Timothy Carter

You’ve got a content marketing strategy, but is it working? If you want to be a successful content marketer, it’s not enough to do what you think is effective—you need to objectively measure whether what you’re doing is effective or not, and then take the appropriate corrective actions. Many marketers don’t understand what’s necessary in measuring and analyzing a content marketing campaign—and even if they do, they may have trouble interpreting the data. In this guide to content marketing ROI, you’ll learn the potential payoff of a content marketing campaign. What Works in Online Marketing survey, 40% of SEO agency respondents (114 out of 284) indicated that they were not sure about their content marketing ROI from on-site content marketing efforts, and 43% (123 out of 289) weren’t sure about content marketing ROI from their off-site efforts. Clearly, many marketers find it challenging to measure content marketing ROI from their content marketing efforts. When you’re first starting out, measurement and analysis can be intimidating, but data measurement and analysis are objective and complex. I’ve written this guide to help you better understand the importance of measurement and analysis—and how to do it effectively for your content marketing campaign. What is Content Marketing ROI? First, let’s define ROI—it’s an acronym that stands for “return on investment,” and most marketers will tell you it’s one of, if not the most important metric you need to know to determine your campaign’s effectiveness (in content or for any other strategy). If your content marketingROI is positive, you’re doing something right – keep working to improve it. If your content marketing ROI is negative, you know that something isn’t working and it needs to change. There are a few problems with ROI when it comes to content marketing, however: Content affects many areas. One of the reasons why content marketing is so powerful in the first place is because it doesn’t rest alone in any one area. It affects your domain authority and the amount of virtual real estate your website has, it facilitates social media marketing and email campaigns, and can be used for countless other channels—it can even be used for client retention in addition to or instead of client acquisition. Not all content effects are easy to measure. Some content benefits are terribly difficult to quantify. An increase in brand reputation can increase your conversion rates and may push users further along the buy cycle when they get to your site, but you can’t quantify these things with any degree of certainty. It’s a slow building strategy. It takes a long time to see the true benefits from content marketing. As you grow your strategy from nothing, you’ll almost certainly start with a neutral or negative content marketing ROI, which can only become positive after months or even years of effort. Despite these weaknesses, understanding your content marketing ROI as well as possible is crucial, so I still highly encourage you to keep it as one of your top priorities for gauging campaign success. Bonus: We released a separate article outlining how to compute your SEO ROI.  Why Measuring Content Marketing ROI is Important Before I dig into the details of measurement and analysis, I want to explain the importance of analysis in the first place. Why is this phase of the process so important to the success and health of your content marketing initiative? Setting and Measuring Goals First, analysis can help you define, set, and eventually measure your content and goals. Defining success. There are many possible types of goals your brand can set for its content marketing campaign, and there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to go about it. For example, you could focus exclusively on building a better reputation for your brand, and work on getting featured in high-authority publishers. Or, you could focus on customer retention and drive your efforts toward your help and support content. You could focus more on generating traffic, or getting more conversions, or just reaching a wider social audience so you can attract more followers. How can analysis help you figure out what SEO goals you want to set? When you’re first starting out, most of your goals will be speculative, or based on preliminary forms of research like market research or competitive research. But once you get rolling, you’ll have access to far more in-depth and brand-specific pools of data, which can tell you exactly how your content and SEO is performing. Here, you’ll be able to see where your strengths and weaknesses are; for example, if you see that your conversion rates are at an all-time high, but your traffic is lackluster, you can adjust your goals to focus on attracting more traffic. You’ll also have a baseline for comparison here; if you know you’re getting 1,000 website visitors a month with your current strategy, 1,200 next month is a pretty realistic target. Goal criteria. When you’re setting goals to measure and analyze, you’ll want to keep some important criteria in mind. The SMART criteria is always a good standby here, even though there’s some variability in what “SMART” can actually stand for (Wikipedia says they stand for specific, measurable, achievable, relevance, and time-bound). Your goals should be specific, so you can have an objectively comparable number for your data. They should be measurable, obviously, so make sure your goals are relevant to something you can measure in your analytics platforms. Make them achievable and relevant, so they’re actually going to matter for your brand, and set a limit when it comes to timing (give yourself at least a month to make any kind of meaningful progress). Once you know your goals, you can establish what you’re actually going to measure when it comes to content marketing ROI—and how you’re going to measure it. Ongoing development. Remember that the process of setting and achieving goals is an ongoing one. It’s something that should be revisited, modified, and adjusted as you gather more information about your campaign. For example, you

