: Twitter Blog

What Content Discovery Means To Me…

May 2, 2012 at 10:29 AM by Ido Yerushalmi | No Comments

When I was a kid I used to read the encyclopedia before I went to sleep. If my friends had known it would have led to a lot of trouble, so I also trained in Judo for 10 years. I guess it worked because they never made fun of me for being a geek.

There were two reasons I loved reading the encyclopedia so much: 1) I fantasized about one day winning a trivia competition and 2) I loved reading about things I had no idea I was interested in until I started reading. The topics I read about had absolutely nothing in common besides their alphabetical order in the encyclopedia.

Each night, I came across all types of interesting content, from people to historic events, from geography to physics. That was my first encounter with the notion of “content discovery,” although when I was nine years old I’m not sure I would have understood the meaning of the term (and surely not in English).

I looked at my nightly reading as a version of window shopping. I loved having the ability to discover, research and look for answers to questions I never previously knew existed.

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Use Big Data To More Effectively Engage Readers (Guest Post On Digiday)

Apr 27, 2012 at 10:27 AM by Juan Martinez | No Comments

Big data can be a tremendous asset for driving traffic to publisher sites. However, one of the other cool things it can be used for is keeping audiences engaged beyond the first click after they enter through social media. Unlike search, publishers can leverage social data and followings to skyrocket engagement.

For more information on how brands and publishers can make effective use of technology to enhance the power of their content, check out Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai’s article critiquing recent Digiday coverage. In the piece he explains why he rejoices when he hears that banner ads are dying, he praises ESPN’s multimedia platform approach and he lauds P&G for its powerful storytelling.

Image Source: http://www.health2news.com