Seth Fineberg

Actually had this happen for a conference I was helping with. While I was not familiar with any clauses, we did need to remedy the problem quickly, and made the Keynote a panel discussion with a few presenters we already had. Calls/emails sent around to make it happen, but the "no panic" approach I think made it work in the end.

The most key component to involving your audience in your content process is knowing them, intimately. Once you're there then yes, the next natural progression is inviting them to contribute. This is something we did to much success at my former post. When your audience actually is the focus and feels that all of the content is not only for them, but by them, essential trust will be established. This, in my view, is the ultimate goal of any content initiative. When you have trust, and the content is practical and useful to the audience as well as involves them, content success and longevity are in your future.

Proofing and editing to help mitigate copy errors in your content should actually be number one on this list. As good as any editor is, you always need to comb over what was written, read it back to yourself. Ideally, you have "another set of eyes." In my experience, if it is something you wrote, your brain can read things one way or just gloss over even a simple copy error. If you're unsure of usage there are a ton of tools available to just check. Grammarly of course is one of the best, but even having your own house of style and seeing how similar copy is used can be an invaluable tool.

If you are a journalist, tracking press release performance really needn't be in your wheelhouse or on a list of priorities. Certainly the stories you write can be written for SEO, that's a given in today's digital world. Then it's a simple jump over to Google Analytics and a check of keywords to see what's working. But press release performance can be so subjective and, realistically, you need to be looking more at things like article shares or who may even be quoting you and your piece.

I just had this conversation today. You can have all the great content in the world that you wrote, filmed, recorded or designed in some way. Yet, without knowing what their aim is, what you are hoping to achieve, it won't likely do so. Do you want to be a 'thought leader' or expert in your space? Do you want leads? Are you promoting a book or study? Do you want to grow your partnerships? Whatever it is, the content Has to service that goal otherwise it's just a nice piece of creative.

It all starts with knowing the space you are creating content for. The deeper your understanding of the dynamics and fundamentals, what is actually going on and what actually matters to the audience you are targeting, the more effective your content marketing will be. SEO works the same way, without the aforementioned understanding, you won't really know the key words and phrases to include. Google can only tell you so much.