#the pitting of women against each other not only for a misogynist’s gain but also because the misogynist fears those women

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

Something something the volumes it speaks that the Darkling felt the need to put Zoya and Alina in competition with each other and put them against each other from the moment they met so that they wouldn’t be able to immediately acknowledge what was being done to them and unite against him something something

[lovemyromance]

Let's talk about the dreaded pliant bones argument in ACOTAR

First of all, I don't ever want to see this stupid argument anywhere, especially after HOFAS. Second of all, none of the Archeron sisters are Illyrian so they do not have Illyrian anatomy suitable for childbirth. And yet, we see Feysand and Nessian as mates. So it's not like SJM even cared about that herself.

Then ACOSF happens, and oh no, c-sections don't apparently seem to exist and it becomes a BIG DEAL™ that Nesta changed only her own body and Feyre's body to have Illyrian anatomy.

People have been latching onto this argument like Rose on the goddamn Titanic, anything to cling to their sinking ship.

Let's not forget that Elain & Nesta had their bodies changed already once before, against their will. Why the hell would Nesta change Elain's body without obtaining consent after that traumatic experience? That would be a gross violation of bodily autonomy.

And Nesta was shown how to change the bodies. Which could hint that she still knows how, should a similar situation arise again.

But none of that even matters! What matter is that it's 2024 and we are still saying a woman can't be with the man she loves because she can't give him biological children. That is the crux of the argument Gw*nriels always try to skip around and say without saying. Like "oh no!! She can't have his babies!! Ship sank. It's over. The End."

As if a woman should be reduced down to her ability to procreate. This is not the middle ages people! Wake up!

Also, not to mention, even if we use that disgusting logic - The only other female in this series that is mentioned to have Illyrian anatomy is Emerie. Are we shipping Azriel with Emerie now? Because she can FOR SURE have his babies, if that's all that matters. Who cares about her own desires and personality and sexual preferences if she can have illyrian kids??

Now let's consider what people have been latching onto:

Gwyn...is flexible and adapts to training moves quickly. That's why Nesta commented she had "pliant bones", that's IT. She is part nymph and "has different anatomy than high fae", sure, but is that anatomy in any way, Illyrian? Water nymphs don't have Illyrian leathery wings either so I don't understand why insisting Gwyn has "pliant bones" is in any way endgame ship material. Why would her half-water nymph heritage give her the anatomy to birth a full grown illyrian-winged baby??

And then there's the cowards that use this argument by hiding behind SJM herself by saying "Well, I hate it too, but SJM is *kinda* known for writing like this and her characters are all male-dominated, fae-territorial blah blah, she is *kinda* hinting at endgame because the womb thing–" NO. No.

Don't hide. Tell the room exactly what you are saying. Which is the exact same misogynistic spiel as above, where you try to use gross medieval logic to justify your mf fictional ship, but you hide your faces when you say it. Because you know it's wrong, but you're still not above using that as "evidence" in your ship's favor.

I've even said before, I don't care what SJM says. If I don't like a misogynistic take, I am not using that as evidence in any capacity for any reason.

I'm not even being biased by my preferred ship. I genuinely just want people to stop using this argument because it's hurtful to women as a whole. Ship wars are fine, but ffs, when did we get to the point where we are pitting two women against each other based on whose uterus is more suitable??

And before you even say "I just have a problem because I ship Elriel" No. No.

It's about these kinds of cheap arguments in general. I have also never been one to go off saying how Gwyn can't be a valid love interest because her past SA trauma - That argument is also archaic and hurtful. I've never once used it. I don't like seeing it.

Can we just - Not do it? The only reason such arguments have gained traction is because they're constantly echoed by the toxic sides of the fandom online. It's gross and I don't want to be a part of a group that condones that.

Ship who you want, but let's just be respectful about it. We should not have to resort to cheap arguments like the above.

[rantingcrocodile]

I don’t call myself a radical feminist because I think that if I did, it would only dilute the term. I share a lot of beliefs with radical feminists, but I also have some opposing thoughts.

I read a lot of radical feminist blogging because it’s a balm to my soul, knowing that I’m not alone, knowing that even if we don’t share the exact same values or the exact same label, there are other women who genuinely care.

What strikes me is that because I scan a lot of blogs, see how individual women interact with radical feminism, lesbian women, bisexual women like myself, straight women, women from across the globe from all kinds of different cultures, the “takes” might be different, the individual, specific beliefs might be different, what they think is the most important to talk about or what they think should be talked about more are different, their level of “niceness” is different, but, for me personally, it’s really obvious to spot the difference between someone that believes in radical feminism because they’re a radical feminist and someone that spouts radical feminism to do nothing but seek personal gain.

For example, “I hate men.”

There are a lot of what I see as genuine radfems who will rant and vent about hating men because of our oppression and/or who get frustrated with women who put up with unacceptable male behaviour. It’s understandable. It’s like you can feel the passion there. Then, you have those who call themselves “radfems” who reblog radical feminist talking points occasionally and then rant about men and you can just feel the difference, like they post about hating men and are waiting for the likes and the validation, or they’re just cruel people who are happy that they’ve found a group of people to be nasty and vicious about for no other reason but to be nasty and vicious.

Or lesbians who vent about the straight women and bisexuals that treat them badly.

It’s only right and fair that lesbians can and should be able to rant and vent, and then have solidarity from those that care about lesbians and want them to be safe and treated the way that they should be treated. It’s understandable. Then you get the lesbians who will try the same talking points, but you can tell the difference that all they want is to be seen as “superior” women that fall into the same patriarchal trap that pits women against each other, twisting words and language to use the same manipulation that men use to make us feel guilty and subservient. 

There’s a huge difference between wanting liberation, ranting and venting, and those who latch on to radical feminism as an excuse to be bullies for the sake of being bullies.

This isn’t me saying “You’re not allowed to say “I hate men” because that’s mean” or “Lesbians aren’t allowed to rant about bad experiences with bi women because biphobia.”

This is me saying that I think it’s wrong that there are women who align with the movement to steal the genuine need to rant and vent and turn it into a personality trait.

Either it’s nothing but attention-seeking, which makes a joke out of our need to express ourselves and our rage or it’s a clever excuse to do nothing but bully and abuse other women, ironically using feminist thought to prop up one of the oldest tricks in the patriarchal playbook.

