As you can see by the date of the last post, Daily Marketing Ace has taken a break for the last few days.
Actually, the intention was to continue publishing through the Christmas holiday, but once the holiday actually got underway, that intention went away. Thank you for being patient while I took a much-needed break. I needed it.
Hopefully the little break was nice for you too. I’ve noticed that many of the marketers who’s lists I’m on have done the same. My inbox has been nicely quiet.
I took a break from publishing tips, but did have some time to work on my “fun” project, the next version of DailyMarketingAce.com.
When we go live with the next update, you’ll see both functional changes and changes to the UI. The reason for the update is completely functional - to make the tip contribution process more fluid, but we chose to work in some changes to the WordPress theme and skin as well. I think it’s a big step forward.
This update has been our highest priority because it addresses what I believe to be our critical path at this point. It addresses the need to take the content the next level and it streamlines the process of content collection. In other words, it’s all about content.
Daily Marketing Ace has always been primarily about content. A special kind of content called “tips.” Tips are fantastic. Getting the right tip at the right time can save you money, time, frustration, and any number of other things that are worth saving.
But it’s more than just tips.
Our content formula is very specific:
- limit the length of each tip to a maximum of 400 characters
- have an editor review each tip to ensure that the content is helpful, on topic, and meets our standards
- allow tip contributors to include a short signature line and a backlink
- categorize each tip
- publish content from many tip contributors to provide the benefit of multiple points-of-view
As you can imagine, it takes a bit of work to find and publish tips on a daily basis. Much of the content is found in RSS feeds and emails and edited to fit the DMA format. In other words, my job as editor is to go out and find good content and push it back to Daily Marketing Ace.
This isn’t how it is supposed to work, however. Daily Marketing Ace was originally conceived with a pull content strategy. The goal is to create a publication that is naturally attractive to great content. And lots of it. From many different and thoughtful sources.
The next version of Daily Marketing Ace is a huge step forward because it deals with some major issues:
- the tip contribution process will be open to anyone with good content to share
- contributing tips for publication will be significantly easier
- all incoming tips will be published to the blog, sometimes in real-time
- human editors will review, organize, and sometimes edit tips
- the best tips from the blog will be by email in a ‘best of’ format
- the most prolific tip contributors will get the highest ‘billing’ on the blog
- a fresh new user interface
So, hang tight. Tips will resume next week and soon we will be launching a big upgrade for Daily Marketing Ace.
