Get your content out there

It’s all too easy to talk about content, but very few businesses actually get it written and published. If you want content success you need to have a plan and complete it. List what you want to write and when, and then stick to that plan.

Even the simplest editorial calendar will help you achieve more.

If Benjamin hadn’t finished the book, there wouldn’t have been a movie and his Zoo wouldn’t have had the publicity. Be honest, have you been failing to see your content through to completion?

Tell a story with your content

A story is often more interesting than a technical piece of writing. Yes, even if you’re in a tech industry. Great content is easy to follow, has a clear start, middle and end and most importantly takes the reader on a journey.

The desired destination is a place that’s helpful, inspiring or interesting for the reader.

Enjoy what you’re writing

You need to have a passion for what you’re writing. There’s no point tasking an agency or a member of staff to write your content if they’re not passionate about it. You can always get your work edited after you’ve written it; I couldn’t survive without our editors. Just focus on sharing your passion and let someone else worry about dotting the i’s and crossing t’s.

Make the most of your successes

If you’re lucky enough to get a few bites, just like Benjamin Mee did — no pun intended — you’ll need to make the most of them.

Sometimes your content can get you PR and you may even set out with that intention. If you get success, make the most of it. Dartmoor Zoo have the book featured on their homepage, they have additional web pages explaining their story, it’s available to purchase in the shop and Benjamin does as many interviews as he can.

He was even smart enough to get pictures of movie star Matt Damon wearing a DZP (Dartmoor Zoological Park) t-shirt.

Make your content work harder

Writing the content is just the start. The key to success is getting it in front of your target audience. Share your content on your website, emails, social media, at events and anything else you can think of. You need to make it work hard.

You should also think about how your content helps your SEO. Wherever possible optimise your content even if you’re just adding a few keyword rich links to other pages on your site.

When you find something that works don’t be scared to do it again. Everyone loves a sequel right? Following up on interesting content can be very successful.

Focus on your business but be creative

There’s no point writing content about subjects that are completely unrelated to your business. Benjamin wrote about a Zoo, that makes sense right? However, you should also think about what interests your audience.

A great example of this is the Skull Candy App. Skull Candy make headphones, so what kind of content do they have in their app? It’s not about headphones, it’s snow, surf and skate-related content. This is the content that interests their customers and more importantly their potential customers.

Your business should provide content that helps your customers and prospects and encourages them to reach out and share it with other like-minded people. That’s successful content.

Get your content out there

It’s all too easy to talk about content, but very few businesses actually get it written and published. If you want content success you need to have a plan and complete it. List what you want to write and when, and then stick to that plan.

Even the simplest editorial calendar will help you achieve more.

If Benjamin hadn’t finished the book, there wouldn’t have been a movie and his Zoo wouldn’t have had the publicity. Be honest, have you been failing to see your content through to completion?

Tell a story with your content

A story is often more interesting than a technical piece of writing. Yes, even if you’re in a tech industry. Great content is easy to follow, has a clear start, middle and end and most importantly takes the reader on a journey.

The desired destination is a place that’s helpful, inspiring or interesting for the reader.

Enjoy what you’re writing

You need to have a passion for what you’re writing. There’s no point tasking an agency or a member of staff to write your content if they’re not passionate about it. You can always get your work edited after you’ve written it; I couldn’t survive without our editors. Just focus on sharing your passion and let someone else worry about dotting the i’s and crossing t’s.

Make the most of your successes

If you’re lucky enough to get a few bites, just like Benjamin Mee did — no pun intended — you’ll need to make the most of them.

Sometimes your content can get you PR and you may even set out with that intention. If you get success, make the most of it. Dartmoor Zoo have the book featured on their homepage, they have additional web pages explaining their story, it’s available to purchase in the shop and Benjamin does as many interviews as he can.

He was even smart enough to get pictures of movie star Matt Damon wearing a DZP (Dartmoor Zoological Park) t-shirt.

Make your content work harder

Writing the content is just the start. The key to success is getting it in front of your target audience. Share your content on your website, emails, social media, at events and anything else you can think of. You need to make it work hard.

You should also think about how your content helps your SEO. Wherever possible optimise your content even if you’re just adding a few keyword rich links to other pages on your site.

When you find something that works don’t be scared to do it again. Everyone loves a sequel right? Following up on interesting content can be very successful.

Focus on your business but be creative

There’s no point writing content about subjects that are completely unrelated to your business. Benjamin wrote about a Zoo, that makes sense right? However, you should also think about what interests your audience.

A great example of this is the Skull Candy App. Skull Candy make headphones, so what kind of content do they have in their app? It’s not about headphones, it’s snow, surf and skate-related content. This is the content that interests their customers and more importantly their potential customers.

Your business should provide content that helps your customers and prospects and encourages them to reach out and share it with other like-minded people. That’s successful content.

CEO Jacob de Geer said he initially began working on the design in 2010 to help his wife’s business take card payments.

The problem with chip and PIN is that you can’t target a large part of the retail industry as the sign up fees are too expensive. Then you also have subscription and transaction fees.

Instead iZettle only charges transaction fees: 2.75% for MasterCard and Diner’s Club, or 2.95% for American Express.

The company is also talking to Visa about enabling its cards to work with the device. De Geer said there are 20m companies across Europe that only take cash or invoices, accounting for around 20-30% of the economy.

In the UK there are 1m point-of-sale machines but more than 10m iPhones.

It would therefore appear that there is a gap in the market for a mobile card reader, but that doesn’t mean iZettle’s UK launch is without its challenges.

