Kim Tidwell

A seriously good guide to inbound marketing and the importance of developing marketing assets you own (instead of renting, i.e. PPC) - mainly content.

Thank you Matt for this excellent list. I personally find the amount of information out there, more than a little overwhelming. Thanks for distilling it into a digestible, go-to format.

This is really in depth and very useful - thank you for posting Matt! And thanks also for the GIF tool.

I manage email marketing as a volunteer for the Austin AMA, and I'd like to migrate to an automation system from our current ESP. I have not used an automation tool, but I'm familiar with some of the players and the general landscape.  We're a small organization, managing fairly small lists - but I think it's important that we learn this type of software from a professional development standpoint. What tools have you had success with, that you'd recommend? Would love some feedback!

I don't have a specific link, but I'll do some digging around. I encountered it while working at a fine art stock agency, when I ran a design competition. The concern had to do more with ownership of the designs and whether they could be used for commercial purposes after the competition ( in our case, the designers retained rights and we weren't using them to a commercial end, it was more of a brand awareness exercise for us). I do think that copy is slightly different, and they'd be paid, which is a different model than a design competition. But, with the onset of Google Authorship, you may run into problems about who can claim authorship, etc.  A can of worms, that may or may not need to be considered in your case.

I do think your idea is a great one!

I recently heard of something that may help. There's a free tool called BuzzSumo where you can search any topic, a competitor or even authors to determine what the top content is (i.e. social shares), from that you can start to deduce which headlines are performing well.

My experience is that there is a general backlash out there regarding crowd-sourced design and photography. Copy is obviously very different than design or photography, but it's worth considering.