One of the most overlooked aspects of blogging is actually one of the most important for ranking in search engines: sub heading tags. Many bloggers spend a lot of time on their content, but neglect to use any type of heading tags and sub header tags. This can lead to decreased rankings in search engine results pages. Header (H1 tag) and sub header tags are a significant ranking factor. In this blog post, we will discuss what these important sub header tags are and how you can use them on your website for increased SEO. What are Subheading Tags? The purpose of sub heading tags is to show the reader different areas within a blog post. They are designed for readers who might not want to read all of your content or you may just have too much information and need some help structuring it in an organized fashion. Common Sub headings Include: Introduction Conclusions and Recommendations Steps involved in this section [ex: “How To”] Key Takeaways from this Section (summarize what happened) You should use these types of header tags when every paragraph doesn’t make sense on its own, there’s more than one point being made about something, or if there are multiple steps that need to be completed. What is the Importance of Sub heading Tags? The importance of these sub header and HTML tags is they help readers find what they’re looking for by browsing through headings. For example, if a reader was looking specifically for your conclusion and recommendations section, but didn’t know where that content was located on your website, then it would be very difficult to find. However, with subheading tags in place any topic the reader is interested in can easily be found just by scrolling down (or clicking) to the appropriate area on the page. How to Use Sub Headings to Improve SEO A sub heading tag has an indirect effect on a website’s SEO. Essentially, using sub header tags will allow people to stay on your website long and improve its dwell time. This will send a signal to Google that your visitors are enjoying your website. Subheading tags also improve user experience (UX), which is a major part of boosting your website’s success. Luckily, creating sub heading tags is simple using platforms like WordPress. Below, you’ll learn about clever ways to use them to improve your website’s SEO. Create a Table of Contents Section If you have a large blog post that is divided into sections, make sure to put an introduction and conclusion section. This will help readers find the content they’re looking for quickly by scrolling down or clicking on the appropriate tab at the top of your page or category page (as well as improve SEO). Creating a table of contents section is simple using HTML or CSS. Though, if you’re a beginner, you should hire a developer to create your table of contents for you if you’re not using WordPress. Use Keywords in Your Subheaders This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s still worth mentioning. You should use keywords in your subheaders to improve search engine optimization and make it easier for readers who are interested in specific topics. Simply adding the keyword you want people to find will help that goal come true. Doing so will help your content rank for more popular keywords on the internet and drive meaningful website traffic. Optimize Subheaders for Featured Snippets Google will sometimes show snippets in the SERPs. This is a good opportunity to boost your technical SEO by including keywords and optimizing them for gaining a specific, coveted featured snippet. For example, if you have an article that discusses how many cups of coffee per day are too much, then adding phrases such as “too much” or “cups of coffee” into subheaders could put your content at the top of Google’s search results when someone searches those words (even before they read). There are some different types of subheadings that readers may find helpful while reading through blog posts: introduction headings, conclusions/recommendations headings, steps involved in this section headers, and key takeaways from this section headers. Use Subheadings to Explain Key Takeaways One way to use sub headings as a blog post is by including key takeaways from the specific section. This will let readers know what they can expect when reading that particular content, which improves user experience and better organizes your article for easy-to-find information. This also will add a nice visual effect to your blog and improve its readership. Heading Structure for Hierarchy H1, H2, and H3 header tags should always be used in numerical order. Header tags provide structure to your article, page or post. For example, if a blog post was divided into three sections with six content pieces each, then you would have to use H1 tags for the introduction and conclusion headings. You could do that by making your table of contents section using HTML or CSS (or having someone else create it). Note: each page should only have one H1 heading.  Next, you should start adding H2 tags. This will help readers find those specific topics more easily. In the rare event that you want to add more information under H2 tags, then you’re free to use H3 tags. Avoiding this order will not only confuse your readers, but it’ll make it difficult for search engine bots to crawl your web page and understand what your content is about. Make Your HTML Heading Tags Easy to Read While subheadings can be helpful in organizing your blog post, they should also help readers understand the content. This is why you should avoid using technical language or complicated sentence structures when creating them. Instead of “The Four Fundamental Principles for Successful Public Speaking,” try something more straightforward such as: “Four Strategies that Will Help You Improve Your Public speaking.” The simpler your headings are, the better it will be to read and comprehend what’s being discussed within each section

