This Week in Content Marketing: Content Creation Plummeting on Facebook

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.

In this week’s episode, Robert and I analyze several new digital marketing statistics, including the decline of user content creation on Facebook and consumer use of wearables, and discuss the opportunities and challenges each trend creates for marketers. We ponder Doc Searls’ observations on the rise of ad blockers, and explore the thinking behind the Digital Disruptors documentary film one small agency is developing. Finally, we share what marketers can learn from publishers who are hiring “platform wranglers” to bring a more strategic focus to their online channel initiatives. Rants and raves include retailers using online data to drive what they offer in their physical stores and Activision’s decision to launch a film studio. We wrap up the show with a #ThisOldMarketing example of the week from Interface Age magazine.

This week’s show

(Recorded live November 9, 2015; Length: 1:05:55)

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1. Content marketing in the news

• Nine fascinating stats in digital marketing this last week (4:00): Adweek highlights nine of the most interesting digital marketing stats from the past seven days in this article. Among the most interesting: Facebook users are becoming lurkers; 66% report they didn’t post anything there in the last three months.

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#Facebook users are becoming lurkers; 66% report they didn’t post in the last three months via @Chris_Heine
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Robert and I discuss a variety of factors that may be contributing to this trend. Another  fascinating stat: By the end of this year, 39.5 million U.S. adults will have utilized wearables such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, a 58% jump over last year. We discuss the         opportunities for utilizing data from these devices to provide enhanced or personalized customer experiences. Nike’s “Your Year” is a great example of what’s possible.

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39.5 million U.S. adults will have utilized #wearables, a 58% jump over last year via @Chris_Heine @adweek
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• Ad blockers and the next chapter of the Internet (15:24): This opinion piece by uberblogger and customer advocate Doc Searls takes the Techdirt website to task for giving its readers the ability to turn off ads if they want to, but continuing to track their activity. Searls claims Techdirt is in denial about its lack of power over readers with ad blockers. I observe that people want irrelevant ads blocked but don’t seem to care that brands are still collecting data about them, while Robert thinks Searls’ description of “surveillance-based marketing” sounds too draconian.

• The inside story on the design disruptors documentary film (25:45): Small design firm InVision has taken on the challenge of creating a feature-length documentary called Design Disruptors, the HubSpot blog reports. This film will explore how design has risen to become one of the most important roles in modern business. Its recently released trailer has garnered international attention. Robert and I love this approach, which aims to grow the entire industry, not just promote InVision. We discuss why it can really make a difference for a small company and what risks it may involve.

• Publishers create new job role: Platform wrangler (31:47): The rise of the distributed publisher has given rise to a new role at media companies: the platform ambassador. This article from Digiday explores a variety of approaches large media publishers are taking to strategically manage relationships and processes with all of the major social media platforms. Robert and I wholeheartedly agree that this is the way that every marketing organization should start to think. We discuss the industrial-age thinking traps many marketers tend to fall into.

2. Sponsor (41:03)

• Lean content marketing: Whether you are a large or small organization, getting your content marketing machine up and running is tough! A lot of companies lack the budget, resources, and time to implement an effective content strategy. In this e-book from Marketo, you will learn to leverage the resources you already have to create the content needed to fuel demand. http://bit.ly/marketo-lean-marketing

3. Rants and raves (44:20)

• Robert’s rave: Robert loves this excellent article from HBR, which outlines best practices that organizations ought to keep in mind as they think about creating digital experiences. The author also talks about adapting the marketing department’s structure and purpose around the creation, management, and flow of content – excellent advice that is presented in a concise, actionable form.

• Joe’s raves: I have three quick raves to share. The first is an article about the launch of Amazon’s first physical store in Seattle, and how it and other retailers are using their online customer data to provide excellent in-person experiences.

Image source

The second article is an announcement that Activision Blizzard is launching its own movie and television studio to redeploy its deep trove of video game characters and plots into new media. This strategy can pay off by attracting new customers to each medium.

