(Newswire.net — August 12, 2014) Altadena, CA —
93% of marketers use content marketing and 60% create one piece of content each week. This explosion of content online means that consumers have an overwhelming array of information available to them. But are they finding this content? Unless branded content can easily be found and shared all this effort on the part of brands may be a waste of time and money. SMART News: how to write branded content that gets found in search and shared on social media gives marketers what they need to know to succeed with content marketing.
According to PRESSfeed’s annual survey of news content, very few companies are optimizing their news content for search or social. This was supported by a study of news content on the major wire services that showed that less than 20% of all press releases are optimized for search and social media.
For years press releases have been regarded as a good SEO tactic. But the recent Google Panda 4.0 applied the Google content quality guidelines to news content and categorized news releases as owned content, not earned content. This hit the PR industry hard. Wire services saw their rankings and site traffic plummet as a result.
SMART News: how to write branded content that gets found in search and shared on social media covers everything a PR or marketing person needs to know so that their content will rank in search and social media and prompt the reader to share it with their friends and colleagues:
- The shifts in media consumption
- How search and social are converging
- Why social is important to online visibility
- The Web search algorithms
- Panda and Penguin updates – and how they affect news content
- The News search algorithms
- How to do keyword research
- How to find trending topics
- How to find and use a news hook
- How to write the headline – for search and social
- What goes in the subhead
- The lede graf
- Where to put links
- What kind of links to use
- How to use the Boilerplate to improve local search ranking
- The media’s need for images and video
- What multimedia to add to news content
- Optimizing images and video for search and social
- Google Authorship – for web search and news search
- How to tag your news content
- Using rich snippets to improve your search listing
- Finding new audiences for your news content
- The value of a Content Hub – the new role of the newsroom
- How and where to distribute your content
- Forming content partnerships
- Working with influencers
- Paid amplification of content
- Measuring the impact of your content
SMART News is written by Sally Falkow, a veteran PR practitioner who is Accredited in PR by the Public Relations Society of America. Falkow has been evangelizing the use of digital PR and optimized news content since 2000.
“The internet has completely changed the news business,” says Falkow. “Every media outlet is operating under different rules now. This has created a wonderful opportunity for brands to create news content – if they write it correctly, add images and video that enhance and extend the story and make sure it can be found and shared.”
SMART News is now available on Amazon in the Kindle Store for $8.98
http://www.amazon.com/Smart-News-branded-content-Marketing-ebook/dp/B00EB9Q29O