“I am very happy to be joining Zemanta because it is at the intersection of three massively important trends for online publishers and advertisers: the increasing use of content marketing, the rise and importance of native advertising and the rise of mobile,” wrote Todd Sawicki, President, Zemanta.

He puts three biggest challenges for (online) publishers and advertisers together. Sawicki believes that native advertising “will solve mobile monetization for publishers”. This is in line with the more and more popular belief in the “intersection” between the trends Sawicki mentions: content marketing, mobile and native advertising. “Content works better than banners, and on mobile, content works even better,” said Jon Steinberg, president of Buzzfeed.

Content marketing or brand journalism is about brands becoming publishers. However, classic publishers have taken notice while trying to figure out how to save themselves from impending doom as online advertising doesn’t bring as much revenue as they’d like. Publishers like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and even Forbes and Associated Press now create content for brands and run them as posts.

Five years ago, Associated Press developed a mobile app that drives them, especially lately, into a consumer-media destination. Jim Kennedy, AP, who will join the panel on Content Marketing for publishers on Thursday, May 23, at Went Native New York: “We felt as we moved into selling our own advertising and sponsorships, there was another opportunity to service the brands we do business with through other things AP does.”

Forbes have developed a set of services to help marketers become brand journalists, including content development, SEO optimization, distribution and syndication opportunities through text syndication, content ads and social promotion. “We are constantly looking to grow and evolve our BrandVoice thought leadership platform to better meet the needs of our marketing partners,” said Mark Howard, Forbes Media Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy. Dozens of companies have used BrandVoice since its launch more than two years ago.

Todd Sawicki recently stressed, “The biggest hurdle is for publishers to realize the old school print/traditional media divide between editorial and publishing is a false division. For native advertising to work – editorial needs to be involved to judge branded content to make sure it doesn’t harm the editorial brand of the site.”

There are additional challenges within the mobile environment. Sawicki believes that content marketing may be the right platform for the mobile.

Two years ago, Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute challenged publishers with the article titled Content Marketing Has Arrived. Should Publishers Be Worried? “For publishers, the opportunity to partner with brands on these initiatives is clear. What will you do? “

Indeed, what can publishers do, what are the challenges, and how can they be overcome? Kyle Monson of Knock Twice will discuss these issues during the panel Content Marketing for Publishers with Jim Kennedy, Associated Press, Mark Howard, Forbes, Tom Allcock, Say Media, and Todd Sawicki, Zemanta, at AdNative New York, a half day conversation about native advertising, co-hosted by Zemanta. Join us next Thursday, May 23, 2013.

The post Publishers’ Challenges: Content Marketing, Native Advertising and the Rise of Mobile appeared first on Zemanta Blog.

So, let’s say your end goal is to drive more traffic and overall unique visitors. There’s a ton of data that can help you reach this, but you need to filter out only the most important data: the data that will help you reach your goals more efficiently without breaking the bank. I’ll show how you can leverage big data from free competitive intelligence tools to drive more traffic to your website.

Traditional SEO strategies like adding in keywords and building links on related sites are really powerful for driving organic traffic, but the research process is highly time consuming and not scalable without data to support your efforts. This is where big data comes in handy. Free competitive intelligence tools like MixRank and SEMrush allow you to see what related or competitive sites advertisers are bidding on and which keywords have the most volume for their target audiences.

The value of paying attention to the keywords that advertisers are bidding on gives you an idea of how competitive a keyword is – imagine if you could instantly identify all of the most highly sought after keywords and high-traffic sites that advertisers are willing to pay for within seconds. By focusing on where the ad budgets are being spent and concentrated on, you can easily uncover highly relevant sites and keywords that will shorten research time when creating content, and help you grow your reach.

Here are two key data points that you should take a look at to snatch highly targeted traffic.

1. High Traffic Related Publishers

MixRank crawls over 100,000 publishers daily, and categorizes all of the publishers in the publisher directory. This is a great free resource you can use to find other publishers and blogs in your industry that you can build links on. Finding high traffic sites are easy, but finding those that are directly correlated to your site can be hard. Use the Subcategories to drill down to the most relevant sites.

By clicking on a publisher in the directory, you can see more stats about the site’s traffic and demographic data to reveal if this is a site worth building a link on. Link building on the most relevant sites that have high traffic is a cost-effective way to drive traffic. The previous time consuming challenges of finding and researching these sites are now eliminated with a free Publisher Directory.

