Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing

Book Preface

This book is the result of thousands of conversations with hundreds of companies over the last 12 years. On January 1, 2000, I started the new century with a new career on the web. Since that day, I’ve immersed myself in nearly every aspect of digital marketing. In April 2001, I co-founded a web design company called Orbit Media Studios with my great friend Barrett Lombardo. Today, Orbit is an award-winning team of 30 specialists with hundreds of happy clients and nearly 1,000 successful projects.

Through all of that experience, I’ve learned many things about digital marketing. The book you’re reading now is a compilation of the most important and effective lessons I’ve learned.

The simplest way to summarize all of it goes something like this…

To be successful, websites must do two things: 1. Attract visitors, and 2. Convert those visitors into leads and customers. In order to do this, web marketers must do two things: 1. Create content, and 2. Promote it. I’ve learned that content makes the difference between success and failure on the web.

The structure of this book is based on those four aspects, broken into two sections: Lecture and Lab. The Lecture section includes the theory of web marketing, which consists of attracting visitors (traffic) and getting them to take action (conversions). The Lab section covers web marketing in practice, which is creating content and promoting it.

By the time you finish reading this book, you should have a solid foundation of all the main topics as well as a good understanding of the specific actions you’ll need to take to succeed on your own. You’ll know which actions lead to which outcomes. You’ll know where you’re going and how to get there.

Beyond this, my hope is that your new insights into web marketing will motivate you to get started and stay active. I hope you realize that web marketing is enjoyable because it’s creative, something both social and analytical. There’s nothing intimidating about it. You may discover that, yes, web marketing is critical to modern business, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Andy Crestodina

Who This Book is For

This book is for people who are interested in improving their marketing, increasing sales and growing their business. You don’t need to be a social media celebrity or a best-selling author. You do need to be yourself. And regardless of who you are, it’s almost certain that you’re well suited for content marketing.

If you are a thoughtful and detail-oriented person who enjoys researching and writing well-considered articles, content marketing is for you. If you’re a fast, informal writer who can produce quick posts based on today’s news, content marketing is for you.

If you are analytical and prefer digging through data over chatting with people, content marketing is for you. If you’re a social person who would rather connect with people than analyze numbers, content marketing is for you.

Introverts and extroverts, number-crunching researchers and big-picture thinkers, content marketing has something for everyone. However, you must write. All content marketers have this in common.

How to Use This Book: Experiment and Measure

This book is called “Content Chemistry” for a reason. As in chemistry, content marketing is about experimentation and measurement. Like a chemist, we’ll mix chemicals (content), add energy (promotional activity), and observe and measure the reactions (analytics). Then we’ll repeat or try something new.

• Experimentation: These practices will continue to evolve. Techniques should be adapted to suit your business. It’s an ongoing process of trial and error, and gradual improvement.
• Measurement: Virtually every aspect of web marketing is measurable, much more so than with traditional advertising. This is part of the fun but also a necessary part of the work. If you’re not measuring results, you’re not doing content marketing.

Results will often be unexpected, but the purpose remains constant: we seek awareness, relevance and trust.

There is no need to read this book cover to cover, so feel free to jump around. Each page has insights and ideas for you to try. Depending on your skill level, you may skim the lecture (Chapters 2 and 3) and go straight to the lab (Chapters 4 and 5).

The techniques in this book are intended to demonstrate the concepts. I have tried them all and found each to be successful. Once you understand both the theory and practice, I invite you to try a little chemistry of your own!