Five Marketing Articles You Should Read

Need to fresh ideas on how to improve your marketing and your business?

Can't go wrong with these...

1. 50 Split Testing Ideas (You Can Run Today!), Neil Patel
2. Words on Words: 5 Books That Will Improve Your Writing, Gregory Ciotti
3. How to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience, CopyBlogger
4. The Complete List of Evergreen Content Ideas for your blog, Buffer
5. 29 B2B Growth Hacks – The ULTIMATE List, Startup Moon

Top Five Articles to Read in October

It is October now. Really. The fourth quarter. The last quarter of the year. What should you be reading? Here are a few items...


How To Meet Mark Zuckerberg, by Alyson Shontell, Business Insider

In case you didn't know, Business Insider has a ton of great articles. So, what is the secret to meeting the Zuck?

He likes to meet entrepreneurs and help them. He especially likes to meet entrepreneurs who are building cool things on Facebook's platform. Zuckerberg also referenced Runkeeper, Spotify and Airbnb as startups that were "killing it."

He explained:
"The way that I got to know Kevin [Systrom] is they started off building on top of our platform. They had just a great open graph integration that made it so you could take pictures with Instagram and share them to Facebook and it's really first class…One of the things that I like to do is, with all of our big developers, I just like to reach out and get to know them personally. Partially because I'm just really interested in entrepreneurship and helping other entrepreneurs, but also I just want to get to know the people who are doing great stuff on top of our platform."

Top 25 Websites for CEOs, by Mike Myatt, Forbes

A treasure trove of valuable websites. Do you know all of them?


Content Marketing 101: 8 steps to B2B success, by David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Sherpa Blog

They are

1. Define your goals – tie this to business strategy/objectives
2. Understand your audience – identify where audience concerns/pains/needs intersect with your expertise/solutions and what type of information they seek out/prefer
3. Map content to these findings
4. Audit existing content to identify gaps and/or content that can be used or needs updating
5. Create a content schedule/calendar to ensure you consistently produce content because it’s not a once-and-done exercise
6. Develop content (include your sales team and other customer-facing employees as they need to understand the story you plan to tell)
7. Distribute content
8. Measure the results

Twitter mulls a replacement for follower counts, by John Koetsier, Venture Beat

Quote:

Joking that he was on the board and shouldn’t say too much, (Evan) Williams indicated some kind of engagement score may be coming, and that Twitter’s recent strategic shifts to a more-restrictive Twitter API access policy enable better measurement of engagement. If, after all, every Twitter client for consumers is created by the company itself, Twitter could much more easily determine exactly which tweets were requested by users, and make some pretty good guesses about which ones were actually seen and read.

15 writing tips from a journalist turned PR pro, by Becky Gaylord, PR Daily

Some pretty valuable tips for organizing the writing process.

Monday Reading List

Facebook Launches New Mobile Web Standards Initiative, Easier Payments for the Mobile Web - Silicon Filter

During a special lunch-time event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Facebook's CTO Bret Taylor introduced a number of new industry-wide initiatives for the mobile web. Facebook is also working with a number of other vendors to define better web standards that can be implemented across devices to ensure that users can get a consistent mobile web app experience across devices. The Core Mobile Web Platform, as this new group is called, will work to ensure that there are very specific mobile web standards that developers can expect to be available across devices and mobile browers.

Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments of Writing & Daily Creative Routine  - BrianPickings.org

COMMANDMENTS

• Work on one thing at a time until finished. 
• Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’ 
• Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 
• Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 
• When you can’t create you can work. 
• Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. 
• Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it. 
• Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only. 
• Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude. 
• Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. 
• Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy - Brainpickings.org

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:  

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it. 8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.