Content Awareness Channels

In the previous chapter we discussed the concept of content leadership. If you recall, it is the aggregation of current thought in the marketplace with your new thoughts that provide additional value to move the conversation forward. In order to become a content leader, you must have a platform in which you can express your views. This is why we use WordPress. If you didn’t know already, WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites on the Internet^[1].

Remarkably, WordPress provides a brilliant working case on how an open source community of dedicated web developers, users, and supports can all work together to create a free product that today benefits millions of users around the globe. It was on May 27, 2003 that Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little launched the very first version of WordPress 1.0. Since that time, a whole industry of thousands of developers, designers, writers, bloggers, and web publishers have come to make their entire living off of the WordPress platform. For a complete history of all of the iterations of WordPress and the many technological breakthroughs for the platform, you can read their blog on The History of WordPress from 2003-2022^[1].

With WordPress, you have now created your own website and will use it to blog. According to the Webster dictionary, a blog is “a web site on which someone writes about personal opinions, activities, and experiences.” Your website and blog will be the source of awareness for your content. As described in the previous section, the goal of inbound marketing is to generate leads that come to your website to read your leading content. This content is created within your blog, and then linked to via your blog’s URL permalink. You will use these permalinks in both your social media content and email content to “pull” these consumers back to your website, which will be mechanically setup with various calls-to-actions. These call-to-actions are strategically positioned as consumer online forms placed on your site and throughout your blogs. Each time a user fills out one of these forms, that user’s personal data will be collected and stored in your website, your email distribution lists, and your customer relationship management (CRM) database, which we will discuss in future chapters.

When we consider the history of blogging, it was well established before WordPress was ever launched. In fact, the first ever blog was considered to be launched by an undergraduate student named Justin Hall from Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. His site, called links.net in January of 1994 was a review of HTML examples he came across from various online links. It wasn’t robust or profound, but it was enough for the New York Times to dub him as the “founding father of personal bloggers^[2].” Though Justin wasn’t sure about the nomenclature, whether he was a web diarist or web blogger or that he wrote an open diary or started the first personal home page, Justin has graciously accepted the title. It wasn’t until 1997 that the term “weblog” was introduced by Jorn Barger, creator of the website Robot Wisdom. He pioneered the term to describe a “log” of his internet activity. Later in 1999, IBM programmer Peter Merholz shortened the term from “weblog” to “blog,” which we still use today^[2]. These proceedings eventually gave rise to social media platforms and today’s microblogging trends. These thought and technological advances led to the creation of YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as spawned leading aggregation and communication websites like Huffington Post, Moz, Buzzfeed, Mashable, HubSpot, and so many more of the sites used by today’s digital marketers.

When we combine the history of how our content awareness channel through the use of our website and blog combine with the critical history of social media, you will have a much fuller understanding of how Inbound Marketing became an important organic piece of the digital marketing landscape. Let’s now press into the history of social media to ascertain a more robust understanding of how all of these pieces fit together so that you can more fully understand the “why” of “what” your are doing, in order to know “where” to do it, all the major components needed for effective digital communication.

References:

[1] The History of WordPress from 2003-2022. https://phrasee.co/blog/a-brief-history-of-email/. Accessed 10/18/22.
[2] Hubspot: A Brief Timeline of the History of Blogging. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-blogging. Accessed 10/18/22.