Whatever the reason behind the bandwagoning false outrage, it’s misogynistic. 

Once you see the difference between the real, pained ranting of a woman who has had enough and the woman who only wants to harm other women, you’ll see exactly what I mean.

[alicentflorent]

sansa was d&d favourite and you can't deny that. they went above and beyond to make her seem better than all the other women and gave her a position of power

okay first of all, fuck anyone who thinks that Sansa was d&d’s favorite when they mistreated her throughout the majority of the show and as a result also mistreated Sophie as they did with most of the actresses. d&d only care about the white men they use as self inserts (just look at the final council) and that’s the tea.

They changed the storyline of Sansa becoming an important political player and figuring out who she really was after being a prisoner and forced to suppress her emotions and opinions. just after we see her escape her abusers and gain some agency and control over her situation they have her sold off to RAMSAY because d&d thought a woman being tortured and raped (yes that is the extent of the storyline. nothing else is adapted from jeyne’s story.) because d&d thought it was more interesting than seeing her become stronger and an intelligent politician without facing extreme violence.

She had some good moments in season six but most of it was a direct result of her season five storyline (taking down Ramsay for example) so for those of us that love Sansa and relate to her. the empowering moments fall flat because we are aware of the story changes that happened to get us to that moment. 

I’m not even going to go into the ooc fuckery that was season seven but if you think Dany was mistreated in an ooc badly paced story that made no sense for her character arc that we had seen so far then look at Sansa and Arya in season seven. They did the exact same thing here that they did to Dany in season eight. They used misogynistic tropes that pit women against each other and villanized both women insinuating that they were capable of killing each other when hero big brother wasn't around. The only difference is it ended suddenly with the two sisters taking out baelish instead of killing each other in a jealous rage. Which again fell flat because we had to watch the stark sisters characterisation get completely assassinated. season seven could have served as sansa’s political plot line with baelish that we missed out on in the vale and still ending with Sansa and her siblings taking him out. for example we could have had her learning how to play him and the game then maybe finding out that baelish is poisoning robin. therefore, still an immediate threat to her family that has to be taken out instead of used for political gain. There was some source material there but d&d didn't want to use it. Much like the dark!dany story, they wanted to take the easier misogynistic route. turning the sisters against each other reducing one to the powerhungry, manipulative “i suffered the most” trope and the other into “anti women victimblaming sociopath” trope. Then doing a 180 at the end of the season to pit them against another woman in season eight. 

then in season eight, Sansa got to be qitn but that was after a season of having her thanking her male abusers for making her strong including the one that just locked her up and violently raped and tortured her. she also ended up alone because women that chose love, family and their relationships with other people are driven mad or incapable of being strong. 

Instead of saying “this woman was treated better than my fave and it isn't fair!!” try looking at the overall issues of the shows treatment of women and acknowledging that whether you like them or not all the women were done dirty at some point and giving them what you consider to be a “good ending” or a position of power doesn't undo the misogyny or mistreatment of a female character.

[dracaesanguinem]

My views and opinions on s08e04 (part 2)

Once more, as I mentioned with part 1, where I mostly addressed what I felt about Daenery’s character, I do not mean to write this post to get riled up reactions since this is not addressed to any of the characters or their writers on this website. This is my opinion and my critical view on what happened with some writing points and some character points in the latest episode.

Please, if you feel like you have something to add, in a civil manner, we can discuss matters. If what you have toward me is just hate, please do not address it my way... These are just my opinions. If you want to play you character strictly as it’s written in the show canon, that is up to you and you will never so much as receive hate or any thing of the sort because of it from me. I am show canon friendly, I am book canon friendly, I’m complete AU friendly. You do you, by dear writer.

This post is going to regard what I think of how other characters written and treated in the last episode, especially women:

I am incredibly appalled by the continuous misogynist ways that this show keeps portraying women, especially women of power and women of color. We’ve seen it before with characters like Cersei, the Sand Snakes, Elaria, etc. This episode has been the very pinnacle of a problem that has started a long time ago and it goes much beyond the 'way that women were treated in medieval times’ (which has been a common ‘excuse’ that even I admit to using in the past) because this is about how the producers are writing the characters themselves, not just the views of society towards them.

THIS CONCERNS SO MUCH MORE THAN THE CHARACTERS WHO I’M POINTING OUT so please, if you can, bare with me until the end of this really long post. I’m sorry it’s so long, I just feel like these things need to be said.

• Missandei: I must say, killing the only POC female character in this show for shock value is... awful. I'm glad some of the rumors/leaks circulating regarding what happened before her death didn't turn out to be true, though I don't exactly trust they weren’t written in and then just erased at last minute.

• Brienne: As much as I understand ultimately why Jaime ended up leaving Brienne, I was not expecting them to pull a ‘virgin’ theme toward her in the drinking game, and I even less expected Jaime to address it again in the room, almost seemingly as if this was a ‘duty’ of his. It’s never actually said that this is how he views it, and I don’t hate Jaime at all for any of this, it’s just the way that the narrative itself is constructed. It’s something I’ve seen before in shows and movies where a man feels the need to take the V card away from a woman. I think women are entitled to their bodies and to do with them as they please. The ‘virgin card’ is such an old theme and so misconstrued and used so much toward women as a guilt object, that I just wished that it had not been used in this case. I’m not so much angry at this as I am a little disappointed. It wasn’t necessary and it didn’t add anything to the chemistry Jaime and Brienne already had or any of what happened between them, which I honestly think was beautiful though I won’t address Jaime’s choices at the end of it all.

• Sansa and the Sansa/Daenerys dynamics: I have to be honest and true to what I feel and that is that I don't like, at all, the way Sansa is being portrayed in the show in certain moments. Her mistrust and spitefulness is being written in such a way that it leaves the audience questioning the reasons WHY she doesn't like Daenerys when they have more in common than not. Lines like "why her" and "your loyalty to your dragon queen" (the last one being delivered when Daenerys was fighting, not just for the kingdom she wants, but for the north and for Sansa's people alongside some of those whom Sansa loves the most), were completely put in without context toward her reasoning just to make the character seem spiteful.