Finally, Jay Acunzo has written an excellent rebuttal of my idea that Nike should acquire the popular Grantland sports news site. As usual, his thinking is top-notch.

4. This Old Marketing example of the week (53:39)

• Interface Age magazine: One of the first national microcomputer magazines, Interface Age started out as SCCS Interface, the club newsletter for the Southern California Computer Society. It was immediately popular with microcomputer hobbyists and early fans of Apple Computer. After several issues, Bob Jones, of the advertising agency McPheters, Wolfe, and Jones, offered to transform it into a magazine that was on par with professionally produced publications. He made a profit-sharing deal with SCCS in which that group would provide the majority of the content and Jones would manage the publishing and marketing. The magazine was released in August 1976 with the new name, Interface. By the following year, it had been expanded to Interface Age. That remained its name through the rest of its run, which ended in 1985. The Apple II History website contains some fascinating quotes from an interview with Steve Jobs in the July 1976 issue. It’s a great story of how a publication produced by a nonprofit evolved into a successful magazine. It’s a terrific example of #ThisOldMarketing.

For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page.

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The post This Week in Content Marketing: Content Creation Plummeting on Facebook appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Danger Ahead: When Content Distribution Is On Autopilot

Andy Crestodina is the co-founder of Orbit Media and one of the best teachers we know when it comes to search engine optimization, email marketing, and social media. In this interview, he speaks plainly about why great content creators don’t always come out ahead, and the dangers of putting your content distribution strategies on autopilot.

CCO: Three years ago, the content marketing mantra was something like, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ Yet more and more, I see marketers paying a lot of attention to what comes after creation. What matters more?

Crestodina: Quality is a deal breaker. Low-quality content can’t be helped by any effort. No amount of promotion will help a bad piece of content get more traffic, engage more visitors, or attain higher ROI. Quality is a necessary baseline.

But there is not necessarily a correlation between high-quality content and traffic. An OK piece of content that is promoted brilliantly will outperform brilliant content with just OK promotion. There is no doubt in my mind about that. The winners are those who are great promoters. Great creators are not necessarily going to come out on top.

It’s common – especially for bloggers – to publish something, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and then move on to the next piece of content. They spend 80% of their time on content and 20% of their time marketing it.

They’re slaves to the publishing calendar. To get better results, they speed up the publishing schedule but do not change their tactics for promotion. Endlessly sharing via social media and emailing to a list are not nearly as powerful as a plan to get large-scale sharing or a plan to aggressively grow your list.

The winners in content marketing are those who are good at influencer marketing, list growth, and keyword research/usage. Those are the most important tactics for the three main traffic channels: social, email, and search.

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CCO: I see influencer marketing, list growth, and SEO as tech-driven. True?

Crestodina: There’s a science to it and tools for each, but I don’t think you need technology to do any of those three. You only need basic tools. Simple programming and web design tricks will give you list growth. And you don’t need to use influencer-marketing platforms.

It’s not really about the tools; it’s what you do with them. Imagine you want more friends in life. Would you say, “I need to get better at communicating. I’m going to buy a better phone?” No. You can’t automate getting new friends. The same is true for growing your audience.

Here’s a classic example: A lot of marketers use a plug-in from WordPress to manage keywords. Every time they write something, they are careful to use certain keywords in the headline and body text, use meta tags, etc. The plug-in tells them to use the keyword “x” many times. The visual meter on the screen goes from red to green when they’ve filled the quota. That is a crazy way to do SEO because it doesn’t take into account the likelihood of ranking for that phrase. No matter how and where you use the phrase, you will lose if you’re not in the same range of authority and link popularity as the other high-ranking sites for the phrase.

Marketers who try to ram in keywords – and particularly those targeting a phrase for which they have zero chance to rank – show a fundamental lack of understanding of what works. It’s depressing in the long run.

Another mistake is choosing a keyword(s) because it has the biggest search value. If someone sees that one phrase gets 100 searches per month versus another with 10,000 searches per month, they think the second phrase is better. But this isn’t always true. People want a prescriptive answer, but it’s not that simple.

