I’m reading Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod and he has a great quote in it from Director David Mackenzie, where he says, “A film is only as good as the reasons for making it.” Hugh explains, “What is true in Hollywood is also true for products and businesses. It’s not what you make, it’s what you believe in. That is what people respond to. That is where the enterprise lives or dies.”

A quote from Stephen Covey: “Management is going up the ladder as efficiently as possible, leadership is making sure the ladder is up against the right wall.” A lot of businesses go to work on improving inefficiencies and strengthening processes but without first focusing on their purpose, or what wall their leaning up against. Once that purpose is defined its important to let everyone know, as clearly as possible, which wall it is. Usually this purpose can be distilled into one sentence without any lame business jargon. Zappos declares to have the best customer service in the world. Wal-mart is the least expensive. Starbucks makes the worlds best coffee. It is the stake in the ground, line in the sand and banner in the sky that unapologetically declares the business’s purpose that everyone can rally behind and cause a movement. Again to quote Covey, “No management success can compensate for failure in leadership.” Working on the packaging, the logo or your Facebook page is like organizing deck chairs on the Titanic unless the customer has bought into the vision of the organization. For whatever problem a business has I think a sense of purpose will help overcome the problem faster than focusing on the problem itself.

I’ve been playing with the new AdWords automated rules ever since it’s been released, here are some ideas I’ve come up with on ways to use it:

If you have an account with a lot of keywords you probably did a lot of work and research to get all those keywords in your account. But chances are there are a lot of them that aren’t getting a chance because their bid is below first page CPC, and you may not even know which keywords those are. Set up a rule to get those keywords onto the first page to see what they can do. On all campaigns set up a “Raise bids to first page CPC when…” rule.

For a big performing campaign, maybe a brand terms campaign where you always want to be on top, set a rule to increase bids every time your ads go below position 3 by choosing “Change max CPC bids when…”.

Then to optimize keywords based on conversions set up another “Change max CPC bids when…” rule so that if a keyword has a CPA that’s too high it gets bid down, (I also made it a rule that it has to have at least 2 conversions before I start bidding down, everyone deserves a second chance right?)

and if it has a low CPA it gets bid up.

Also for those keywords that just keep spending and never convert, set up a “Pause keywords when…” rule that says once a keyword has spent a certain amount and still hasn’t converted, it gets paused.

Instead of asking, “what is your marketing strategy?”, I think the more important question is, “what is your content creation strategy?”

Churning out fresh content is the essence of SEO, fuels your Facebook fans and Twitter followers, adds credibility and trust to your brand, helps customers down the conversion funnel, holds the customer’s attention and enhances the customer’s memory.

It’s not easy to blog regularly, upload current videos to your YouTube channel, tweeting and feeding Facebook. But it’s a heck of a lot more worth it than a traditional marketing strategy of having well crafted ads placed periodically in places where people try to ignore them.

And when it comes to quality vs quantity, I think quantity is more important. I’d rather have a few hundred (and growing everyday) fishing lines in the water that a couple really expensive ones.

So what does a content creation strategy look like? I’m still working on that one, but what it begins to look like is a cadence of timely content based on:

• Being a teacher
• Going behind the scenes
• Giving a little at a time
• Focusing on their interests, not yours
• One on one dialogs
• Making customers famous
• Being a curator

In the end your content creation strategy earns you attention by being a publisher instead of paying some other publisher for their audience’s attention.