Sansa is a strong woman who is been through so much. She brings out the best in the people around. those who truly love her. She is a competent ruler of her house, she's very much able to govern Winterfell on her own... She would've been such a good influence and ally to Dany and the only reason why they are not isn't even clear. And it's NOT because of the North’s independence. The comments I cited are not about the independence, they seem and feel spiteful and personal. The way she looks at Daenerys during the feast looks like envy and bitterness. It's like they split her character into two completely different halves: the one that is showed with those Sansa loves and the one that is shown whenever Jon or Daenerys are present in the same scene.

It's a plot to pit female characters in power against each other who have no reason to hate each other beyond the bickering we're given through their side-eyes and remarks. And, don't get me wrong here, I equally hated the moments Dany used the same sort of remarks against Sansa. These characters have more reasons to be joined and not hateful toward each other. It's misogynistic, it's ugly toward a character that had such a BIG character development and it's wrong BY HER. I say this out of love for Sansa's character but out of anger toward the way she's being written in the show.

This is coming from the two men who are comparing Sansa to Littlefinger. Do you think that's a compliment? It's not. Littlefinger cared for nothing more than himself. He was selfish and power hungry, he had nothing he cared for more than his precious power and his personal gain and he moved every pawn to make sure he had what he wanted. Sansa is not like that. She might have learned from him, but she has so much more that she cares for and everything she does is for her family and for her home. Not for power. Not for the throne. Not for a title.

I'm not going to comment further on the Sansa disregarding her promise to Jon because, honestly, after a whole speech about how Jon is a Stark to her, a brother to her, it just made so very little sense that she would just tell Tyrion, again, only out of spite against Daenerys — remember she chose to say it after the words 'why her' and after Tyrion kept trying to persuade her into getting to know Dany better. Also, doing so just so that Jon might have a better claim when she knows it’s not what he wants and it goes against his wishes, after all they’ve been through, feels very wrong.

The issue in this specific case is bigger than fiction, it's bigger than two characters: this is a vision so many men have of women, especially women in power. Sometimes, not even just men. I see on twitter and tumblr every day fans from either one of these characters riled up against each other when the core of the problem is in the writer’s views and not the characters themselves. These are the skewed views some men have of women: that they bicker, and b*tch and are ultimately detrimental toward each other, especially if both have a position of power. This is a problem that happens outside of fiction when women don't support each other and instead hold spitefulness and hate when, ultimately, women are already victimized ENOUGH without need to be turned against each other. And it honestly HURTS to see two women who are strong, who went through so much, so many similar experiences, being written flatly like this, through the hands of men that ultimately do NOT understand what they are made of and do NOT understand all that they've been through.

[labourpress]

Jeremy Corbyn speech to Labour Party Conference

Jeremy Corbyn MP, Leader of the Labour Party, speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton today, said:

 ***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

 Conference, thank you for that.  We meet here this week as a united Party,  advancing in every part of Britain, winning the confidence of millions of our fellow citizens, setting out our ideas and plans for our country’s future, that have already inspired people of all ages and backgrounds.

 And it’s a privilege to be speaking in Brighton.  A city that not only has a long history of hosting Labour conferences, but also of inspirational Labour activists.

 It was over a century ago, here in Brighton, that a teenage shop worker had had enough of the terrible conditions facing her and her workmates. She risked the sack to join the Shop Workers’ Union, after learning about it in a newspaper used to wrap up fish and chips, and was so effective at standing up for women shop workers, she became assistant general secretary before the age of 30.

 In that role she seconded the historic resolution at the Trades Union Congress of 1899  to set up the Labour Representation Committee so that working people would finally have representation in Parliament.

 That became the Labour Party  and it was this woman, Margaret Bondfield  who later become a Labour MP. And in 1929, the first ever woman to join the British cabinet’

 From a Brighton drapery to Downing Street.  Margaret Bondfield’s story is a reminder of the decisive role women have played in the Labour Party from its foundation, and that Labour has always been about making change  by working together and standing up for others.

 Conference, against all predictions in June we won the largest increase in the Labour vote since 1945 and achieved Labour’s best vote for a generation.  It’s a result which has put the Tories on notice  and Labour on the threshold of power.

 Yes, we didn’t do quite well enough  and we remain in opposition for now, but we have become a Government-in-waiting.   Our outstanding shadow cabinet team here today. And our message to the country could not be clearer - Labour is ready.

 Ready to tackle inequality , ready to rebuild our NHS, ready to give opportunity to young people, dignity and security to older people,  ready to invest in our economy and meet the challenges of climate change and automation, ready to put peace and justice at the heart of foreign policy.  And ready to build a new and progressive relationship  with Europe.

We are ready and the Tories are clearly not. They’re certainly not strong and they’re definitely not stable. They’re not remotely united. And they’re hanging on by their fingertips.

But this Tory Government does have one thing that we lack.  They have tracked down the Magic Money Tree when it was needed to keep Theresa May in Downing Street.  It was given a good old shake - and lo and behold – now we know the price of power – it’s about £100m for each Democratic Unionist MP.

During the election campaign, Theresa May told voters they faced the threat of a “coalition of chaos . Remember that? Well, now they’re showing us exactly how that works. And I don’t just mean the Prime Minister’s desperate deal with the DUP. She’s got a “coalition of chaos” around her own cabinet table  - Phillip Hammond and Liam Fox, Boris Johnson and David Davis.

At each other’s throats,  squabbling and plotting, manoeuvring to bundle the Prime Minister out of Number Ten  and take her place  at the first opportunity  Instead of getting to grips with the momentous issues facing our country.

But this coalition of chaos is no joke. Just look at their record since the Conservatives have been in office;

The longest fall in people’s pay since record began

Homelessness doubled

NHS waiting lists lengthening

 School class sizes growing and teachers leaving

 Over 4 million children now in poverty

20,000 police officers … and 11,000 firefighters cut

More people in work and in poverty … than ever before

 Condemned by the United Nations for violating the rights of disabled people.

That’s not strong and stable. It’s callous and calculating. Because the Tories calculated that making life worse for millions in the name of austerity  would pay for hefty tax handouts to the rich and powerful.

Conference, your efforts in the election campaign stopped the Tories in their tracks. The election result has already delivered one Tory U-turn after another over some of their most damaging policies. The cruel dementia tax was scrapped within three days of being announced. Plans to bring back grammar schools  have been ditched . The threat to the pensions’ triple lock abandoned. Withdrawal of Winter Fuel payments  dumped. The pledge to bring back fox hunting dropped. And their plan to end free school meals in primary schools  has been binned.