The gap between good and great isn’t a quality gap; it’s a promotion gap. Great content requires an understanding of why people visit a particular website, how headlines work, the role of images and colors – basically the psychology of web searches and content consumption.

Let me offer an example. You may want to know: What is the best format and topic for downloads that will get people to give you an email address? The answer? A list of tools in a PDF format. It may vary audience by audience, but evidence shows the ideal ethical bribe to get a visitor to subscribe (i.e., share an email address) is a PDF with a list of tools. Those who don’t try it will have slower list growth.

Promotion savvy requires an analytical – even technical – skill set. You need to be a hacker of psychology and search. There’s little opinion involved. Judging the quality of content is squishy, but knowing which actions lead to which outcomes for traffic and promotion is not that squishy.

This article originally appeared in the October issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to CMI’s bimonthly, print magazine.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Danger Ahead: When Content Distribution Is On Autopilot appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

The Basics of Digital Governance: What Content Marketers Need to Know

Do you ever feel confused about which members of your digital content team should make what decisions and when? Do you even know who all the team members are and what they do?

Do you sometimes smell ROT (information that’s redundant, outdated, or trivial) and wish that your organization had a better process for maintaining its old content so that customers were more likely to discover only content that’s relevant, up-to-date, and useful?

If so, you’re yearning for digital governance. You’re yearning for the things that Lisa Welchman talked about at the Intelligent Content Conference (and that are summarized in this post). And if the popularity of her session is any indicator, you’re not alone in your yearnings.

You can learn even more by downloading CMI’s e-book, Digital Governance: A Primer for Content Marketers.

What exactly is digital governance?

As Lisa defines it, digital governance is “a discipline that focuses on establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy, and standards.” In other words, digital governance gives organizations a way to manage content-related decisions that does not involve the seat of anyone’s pants.

Most digital governance challenges come from not knowing who’s supposed to decide things. We’re not talking about micromanaging. We’re talking about supporting people in doing their jobs. For example, if you need to pick a color palette, “it’s not a community decision,” Lisa says. “It’s a conversation, and then you say, ‘That team over there gets to decide.’ Because that scales.”

Does governance stifle creativity?

No. Governance enables innovation and creativity.

A small digital team, like a jazz ensemble, can get away with making things up as it goes along. A large team, on the other hand, needs to operate like a symphony orchestra, as Lisa explained to me after her talk. Improvising doesn’t scale. A large team needs to follow standards just as an orchestra needs to follow sheet music. Unfortunately, most large teams don’t mature into the orchestra model.

Standards help a large group function by “providing the structure needed for people to prepare and deliver content on a large scale while still allowing for creativity and a beautiful outcome.”

Does every project need a governance plan?

No. You don’t need governance for every content effort. For example, when you launch a new channel or do something experimental, governance would just get in the way. Lisa calls this early phase after launch “organic growth.” During this phase, you try things and figure out what works.

You need digital governance only after you start to figure out what’s working. At that point, you should think, “OK, how are we going to put some standards and mechanisms in place to scale this effort?” Along with that, you should think about what content is worth keeping and what should be thrown away.

Most organizations don’t do that. Their content falls into chaos, as represented by the blue dots in and around this arrow.

Lisa Welchman, author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, addresses the middle part of this arrow – moving from content chaos to basic management. “I want to show you how to get yourself out of trouble, to get your feet on the ground, and do some things intentionally – governance by design – instead of firefighting all the time.”

How do we get started with digital governance?

To get started, create a digital governance framework by following these steps:

1. Organize the digital content team.
2. Identify the strategists.
3. Identify the policymakers.
4. Establish workable standards.

1. Organize the digital content team

Find out who’s on your digital content team and organize them. The team may be broader and more dispersed than you expect, maybe even “sprayed all over the organization.”

