At 20, I was gaining valuable experience and building my portfolio, which was going well until my father said “No more unpaid internships.”. For a few days, I applied to hundreds of open marketing positions, many of which I totally did not qualify for (hey, worth a shot, right?). I waited and waited.

Content marketing is what I like to call nonchalant advertising because your content is so good that people do not even realize your marketing. A better definition of content marketing is: creating free, quality content that engages your company’s “buyer persona(s),” otherwise known as your specific target audience members, and keeps them coming back to your website.

Anyone who knows me has heard me talk about the infamous “f-factor,” a brilliant term originated by trendwatching.com. “That’s ‘F’ for friends, fans and followers who influence a consumer’s buying decision. The F-factor is a stage toward the end of the SEO optimization cycle. It is the sharing and re-sharing that precedes your blog post (keyword inputs, personal social sharing of the post and social bookmarking, which is a topic for another blog post).

Yesterday, I sat down with a client to talk about her company’s online presence, or rather the lack-there-of. I made the point, which the client already knew but most people do not realize that amazing content is the key to any social media or online marketing plan. I said, “All anyone (who does not understand social media) asks is: where is the return on investment.

If you want your page to be found by search engines then it is vital that you that you know the key factors in search engine optimization (SEO). In this series, I will explain what those are. Effective SEO is much more than just utilizing certain keywords. Today, you need to create quality content in order for search engines to rank your page among its first pages.

How can the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle help your marketing? The 80-20 rule states that “for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.”. My definition of the 80-20 rule is a bit different – focus on creating content that is interesting to customers 80 percent of the time and only spend 20 percent of the time spewing out promotional content.