You’re on the hunt for a birthday present for your BFF and you’ve come up with a great idea: a year’s supply of her favorite… Kona coffee. So you plug “Kona coffee” into Google and generate 1,800,000 results. After a few false starts you realize you really want to give her “100% pure organic Kona coffee” – and only a five-pound assortment once you realize its high cost. Each time you start a new search, the words you enter become more refined. Then you begin looking for the best deal. In your hunt you’ve landed on, scanned and quickly exited 24 websites before you finally settle on the one through which you place your order.

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We’ve all heard the mantra “content is king” – a quote originating from an article Bill Gates wrote in 1996 in which he stressed that content sites, not ecommerce sites, would generate the bulk of income in the years ahead. In fact, content has become as essential to a company’s success as its products and service. But now, content – text, images, video/flash, audio – can simply overwhelm. “Everyone” is publishing content and it is “everywhere,” ranging from blog posts to white papers to videos posted on YouTube. With all this noise, the content we post on our websites may not be attracting our target audiences and achieving expected results. So how do we open the door to greater content-publishing and audience-engagement success? Like anything else, the devil’s in the details.

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