The team – the full set of resources required to keep your digital presence functioning for your organization – comprises these sub-groups:

• Core team
• Distributed team
• Working groups and committees
• Extended team

“You have to get a handle on the whole team,” Lisa says, “and it takes some effort.”

2. Identify the strategists

After you’ve got a handle on your team, you need to identify the leaders in the realm of strategy. You need two kinds of strategists: Those who can establish vision and those with the digital savvy to enable that vision.

Many organizations have a problem in that the people with digital savvy are, as Lisa says, “much more junior than the executives, so there’s this big gap. Even when there’s a chief digital officer, often that person is not as senior. That will change.”

3. Identify the policymakers

To develop adequate policies, you need two types of people:

• Policy steward (the person who makes sure that the necessary policies are in place)

• Policy authors (the people who write those policies)

Policy is about managing risk. People usually attend to policy only as much as they have to. If you look at the footer on a website, you’ll see policy-related terms like privacy, terms of use, and security. The larger the organization, the more numerous and complex its policies are.

Often, organizations have privacy and security policies that their IT groups have created. In general, though, Lisa says, many organizations are “very immature on policy.”

4. Establish workable standards

Lots of people care about – and argue about – this final step in creating the framework. This step is where you determine the nature of your organization’s digital presence. This is where you answer questions like: Who determines the nature of your digital portfolio? Who decides what stuff we make and what it looks like? What’s the tone?

Standards fall into four camps:

• Design
• Editorial
• Network and infrastructure
• Publishing and development

When you define a standard, you have to think about implementation. If a standard would be hard to implement, scrap it and come up with a basic, workable guideline. When you create workable standards, and when the digital content team understands who’s in charge of which things, no one has to enforce the standards after the fact, saying, essentially, “That doesn’t work – take it down.” Compliance is naturally high.

Summary

After you’ve put a digital governance framework in place, ideally everyone on the content team embraces your organization’s digital content standards the way orchestra members embrace their sheet music. In that standards-compliant environment, team members know who’s supposed to do what when. Together, they make beautiful music – and give audiences the kind of experience they came for.

What governance issues do you struggle with? What processes work well for your team? Let us know in the comments.

To learn even more, download this e-book: Digital Governance: A Primer for Content Marketers.

Want to learn more about digital governance and other content strategy topics in person? Register for the Intelligent Content Conference: Content Strategy for Marketers. Lisa Welchman is also offering a workshop specific to digital governance.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The Basics of Digital Governance: What Content Marketers Need to Know appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Trouble Coming Up with Ideas for Posts? Check Out This Generator

If you have been blogging for a while, you probably know that coming up with ideas for new and interesting blog posts can be quite a challenge on in a while. Keeping your blog updated and writing new content regularly is paramount to getting well positioned on the Google search results, but creating all that content is not easy!

Luckily there are some tricks and tools you can use for this purpose.

The tip I have is to take a look at a magazine stand or at magazines from niches different from yours. You’ll notice that the headlines and the stories can easily be adapted to your own blog and audience. For instance, suppose you have a blog about cars. Pick up a fitness magazine and you might find an article titled “7 Mistakes You Are Probably Doing in the Gym.” You could adapt it to your own site as “7 Mistakes You Are Probably Doing With Your Car.”

Easy huh?

Now here’s a tool that will remove even that work from your part. It’s called Blog Idea Generator. All you have to do is to input 3 words (preferably nouns) and the tool will automatically generate 5 blog post titles for you. I tested it and really liked the result, and the ideas it suggested were really catchy and engaging.

Definitely a tool to bookmark and use regularly, whenever your creative juices are not flowing adequately!

How about you, what tips and tricks do you use to come up with new blog post ideas?

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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This post is courtesy of: http://www.dailyblogtips.com

Is Design Mostly Dead? DIY Platforms vs. Hiring a Pro

Just because I know how to use a hammer and nails doesn’t mean I can build myself a house. Sure, I may be able to craft a perfectly adequate birdhouse, but definitely not a house where my family would live.

