Archive for writing on the web – Page 2

Are Infographics Becoming Too Complex?

There’s no doubt that infographics are an extremely useful internet marketing tool, and as such, they’re becoming ever more commonplace when trying to gain new blog readers. There’s  no better way to attract new customers than with a clever graphic.

The problem, however, is that we’re seeing more and more that are overly complex, and are simply a waste of time. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, would this infographic be better if it were shorter, simpler, or even as text?

The main advantages of infographics, and the main reason they’re used, is that they can convey information quickly and concisely in an eye-catching way. Boring processes and masses of statistics can be explained quickly through the use of a great image, and people love this.

If you’ve got a great product for instance, you can explain some of its main features in a graphic. It’s much better to get a series of facts from an infographic than a large body of text, but if the infographic itself becomes overly long and complex, the point is lost.

Get Your Point Across Read More→

Educate Your Readers: 4 Learning Styles

Remember the 4 E’s of Better Business Blogging? It’s my short hand memory checklist before publishing a blog post: Educate, Entertain, Engage & Enrich readers.

You write to educate, entertain, engage and enrich readers when you want to build readerships and get great results with your blogging.

When it comes to educating readers, it’s important to take a page out of teachers’ notebooks. Teachers know that not all people learn the same way.

Most of us teach in the style we’re most familiar with: our own learning styles. If you’re analytical, you’ll teach using data. Your blog readers will understand and learn well if they’re like you.

But not all readers are the same. Take, for example, an active experimenter. They want to know how to do something and need to try it out before they learn something.

I’m probably more of a conceptualizer: I’ve got to sit and think about something a while. It also helps when there are visuals so I can see how it works.

Everyone has a preferred learning style and we also have combinations. Then there’s the right brain and left brain to consider also. If you’re not a savvy psychologist or a teacher, you may be ignoring some of your readers if you’re only writing to those with your own learning style.

What’s a business blogger to do?

Here’s some help:

I’ve taken information off the www.aboutlearning.com site which explains the 4MAT system for understanding four different kinds of learning styles. I’ve tried to simplify it so you can apply it to business blog writing. Read More→

Serial Writing Formula: 1=5+2=7+1

I’m no math genius, nor do I even think remotely like that in analytical terms. But once in a while I stumble upon something that makes sense, saves time, and produces exponential results.

I’m talking about serial writing. You take one main concept, break it down into a list of 5 key elements, write an introductory overview, write a concluding summary, and here’s what you get:

  • 1 longer article you can include on your website, ezine, and format into a PDF special report to sell or give away as a bonus.

1 idea = 5 points + intro + summary = 7 articles + 1 PDF report

Here’s why I like to do this:

I know that each week I need to come up with fresh content from my blogs and 2 ezines. That could be a struggle to keep fresh, yet stay focused and on topic. Or, it can get my creative juices flowing if I sit down and look at a concept from the stand point of this formula.

Here’s what I’m talking about. I learned this while I was doing it last week. I decided to try to encapsulate the main ingredients of successful online marketing systems – that was the main concept.

I made a list and came up with 6 key elements (actually only 5; the 6th one was recycling the first 5 steps).

I wrote an overview listing all 6 steps, then posted one point each day on our blogs. After the 7th posting, I wrote an 8th one summarizing the points, and including some additional information about the tools necessary for each step.

Then I edited each blog post to become a stand-alone article for submission to article directories. The goal here is to get these keywords out onto the Web in as many different ways as possible. I also am writing a press release with the 6 steps included.

Then I gathered all 8 articles together and edited them into one stand-alone special report and formatted it into a nice PDF file. This can be used as a free give-away for signing up or registering for something, or can be sold as an ebook.

We can also take the 8 articles and turn them into a series of autoresponder messages and call it a mini-course. This would be used to drive traffic to a landing page for selling a course or ebook or other program.

This week, as I wondered what to write about for my blogs, I remembered how easy it has been the last couple of weeks while completing the online success series.