The device uses signature confirmation rather than a PIN, and de Geer says that chip and PIN payments are more ingrained with UK consumers than they are in the rest of Europe.

We have to educate consumers so they know it is a safe process. No information is stored on the device, it simply acts as a modem and the payment is processed in the back end.

Furthermore, much of the focus in mobile payments has been on NFC, but de Geer says iZettle is a totally different solution. 

If you look at the number of NFC cards in the UK there’s still a long way to go until we see a consumer shift towards contactless payments.

He said iZettle isn’t designed to change consumer behaviour, but instead enables the 500m Europeans who currently have a bankcard to pay for goods in a different way. 

The success enjoyed by Square in the US certainly suggests that iZettle should catch on with consumers in the UK but that also means it probably won’t be long before it faces competition from other mobile card readers.

We are the first to launch here, but due to the size of the opportunity we expect there to be other products on the market soon. But that’s not something we are worried about.

To participate in iZettle’s beta programme you can download the app from the Apple App Store and request an invitation or sign-up via iZettle’s UK website. It has 3,000 mini chip-card readers to give away.

As reported by The Guardian, 10m of those users are in the UK. That's good enough to make the UK Twitter's fourth largest audience behind the US, Brazil and Japan, and explains why the company has a 30 person strong office in London.

Although Twitter's userbase can't compete with Facebook's, the service's impact on society has arguably been nearly as significant, and in some areas, perhaps even more significant. As The Guardian's Charles Arthur notes, "over the past year [Twitter] has been blamed for inciting riots – a charge that was disproved – and of undermining superinjunctions involving, among others, Ryan Giggs and Jeremy Clarkson." And, as Arthur points out, Twitter has become a key platform for prominent figures, celebrities and brands to interact with the public.

Like Facebook, Twitter has a front-row seat to the mobile revolution. According to the company, some 80% of British users who used Twitter in the past month did so using a mobile phone. Obviously, Twitter's service, which was inspired in part by SMS, is more easily adapted to a mobile experience than, say, Facebook's, but in terms of monetization, which Twitter has taken slowly, the dramatic rise of mobile usage is clearly going to present challenges for Twitter too.

One challenge Twitter is facing that Facebook isn't (yet) is user attrition. The Guardian's Arthur observes that one research firm had pegged the number of Twitter profiles created at around 383m at the beginning of the year, so the 140m figure Twitter is touting hints that the company's service isn't for everybody.

Even with all the question marks, Twitter's growth, coupled with its age and the amount of funding it has received, raises the question: will we see a Twitter IPO in the next year or two? If Facebook's IPO is a success and its share price doesn't sink dramatically in its first six months, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see some of Twitter's investors pushing for a TWIT listing.

When Facebook goes public on Friday, it will be selling 50.6m shares more than it originally planned to, and at $34 to $38 per share, the company's stock will debut in a higher-than-anticipated price range.

All told, Facebook could raise nearly $15bn in its offering and hit the much-talked-about $100bn IPO valuation it looked as if it might not achieve. So much for a lack of demand for the company's shares, which will trade under the ticker symbol FB.

Facebook's IPO will be the richest ever, and it could even be the most interesting ever. Why? Because for all of the apparent investor demand Facebook and its army of bankers have been able to drum up, there's a general skepticism about the company's future.

Take Bloomberg's investor poll last week, which asked more than 1,200 investors, analysts and traders who subscribe to Bloomberg what they thought of Facebook's valuation. 79% of them thought the company would be overvalued at $96bn. Just 7% believed it was valued correctly at that figure, and a paltry 3% suggested it was undervalued.

An AP-CNBC poll found similar numbers, with half of respondents, which include Facebook users and investors, saying the company would be overvalued at $100bn. Active investors were even more skeptical, with 62% believing the $100bn figure to represent an excessive valuation. As in the Bloomberg poll, just 3% of those surveyed thought Facebook would be undervalued at $100bn.

There may be good reason for this. Over half of the Facebook users in the AP-CNBC poll indicated that they never click on ads or sponsored stories, and another 26% said they "hardly ever" do so. As for the company's potential to turn its vast social network into a commerce juggernaut, over half of those surveyed said they wouldn't trust Facebook for financial transactions (as compared to some 8% who would).

Facebook's future, of course, may rely on mobile, and area it admittedly hasn't yet cracked but where it is focusing a lot of attention. Given the demand for Facebook's stock, it would appear that investors and speculators who have ponied up for shares in the IPO aren't too concerned about mobile being a drag on the company, at least in the short-term.

But the company's mobile problems may not just be related to monetization. Facebook has a reputation as being home to some of Silicon Valley's top engineers, but a post looking at how Facebook's iOS app has been built raises questions about the social network's mobile chops. Interestingly, it's not the first time techies have criticized the social networking giant on technical grounds.

Put all this together and you have what could be better-than-television drama. Right now, there are enough investors are willing to hand Facebook and shareholders billions at a $100bn valuation, but their apparent exuberance is tempered by the fact that so many people are also skeptical about the company's valuation and prospects.

Which group is right? It's worth noting that those putting their money into the IPO may have a wide range of motivations, from short-term speculation to a desire to be involved in one of the most historic IPOs ever, and some of these motivations won't necessarily lend themselves to long-term shareholder loyalty. At the same time, Facebook has -- thus far at least -- managed to overcome its greatest obstacles, which include more than a few high-profile user backlashes.

Which hints at why the Facebook IPO may be so compelling even to those who aren't buying shares: for all of Facebook's undeniable, astonishing success, it appears remarkably -- perhaps almost unbelievably -- vulnerable.