As a professional graphic designer, I bring out my hammer-and-nails quip when I get frustrated by the proliferation of images gaining steam with the recent tech trend of do-it-yourself design platforms. With drag-and-drop artwork and a multitude of pre-loaded fonts and templates, someone with little to no design skill can create a piece of artwork.

Obviously, these are great tools for content marketers who may not have the budget or time to bring in a designer for a project. But I harken back to a quote from CMI’s Chief Strategist Robert Rose, “A chainsaw in my hands has a very different purpose and effect than a chainsaw in a professional’s hands.”

There’s something missing from many of these DIY-created images. What is it?

Allow me to quote the “mostly dead” Westley from one of the CMI staff’s favorite films – The Princess Bride (yes, we quote it quite often): “True love.”

True love, in the sense of what designers bring to their visual creation in the form of creativity, hierarchy, design rules, and attention to detail that gives their design a bigger impact over others clogging the audience’s news feeds.

Learn the rules

To their credit, DIY design platforms offer an abundance of blogs and tutorials on how to use their tools. Many of their posts focus on the do’s and don’ts of graphic design – the design rules to follow (or not to break). But, one thing I have learned in my years in the profession is that while design evolves and you need to learn though trial and error, good design is always grounded in the rules. I still (hazily) recall my college days, sitting in all of those design courses where we would endlessly critique the positive use of negative space, proper font treatments, and the dreaded trapped white space. We studied the color wheel for hours. We learned proportion and hierarchy.

For most of us, those lessons became inherent rules that we now follow from the start of a project. Allow me to show you an example of DIY artwork where the creator didn’t understand some of the basic design rules:

I pulled this example from a blog dedicated to the ease of use of DIY design programs. To me, it’s obvious that the blogger who created this particular graphic didn’t understand (or follow) some of the rules, including:

• Colors: I counted four. They are not particularly bad, but the way they are used seems disjointed.
• Fonts: I counted four. That’s way too many for such a piece, especially when used so randomly.
• Hierarchy: There is little use of hierarchy in this piece. It seems that everything carries the same weight and it’s causing my eyes to bounce all over the page searching for the pertinent information. Notice how the number 26 and the month of May are larger than the event name? The date isn’t what’s most important.

It’s a common mistake – DIYers are often so enchanted by the bells and whistles that they use too many of them and lose sight of the concept of the design.

It reminds me of the man in the Johnny Cash song, One Piece at a Time, who works at a Cadillac plant and steals one part every day for 30 years. He finally builds the “Cadillac,” but it looks nothing like a Cadillac. The man got so caught up in collecting the parts, he failed to recognize that he would have parts from 30 years and could never create a cohesive Cadillac model.

Taking the content from the example, I did a little revamp on it to show you the difference in use of fonts, color, and hierarchy.

See the difference? The reason I did this was to show you that ease of use doesn’t always guarantee best results, but following the rules of design does. Among the improvements:

• Colors: I kept the same colors as the original, but notice how I used the light orange and aqua colors in more of an accent role?
• Fonts: I went from their use of four to using two. The unique difference in the weights of the fonts eliminates the need for any more typefaces.
• Hierarchy: Notice that the predominant image is the event name? The accompanying treble clef artwork is now tucked behind the name as an enhancement for the headline to make the viewer realize within seconds that this is a musical event. Also, notice that some of the copy has been trimmed and now it is basically the pertinent info, placed in a pattern that the eye can easily skim.

Get a critique

If your budget doesn’t allow for a complete concept-to-design project, consider getting a critique or hiring a designer to consult. If you really enjoy using your DIY platforms, but are maybe second-guessing some of your design decisions, a designer may be able to guide you in the right direction while allowing you to do the work.

At CMI, I am fortunate to work with a team that is pretty savvy when it comes to visual content. With that being said, I completely trust members of my team to occasionally pursue their own visuals, as I know that they have an eye for design. I often look at my job as a visual facilitator. For example, Clare McDermott, editor of Chief Content Officer magazine, has a keen sense for design. She knows what she likes, she appreciates great design, but she relies on the creative team to translate and expand on her fantastic ideas for the layouts of the magazine.

