Content is KING !


“People don’t read, especially when it comes to web and mobile” – I said that!

Content is important:

• Content adds value
• Content is part of the user experience

With ‘Mobile First’ design philosophy coming into power, content is increasingly gaining importance, but ironically much of the mobile first design philosophy fails due to one big reason: CONTENT. Content failure is not a new phenomenon and can be seen even in web specific designs. If, we address the root cause of the problem, it can be attributed to difference in user behavior towards content for website and mobile.
Keeping this in mind, here are some guidelines to create effective digital content. These guidelines are applicable for both mobile and web content strategy:


1. If the first 160 characters of content do not sound meaningful, rest of content cannot be useful!
With the ever reducing attention span of readers, you need to ensure that the audience is impressed with the first 160 characters of content you write. If an idea cannot be told succinctly there will be no one listening to it, and if there is no one listening, the idea is useless. Hence, it makes more sense to put in all the skills and make those first 160 characters impressive!




2. If everything is useful, then everything is useless. True or False?
True. If you think that all the content is useful for a website’s target audience, then you are surely mistaken. We usually tend to fill in so much content that everything seems to be useless and the user tends to drift away.




3. Use scan-able keywords
Every user opens a site with something in mind. If that something is not scan-able or searchable, it is highly unlikely that the user will stay for more.




4. Start with conclusions and recommendations
‘Inverted pyramid’ style of writing is the key for good content on web and mobile. People want to know quickly about everything; no one has time to read a novel




5. Attention grabbing headings, meaningful subheadings
Headings are used to grab attention and sub-headings are used to further utilize that attention span. Keeping the sub-heading simple without jargons and to the point, helps to gain the reader’s trust as well. Jargon, complex terms, clever lines are meant for the main heading. Keep them out of the rest of the content!




6. A picture is worth 1000 words, but we don’t want 1000 words. Do we?
The intention is to keep it simple, neat and easy to download. A picture may seem to be the best option for visual appeal and representation of an idea, but it increases the size of the content. With download speeds varying unpredictably, pictures sometimes are a blot to user experience.

9 intranet content types that add value to your organisation

Everyone knows that intranets are a great way to collect and distribute information and content throughout an organisation. But exactly what types of content should the intranet be used for and how does this content add value to an organisation?

Research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) has shown that those intranets that make it easier for people to do their jobs are the most valuable.

Indeed, how an organisation does things is what separates one organisation from another. It is a critical ingredient to success. Does a bank manager call you back to discuss your loan application or does she send you a computer generated letter? Does an inquiry about your phone bill result in you being offered additional services or do you simply receive an answer to your question? Do you add one slice of tomato or two to that cheeseburger? 

Every organisation has hundreds, maybe thousands, of decisions to make about the way it operates. These decisions combine together to comprise business activities and policies and ultimately determine whether an organisation succeeds or not. And the most efficient way for these practices to be dispersed across an organisation – particularly organisations with many employees - is through the intranet.

An effective intranet can be viewed as the ‘brains’ of an entire organisation – it describes how an organisation functions and ensures that all employees are ‘singing from the same hymn book’.

Bearing this in mind, the following list of 9 intranet content types will help your staff carry out business tasks more effectively (8 of them at least!). Use this checklist to make sure your intranet is capturing and delivering content that will add value to your organisation.

1. How to

This type of content describes how the different business tasks within an organisation are performed. Examples include how to process a sales order, how to invoice a customer, how to identify new customers, how to order a new laptop and thousands of other possibilities.

On most intranets this is a collection of web pages, policies and procedures. New organisations will create a lot of this type of intranet content as new tasks are identified and created. For existing organisations, this content is updated and changed as new processes, systems, practices, innovations, ideas, products and services are introduced.

Potentially all staff may be the creators and also the end users of this content. The value of this type of content to an organisation is that it ‘de-skills’ many tasks and spreads the knowledge throughout an organisation, effectively making it less expensive and more efficient for organisations to operate as more staff are able to complete more tasks more quickly and more consistently.

2. Forms, templates, tools, applications       

This is content that supports the ‘How to...’ content. Examples may include templates, websites, online forms and web applications. This can help staff complete tasks more quickly and accurately, eg. a template (or online form preferably) for claiming expenses ensures that this task is done consistently and correctly with a minimum of hassle to the staff member.