The reality is that barely three months since the election  this coalition of Conservative chaos is tearing up its Manifesto and tearing itself apart. They are bereft of ideas and energy.  Indeed, they seem to be cherry-picking Labour policies instead, including on Brexit.

I say to the Prime Minister: “You’re welcome . But go the whole hog end austerity, abolish tuition fees, scrap the public sector pay cap. I think we can find a Commons majority for all of that. This is a weak and divided Government  with no purpose beyond clinging to power.

It is Labour that is now setting the agenda  and winning the arguments  for a new common sense  about the direction our country should take.

Conference, there were two stars of our election campaign. The first was our Manifesto  that drew on the ideas of our members and trade unionists  and the hopes and aspirations of their communities and workplaces.  And we were clear about how we would pay for it by asking the richest and the largest corporations to start paying their fair share.

Not simply to redistribute within a system that isn’t delivering for most people  but to transform that system. So we set out  not only how we would protect public services but how we would rebuild and invest in our economy, with a publicly-owned engine of sustainable growth, driven by national and regional investment banks,  to generate good jobs and prosperity in every region and nation.

Our Manifesto is the programme of a modern, progressive socialist party  that has rediscovered its roots and its purpose, bucking the trend across Europe.

And Conference, the other star of that campaign was YOU. Our members, our supporters in the trade unions, our doorstep and social media campaigners. Young people sharing messages and stories on social media, hundreds of thousands organising online and on the ground  to outplay the Tories’ big money machine.

Is it any wonder that here today in Brighton you represent the largest political party in western Europe, with nearly 600,000 members, alongside three million affiliated trade unionists, brimming with enthusiasm and confidence in the potential of our people. You are the future.  And let me say straight away. I’m awed and humbled by everything you have done, along with hundreds of thousands of others across the country, to take us to where we are today.

I have never been more proud to be your elected leader. Our election campaign gave people strength. It brought millions on to the electoral register  and inspired millions to go to vote for the first time.

And Labour was the Party of unity, bringing generations and communities together, rather than pitting young and old against each other, as the Tories did.  We will never seek to squeeze one generation to support another.  Under Labour, people will win together.

The result of our campaign confounded every expert and sceptic.  I see John McDonnell said the ‘grey beards’ had got it all wrong. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, John? We wiped out the Tory majority,  winning support in every social and age group  and gaining seats in every region and nation of the country.

So please, Theresa May take another walking holiday  and make another impetuous decision. The Labour campaign machine is primed and ready to roll.

Of course, there were some who didn’t come out of the election too well. I’m thinking of some of our more traditional media friends. They ran the campaign they always do under orders from their tax exile owners  to trash Labour at every turn. The day before the election one paper devoted fourteen pages to attacking the Labour Party. And our vote went up nearly 10%.

Never have so many trees died in vain. The British people saw right through it.  So this is a message to the Daily Mail’s editor-  next time, please could you make it 28 pages?

But there’s a serious message too, the campaign by the Tories and their loyal media was nasty and personal.  It fuelled abuse online and no one was the target of that more than Diane Abbott.  She has a decades-long record of campaigning for social justice and has suffered intolerable misogynistic and racist abuse. Faced with such an overwhelmingly hostile press and an army of social media trolls,it’s even more important that we stand.

Yes we will disagree, but there can never be any excuse for any abuse of anybody. We settle our differences with democratic votes and unite around those decision.

That is the Labour Party, here this week, and out in the communities EVERY week -diverse, welcoming, democratic  and ready to serve our country.

There is no bigger test in politics right now than Brexit, an incredibly important and complex process, that cannot be reduced to repeating fairy stories from the side of a bus  or waiting 15 months to state the obvious.  As democratic socialists, we accept and respect the referendum result, but respect for a democratic decision  does not mean giving a green light to a recklesss Tory Brexit agenda  that would plunge Britain into a Trump-style race-to-the-bottom  in rights and corporate taxes.

We are not going to be passive spectators  to a hopelessly inept negotiating team  putting at risk people’s jobs, rights and living standards. A team more interested in posturing for personal advantage than in getting the best deal for our country. To be fair, Theresa May’s speech in Florence last week  did unite the cabinet. for a few hours at least.  Her plane had barely touched down at Heathrow  before the divisions broke out again.

Never has the national interest been so ill-served on such a vital issue,  If there were no other reason for the Tories to go their self-interested Brexit bungling would be reason enough. So I have a simple message to the cabinet  for Britain’s sake pull yourself together  or make way.

  One thing needs to be made clear straight away.  The three million EU citizens currently living and working in Britain are welcome here. They have been left under a cloud of insecurity by this government when their future could have been settled months ago.  So Theresa May, give them the full guarantees they deserve today.  If you don’t, we will.

Since the referendum result our Brexit team has focused above all on our economic future. That future is now under real threat.  A powerful faction in the Conservative leadership  sees Brexit as their chance to create a tax haven on the shores of Europe  a low-wage, low tax deregulated playground for the hedge funds and speculators. A few at the top would do very nicely, no question. But manufacturing industries would go to the wall  taking skilled jobs with them our tax base would crumble  our public services would be slashed still further.

We are now less than 18 months away from leaving the European Union. And so far, the Tory trio leading the talks have got nowhere  and agreed next to nothing. This rag-tag Cabinet spends more time negotiating with each other than they do with the EU. A cliff-edge Brexit is at risk of becoming a reality. That is why Labour has made clear that Britain should stay within the basic terms of the single market  and a customs union  for a limited transition period. It is welcome at least that Theresa May has belatedly accepted that.

But beyond that transition, our task is a different one. It is to unite everyone in our country around a progressive vision of what Britain could be, but with a government that stands for the many not the few.

Labour is the only party that can bring together those who voted leave and those who backed remain  and unite the country for a future beyond Brexi. What matters in the Brexit negotiations is to achieve a settlement  that delivers jobs, rights and decent living standards.

Conference, the real divide over Brexit could not be . A shambolic Tory Brexit driving down standards .Or a Labour Brexit that puts jobs first a Brexit for the many, one that guarantees unimpeded access to the single market  and establishes a new co-operative relationship with the EU.

