In the wake of Junta42′s announcement today of the top 42 content marketing blogs — a list you should bookmark, peruse, and read at your leisure — I point you to two comments Marc Dangeard left in October 2008 in response to the marketing shift from content to conversion.

Marc suggested that content marketing involves monitoring blogs, discussion forums, tweets, videos, and other online data and managing its distribution.

Summarizing his first comment:

Content marketing requires creating a list of these feeds, organizing your team to monitor collaboratively, pushing relevant ads because you understand your audience and what they discuss where, and measuring your campaign impacts.

When I asked Marc to elaborate how he uses a tool via eCairn, he replied:

I build a list of blogs (and other RSS feeds including forums and twitter search) related to my project.

I monitor on a regular basis using filters on posts, to extract whatever is relevant.

When I comment, I make a note of it to track of where I started conversations.

When I make a note, I share it through a widget which is on my blog and other places.

I keep growing the list through their “suggested blogs” feature, which is based on what I read and comment, and which is where they have a big chunk of their IP. This allows me to build up the value of the asset (blog list) as I go. And this is how I found your blog.

Marc wrote the above 14 months ago and it remains valuable today.

Marketing your content involves monitoring your content; you would be silly to do one without the other. The 42 bloggers announced today understand the importance of content marketing. (I placed 64th in the big list of 336 blogs, a gradual fall from earlier this year when I placed 19th with less blogs.)

Related posts:

1. Forrester Research Gets an F in Monitoring
2. Why Monitoring Your Name is Important
3. How to Write Blog Content For Your Readers (or Why Metrics are So Important)

Tagged as: blogging, marketing