3. Re-usable documents

This consists of documents that can be modified and then re-used again. Examples include sales proposals, funding requests, project plans and presentations. This can be a great time saver for many organisations and can also improve the quality of the document.

Imagine that you have a 100 page sales proposal that you have already done for an organisation previously (which was successful!). It is much easier to re-use and modify this sales proposal for a new client than to start again from scratch.         

4. Structured content      

This includes content that has a consistent structure and has many occurrences of the same item. Examples include staff lists, customer lists, service and product lists, business unit descriptions and other ad hoc lists (eg. list of recommended training venues). This type of content will also support the ‘How to...’ content and can be added and updated on an almost continuous basis, potentially by all staff.

The more items and the more comprehensive the information, the more useful this content will be. Imagine that before meeting a customer, you are able to read a description of the customer that is the sum of all knowledge of everyone in the organisation.

5. News, blogs, staff status updates   

This is content that staff may or may not choose to read. It is not critical for the completion of a task but will highlight areas of the business that are important to staff. This content may be managed by a central group such as the communications team and may be used help spread the culture and values of the organisation as well as helping to engage employees. Examples of this type of content include news stories that highlight other categories of content, eg. a change in the way a task is done, staff profiles, a new customer, a successful proposal bid or a relevant external news story.

6. Reference material     

This can includes case studies, white papers, other research and articles that can help your organisation in some way. It is content that does not change and can also help support ‘How to...’ content.  This type of content helps develop the skills of staff and can also improve business processes. For example, you may read an article about using social media more effectively for marketing and this may change your marketing processes as a result. This type of content can be added to over time, potentially by all staff.            

7. Collaboration, discussion

This is content that is ‘under development’ or ‘in-progress’. It requires less governance than the other content types and typically does not require ‘approval’ or ‘sign-off’. It may include documents you are working on with other people, new product ideas, suggestions, discussion forums, project sites and other general purpose team sites.

Collaboration areas may be used on a daily basis. Output from collaboration type content may eventually find its way to the other content types. For example, if you post a discussion question about the best place to run a workshop in New York, the resulting answer would be logically placed as ‘structured content’ in a list of ‘Workshop Venues’. In future, if a staff member is looking for a place to run a workshop in New York, rather than reading a discussion topic which could potentially have dozens of comments, they can simply refer to the ‘workshop list’ (which will be referenced from a task called ‘Conduct a workshop’).

8. Reports, performance measures

This includes content that provides feedback about how the organisation is performing – in other words, how effectively tasks are being performed. This may include the share price, customer satisfaction levels, sales figures and a host of other key performance indicators.

9. Archive, records

This content is anything that is kept simply for historical purposes (for example old product descriptions or details of staff who have left). By default, some intranets end up acting as an archive, however this is not the best place for this type of content. Over time, the more content that is added to the intranet, the less effective searching becomes and the less trusting staff are of the content. Imagine a staff list where most of the staff have left! The intranet should be a place where staff can access current, accurate and relevant information.

Alternative approaches to records management and archiving are more appropriate.

1. SEO's Major Pit falls:


SEO Techniques are a set of specific tasks that would be performed by a Search Engine Optimization Company, when employed by a Client who desires high search engine 


positions to attract targeted traffic, with the intention of increasing their conversion rates and brand awareness. 


All of these pages, keywords and techniques need to work together so you need a plan to coordinate that, including:


Keyword research , potential keywords !


SEO Strategy (Individuals practice)


Social Networking


Site structure (matching your target keywords) and navigation to distribute link power around your site


On page SEO, Off page SEO




2. Not having a keyword:


Relevant Keywords and Quality Content are of the up most importance when implementing effective search engine optimization techniques. When a person try to search query into a Search Engine they expect exact results relating exactly to the Keywords that were entered. In order for the Search Engine to display results quickly it needs a method of Indexing its database which could contain references to billions of websites. 


So first step to Sucess / Failure starts with the KEYWORD !


3. On page, Off Page SEO:


The term "On Page" is related to and defined as the actual website domain and its content, including all sub pages. The Search Engine will base its scoring on the Quality of the Content relating to the Relevant Keywords that are visible within the pages of the site. Web pages within a site should all be unique. Individual web 


pages have the ability to create Meta Tags. 




The term "Off Page" is related to other websites that provide a Backlink to the Domain Name URLs that the Algorithm is calculating. The Search Engine will determine the relevance and quality of the website that is providing the link, and weight or score the link information accordingly. 