A Brexit that uses powers returned from Brussels to support a new industrial strategy  to upgrade our economy in every region and nation.  One that puts our economy first not fake immigration targets that fan the flames of fear. We will never follow the Tories into the gutter of blaming migrants for the ills of society. It isn’t migrants who drive down wages and conditions  but the worst bosses in collusion with a Conservative government  that never misses a chance to attack trade unions and weaken people’s rights at work.

Labour will take action to stop employers driving down pay and conditions  not pander to scapegoating or racism.   How Britain leaves the European Union is too important  to be left to the Conservatives  and their internal battles and identity crises.

Labour will hold Theresa May’s squabbling ministers to account  every step of the way in these talks. And, with our Brexit team of Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry and Barry Gardiner  we stand ready to take over  whenever this government fails. to negotiate a new relationship with Europe that works for us all  reaching outto help create a Europe for the many for the future.

The truth is …. That under the Tories Britain’s future is at risk whatever the outcome of the Brexit process. Our economy no longer delivers secure housing secure well-paid jobs or rising living standards. There is a new common sense emerging  about how the country should be run. That’s what we fought for in the election  and that’s what’s needed to replace the broken model forged by Margaret Thatcher many years ago.

And Ten years after the global financial crash  the Tories still believe in the same dogmatic mantra – Deregulate, privatise ,cut taxes for the wealthy, weaken rights at work, delivering profits for a few, and debt for the many. Nothing has changed. It’s as if we’re stuck in a political and economic time-warp.

As the Financial Times put it last month  our “financial system still looks a lot like the pre-crisis one” and the capitalist system still faces a “crisis of legitimacy”, stemming from the crash.

Now is the time that government took a more active role  in restructuring our economy. Now is the time that corporate boardrooms  were held accountable for their actions,  And now is the time that we developed a new model of economic management  to replace the failed dogmas of neo-liberalism … That is why Labour is looking not just to repair the damage done by austerity  but to transform our economy with a new and dynamic role for the public sector particularly where the private sector has evidently failed.

Take the water industry. Of the nine water companies in England  six are now owned by private equity  or foreign sovereign wealth funds. Their profits are handed out in dividends to shareholders  while the infrastructure crumbles  the companies pay little or nothing in tax  and executive pay has soared as the service deteriorates.

That is why we are committed  to take back our utilities into public ownership  to put them at the service of our people and our economy and stop the public being ripped off.

Of course there is much more that needs to be done. Our National Investment Bank… and the Transformation Fund  will be harnessed to mobilise public investment to create wealth and good jobs. When I’ve met business groups  I’ve been frank  we will invest in the education and skills of the workforce  and we will invest in better infrastructure from energy to digital  but we are going to ask big business to pay a bit more tax.

The Tory approach to the economy isn’t entrepreneurial  It’s extractive. They’re not focused on long-term investment and wealth creation. When you look at what they do rather than what they say it’s all about driving down wages, services and standards … to make as much money as quickly as possible with government not as the servant of the people  but of global corporations. And their disregard for rampant inequality  the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poorhave made our society more brutal  and less caring.

Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument  the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower. A horrifying fire in which dozens perished  an entirely avoidable human disaster.  One which is an indictment  not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation   and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world,  it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all  and which has contempt for working class communities.

Before the fire, a tenants’ group of Grenfell residents had warned … and I quote words that should haunt all politicians  “the Grenfell Action Group firmly believesthat only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord”. Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions  It stands for a failed and broken system  which Labour must and will replace.

The poet Ben Okri recently wrote in his poem “Grenfell Tower”:

Those who were living now are dead

Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled

If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.

See the tower, and let a world changing dream flower.

We have a duty as a country to learn the lessons from this calamity and ensure that a changed world flowers . I hope that the public inquiry will assist. But a decent home is a right for everyone whatever their income or background. And houses should be homes for the many not speculative investments for a few. Look at the Conservative housing record and you understand why Grenfell residents are sceptical about their Conservative council and this Conservative government.

 Since 2010: homelessness has doubled, 120,000 children don’t have a home to call their own, home ownership has fallen, thousands are living in homes unfit for human habitation. This is why  alongside our Shadow Housing minister John Healey we’re launching a review of social housing policy - its building, planning, regulation and management.

We will listen to tenants across the country  and propose a radical programme of action  to next year’s conference.   But some things are already clear  tenants are not being listened to.

We will insist that every home is fit for human habitation, a proposal this Tory government voted down.  And we will control rents -  when the younger generation’s housing costs are three times more than those of their grandparents, that is not sustainable.

Rent controls exist in many cities across the world   and I want our cities to have those powers too and tenants to have those protections.  We also need to tax undeveloped land held by developers and have the power to compulsorily purchase.   As Ed Miliband said, "Use it or lose it".   Families need homes.

After Grenfell we must think again about what are called regeneration schemes.

 Regeneration is a much abused word.

 Too often what it really means is forced gentrification and social cleansing, as private developers move in and tenants and leaseholders are moved out.   We are very clear: we will stop the cuts to social security.

 But we need to go further, as conference decided yesterday.

 So when councils come forward with proposals for regeneration, we will put down two markers based on one simple principle:

 Regeneration under a Labour government will be for the benefit of the local people, not private developers, not property speculators.   First, people who live on an estate that’s redeveloped must get a home on the same site and the same terms as before.

 No social cleansing, no jacking up rents, no exorbitant ground rents.   And second councils will have to win a ballot of existing tenants and leaseholders before any redevelopment scheme can take place.

 Real regeneration, yes, but for the many not the few.

  That’s not all that has to change.

 All parties unite in paying tribute to our public sector workers:

 The firefighters who ran into Grenfell Tower to save lives; the health service workers caring for the maimed in the Manchester terrorist outrage; the brave police officers who confronted the attackers at London Bridge; and PC Keith Palmer who gave his life when terrorists attack our democracy.

 Our public servants make the difference every day, between a decent and a threadbare society.

 Everyone praises them. But it is Labour that values them and is prepared to give them the pay rise they deserve and protect the services they provide.

 Year after year the Tories have cut budgets and squeezed public sector pay, while cutting taxes for the highest earners and the big corporations.

 You can’t care for the nation’s health when doctors and nurses are being asked to accept falling living standards year after year.

 You can’t educate our children properly in ever larger class sizes with more teachers than ever leaving the profession.

