25 Content Highlights Of 2011

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There are some people who are theatre people. There are some people who are music people. And—getting closer to the point of this post—there are the book-lovers. Me, I’m an online content junkie.

With this post, 12 months in the making, I delight in that special piece of content found swimming out there in a sea of perfectly average content. This is my list of what I found to be the best marketing, digital marketing and/or investment-related content—with a few wildcards—of 2011. It's an updated edition of a similar list published last year at this time.
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Thought Leadership Marketing And SEO’s Role In It

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What role does SEO play in your firm’s Marketing? Many companies we work with don’t invest a lot in search engine optimization. But the companies that do tend to swing over to the other extreme—they tend to have a deeper appreciation for how search drives website traffic and, because of this, they invest many of their hopes and dreams into their SEO efforts.

In many cases, that’s not practical. SEO can’t on its own rescue an online presence, and particularly not if an SEO team is siloed. What an organization knows and understands about SEO can be leveraged many times over once the search professionals are mainstreamed with the rest of Marketing, including writers and producers involved in creating content to be marketed and syndicated.
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+1 And PDF Tweaks For Boosting Your Search Rankings

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I had been planning a post about the importance of updating your social sharing icons to include Google’s +1 button. You’d do this for two reasons:

1. To enable site visitors to share your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) content on Google+. You’d be joining the ranks of more than 1 million sites that have added +1 since its introduction in June, according to Google.

2. To optimize your Google search engine rankings and traffic. It’s Google’s +1 button, remember, and Google is believed to be paying close attention to content that’s +1ed (I know that's not really a verb, I'm just hoping that investment writing expert and loyal reader Susan Weiner is taking an extended Labor Day vacation). Only a human can +1 a piece of content and Google is increasingly acknowledging the importance of human signals as a complement to its algorithms.

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The Best Of The First Half: 5 Awesome Marketing Infographics

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Sometimes, the concept of strangers taking time during their workdays to “share” content with other strangers can seem a bit forced, especially if it’s as part of a deliberate program to get out there and be social.

In my case, the sharing instinct is genetic—I come from a long line of article-clippers whose get-togethers tend to start with an exchange of newspaper articles, cartoons and coupons. My enthusiasm for the state-of-the art today is that the social sites enable sharing with like-minded professionals, most of whom I don’t know. While it’s not uncommon for deeper connections to build, that’s not what’s behind my urge to share.

Online reading today for me has become a three-part act involving 1)the discovering of “awesome” content 2)the pointing of others to it and 3)the learning about cool stuff from others.
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It's Time To Start Leveraging Mutual Fund, ETF YouTube Channels

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For a while now, I’ve felt that YouTube may be the most under-leveraged social media site for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies. This is a shame considering the opportunity—and the significant internal discussion and review that precedes an asset manager’s establishment of a YouTube channel and the effort invested in producing video content.

When was the last time you checked in on asset managers on YouTube?

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