Here’s another example of a blogger creating a great visual on his own but calling on a pro for critique. Blogger and friend Buddy Scalera recently wrote a post, Conflict Is Story. He makes reference to zombies and found some great royalty-free artwork of a lady during a zombie walk that he wanted to use. Buddy needed to create a header image for the post so he used that image with a headline:

Buddy’s original example

After designing it, he reached out to me for my thoughts and I shared a few ideas. Instead of recreating the art himself, he asked me to take a stab at it.

Professionally revised example

Here’s how I reviewed and revised the image:

Challenge 1: The image background was distracting. The random people walking around took away from the fear-striking look of the zombie girl. The lines of the building masonry led my eye all over the place.

Solution 1: I cropped the image to remove the background and let zombie girl make direct eye contact with the viewer.

Challenge 2: The headline was competing with the image.

Solution 2: I placed the headline in its own block of color – a color sampled from the deep red blood on the zombie’s neck. I also matched the word “conflict” and subhead to the orange highlights in the zombie’s hair.

I picked an irreverent font for the headline and tilted it slightly to pull the viewers’ eyes back to the zombie.

Challenge 3: The blog site information was barely visible in the right bottom corner.

Solution 3: I featured Buddy’s name and website prominently, which is particularly important if the image is being shared on social channels.

Think about a pro

So you have a project in mind that will need some visual content. You ask, “Do I do it myself with one of the DIY platforms or do I call in a designer for the assist?”

Remember, hiring a professional designer for your visuals is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Consider these scenarios:

• Involve a professional designer in a large-scale project or series of posts where you want a cohesive brand look that not only stands out in a crowd but is easily understood by viewers.

• Hire a professional designer to create visual templates for frequency tactics (i.e., blog post headers) that can be easily updated by your team.

• Consult with a professional designer to review your portfolio of visuals and make suggestions that can be incorporated on a DIY basis or as your budget grows to accommodate professional services.

In our ultra-connected world, especially in the content community, I’ll bet that if you ask, someone knows a designer who can help. If you are having some issues, take a look at sites like UpWork.com, a community of freelancers who share their complete bios, skills, designs, and hourly rates.

Have fun storming the castle

Sure, there is definitely a place for the DIY design platforms in content marketing but, as a designer, I implore you to study up on your design rules before taking the leap and creating your own artwork. It’s so simple to fall into the world of easily recognizable, frequently used templates, and clip art, hoping to stand out and look unique. But, in actuality, these efforts really just get lost in news feeds.

Yes, some content marketers still may want to use the DIY platforms like a magic pill bought from Miracle Max. But you know it takes the combination of both the magic of the pill and that true love brought by a designer to really differentiate your visuals. Otherwise, the idea of standing out in the crowd? Inconceivable!

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How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Visual Content

Want to learn more about visual content, get all the latest insight, tips, and more? Visit CMI’s visual content topic hub.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Is Design Mostly Dead? DIY Platforms vs. Hiring a Pro appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Is It Time to Ditch Your Company Blog’s Comments Section?

There was a time, not so long ago, when a blog or news site’s comments section was considered a boon to Internet dialogue – a way for the “people formerly known as the audience” to break past the media gatekeepers and create meaningful discussion on an issue or topic. Comments were a new evolution of the traditional letters to the editor appearing in newspapers for more than a century. No single arbiter of taste would decide which letters appeared in the paper and which were thrown to the waste bin.

But if you’ve been following the goings-on in the media and content industry recently, you know that more publishers are giving up on this user-generated utopia and closing down the comment sections. Just search for the phrase “closing its comment sections,” and you’ll find a litany of outlets announcing an end to their comment sections – a list that includes The Daily Dot, Recode, CNN, Popular Science, and Copy Blogger.

Why abandon features previously considered essential for dialogue? Well, the editors of these outlets offer reasonable rationales worth considering for anyone who hosts a blog, whether it’s on a company website or your own personal domain.