 You can’t protect the public on the cheap.

 The police and security services must get the resources they need, not 20,000 police cuts.

 Scrapping the public sector pay squeeze isn’t an act of charity - it is a necessity to keep our public services fully staffed and strong.

 Not everything worthwhile costs money though.

Like many people, I have been moved by the Daily Mirror's campaign to change the organ donation law.

There are more than 5,000 people on organ transplant waiting lists, but a shortage of donors means that in recent years only 3,500 of them get the life-saving treatments they need.

So that everybody whose life could be saved by an organ transplant can have the gift of life - from one human being to another.

The law has already been changed in Wales under Carwyn Jones’s leadership, and today I make the commitment a Labour government will do the same for England.

 In the last couple of days John McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey have set out how we are going to develop the economic plans in our manifesto to ensure that sustainable growth and good jobs reach ALL parts of the country.

 So that no community or region is held back.

 To establish regional development banks,. to invest in an industrial strategy for every region.

 But the challenges of the future go beyond the need to turn our backs on an economic model that has failed to invest and upgrade our economy.

 We need urgently to face the challenge of automation - robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant.

 That is a threat in the hands of the greedy, but it’s a huge opportunity if it’s managed in the interests of society as a whole.

 We won’t reap the full rewards of these great technological advances if they’re monopolised to pile up profits for a few.

  But if they’re publicly managed - to share the benefits - they can be the gateway for a new settlement between work and leisure. A springboard for expanded creativity and culture.

 The tide of automation and technological change means re-training and management of the workforce must be centre-stage in the coming years.

 So Labour will build an education and training system from the cradle to the grave that empowers people.

 Not one that shackles them with debt.

 That’s why we will establish a National Education Service which will include at its core free tuition for all college courses, technical and vocational training so that no one is held back by costs and everyone has the chance to learn.

 That will give millions a fair chance.

 Lifelong learning for all is essential in the economy of the future.

 The huge shift of employment that will take place under the impact of automation must be planned and managed.

 It demands the reskilling of millions of people. Only Labour will deliver that.

 As Angela Rayner said yesterday, our National Education Service will be run on clear principles: universal, free and empowering.

 This is central to our socialism for the 21st century, for the many not the few.

 During the election I visited Derwentside College in the constituency of our new MP Laura Pidcock - one of dozens of great new MPs breathing life and energy into Parliament.

 They offer adult courses in everything from IT to beauty therapy, from engineering to childcare.

 I met apprentice construction workers. They stand to benefit from Labour’s £250 billion National Transformation Fund, building the homes people need and the new transport, energy and digital infrastructure our country needs.

 But changing our economy to make it work for the whole country can’t take place in isolation from changing how our country is run.

 For people to take control of their own lives, our democracy needs to break out of Westminster into all parts of our society and economy where power is unaccountable.

 All around the world democracy is facing twin threats:

 One is the emergence of an authoritarian nationalism that is intolerant and belligerent.

 The second is apparently more benign, but equally insidious.

 It is that the big decisions should be left to the elite.

 That political choices can only be marginal and that people are consumers first, and only citizens a distant second.

 Democracy has to mean much more than that.

 It must mean listening to people outside of election time. Not just the rich and powerful who are used to calling the shots, but to those at the sharp end who really know what’s going on.

 Like the Greater Manchester police officer who warned Theresa May two years ago that cuts to neighbourhood policing were risking people’s lives and security.

 His concerns were dismissed as “crying wolf”.

 Like the care workers sacked when they blow the whistle on abuse of the elderly..

 Or the teachers intimidated when they speak out about the lack of funding for our children’s schools.

 Or the doctors who are ignored when they warn that the NHS crumbling before our eyes, or blow the whistle on patient safety.

  Labour is fighting for a society not only where rewards are more fairly spread, but where people are listened to more as well by government, their local council, their employer.

 Some of the most shocking cases of people not being listened to must surely be the recent revelations of widespread child sex abuse.

 Young people - and most often young working class women - have been subjected to the most repugnant abuse.

 The response lies in making sure that everybody’s voice must be heard no matter who they are or what their background.

 The kind of democracy that we should be aiming for is one where people have a continuing say in how society is run, how their workplace is run, how their local schools or hospitals are run.

  That means increasing the public accountability and democratization of local services that Andrew Gwynne was talking about on Monday.

 It means democratically accountable public ownership for the natural monopolies, with new participatory forms of management, as Rebecca Long-Bailey has been setting out.

 It means employees given their voice at work, with unions able to represent them properly, freed of undemocratic fetters on their right to organize.

 I promised you two years ago that we would do politics differently.

 It’s not always been easy.

 There’s quite a few who prefer politics the old way.

 But let me say it again. We will do politics differently.

 And the vital word there is “we”.

 Not just leaders saying things are different, but everyone having the chance to shape our democracy.

 Our rights as citizens are as important as our rights as consumers.

 Power devolved to the community, not monopolised in Westminster and Whitehall.

 Now let’s take it a stage further - make public services accountable to communities.

 Business accountable to the public, and politicians truly accountable to those we serve.

 Let the next Labour government will transform Britain by genuinely putting power in the hands of the people, the creative, compassionate and committed people of our country.

 Both at home and abroad, what underpins our politics is our compassion and our solidarity with people.

 Including those now recovering from hurricane damage in the Caribbean, floods in South Asia and Texas. and earthquakes in Mexico.

 Our interdependence as a planet could not be more obvious.

 The environmental crisis in particular demands a common global response.

 That is why President Trump’s threats to withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Treaty are so alarming.

 There is no contradiction between meeting our climate change commitments and investing to build a strong economy based on high skill industries.

 In fact the opposite is the case.

 Action on climate change is a powerful spur to investment in the green industries and jobs of the future. So long as it is managed as part of a sustainable transition.

 We know, tragically, that terrorism also recognises no boundaries.

 We have had five shocking examples in Britain this year alone.

 Two during the course of the General Election campaign and one in my own constituency.

 Both Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan - the mayors of Manchester and London - played a crucial role in bringing people together in the aftermath of those brutal attacks.

 The targeting of our democracy, of teenage girls at a pop concert, of people enjoying a night out, worshippers outside a mosque, commuters going to work - all of these are horrific crimes.