Acquiring backlinks is the single most important aspect of your SEO strategy. Backlinks are the foundation for ranking in the search engines. There are plenty of ways to acquire backlinks, including through content marketing, guest blogging, and several other link building strategies. However, the most valuable backlinks you can acquire are building editorial links What are editorial links? The benefits of editorial links are generated naturally when bloggers or publishers decide to use your editorial link-building strategy  as a resource in a published article. The most valuable editorial links come from high authority website’s, but those aren’t easy to acquire. Owners of high authority sites know that external editorial link quality matters so they don’t link to random web page. Instead, they carefully select external links and only editorial link building to the highest quality content they can find. Want to gain ranking in the search engines? You need editorial links If you’re already generating backlinks through content marketing, don’t stop your campaign. Content marketing is an essential long-term digital marketing strategy. However, if you want to get backlinks from high authority websites, here’s how you can earn some benefits of editorial links. 1. Find out where your competitors have backlinks Searching for your competitors’ backlinks is one of the easiest ways to find leads for obtaining editorial links. First, use our backlink checker to find out where your competitors have backlinks. Next, visit each website to determine whether or not you’d want to be associated with the content. If the site gets your stamp of approval, find out how you can get a backlink published on the site. Contact the editor or have your PR department make contact to find out what’s possible. 2. Create irresistibly authoritative contents Creating irresistibly authoritative contents is the most reliable way to generate natural backlinks on a long-term basis. Unlike seeking out backlinks individually, when you have irresistible content, people will find your content and editorial link it on a regular basis. At least, that’s the goal. It is possible to create a website that gets natural backlinks from high authority websites. There are plenty of examples on the internet of sites that have achieved this level of popularity. For example, Social Media Examiner is one of the most-linked social media marketing websites on the internet next to Neil Patel’s website. Both sites produce high-quality content with useful information on a wide variety of topics. When people are searching for information while writing an article, they’ll usually editorial link the first qualifying website found in the Google. That’s why it’s important to create authoritative contents. When people search for resources to cite, and your site shows up in their search, you don’t want to give them any reason to bounce and start looking for a better resource. You want to make sure that when people find your web page, they are impressed by the content enough to use it as a resource either now or later. Getting ranked will increase how often you get linked It takes time to get ranked in the Google, but once you start showing up in top search results, your site will start getting linked naturally more often. That, in turn, will help you rank higher in Google, which will continue to increase your site’s visibility, traffic, and backlinks. Creating authoritative contents is just the step. Once you’ve created irresistibly authoritative contents, you’ll need to find a way to let potential publishers know about your content. Don’t rely solely on Google to get your content noticed. That brings up the next technique. 3. Hire a PR professional for outreach in your niche   If your business has a PR department, have your PR personnel reach out to the editors of major publications online. Have them ask what kind of content they’re currently looking to publish and how you can maximize your chances of getting content published on their site with a backlink to your website. If your business doesn’t have a PR department or you’re an entrepreneur and freelancer, hire a PR professional to perform outreach services. Many professional marketing agencies provide outreach link building services for editorial links, but there are also independent outreach services you can find. 4. Dominate your niche The ultimate method for getting high-quality editorial links is to publish content that dominates your niche. Not just one or two pieces of content, but as much high-quality, authoritative, in-depth content you can possibly create. Here’s how to create content to dominate your niche. 1. Produce genuinely authoritative contents Let’s face it – if you want people to editorial link to your content naturally, you need authoritative contents. Your content needs to be seen as the ultimate reference for whatever topic you’re covering. For an example of this kind of content, check out WP Beginner’s guide to moving a WordPress installation from HTTP to HTTPS. MyThemeShop also produces exceptionally high-quality content as seen here in this WordPress security article. These two websites dominate the search engine for tutorial-related searches for a reason. Both of these websites publish thorough, accurate, and extremely helpful content. How to create authoritative contents Brainstorm. The first step to creating authoritative contents is brainstorming several topics and choosing one to start. Try to think of topics that are important to people. Topics that answer previously unanswered questions are a good place to start. However, you can cover a more general topic as long as you dive in deeper than any of your competitors. Research. Assume you don’t know everything there is to know about your topic. Even if you’ve been a professional in the field for 50 years, there will always be things you don’t know about your niche. Research as much as possible to discover what you don’t know. Read what your competitors have to say about the topic and take notes when you learn something new. For example, say you run a website documenting the Maya civilization. In your research, you might discover that the Mayans developed the