4. SEO - Content, Sales and Marketing team goes hand by hand ! 
when one hand fails, rest will fail too !!


New content without SEO to maximize the number of target visitors seeing that content is a waste. SEO without marketing to convert those visitors is a waste. Your content, SEO and marketing should work together as part of a process. 


5. Reports / Analytics - Never Ignore !


You have to monitor response eg, how much time users spends time in the site / page ? How many buy your product or signing up to your newsletter ? How many enquires has reached the sales team ? Also do Monitor traffic, rankings and response for relevant searches. 


If you are getting good or bad results you need to act appropriately. 


6. Unsupportive content management systems


By choosing a poor CMS, you end with a poor navigation & content flow, which would in return affect the ranking as well. If you want to drive in rain without getting wet, buy a car than opting for scooter.


8. Take control of your website.


By letting developers take control of online content is like you letting the doctor to diagonize the problem without telling the actual problem. The developer's job is to deliver the functions you want and keep the site working. What goes on the site and where and when is the responsibility of editorial and marketing, including SEO.


9. Information Architecture:


Organising functionality and content into a structure that people are able to navigate intuitively doesn’t happen by chance. Organisations must recognise the importance of information architecture or else they run the risk of creating great content and functionality that no one can ever find.


In Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites they define information architecture as:


- The combination of organisation, labelling, and navigation schemes within an information system.
- The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content.

Web Advertising Guide:

If you operate a blog, have built a web app or are otherwise are trying to monetize a property on the web, advertising is one of the first paths that you might amble down. Let’s throw the baby in with the bathwater and say that ads will be your primary method of monetizing your idea. In that case you might need to be a little more sophisticated. This guide will step you through the process of finding the right advertisers for your site, and maximizing your revenue potential.

Types of revenue models from advertising

CPA

Cost Per Action (Affiliate) programs are sold through marketplaces like Commission Junction. These advertisements usual marked by high (sometimes very high) payouts, but the downside is that in order to make any money at all — users have to purchase the product or services from the advertising company through your site.

Typically, these types of ads perform best on high volume sites with services that compliment the product that the advertiser is trying to sell. If your site is about concert reviews, a Ticketmaster Affiliate program will perform a lot better than if your site was about Model Trains. If your site has no particular focus, Affiliates are going to be a hard sell.

I would suggest trying them out but realize that many, many times these will make you no money at all.

CPC

Cost Per Click advertisement is the first stop for many entrepreneurs looking for a way to monetize. Google Adsense is the most well known CPC vendor. The benefits of CPC are that these ad blocks are easy to set up, and they can potentially generate revenue even at small levels of traffic.

The downside to CPC advertising is that the revenue it generates is uneven because it strongly depends on ad placement location and niche your service operates in. Certain industries (typically those that sell high ticket products and services) can do really well under this model but many will find themselves with an inventory full of really low paying ads.

Typically, CPC is a good place to start until you get your feet wet; however, unless it’s consistently successful for you it does not scale as well as other options.

CPM

Cost Per Thousand advertising are what networks like Casale Media and Tribal Fusion deal in. You are paid per impression instead of for each click. Typically, for web services with high volume but relatively low engagement, this is a great option for monetization.

Not only do these networks often pay more than CPC advertising, but your payment is directly related to the number of pageviews that you get to your site. This makes it a lot easier to predict your advertising revenue from month to month.

The biggest drawbacks is that many of the good networks are difficult to get into, and the bad networks offer CPMs that are too low to be a viable revenue model. I suggest constantly shop around for better CPMs. As you grow and your audience becomes more engaged, you should be looking for networks that are willing to pay you more for that engagement.

Boutiques

BlogAds, Federated Media, and The Deck are three examples of boutique ad networks. Typically, these companies focus their attention on specific verticals and have extremely high standards in the sites that they let in. As a result, the CPMs that they pay are often substantially higher than similarly positioned networks.

In order to be considered for one of these networks, you will either have to have a service that is high profile, targets a very specific niche or extremely high volume. Since these are premium advertisers, they might also have stricter rules about how their ads can be displayed.

Usually, by the time you are ready to apply for a Boutique ad network your real question will be whether you want to outsource your sales or handle them yourself. If you decide that doing sales internally is not in your best interest, these networks are an excellent source of revenue.