 And we all unite in both condemning the perpetrators and in our support for the emergency and security services, working to keep us safe.

 But we also know that terrorism is thriving in a world our governments have helped to shape, with its failed states, military interventions and occupations where millions are forced to flee conflict or hunger.

 We have to do better and swap the knee-jerk response of another bombing campaign for long-term help to solve conflicts rather than fuel them.

 And we must put our values at the heart of our foreign policy.

 Democracy and human rights are not an optional extra to be deployed selectively.

 So we cannot be silent at the cruel Saudi war in Yemen, while continuing to supply arms to Saudi Arabia, or the crushing of democracy in Egypt or Bahrain, or the tragic loss of life in Congo.

 And I say this today to Aung San Suu Kyi - a champion of democracy and human rights - : end the violence now against the Rohingya in Myanmar and allow the UN and international aid agencies in to Rakhine state.

 The Rohingya have suffered for too long!

 We should stand firm for peaceful solutions to international crises.

 Let’s tone down the rhetoric, and back dialogue and negotiations to wind down the deeply dangerous confrontation over the Korean Peninsula.

 And I appeal to the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres to use the authority of his office and go to Washington and Pyongyang to kick start that essential process of dialogue.

 And let’s give real support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion and move to a genuine two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

 Britain’s voice needs to be heard independently in the world.

 We must be a candid friend to the United States, now more than ever.

 The values we share are not served by building walls, banning immigrants on the basis of religion, polluting the planet, or pandering to racism.

 And let me say frankly - the speech made by the US President to the United Nations last week was deeply disturbing.

 It threatened war and talked of tearing up international agreements.

 Devoid of concern for human rights or universal values, it was not the speech of a world leader.

 Our government has a responsibility. It cannot meekly go along with this dangerous course.

 If the special relationship means anything, it must mean that we can say to Washington: that way is the wrong way.

 That’s clearly what’s needed in the case of  Bombardier where thousands of jobs are now at stake.

 A Prime Minister betting our economic future on a deregulated trade deal with the US might want to explain how 220% tariffs are going to boost our exports.

 So let Britain’s voice be heard loud and clear for peace, justice and cooperation.

 Conference, it is often said that elections can only be won from the centre ground.

 And in a way that’s not wrong - so long as it’s clear that the political centre of gravity isn’t fixed or unmovable, nor is it where the establishment pundits like to think it is.

 It shifts as people’s expectations and experiences change and political space is opened up.

 Today’s centre ground is certainly not where it was twenty or thirty years ago.

 A new consensus is emerging from the great economic crash and the years of austerity, when people started to find political voice for their hopes for something different and better.

 2017 may be the year when politics finally caught up with the crash of 2008 - because we offered people a clear choice.

 We need to build a still broader consensus around the priorities we set in the election, making the case for both compassion and collective aspiration.

 This is the real centre of gravity of British politics.

 We are now the political mainstream.

 Our manifesto and our policies are popular because that is what most people in our country actually want, not what they’re told they should want.

 And that is why Labour is on the way back in Scotland becoming once again the champion of social justice.

 Thank you Kezia. And whoever next leads Scottish Labour - our unifying socialist message will continue to inspire both south and north of the border.

 That is why our party now has around twice the membership of all the other parties put together.

 Conference, we have left the status quo behind, but we must make the change we seek credible and effective.

 We have left our own divisions behind. But we must make our unity practical. We know we are campaign-ready.

 We must be government-ready too. Our aspirations matched by our competence.

 During the election campaign I met and listened to people in every part of the country.

 Struggling single parents, young people held back by lack of opportunity.

 Pensioners anxious about health and social care, public servants trying to keep services together.

 Low and middle earners, self-employed and employed, facing insecurity and squeezed living standards.

 But hopeful that things could change, and that Labour could make a difference.

 Many hadn’t voted before, or not for years past.

 But they put their faith in our party.

 We offered an antidote to apathy and despair.

 Let everyone understand - We will not let you down.

 Because we listen to you, because we believe in you.                                                   

 Labour can and will deliver a Britain for the many not just the few.

Thank you.

[mermaidsirennikita]

Historical Fiction and Feminism/Internalized Misogyny

(This post contains spoilers for The Conqueror’s Saga, The White Princess, The White Queen HBO’s Rome, and Spartacus--sometimes in very vague ways, but I thought I’d be thorough.)

Recently, I’ve discussed feminism and historical fiction in the context of television on my blog—largely in terms of how NOT to do it, as seen on The White Princess.  Marketing historical fiction (or fantasy that resembles historical fiction) as feminist is big in this day and age.  Even if the word “feminism” isn’t thrown around, you see people talking about “strong female characters” and, essentially, women “overcoming obstacles” presented by cultures of the past.  The thing is—does a woman acting like a feminist in a historical setting make the work itself feminist?  Does her lack of feminist views, or even anti-feminist perspective make her a bad character?  

What prompts me to think about these things is not actually a TV show in particular, but a few reviews of a book series that I immensely enjoy, Kiersten White’s The Conqueror’s Saga. The Conqueror’s Saga—which I highly recommend—is technically alt-history.  It considers historical events, altered simply by turning a male historical figure—Vlad Tepes/Dracula—into a woman, in the form of series protagonist Lada.  Lada is literally Vlad, but in the form of a (heterosexual) woman.  She has a couple of sexual/romantic relationships with men, but they don’t at all dominate the series the way they often do with YA, and are viewed from a historical perspective in which Lada, despite her hunger for power, is intensely aware of the natural advantage men have over her. She wishes to rule Wallachia, but is tempered by the fact that she is a woman.  This seems like a “feminist” premise, at least in the shallow manner in which feminism has been presented to the typical reader by pop culture.

Lada—a character who has manipulated people for personal and political gain, murdered, betrayed—is critiqued in some of the reviews that provoked me to write this for her anti-feminist views.  In the first book, she doesn’t trust women who are a part of an Ottoman harem, in part because they use sex as currency and are intensely sexual and feminine in a way that she is not.  While very aware of her own sexuality and femininity, Lada struggles with it and at times seems to hate it—in the second book, she seems to come to the conclusion that more than a man or a woman, she wants to be a soldier.  And the reason why she hates her feminine body is that it makes it difficult for to be a soldier in medieval Europe.  She also resents her mother, an abused woman, for not protecting her children, not defending herself.  This is victim-blaming, likely with a dose of Lada’s own trauma informing it.