2. Top Keywords

Both MixRank and SEMrush have easy-to-use search engines that allow you to search for any keyword related to your website. The main difference between the two tools is that MixRank indexes contextual keywords while SEMrush indexes search keywords. So, while neither of the tools provides the same type of keyword research, both keyword types are proven and innovative when building content on your site. Conducting a search within SEMrush is quite simple. Just enter the keyword you’d like to see data for and you’ll see an overview page of the CPC, exact volume, phrase match keywords and related keywords. These stats can provide you instant ideas on what keywords to publish content about.

Within MixRank, the process is quite similar. Perform a keyword search and within the search results, click on the Keywords section on the left to see a list of keywords and the number of ads that are bidding on the keyword. These metrics suggest how popular the keywords are in the industry, and what keywords you should be using in the content of your site.

By clicking on any keyword, you’ll be directed to a keyword report, where you have access to Related Keywords that you can start growing your content on. You can even uncover how competitive each keyword is based on the amount of  advertisers and ads that are bidding on them.

You can even take this one step further and look at a single advertiser’s keywords to understand how much traffic an advertiser in this niche is buying. Simply click on the Advertisers section on the left, and click on any advertiser’s domain.  In this example here, we can see gohealthinsurance.com is bidding on over 11,000 keywords and 17,000 websites.

Within seconds, you can see tens of thousands of keywords and sites to expand your reach towards. MixRank helps you uncover those hard-to-find traffic sources and out-of-the-box keywords that will reach lateral audiences. It’s worth expanding your content to include keywords you may have never thought about, while investing some time to build links on these sites that already reach your target audience.

As we know, big data can’t literally drive traffic. It’s all about how you leverage it and take action on it, which will provide returns. As SEO becomes more and more time-consuming to improve search engine rankings, the ongoing process of building links on other relevant sites and creating powerful content with the right keywords can be done more rapidly with big data competitive intelligence tools.

So, wouldn’t it be nice to start using free data that would provide significant time savings when trying to find the most targeted sites in your industry or the keywords with the most volume?

The post How to Leverage Big Data from Intelligence Tools to Drive Traffic appeared first on Zemanta Blog.

Here are 25 mobile & content marketing facts:

1. Within 4 years, more consumers will access internet content via mobile devices than PCs (Source: Brightcove)
2. People spend more time on mobile apps (94 minutes/day) than desktop and mobile web (72 minutes/day) (Source: Brightcove)
3. 43% of B2C marketers use mobile content as a content marketing tactic (Source: CMI)
4. 42% of B2C marketers use mobile apps as a content marketing tactic (Source: CMI)
5. 33% of B2B marketers use mobile content as a content marketing tactic (Source: CMI)
6. 26% of B2B marketers use mobile apps as a content marketing tactic (Source: CMI)
7. From 2011 to 2012, the use of mobile as a tactic by B2B marketers has increased from 15% to 33% (Source: CMI)
8. 30% of marketing managers think that branded mobile apps is the most important channel for engaging consumers (Source: The CMA)
9. There are 5x as many cell phones in the world as there are PCs (Source: Impiger Mobile)
10. 82% of US adults own a cell phone (Source: Pew Internet)
11. 49% of the mobile subscribers in the US own a smartphone (Source: MobiThinking)
12. 25% of Americans ONLY use mobile devices to access the internet (Source: GoMo News)
13. 73% of smartphone users said they used mobile web to shop rather than an app (Source: Yahoo)
14. 72% of smartphone users in the US use the device to look up directions or maps (Source: zmags)
15. 56% of global online consumers watch video on mobile at least once a month (Source: Brightcove)
16. 28% of global online consumers watch video on mobile at least once a day (Source: Brightcove)
17. 60% of web users say they expect a site to load on their mobile phone in 3 seconds or less (Source: Compuware)
18. 74% are only willing to wait 5 seconds or less for a web page to load before leading the site (Source: Compuware)
19. Time spent on mobile apps is largely dominated by games and social networking (49% and 30% resp.) (Source: HubSpot)
20. 72% of smartphone users in the US use the device to go online while traveling (Source: zmags)
21. 64% of smartphone users in the US use the device to go online while in a restaurant or coffee shop (Source: zmags)
22. 63% of smartphone users in the US use the device to go online while in a store when shopping (Source: zmags)
23. 74% of smartphone users use their phone to help with shopping – 79% ultimately making a purchase as a result (Source: Impiger Mobile)
24. 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action and over half lead to purchase (Source: Search Engine Land)
25. 70% of mobile searches lead to action within one hour – It takes one month for the same percentage of desktop users to catch up (Source: Mobile Marketer)

Hopefully this list of facts will convince you that you need to begin placing a strong emphasis on mobile. And you can start with adding Zemanta! Not only are our related posts optimized for mobile, but they are customizable and look stunning on any mobile device.

