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It's finally here! The Australian edition of Chief Content Officer launches today, Thursday, 3 March. As the editor `Down Under, it's been a return to my roots. Ten years ago I left the editorial staff of an expat magazine in Malaysia so I could concentrate on my writing. When the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) in the USA asked me if I was interested in joining their team, I jumped at the chance to get back into a formal editing role.

Chief Content Officer (CCO) is the world's first magazine devoted to the fast-growing, evolving field of content marketing. It is written by, for, and about the most innovative, influential global content marketers. Here's the best part, it's a digital magazine, free of charge and iPad ready. Subscribe right now and start reading the first issue.

Australian Content
What I like best about CCO is the dedication Joe Pulizzi and the CMI team have shown to the Australian market. One of two international locations selected for the magazine launch, I'm very encouraged CMI has identified Australia as one of the leading centres for creative ideas around content. Every issue will feature Australian writers and Australian businesses alongside the best parts of the USA magazine.

Australian Writers
The inaugural issue features two fantastic writers with different perspectives on content. Jonathan Crossfield (@kimota) and Gemma Tognini (@GemmaTognini) both deliver valuable insight on how to improve the effectiveness of your marketing. After you read their articles, you might just be itching for a fight or looking for a regular news beat. Either way, I bet you'll be thinking differently about your content. I certainly am.

I'm grateful to both Jonathan and Gemma for their willingness to contribute to a magazine they'd never read before. I admire their enthusiasm and commitment it was a pleasure working with both of them.

Localisation Project
Getting the first issue out the door was a trip down memory lane on another front. Since the magazine is produced in the USA, the content had to be localised before publication in Australia. Having worked in international markets for more than 20 years, I knew what to expect and what was required. It also inspired a blog post about localising content being published at CMI today. Take 5 minutes and read it. If you plan on sending your content to another country, it will save you heartache and money. I promise.

Pitch me a story
I'll be on the lookout for more great features by Australian writers. If you know anyone doing something interesting with their content, let me know. We want to hear about all the cool stuff out there.

What do you think about Chief Content Officer?

Heidi Cohen sent me a tweet earlier in the month inviting me to join her Blogger Love Contest. I'm always happy to have a creative writing assignment. Since I struggle with titles, I'm delighted one of the rules of the content is to use a pre-crafted title. When I saw the section on creativity, I knew exactly what I wanted to blog about web design.

I often write about the importance of design in asset based marketing. I don't believe content can ever move into the `great' realm without a good design behind it. While I'm not about to weigh in on the complexities of web design, it's undeniable much of what is on the web is tired, boring or taken right out of the box. Much like content full of gobbledygook, boring design encourages your visitor to move on to something more inviting. The converse is also true, great design entices people to hang around.

As Heidi mentions in her post:

"The key is to think like a child! Childlike wonder is great. It's not hindered by all of the negative thoughts that our parents and teachers have put in the way. (Of course, their intentions were good, but the net effect is that we still carry those prohibitions around inside our heads.)"

In the spirit of the Blogger Love Contest and with Heidi's advice firmly planted in mind, here are some of my favourite websites where a whole lot of childlike wonder turned out some pretty cool designs.

Childlike Drawing
Attorneys are notoriously conservative. Their websites are often as risk averse as the profession. In other words, they're boring. Watermark is a firm specialising in trademarks, patents and intellectual property. The design is clever with childlike drawings demonstrating their area of expertise. The copy is tight and sophisticated. It's a great website.

Funny Pictures
One of my clients, The Zella Company, put together a smart website with a clean design. They included four fun images that continue to stand out in my mind. It's a small thing but it's positioned their company beautifully and increased the stickiness factor of their content. It's hard not to have a look around and see if they have any more creative ideas on their website. (They do.)

Telling Stories
You don't expect restraint when you think of Indian film but that's exactly what you get at the On The Road Productions website. Both design and copy are sparse. Very cool storyboard-style navigation fittingly represents their business. The overall effect is one of a major player who knows how to edit out the junk leaving only the most essential parts of the story. Check it out.

