Last month in Philadelphia, I gave a 10-minute presentation on content marketing to an audience at SEER Interactive's SearchChurch. Since the setting was so unique, I tried a different format and style that I haven't done previously. It was a bit fun and silly, and also a little heavy-handed (but meant tongue-in-cheek). The fundamentals of what I tried to present, though, are things I solidly believe in:

• That success is driven by learning from experimentation and failure
• That content's goal is not simply links nor SEO, but to earn the awareness, affection and trust of potential customers
• That committing to a vision that requires sacrifice, sweat equity and tolerance of failure is the best way to earn inbound marketing success in the long term

Below is the slideshow from that presentation:

And I've also got a video from the event (which SEER kindly recorded and posted) for those interested.

Looking forward to all of your thoughts around this presentation and the concepts therein. This certainly isn't the only way to approach content marketing, but it's one that I've seen have tremendous effect and value.

And for anyone interested, SEER also posted the other talks from the meetup, including:

• Joanna Lord on Retargeting 2.0
• Chris Countey on Google Authorship
• Purna Virji on Karmic Link Building
• Rachael Gerson on KPIs for SEO
• Ian Howells on Location Data for SEO
• Eppie Vojt on Scraping Everything
• Annie Cushing on Web Scraping for Code-o-phobes
• Wil Reynolds on Link Building in a Post-Penguin World

p.s. Nearly every photo in the slide deck (with a few exceptions like the Walter Cronkite slide) were taken by my wife for her travel blog. It was really fun to put together a slideshow using them and it's something I might do more of in the future.