Category Archives: Online Marketing

5 Ways to Get Readers to Respond

You spend a lot of time writing content on your blog but if the only comments you get are from people looking for free marketing, maybe it’s time to revise your content strategies. Here’s a guest post from Chris Peterson at Straight North integrated marketing services in Chicago. 1. Your Blog as an Interactive Tool…

Content Marketing Tasks: Practice Makes Progress

If you’ve spent your career avoiding certain marketing tasks because you don’t think you’re any good at them, you struggle each time you try, and you end up with weak results, take heart. Persistence has been touted by poets for a reason. Your brain learns a lot each time you try something, even if you fail. If…

When Business Blogging Works Too Well…

Blogging for your business works like this: You blog about the problems you solve for your clients You get found on the Web by the people who need your services People get to know you, like you, trust you They email or call and hire you (photo courtesy ddpavumba) But then your business grows, you get busy,…

Content Marketing that Speaks to the Old Brain

You get better results with your content marketing when you speak to the “old brain,” the one that’s also known as the primitive brain or the survival brain. Knowing how the brain works will help you write better as well as help you with presentations to influence others. There are a few principles to remember, and here’s…

Neuromarketing Research: 3 Keys that Trigger a Buying Decision

The study of the buying decision process, or neuromarketing, has had a tremendous impact on content marketing. More brands are being studied in laboratories around the world as consumers are being hooked up to brain imaging machines, fMRI, EEG and other devices so that they are monitored while they read marketing messages and make decisions. Neuromarketing is extremely…

“WIIFM”? Neuromarketing Improves Your Odds

Every time I read about a new neuromarketing study, it seems they’re only confirming what copywriters and marketers knew all along: to get readers to take action, you must address the “what’s in it for me” filter in consumers’ minds.  Easy, right?  Well… Although we can’t directly cause people to do something, we can use knowledge…

5 Reasons Content Marketing is Getting Harder

I hate to be a purveyor of gloom, there’s too much of that around these days. But I’ve been thinking about this and want to share my thoughts with you. Here are some reasons content marketing is getting more challenging. There exists: A shift away from focusing on your products and services (what you know…

Writing Compelling Content:
What Drives Your Readers?

In a recent blog post, Compelling Content:  What Are Your Readers’ Hot Buttons?, we explored the top 10 hot buttons and the use of emotional words and phrases to tap into these issues.  Here’s another model based on only 4 drivers. 4 Drives in a Nutshell Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (Jossey Bass, 2001),…

5 Blog Writing Lessons from the U.S. Open Tennis Championships

Every time I watch top tennis players compete, I learn something about blog writing. The US Open is on right now, through next weekend. (Seriously, I think about tennis when I’m blogging.) Here are five blog writing tips. You’ve got to keep moving. When a topic is hot, you see a few hundred other posts about…

Say NO to Auto-Feeds:
Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites

Today’s guest post is written by Christine Buffaloe, of Serenity Virtual Assistant Services, a great resource for social media know-how, for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Many people who think they don’t have time for social media use applications that automatically feed their blogs into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Although this seems like a good idea,…