Direct Sales

If you have the team, the time, and the patience the best way to make money off of ads is selling them yourself. Not only do you not have to pay an ad network a portion of what you make, but you also have complete control over how the ads will be presented and what type of advertisers that you choose to take on.

It sounds great but the big thing to remember is that selling advertising is not easy. Everything from identifying potential advertisers, to determining a price point that makes sense for your customers to providing them with the details of how well their ad is doing takes time. When you are a young company, that time might be better spent taking care of more pressing problems.

If you are ready to invest in an ad sales team, the biggest thing to remember is that advertisers pay premiums for strong verticals, high click through rate and exclusivity. When building your package, try to have one or more of these “features” as a part of it.

Understanding key terms

When shopping around for an advertising network, there are three phrases you will hear a lot. Understanding the distinction between them will save you time, effort and lost revenue.

Ad network

Examples: Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertisers.

An ad network serves ads in a format as determined by their technology. Take a look at the three examples that I gave, you will see that each of them has a particular format of ads that they carry — whether it is Adsense’s contextual model or Adbrite’s marketplace, each network brings to the table both the technology and the creative to serve with it. Typically, ad networks have no problem filling your inventory and they pay out on a cost per click or cost per action basis.

Ad servers

Examples: Doubleclick (DART), Right Media, Atlas

An ad server is a “capsule” that tracks and displays ads. It is neither an ad network nor is it a rep agency, it’s a piece of software. Ad servers allow you to track the number of impressions you are serving, analyze the demographic data surrounding it and control which networks and rep agencies get impressions. The better ad servers let you target your campaigns by a number of psychogaphic and demographic criteria. There are a few good free ad serving solutions available (OpenAds for instance), however, if serving ads will be a serious part of your business (and you have the minimum required pageviews) you should look into purchasing DART or Atlus.

Rep Agency

Examples: Technorati Media, Federated Media, and Gorilla Nation

We often use the words ad network when we mean to say rep agency, there is a significant difference.

A rep agency is a company that acts as a broker between publishers and agencies. In exchange for getting deals with major brand advertisers (Netflix, Fritos, Pepsi etc . . .) they take a portion of the revenue (anywhere between 30-60%). Rep agencies can be extraordinarily beneficial because they have well connected sales teams who can land deals that many small companies cannot. The good ones have an inside track with the major ad agencies, and they control a substantial volume of impressions — which makes it easier for them to get agencies to the table. Most large web properties, even those capable of doing direct sales will sell a portion of their inventory through rep agencies. It simplifies sales cycles and ensures that everyone “gets an ad.” Since every impression served from a rep agency represents a “sale,” these networks typically have a harder time filling inventory than ad networks.

The advertising chain

Setting up a set of campaigns for a large site means understanding the advertising chain. No one provider will be able to fill all of your available advertising inventory with the highest paying ads. How do you solve this? You chain a bunch of different providers together. Applications like the Rubicon Project and Pubmatic exist to make this easier, but you can do it on your own with a little bit of work.

Direct sales

This represents the most expensive ads in your stable. These are ads sold by your sales team. Typically the rate in which these ads are displayed are determined by contract you have with the advertiser. In most cases these will exist near the top of your chain and will take up anywhere from 30 to 60% of your inventory.

Rep Agency sales

Next down the line come your high quality rep agencies. The rule of thumb is to pick the one with the highest CPM and fill rate to exist at the top, and plug in other networks as passbacks. A passback is an additional provider that will be given an opportunity to serve an ad should the provider further up the chain be unable to. At this point you should have taken care of 20 or 30% more of your inventory, enough to finish the chain using . . .

Ad Networks

If you still have unsold inventory, don’t be afraid to throw in an ad network like Adsense. Under the right conditions, these networks can generate a substantial amount of revenue and just as importantly, they rarely ever have a problem with fill. Don’t give up on trying to fill your inventory using providers further up the chain though, typically ad networks provide lower quality, more generic ads than either direct sales or rep agencies.

Here is an example of an advertising chain:

Ad server: DART

Toshiba (Direct Sale)
Netflicks (Direct Sale)
Technorati Media (Rep Agency)

• Tribal Fusion (Passback)
• Blue Lithium (Passback)

Adsense (Ad Network)

Making money from ads on the web is a balancing act. Always, you are trying to maintain the highe,st possible CPM while still filling out your inventory. To do this requires experimentation and a little bit of patience. Never be afraid to keep trying, the more work you are willing to put into it, the more money you are likely to get out of it.

(emailer)