If you ask most people if they want to be the best at any given thing, they’re probably going to say yes. Who wouldn’t want to be the best at what they do? But who or what is the best depends on what criteria are used to evaluate quality. If you want an “A” grade, you need to know how you’re being graded. If you want to win the gold medal, you need to know how the judges will score you. If you want to have the highest rank in Google search results, you need to understand E-A-T. Google E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) are the search quality rater guidelines that Google uses to determine the quality of a website’s E A T. Then, they rank it accordingly. When you make and publish a website, it will eventually be seen and manually reviewed against these guidelines by one of the thousands of quality reviewers Google hires to submit feedback about web page quality. That information is used as a major contributing Google ranking factor. So let’s break down each of these categories: Expertise One of the wonderful and horrible things about the internet is that anyone can publish anything. When you come to search engines like Google e and put in a search term, you want results from people who actually understand the subject they’re writing on. That’s where expertise comes in. To do well in this category, you need to show that you have a particular kind of expert knowledge related to the content of your site. Otherwise, how can readers rely on you? Think about this: if your site offers unreliable or only basic knowledge that doesn’t help the audience solve their problem, they’re just going to go somewhere else and fast. That’s not good for you but it’s not good for Google either so your site direct ranking factor will suffer. Provide clear, detailed information which shows your everyday expertise and experience and you will succeed in this category. Authority If you hadn’t noticed there are a lot of websites and businesses out there to choose from. Truly a lot of them. So, people will choose the ones that have authority. Authority can come in the form of reviews, references, any kind of recommendations. These are things that prove your credibility as a business. When other credible sources are recommending you as a credible source, that boosts your position as an authority even higher and gives customers something they can really put their faith (and maybe even their money) into. Trust Ah, trust. Is there anything as hard to win and easy to lose? Click baiting will lose your audience’s trust in an instant. If someone clicks on your site for one thing that you claimed to be offering or writing about and very clearly doesn’t find that thing, forget about ever seeing that person on your site again. The payoff simply isn’t there and Google knows that. Being accurate and consistent in the way you portray yourself and your high-quality content will help to build trust. Don’t try to hide sponsorships or affiliate links. Don’t push the sale at the cost of honesty and transparency. Your audience and potential customers won’t respond well and neither will Google, creating quite a nasty cycle where the main loser is your business. Trust is worth the effort. Write that down so you don’t forget. That’s how true this is. Why Does E-A-T Matter? Hopefully, the importance of these three descriptors is somewhat obvious just from reading their descriptions and running a business. You always want to be an expert in your field, authoritative sites, and trustworthy. Meeting the E-A-T guidelines is one of the most important things you can do to stay high in Google rankings, according to SEO professionals. It will keep the people who visit your website from going elsewhere and developing a negative view of your business. It will make Google drive traffic toward your site over others because the reviews show users will have a better experience on your website. It will help you gain or maintain a favourable position in search engines results, positively impacting your traffic and revenue. Sound good? It should. Here’s how you can actually make it happen. How to Improve E-A-T Improving E-A-T is no small feat and it will require a significant amount of work. But here are some of the highlights of what you should do: Be consistent: Is your brand memorable and capable of instilling trust in customers? Stay up to date: Are the facts and other information in your create content Google still accurate? Make quality, useful content: Does your creating content meet a need and the standards customers with Google set? Write an About Us, Contact Us, and FAQ page: Are you telling the story of the brand, giving customers enough information to trust you? Just by answering these questions and making some adjustments, you can go a long way toward improving your site in terms of E-A-T. Quality content creation is the most important of all so even if it takes some time, it’s worth focusing your energy there. Try using this guide to write effective content. Clearing Up Some Misconceptions Working on E-A-T will only be beneficial if you know what you’re doing so here are some common misconceptions you shouldn’t believe. No E-A-T Scores You aren’t assigned a score for your adherence to the E-A-T guidelines by Google’s search algorithm or the quality raters. It’s not like the SAT where a few more points can get you into Harvard or in this case, the top of the search results page. The way your website exhibits Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness Or E A T indirectly affect the rankings of your website (fairly significantly) but this can’t be tied back to a single score or internal grade from Google. E-A-T is Not New Though these three letters have become the subject of much discussion lately, E-A-T is not actually new. It has been