Better conversation occurs on social media

The Internet looks a lot different than it did when comment sections made their debut. Many content sites now see almost half their traffic coming from mobile, and many of those mobile users are coming to the sites through social platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

“In our experience, our community hasn’t evolved in our comments,” said The Daily Dot editor Nicholas White. “It’s evolved in our social media accounts.”

While some bloggers and journalists wade into discussions in their comment sections, most steer clear of them. (There’s such a groundswell of support that people frequently use the hashtag “dontreadthecomments”.) However, just because they stay away from comment sections doesn’t mean they’re not engaging with their audience. Many journalists respond to tweets, for example, making Twitter a more likely platform for conversations between content creators and their audience.

Trolls derail every conversation

It turns out that when you give Internet users a blank page on which to write, too many like to fill it with ad hominem attacks and trolling. This type of demagoguery often alienates and sometimes even traumatizes the writers of the articles under which these comments appear (and some of the commenters who receive similar treatment by their fellow commenters). As a thought experiment, imagine a work environment in which you were constantly and easily exposed to vicious negativity every time you produced new work product.

Not only do trolls have a psychological impact on a site’s writers, but they affect readers’ perceptions of truth and facts. In its announcement that it was shutting down its comment section, Popular Science cited a study conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Dominique Brossard that found “uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”

Crickets chirp

Of course, millions of blogs don’t experience those problems because they don’t receive any comments at all. It’s not necessarily their fault, it’s just that most sites don’t attract enough traffic or write the kind of provocative content that spurs comments. If every single one of your blog posts is devoid of user-generated discussion, why offer a commenting tool at all? You’re simply sending a signal to everyone that your company blog is a ghost town, even if it has a high readership. By uninstalling the commenting software, you also could significantly increase your site’s loading time.

No problems here, we’re keeping comments

So let’s say you decide, after reading all the reasons for ditching your comment sections, that you still want to keep them (which, by the way, is a perfectly reasonable decision). How can you generate more vibrant, reasoned discussion?

Go niche

“We all like to joke that comment sections are all hell holes,” wrote Aaron Miles. “But when you tap into a specific niche, you can get an audience that is less prone to idiocy and trolling.” That’s because when you’re writing about some industry-specific topic, your commenters will find fewer segues to launching political flame wars that quickly trigger Godwin’s Law (as an online argument heats up so does the probability that somebody will bring up Adolf Hitler or the Nazis).

Niche blogs also tend to have smaller, more specialized audiences, who are prone to more thoughtful discussion.

Ditch anonymity

On the positive side, anonymity allows one to discuss delicate topics with which you might not want to be associated. More often than not, though, anonymity provides a shield to trolls and spammers who can spew hatred with impunity. Many media companies have installed the Facebook comments widget for precisely this reason; it forces commenters to be logged into their Facebook accounts, thereby ensuring any rhetoric is associated with their real-life identity.

Of course, it turns out that the Facebook widget isn’t a foolproof shield against trolling. “If you’ve been in the comment section of basically any article on The Huffington Post or BuzzFeed, the continuous stream of inanity, attached to people’s real names and photos even, seems to prove that basically nothing will get people to stop being dumb and/or terrible people on the web,” wrote Miles.

Nonetheless, when there’s a strong tie to a user’s actual identity, especially when there are potential professional implications for abuse, comments can work well. LinkedIn already has a built-in way to authenticate commenters on Pulse posts. Similarly, commentary sites like the rapidly growing Quibb make an effort to authenticate users and have them interact as people with professional identities – not strangers in the night.

Foster and moderate discussion

If you enable comments, you have the responsibility to engage with them. Too often we see an “anything-goes” mentality in which the commenters are essentially left on their own. This sends two signals: (1) You don’t care about your readers, and (2) There are no rules of engagement in the comment sections.

Take a look at a blog where the writer takes the time to respond to commenters (Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout is a good example of this), and you’ll find a readership willing to engage in thoughtful discussion.