Pile it On
CampaignMakers, a Perth advertising agency, took the `more is better' approach to imagery on their website. The home page is crammed full with the city landscape. Each one expands into a different page of information. The interactive graphic makes it hard to quit poking around.

Do you see what I mean? All these websites have an element of wanting to do something different while still maintaining a strong focus on content. Creativity abounds in every one. Each takes a different approach but they've all stuck in my mind as examples of great website design. That, of course, moves them out of the marketing expense category and into business asset territory.

What cool website design have you seen lately?

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*Image Credit: Swiped right off the www.watermark.com.au site!

Have you seen the Wordle utility? I've noticed it before on websites and thought it provided a cool graphic. Wordle takes a body of text, or a link to a blog or RSS feed, and creates a graphical picture of all the words in your content. The resulting image gives you an idea about word density. Cool, for sure, but I couldn't figure out a practical use for it. I have now.

I recently read Glenn Murray's excellent ebook titled, Practical SEO Copywriting: The complete guide to writing copy for visitors AND google. Glenn, aka @divinewrite, used Wordle images throughout his book to prove how his recommendations improve web copy.

Improved Copy
I'm sold. I've become a little bit of a Wordle fiend, adding it to my bag of tricks to ensure I'm producing the best possible copy. It's amazing how often a Wordle image will show me I've overused a particular word or haven't quite hit the SEO keyword target I was aiming for. I've started delivering a Wordle image with my finished copy so my clients can see how a particular page is optimised and for what keywords.

The Take-Away
Give Wordle a whirl. The advanced options allow you to provide a bit of intelligence to the weighting process but I tend to stick with the bog-standard utility. If you don't like the graphic generated, click on the "Randomize" button and see a different representation of your content.

Have you used Wordle?

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Image Credit: www.wordle.net using the text of this post

It seems fitting, on the eve of Valentine's Day, to reflect on one of the most common problems I encounter with content marketing. I've yet to meet a single person that doesn't agree content marketing is a great idea. Small business owners, in particular, love the thought of being able to dispense with their advertising expenditure. Content marketing gives companies a ton of autonomy in their marketing activity another highly attractive aspect. No one disputes the benefit of spending marketing budget to produce original content and create a tangible asset at the same time. So where does it go wrong?

It's not as easy as it looks
Setting up social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are a snap. The early days, like any romance, are fun and even a little intoxicating. Suddenly you're communicating with people from all over the world, sharing ideas and finding more information than you imagined possible. As the first bloom of love wears off, the hard slog of consistency sets in. Mal Gordon wrote an excellent post called Can I Have a Puppy? nailing the problem many business owners have when it comes to the social media end of their content marketing strategy.

It's not free. It's not even cheap.
Many of us were drawn to the idea of content marketing myself included – because it's `free'. While I've laid out almost no cash for my content marketing strategy, I also have the luxury of being a writer. Producing content isn't a problem for me. Has it been free? Well, no. I have to schedule my blogging and social media time or it doesn't get done. When I'm working on my own blog or spending time social networking, I'm not doing client work and, therefore, not earning money. In a blog post titled, The Real Cost of Social Media, Danny Brown dissects all the different ways a social media campaign costs money. He put a dollar figure to each task and came up with a pretty staggering total. While he admits to using a `worst case scenario', I don't think he was that far out of the ballpark for what a full-fledged campaign costs.

It takes time – a lot of it
One thing many people don't anticipate about a content marketing strategy is the amount of time required to develop, implement and manage a content marketing strategy. Most business owners I know are already time poor. Even if they have the desire and the talent to develop case studies, white papers, blogs, newsletters, videos, e-books or any other original content, they probably don't have time in their schedules to do it. One of the most fascinating findings in the B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report put out by MarketingProfs and Junta42 was how much content creation is being outsourced. While 55% of all content is outsourced, 77% of large companies outsource their content? Why? I suspect it's because they have the budget to do it.

