Cottage’y gift stores have amazingly consistent merchandise: Candles, magnets, potpourri and other semi-fancy dust collectors you give to great aunts and folks you don’t know that well. If you have ever been to the International Gift Show you’d understand why all those stores are the same—aisle upon aisle, booth upon booth of items that give oak hutches and bookshelves purpose.

Recently I got one of those inspirational signs as a gift and had a content marketing epiphany. Caring is sharing, so here you go:

Gift Store Wisdom—To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.

Content Wisdom—To Google you may be one website, but to a consumer you may be the website.

Gift Store Wisdom—You always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Content Wisdom—You always miss connecting with 100% of the customers you don’t talk to directly.

Gift Store Wisdom—The road to success is always under construction.

Content Wisdom—The content you created last week/month is still relevant but not enough to feed Google—it’s always hungry.

Gift Store Wisdom—Never too busy to be beautiful.

Content Wisdom—Content and Design are not oil and water. Make your content pretty—your content will thank you.

Gift Store Wisdom—Map out your life. But do it in pencil.

Content Wisdom—Have a starting place to measure from and then measure, test and start over.

Gift Store Wisdom—To play it safe is not to play.

Content Wisdom—Content Marketing and Advertising that inspires you to act is rarely safe. Look at all your favorite campaigns (advertising, marketing, content) and send me a link of all the safe ones.

Gift Store Wisdom—Age isn’t important, unless you are cheese.

Content Wisdom—Send your best Content Marketing equivalent to ian(at)eatmedia.net

1. Producing relevant content and without taking design into consideration.

-Stock photography that looks stock does absolutely nothing to promote authenticity—in fact it degrades it.

2. Putting multiple people in charge of your content marketing strategy without direction or oversight.

-Too many Indians equals a watered down content marketing strategy, and too little input equals words on a page without a clear call to action. Your content strategy should be your marketing department’s number one priority and your top team should be managing it, or managing the vendor who is managing it.

3. Creating a content marketing strategy without looking at what your competitors are doing.

-Although there is never a guaranteed blueprint for success, you have to perform due diligence before investing time and money towards content. To really hit it out of the park, you should be looking at what the most successful companies across all markets are doing. Subscribe to Ad Age Daily for a taste of what market leaders are up to.

4. Using the same format over and over.

-Unless you are the New York Times, the “wall of words” approach probably isn’t the best strategy, so mix it up. How-to’s, charticles and Q & A’s are all effective ways to engage readers through memorable content.

5. Telling your story instead of letting your customers tell it for you.

-New customers don’t trust you, but they do trust your current customers. Offer happy customers free services or products to participate in an interview or case study. Create a community or forum from which you can cull great stories.

6. Blogging, every once in awhile.

-Your blogging strategy should drive your content marketing strategy. People want to do business with people, not monolithic corporations, so show potential customers who you are and what you know. (Google likes new content, too.)

7. Interviewing customers and not re-purposing the audio from the interview into a podcast.

-Audio is easily captured during an interview via digital recorder or conference call recording. You can highlight one great answer or post the entire interview. We call this a two-for-one. (Story and a podcast.)

8. Tossing new tools (Podcasts, Video, Wiki’s and widgets) atop an unclear content strategy, or shaky infrastructure.

-Implementing a wiki, case studies and a handful of widgets is not going to unleash the customer floodgates. You have to have build your content strategy from the top down, and from the inside out. Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae describes this in detail.

9. Telling people what they already know.

-Don’t repeat what is already common knowledge. I quote and reference many authors, content marketers and executives but I don’t always agree with everything they say, and I say so. You need to make your voice heard. Don’t be gray—it doesn’t look good on you. Be orange instead.

10. Talking to too broad of an audience at one time.

-If your content marketing plan involves a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to connecting with prospective customers, stop. Go back to the drawing board and start over. Successful marketing only works when your message is targeted. If you are creating content targeting middle-aged drivers and teens, chances are you are going to fail miserably on both fronts.

Junta42, run by the Content Marketing ringleader/champion and tireless cheerleader Joe Pulizzi, published the latest release of the Top Content Marketing Blogs today. The Eat Media Blog jumped up 10 spots to number 20—if this were 1986, then we effectively went from #30 “Venus” by Bananarama, to #20 “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood. So, while I am extremely proud to now be numerically associated with an ex-member of Blind Faith instead of a Euro-pop group that included “Banana” in the group’s name, there is still a ways to go. (Ironically, Bananarama most likely out sold Blind Faith by a landslide.)

In all seriousness, the Junta 42 Top Blogs List includes some very talented writers, online marketers and social media experts, and we are honored to be in their company. And though we didn’t break the top 10 in this go-round, honestly, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have been incredibly busy here at Eat Media and haven’t been doing a good job of drinking our own content marketing Kool-Aid. Remember, in the Content Marketing world if you aren’t updating, you’re backtracking.

Never a sore loser, I do thank Joe for not ranking Eat Media at #15, because then we would have been associated with Falco, and the god awful song, “Rock me Amadeus.”

Congrats fellow Junta42 Top Bloggers.

Stay Tuned,

Ian Alexander
VP of Content, Eat Media