More controversial, of course, is Lada’s apparent inner victim-blaming of a group of women raped and impregnated by (essentially) their overlords.  She wonders why they didn’t fight back, why they submitted, so on. As far as the narrative goes, I personally don’t feel like it validated Lada’s feelings.  In fact, when she first inwardly critiqued the Ottoman women, they turned out to be cunning political animals, and she eventually comes to acknowledge their strengths with regards to manipulation.  One of the women who was raped and impregnated becomes a supporting character and friend to Lada, and she comes to—in a sense—admire her own means of manipulation and politicking.  It’s soft power versus Lada’s desired hard power.  So—is a work of historical fiction anti-feminist because a female character expresses anti-feminist views?  

I’ll compare this to The White Princess, a show which was heavily marketed as “feminist”. Elizabeth Woodville is seen alluding to the idea that women were the true powers behind the throne in medieval England (a fact that is categorically untrue, even if some women did have influence over medieval politics).  Woodville, and her house, the Yorks, are promoted as the heroes against Margaret Beaufort.  Margaret is crafted as a foil to Woodville—she refers to her daughter-in-law’s primary function of providing a male heir for her husband.  She condemns her daughter-in-law’s sexuality.  She is Bad. Elizabeth Woodville is Good (and a witch, because witchcraft = feminism).  The series ends on Elizabeth of York becoming a puppet master for her husband, something that didn’t happen.

The fact is that while it’s nice to see a woman talking up girl power in historical fiction, it’s often anachronistic.  And in the case of The White Princess, the narrative ends up pitting women against each other—one side is for grrrl power in a very shallow way (ultimately in the service of propping up a male York heir, but whatever) and the other representing a lack of sexual freedom, “the man putting the woman down”.  And once Elizabeth Woodville is out of the picture, that whole rivalry is sort of confusing and goes every which way and it’s just… a bad show for many reasons, to be honest.  But its faux feminism is the icing on the cake.

There have absolutely been strong women who did hold both soft and hard power in times past.  But they were still affected by the patriarchal societies in which they lived.  Isabel of Castile fought for her right to the throne and gained it—but she still wasn’t satisfied to leave the throne to her firstborn daughter, and ensured the birth of a male heir for herself and her husband.  She raised her daughters not be rulers, but wives.  Hurrem Sultan held immense power as the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, but she got there by arguably undermining other women, and playing a game set up by men.  Anne Boleyn became Henry VIII’s wife and is often portrayed as a woman who was “feminist” because of the power she (temporarily) held over her husband.  But she was chosen by him; she was chased by him; and she got her crown after he took it from another woman.

It's great to see women supporting each other and loving one another in historical settings. We should see female friendships.  We should see mothers loving their daughters.  The White Princess, for all its claims of feminism, was all about pitting women against each other.  But there’s a difference between that narrative, I think, and one in which a woman experiences the effects of her own internalized misogyny, as Lada does in The Conqueror’s Saga.  She hates feminine things because she’s been raised to feel lesser because of her own femininity—this does not make her an anti-feminist character, in my perspective. Nor does it make her story anti-feminist.  It makes her a character with accurate viewpoints about her own sex, hammered into her mind by men.  When she realizes that feminine women are making things happen through their own means, that is a form of reconciliation that feels real to me.  It’s certainly “realer” than silly, anachronistic platitudes about women being badass queens.

Another good example of women being strong characters in historical figures while also dealing with internalized misogyny would be the female characters of Rome.  Two of the main female characters, Atia and Servilia, are set up as rivals.  They are rivals in relation to their roles as rich Roman matrons, and the fact that they are connected to rival men (Atia through her uncle and son, Servilia through her son) only intensifies their hatred for each other.  They call each other whores and bitches, they deride and hate other women.  But does this make them bad women, a part of a woman-hating narrative—or are they simply products of their environments, and accurately portrayed as such?  For that matter, does the fact that Servilia and Atia hate each other diminish the value of their relationship as one of the most prominent and important on the show?  I could question the same of two women on another show set in Ancient Rome, Lucretia and Ilithyia of Spartacus.  (I’m not saying that these characters are feminists at all, by the way--they are not.)  They hate—and sometimes love—each other.  They constantly fight one another.  But their relationship is rich and complex, and the fact that they treat each other badly, and for that matter other women badly, doesn’t mean that this relationship is invalid or a product of an anti-feminist narrative.

Now, I’m not saying that all of these works of fiction are strictly feminist.  Many of them feature male protagonists prominently, and the woman’s journey might not be “point” of the show the way it is on a show like Harlots. (In which almost every prominent character is a woman, the focus of the plot is a profession dominated by women, and women are often quite nasty and misogynistic to each other.)  But it’s important to see women of historical fiction have rich relationships with one another, negative and positive.  It’s important, to me, to see them express at least somewhat-accurate ideas about their own genders.  Otherwise, we get into the routine of some women having more “feminist” attitudes than others, and them being “better” and more “enlightened”.  A woman isn’t a bad person because she comes from a culture that doesn’t adhere to contemporary (popular) western feminism and doesn’t, herself, adhere to the principles of contemporary (popular) western feminism.  The idea of the good, feminist women being better than a woman who really (in regards to historical fiction) not have any concepts of 21st century feminism isn’t feminist at all.

If we forget or wash over the environments to which women had to adapt, the environments they dealt with on the daily, the environments that likely inspired self-hatred in many… We forget our own history.  It’s not fun to see a character like Lada, who I really love, look down on women.  It’s certainly not fun to see a character like Atia who is so entertaining be extremely misogynistic; she’s outright evil to many other women, including her own daughter.  But then, I want to see female characters who are allowed to be as rich, as good or as evil, as male characters.  Who don’t have to shy away from depravity to conform to male expectations of the feminine character.  Women have existed in a largely patriarchal world as good and evil people throughout history, and I want to see that.

[isearchgoood]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger https://ift.tt/38nDtEC #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

[gamebazu]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/3at0abE

[paulineberry]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[epackingvietnam]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

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Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[thanhtuandoan89]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[kjt-lawyers]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[drummcarpentry]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[xaydungtruonggia]

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?

Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

Health and fitness

Travel

Sex and relationships

Finance

Technology

Sports

Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

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