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CONTENT MARKETING CHECKLIST – THE ESSENTIALS
Checklist for content marketing essentials
When creating content that is going to be valuable in attracting a defined audience it is important to remember four key areas, all of which WPcult can assist you with. Your content should try and combine all of the following:
- Educate
Educational content conveys knowledge to the user. Insightful videos that answer a question can leave a lasting impression. This includes videos such as ‘how to’ tutorials across a spectrum of areas: how to tie a tie, how to start a business, how to draw, or even how to be a ninja. Educational content satisfies the consumer’s thirst for knowledge or answers a defined question. This will be content worth viewing and sharing with selective audiences.
WPcult can research what people are searching for around your brand and what consumers want to find out. This in turn will drive traffic to your content.
- Inform
Whereas educational content answers people’s questions, informational content can keep people up-to-date with news and events, as opposed to responding to questions they may have. Social media is now the go-to platform for the collection and distribution of this content, as opposed to old media channels. The challenge with this form of content is its time-limited nature with content becoming irrelevant when lacking context.
- Entertain
Telling stories is as old as the human condition itself. Evoking emotion through entertainment is a great trap for viewers. Video is the ideal tool for evoking empathy or extreme emotion, whether this is through humor or sadness. As one statistic claims that video is worth 1.8 million words, this is the optimum medium to showcase the marketing power of entertainment. Humour also works with text-based advertising and memes, but the humor in video-form is likely to achieve more views and shares than anything else.
- Inspire
One often overlooked goal in content strategy is to provide inspiration to viewers and consumers. Inspiring content can be anything that encourages people to try something new, challenge themselves, or push their limits. Showing the achievements of others, those who have overcome adversity or other challenges will often inspire people to do something featured in the video or to buy a product to help them do that. This can be particularly beneficial in charity campaigns.
Top 28 social marketing resources
Not on this list but we will go over at a later date are
Findable, Readable, Understandable, Actionable, Brandable, and last but not least Shareable. Also Essential are Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Decision, and how you get there Research, Planning, and Ideas, Execution/Creation, Optimization, Distribution and Analysis of the data, Retweak until you have the best results.
Tips & Tricks
Can′t add pagination on WooThemes Thick Theme
Everything I have tried has led to nothing. And I have tried six way’s from Sunday to get my main posts to paginate.
example one:
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; query_posts('offset=1&showposts=' . get_option('woo_other_entries') . '&cat=-' . $GLOBALS['ex_asides'] . '&paged=$paged' ); ?>
example two:
<?php global $myOffset; global $wp_query; $myOffset = 1; $paged = intval(get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; $temp = $wp_query; $wp_query= null; $wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query(array( 'offset' => $myOffset, 'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84), 'paged' => $paged, 'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'), )); ?>
example three:
<?php global $myOffset; $myOffset = 1; $wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query(array( 'offset' => $myOffset, 'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84), 'paged' => $paged, 'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'), )); ?>
And after those tries, I just can’t get more pages beyond the option’s that I choose, and can only pull an archive via the browse more link.
Any suggestions or anything?
Tips & Tricks
Pulling custom fields from outside the loop
In the last post “Creating a custom widget” I showed you how to create a custom widget. Well in this post I will show you how I used my custom widget to display all post with a certain custom field from outside the WordPress loop.
In the last post I used this tag:
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/showcase.php'); ?>
Now I will show you what the file showcase.php
has:
<ul> <?php global $wpdb; $sql = "SELECT wposts.* FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'gallery-url' AND wposts.post_status = 'publish' AND wposts.post_type = 'post' ORDER BY wposts.post_date DESC LIMIT 8"; $pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($sql, OBJECT); $output = $pre_HTML; foreach ($pageposts as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?> <li><a href="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "gallery-url", $single = true); ?>" title="Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"> <img src="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "image", $single = true); ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" /></a></li> <?php endforeach; ?> </ul>
That’s it! The most important item you may want to change for your own custom field is the line : AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'gallery-url'
. Where you would change the text in bold to match your own custom field value.
Update:
Check out Austin from PressedWords comment below.
With his great advise I was able to figure out why all my attempts to use the query_post weren’t working. it came down to this line of code: <?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "gallery-url", $single = true); ?>
, that was what I had in my code, and the $post->ID
is the reason my code would not echo or print the custom field’s value. Solution? replace $post->ID
with get_the_ID()
. HA, so simple.
Tips & Tricks
Creating a custom widget
Today let’s learn a simple quick trick on how to create a custom widget. For my example I will show you how I created my Showcase widget located in the middle, to the right of the posts.
First under your functions.php
file type in the following:
<?php // Custom Widget function MyCustomWidget() { ?> <li class="widget"> <h2 class="heading">Latest Showcase</h2> <ul> <?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/showcase.php'); ?> </ul> </li> <?php } register_sidebar_widget('The Custom Widget for Showcase', 'MyCustomWidget'); ?>
- Always make sure your code is between the
<?php
and?>
for it to work. - Once we call the function, the rest is assuming html code that you may or may not need.
- For instance, you may just put in a picture and call it a day. But my code starts with
<li<
because my sidebar’s start and end with<ul<
. - Any way, once your done, just set the final “
register_sidebar_widget('the widget title', 'the name of the function');
“
That’s it! Now you have a custom widget with what ever you want!
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