When it comes to link building for SEO, measuring results can be nebulous. But boy is it frustrating when you have been actively doing quality outreach and your link building campaign still doesn’t seem to be yielding the results you want (or need). In my experience link building campaigns typically fail for one or more of the following reasons: Your links are from low quality sources (e.g., low quality link directories) Your links are not diverse, relevant or natural Your links are over-optimized for specific anchor text Your content doesn’t fit search intent (it’s either too long OR too short OR doesn’t answer the users’ query) Your content is poor in quality or cannibalizes itself with other content on your site Your niche and corresponding keywords are super competitive Some of what follows should be able to uncover at least a few of the issues plaguing your link building campaign. So why aren’t your link building campaigns working? Let’s find out. How Link Building Should “Work” First, let’s talk about how link building is supposed to “work” in the first place, and the various ways that link building can go wrong. You likely understand the goal is to establish or earn links pointing back to your domain to reap the benefits of increased authority and traffic—so how can you tell if your strategy is working or not? Link permanence. Nothing on the internet is truly permanent—at least, that we know of—but for the most part, the links you build should seem that way. One of the biggest advantages of link building is its capacity for accumulation; since all your links remain in place indefinitely, they’ll continue paying dividends of traffic and building on each other’s authority to improve your campaign further and further over time. If your links are getting removed, or if they’re otherwise unable to fulfill that duty, your link building campaign can’t possibly work. If you’re links aren’t sticking or you’re finding your linkgraph is plagued with broken links, then you’ll likely need to fix broken links by engaging in a broken link building campaign to get them back online. Increasing referral traffic. Link building should also increase your referral traffic; each new link you build serves as another portal to your site, and if that portal is relevant to your audience, at least a portion of your readers should be inclined to click through. As you build more links on higher-authority sources and continue reaping value from your old links, your total referral traffic should be on a trend of constant incline.If your growth slows to a negligible crawl, or worse, if your traffic starts to actively decline, you have a problem on your hands. Increasing domain authority and organic traffic. Similarly, as you progress in your link building efforts, you should see both increasing domain authority and organic traffic growth. Domain authority growth is an indication that you’re building positive momentum with the number and diversity of links you build to your site, and you can calculate that figure using Moz’s Open Site Explorer or a similar tool. If your domain authority becomes stagnant or starts to decline, it’s a sign that your campaign is in jeopardy. If your domain authority is rising, your organic traffic should also start to rise, since your overall search rankings will rise; if it doesn’t, something isn’t working correctly. New opportunities and reputation growth. Throughout your link building campaign, you should be met with a steady stream of new opportunities and the growth of your reputation. That means, you should gradually work your way up to bigger and higher-authority publishers; if you find yourself trapped in the same handful of publishers you started with, you’re doing something wrong. Though reputation is linked to this upward momentum, it’s a distinct concept that’s much harder to measure; if you feel you aren’t establishing your brand as an authority in the industry, it could be a sign your link building isn’t working as well. These general problems all indicate that something is probably wrong with your campaign. Even if you’re earning value in some areas, a disruption of growth in any other area is enough to warrant closer inspection; detecting and correcting the issues within your campaign can always make it stronger. That said, there are many different possible issues to address, so I’m splitting them into two main groups: high-level and ground-level issues. High-Level Issues First up are high-level issues; these are general problems with your approach, your overarching strategy, and your means of execution. They aren’t specific to any one aspect of your campaign but can affect almost all aspects of your campaign when they exist. Publisher Inaccessibility One of the most effective ways to build links is creating guest content to be featured on off-site publications; this provides context for your link, gives you a good excuse to be featured on high-authority sites, and gives you a recurring platform for development. However, if you can’t find your way onto a publisher’s site, which is usually the case, then this option is closed for you. I wrote an in-depth guide on how to become a contributor at major media publications, called The Ultimate, Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Business by Guest Blogging. But bear in mind that guest blogging services should be filtered with extreme caution. Rejection is to be expected with this strategy; no matter how authoritative you are or how strong your pitches are, some publishers just won’t be interested in what you have to offer. But if you find yourself rejected consistently, and unable to land your first guest spot or advance to another publisher, you won’t be able to progress. There are a few possible influencing factors here: Status and reputation. First, your status and/or reputation may not be sufficient to land you a guest spot. Publisher standards vary from highly restrictive to universally open, but if you don’t have a portfolio of content to demonstrate your abilities, or a sufficient online presence to prove your