The post 25 Content Marketing Facts That Will Make You Seriously Consider Mobile appeared first on Zemanta Blog.

As regular readers of this blog already know, Zemanta makes connections. We connect authors with engaging content to include in new articles. We connect publishers with new readers & revenues and we connect marketers with new consumers. We’re able to do this because we understand content & context and are able to weave together meaningful connections through the natural relationships that words, images and links generate online. Ours is a Network connected through content. So I’m quite pleased to be part of the Family. Also, I look good in orange.

I first got to know and respect the Zemanta team in my last role as GM of Typepad at Say Media. There I integrated Zemanta’s technology directly into the Typepad Compose experience as it represented a great opportunity to deliver more value to the platform, its bloggers and their audiences. Of course I was not alone in realizing this, as Zemanta is also activated by default for all new WordPress.com accounts. When the opportunity arose to join this innovative team I jumped at the chance. Recently, Todd Sawicki also joined the team as President. In his introductory post he summed up why now is such an exciting time for Zemanta:

[Zemanta] is at the intersection of three massively important trends for online publishers and advertisers: the increasing use of content marketing, the rise and importance of native advertising and the rise of mobile (and its monetization challenges).

Just as the rise of the web some 15 years ago altered the media landscape. New forces are at play reshaping it yet again. As readers turn more and more to social networks for discovery and mobile devices for consumption, publishers must adapt. As readers become increasingly less tolerant of interuptive experiences, publishers and the marketers who support them must find better solutions.

We’re hard at work to be part of a better solution – one that respects the reader and seeks to build new connections, new relationships, through content.

If you’re a publisher, platform, network or marketer please get in touch with us about joining our ever-growing Zemanta Family. I just did and look forward to welcoming you.

The post Jeff Reine Joins Zemanta as VP of Publisher & Corporate Development appeared first on Zemanta Blog.

Magazines are increasingly becoming, in a world where content is unlimited and free, a premium that commands, because it is an enjoyable experience. Because as long as you have an internet connection, you can get as much mediocre content as you want. But to have a package that’s been curated and skillfully written, reported, edited and fact checked… well, that’s a value added. And that’s the magazine experience. It’s not just the random grabbing of this and that, but it’s the packaging of everything together. And that’s an enjoyable experience. Randall Lane, Editor of Forbes Magazine

This may be true (full disclosure: I am a magazine junkie). But what caught my attention in this statement from this great interview by Mr. Magazine was: “Because as long as you have an internet connection, you can get as much mediocre content as you want.”

Lately, quite a few have written about the inevitable backlash against content marketing or online publishing.

Robert Rose, Content Marketing Institute, writes: “As with most new approaches (think social media, or cloud services, or “big data”), we have seen clearly thought-out practices being evangelized right alongside the short-sighted strategies of trend-obsessed hangers-on. Naturally, this is resulting in ample frustration in our industry. /…/ everywhere the trend is clear: Content marketing is now staring down a “Valley of Disillusionment.”

Christopher S. Penn, writes: “Content marketing. It was the darling of the marketing world in 2012, but it’s fallen on hard times lately. Why? Mostly because marketers are struggling with it, and as a result generating terrible content, which in turn is making people unhappy.”

Honestly, I am not panicking. Terrible content by others makes me nervous only if there are too many hacks, and brands infer that publishing doesn’t work, unless you’re Red Bull or Coca Cola.

It works if you do it right.

Instead of worrying how others, even your competition, do it, focus on your own content strategy. In the end, if you’re going to reap reward, others will follow; they may try and copy yours, but they will realize, sooner or later, that they have to do what’s right for them.

All you have to worry about are the following 4 pillars of successful content marketing and publishing strategy:

1. Plan

Planning is essential. No matter how much we may want to ignore it or be spontaneous, sooner or later (better sooner), you’ll discover it is necessary. Tons of people have already stressed this dozens of times, many of us based on our own experience. I’ve really learned this the hard way.

Planning includes a comprehensive lo