If you’re not willing to foster thoughtful discussion, then I must return to my original question: Why bother with a comment section at all?

CMI actively engages with its readers in the comments section to answer our audience’s questions or participate in thought-provoking discussions that advance the content marketing industry. Want to advance your own blog? Get CMI’s free Ultimate Guide to Blogging.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Is It Time to Ditch Your Company Blog’s Comments Section? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

7 Quick Tips Before You Choose Your Domain Name

About to take the plunge?

Once you decide on a domain name, you'll be with it for a long time. It's important that you make your choice wisely.

Use these seven tips to avoid common pitfalls and pick out a great name for your site.

#1 Use a .com domain extension

If you're considering another domain extension because the .com isn't available, think again.

Did you know that 50.3% of all websites use the .com domain extension? It is by far the most popular and widely recognized top level domain on the web.

Why does this matter?

Because most internet users are more comfortable using .com sites, and many of them aren't aware of other domain extensions. You'll miss out on a lot of type-in traffic from visitors who land on the .com version of your domain instead.

This may sound strange, but as a blogger, it's important to remember that you're much more tech savvy than the average internet user.

#2 Come up with a lot of ideas first

Before you settle on one of your ideas, try coming up with a list of 50-100 domain names.

You see, the people with the most ideas tend to be those with the best ideas. By generating a large list of ideas, you are more likely to come up with one excellent name.

Because coming up with name ideas is so tough, I created a tool to make it easier. I call it the Domain Name Idea Generator.

You can use it to generate up to 100 names based on the terms you input (and it's totally free).

#3 Check availability right away

Don't get too attached to your name before you check if it's available. Attempting to register the perfect name just to find out it's taken is a heart-breaking experience.

Before you get attached to a potential name, check if it's available right away. You can use Instant Domain Search to quickly check the availability of any domain.

#4 Include a keyword

Adding a keyword in your domain can help you rank for terms in your niche.

You can add your niche or an industry term in your domain name to rank little easier. For instance, adding "food" for a blog about food, or "sewing" in a sewing machine review site.

That said, you must tread carefully when adding keywords. There are negative correlations with domains that match keywords too closely.

It's usually best to add one niche term, but if you want to choose a more keyword-rich domain, check out this guide for best practices.

#5 Differentiate from your competitors

Who are your top competitors?

Make sure your site's name is distinct enough not to get confused with others. It would be a shame to have visitors remember your content as belonging to another site, or get into a legal battle from infringing on someone else's copyright.

You probably have hundreds of competitors, so just make a list of the most well-known sites, and make sure your names couldn't be mistaken.

#6 Make it shorter

Shorter domain names are almost always more memorable. For instance, visitors are more likely to remember your site's name if it's blogteacher.com, rather than teachmehowtoblog.com.

In general, the fewer words the better. Try to avoid stop words like "the", "of", and "to" when possible.

I know you just read them, but can you remember both the example domain names without checking? I'm guessing you'll struggle with the exact words and order of them in the second domain.

Try to remove a word from your domain, and shorten the existing words to make for a punchier, more memorable domain name.

#7 Avoid .info and .biz

While the .com TLD ideal, .org and .net can also be okay in certain situations. For instance, a .org is suitable for an organization like a non-profit.

Regardless of what your site is about, you should avoid using any domain extensions besides .com, .org, and .net. In particular, .info and .biz.

While you will find lots of available domains with these extensions, visitors are more likely to be wary of your site's credibility. Can you think of a single site you like that uses one of these extensions?

If people notice your site uses .info and become skeptical or distracted by it, that will harm your site's ability to perform. You want visitors paying attention to your content, not your domain extension.

Conclusion

Choosing your domain name is a big decision. It's how people will remember your blog and what they'll see in your address bar every time they visit.

Take the time to address each of these points before picking your name, and you're sure to come up with a name you can be proud to host your site on.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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This post is courtesy of: http://www.dailyblogtips.com