Content marketing is always changing to reflect the latest technologies and the latest trends in consumption. Content is a broad term, referring to anything from simple social media comments to extensively detailed whitepapers, and everything in between. Using each content medium to its maximum potential is the best way to be successful with your inbound online marketing campaign, but if you stay consistent with only a handful of content types, you run the risk of a stagnant or uninteresting campaign. New Mediums For Content Marketing Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in a way that is valuable to them. Its goal is not to sell but to build trust and brand awareness while nurturing leads through the sales funnel. When done right, content marketing can benefit both consumers and businesses. For businesses, content marketing can be an extremely cost-effective way to reach new customers and generate leads without resorting to paid advertising. And for consumers, well-crafted content can be a valuable source of information and assistance during the purchase process. But before content marketing can be effective, businesses must first understand what their audience wants and needs. Only then can they create content that resonates with that audience. If you’re looking to stay up to date in the content marketing world, or if you’re just looking to inject your strategy with a handful of new mediums, try using one of these content types: Podcasting Podcasts are a series of audio or video episodes that are free to create and syndicate throughout the web. Many leading online brands have their podcast series, each with a unique angle or subject matter that’s explored regularly. Some podcasts focus on industry developments. Some focus on interviews and news. Still, others have more audience engagement factor, bringing in questions and answers or tackling subjects from reader requests. Since podcasts are usually based on a subscription model, they function as a social media platform as much as they do an independent content marketing strategy. Knowing that you can tailor your podcasting strategy to fit your audience appropriately, covering topics and speaking in a way that’s more fluid than straightforward blogging yet more structured than social media interactions. Like with interviews, it’s wise to include written transcriptions of each episode on your website and social media. Do note that podcasts take commitment. Unlike journal articles, which can be used once to great effect, podcasts need to be rolled out regularly before they start generating results. Online Interviews Interviews are a great content medium, especially for busy content marketers. The content takes the form of an organic discussion. You’ll have to spend some time finding and vetting candidates, but once you’ve found a potential interviewee, the remainder of the content piece practically takes care of itself. You can post your interviews as a video or audio file but ensure to include a transcript on your site. The written words are powerful for SEO and are more scannable for readers looking only to get the highlights of the piece. Interviews are valuable because they share information and enhance authority. In addition to providing some great material and positive experiences for your growing content audience, it is a sophisticated form of relationship building and generally works as a mutually beneficial relationship. One thing, If a brand and a leading voice in the industry are both involved in the interview, both of them get a share of credit from the other’s existing audience. First-Party Source Research & Journalistic Articles The term “journalistic articles” is used somewhat loosely here. In order to be accepted into a real academic journal, you usually have to be a strong authority in the field, backed with years of experience, deep knowledge, and a full team of supporting researchers and reviewers. But you don’t necessarily need to be published in a major peer-reviewed academic journal in order to reap the benefits of the “journalistic article” medium. Like whitepapers, journalistic articles are essentially in-depth, detailed pieces of written content that focus on a given concept. The differentiating factor with journal articles is the research factor; whitepapers usually offer secondary research (and occasionally some primary research) in order to support a main point, but journal articles revolve around a bout of original research. Rather than making a point and using data to support it, instead you’ll be presenting data and drawing a conclusion from it. Chances are, you won’t draw people in with humor or entertainment in your journal articles. Instead, these are scientific, logic-driven pieces that will heighten your status as an authority and provide source material for others to use in their content marketing programs. Memes Strictly defined, a meme is an idea or a behavior that spreads rapidly from individual to individual within a given culture. Originally used as a descriptor of evolutionary principles, the term “meme” itself has evolved to refer to bits of online content that have captured attention and gone viral. Some Internet users and online marketers have since begun to refer to any amusing picture as a “meme,” though this isn’t always the case. It’s technically impossible to start a meme, since a meme does not exist until it begins to spread, but you can implement pieces of content that could become a meme in a given context. Hashtags are an accessible example. By introducing a trend, action, or conversation topic using a given hashtag, companies hope to inspire a viral movement collected under that term. Of course, hashtags aren’t a necessary component of meme creation; if you can start a trend simply by making a request or doing something bold, by all means, do it. The key here is to present a piece of content in an easily digestible format that can spread easily from one person to another, preferably in