Consumers are fickle
It's very easy to get side-tracked into a numbers game with content marketing. Worrying about how many followers you have, how many connections, how many likes and tweets and retweets you get is probably the wrong way to go about measuring the success of your content marketing strategy. Jay Baer discusses the problem of `attention infidelity' in a thought-provoking post addressing the behavioural side of life in Web 2.0. He predicts consumers are worn out by unrelenting social media campaigns and now we have to find a way to rekindle the romance with them.

The slow burn of content marketing
It's no wonder people get disappointed. When a new romance takes all your money, all your time, is difficult to please and easily bored, the initial infatuation of `love at first site' fades quickly. Why would anybody stick around in these conditions? Because content marketing works. If you make an investment in content marketing, you'll be building assets and goodwill over the longer term. The success you achieve when you develop your own content and promote it through your custom built networks improves exponentially with time. I've encountered many people who give up just as they're about to realise success with their strategy. In my experience, it takes at least six months of consistent effort for a social media and content marketing strategy to begin showing results. If you work diligently, behave ethically, and focus on building lasting relationships with your followers, I guarantee you'll be rewarded. Avoid the `love at first sight' trap and you're likely to find a groovy kind of love.

What do you love about content marketing?

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Image Credit: All Broken-Hearted by Orin Zebest, on Flickr

Do you ever struggle to come up with ideas for a blog post? If you're like me, you probably suffer from ebbs and flows in inspiration and motivation. Even when I have a good idea, I don't always have enough writing mojo left at the end of the day to translate it into great copy. On other days I can put 500 or more words on the page before I realise I haven't really said anything, or anything that hasn't already been said about a million times. It's not writer's block; it's more like blogging fatigue.

If you're going through a rough patch with your blog, here are some things I find helpful when I need to lift my game.

Enter a Contest
It may sound like odd advice but the structure of a contest can help focus your writing. Bloggertone and BizSugar run the Sugartone Sweet Business Blogging Contest providing a good opportunity to make a big effort. I've recently come across the We Love Bloggers competition being run by Heidi Cohen. I'll be joining to see if it motivates me to sharpen my game. Let me know if you're going enter, too.

Take the Problogger 7 Link Challenge
Last year I participated in the Problogger 7 Link Challenge and was surprised at how much it motivated me. Essentially a pop quiz about your own blog, it made me consider my body of work with a new eye. Darren Rowse did a superb job of resetting my perspective with his challenge. Try it and see if it does the same for you.

Join (or start) a Festival
Blogging festivals are all over the place. Some are competitions and some are just looking to get as many people in one place as possible. My friend Michelle Gay inadvertently started a festival (and a movement ) when she `exposed' herself in a post on her Eating Journey blog. She's had bloggers from more than five countries join in. More than a year later, her Exposed movement is still going because it's motivated so many people to join her. If you ask Michelle, she'll tell you it's inspired her blogging in ways she never imagined possible.

Use a blog marking service
Have you heard of blog marking? I've only recently come across the term even though I've been using a blog marking site for some time. Blog marking is the practice of publishing your posts on another website to expose your writing to different readers. I use BizSugar, a website focused on small business. The comments and encouragement I receive on my posts often inspire new ideas. Interestingly, work that tanked on my website can get a lot of traffic on BizSugar, going a long way to erasing the feeling of disappointment attached to a post that didn't perform so well. Blokube is a new blog marking site generating a lot of chatter but I haven't used it yet.

Volunteer to write for another blog
Guest posting or contributing to a crowd sourced blog is a great way to generate enthusiasm for blogging again. I find when I'm writing for a different audience, I'm more alert to what I'm doing and I spend more time refining my ideas. There's almost always collaboration with the blog owner or an editor which helps, too. Blogging is often a solitary exercise but working with other people on a post often pays dividends in the motivation department.

Consistently producing quality content on your blog can wear you out. The best bloggers employ special techniques to get them back into a blogging groove. Consider trying some of the things I've found helpful when faced with waning inspiration and motivation. I'd love to hear what works for you.

What techniques help you get your blogging mojo back?

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Image Credit: Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos Blogging, after Franciso de Goya y Lucientes by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, on Flickr