So this is the start of another series: How to Write a Series of Articles for Marketing. Maybe I can find a catchier title, like Confessions of a Serial Writer…? Stay tuned as I walk my talk and show you how to make your writing life easier by multi-purposing.

Is Your White Paper a Sales Pitch in Disguise?

I asked Lauren Carlson to share with you here some important perspectives on content marketing. It doesn’t matter what you call your information (white paper/eBook, microsite/landing page), what matters is using information wisely to get found, get known and get clients.

Is Your White Paper a Sales Pitch in Disguise?
Guest Post by Lauren Carlson, SoftwareAdvice.com

When was the last time you read a white paper that added real value to your research process? I’m racking my brain and finding it quite difficult to come up with any good examples.

More often than not, today’s white papers are really just masked sales pitches, too long to keep the attention of today’s buyer. They aren’t engaging the customer and are therefore not serving much of a purpose. So, now what?

It’s time for companies to turn to 2.0 technologies to reach the 2.0 buyer. Twitter is extremely powerful for reaching audiences and building relationships. Advances in graphic design and technology leave no excuse for not having vibrant, captivating content.

There is even software that makes it easy to create, manage and track buyer activity on your site so that you know the kind of information your potential customers want.

With all of these advancements for content marketing, it’s about time we shred the white paper. Marketing Automation Software Guide (MASG) posted an article on this topic. Below is a summary.

Introducing the new buyer Read More→

Vote: What Makes You Read a Blog Post?

What do you find is the most important thing about a blog post? What makes you read? Mark Schaefer over at {grow} blog asked this question and gives his opinion.

Here are the choices:

 

Take a few minutes to decide, then leave a comment about the top blogging elements that get you to read a post.

Read More→

10 Ways to Use Facebook as a List Building Tool

(Annalaura Brown is guest blogging this week, while Patsi’s on vacation.)

Facebook can be a powerful list building tool if you know how to use it properly as such. Here are ten ways you can use FB to build your email list and increase your online business income.

  1. Share your blog posts.

You can do this automatically by using one of several tools such as ping.fm or networked blogs.  Both of these tools allow you to post a blog post on your blog and then have the post automatically show up on your profile or fan page or both.  Ping.fm puts it in your status update while networked blogs puts an image and a summary of the post on your wall.  You will find that many people will read your blog posts from FB, comment, subscribe to your list etc.

2.       Share your compelling opt-in offer.

You want to of course do this on your blog but they are additional ways that you can do it on FB too. Some examples of ways that work to do this are:

  • Include in a status update along with some cleverly written text
  • Put it as a link on your fan page along with an explanation
  • Put it with a description of a video that you upload to FB.

3.       Use the notes application.

This is Facebook’s way of allowing you to write blog posts directly on FB. You can write notes with text and pictures and tag your friends to draw their attention to it. Make sure to avoid tagging too many people or tagging people who might not appreciate the gesture. You also want to always offer value with a link at the bottom to your opt-in offer. Avoid writing notes that may be seen as spam by others.

4.       Share videos.

Videos are very popular on FB and if you do it right, your video may even go viral and be shared by others and create even more visibility for you and your offer. Make sure to include the link to your opt-in offer with the description part of your video.

5.       Offer your offer as a solution to people’s problems. Read More→

Content Marketing with Blogs: New edition

Want to know more about online persuasion and how you can write content that gets results? Here’s a quick one minute video promoting my Content Marketing with Blogs ebook, newly revised. The formatting and design was done by my son-in-law, expert graphic designer and creative genius, Scott Krakoff. Tell me what you think…

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, be my guest: Content Marketing with Blogs…

Neuroscientists Discover “WIIFM” Center in Brain…

Through the magic of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), neuroscientists are able to look inside the brains of consumers while reading marketing messages.

Copywriters and content marketers have been telling us for years how important it is to address the “what’s in it for me” filter in consumers’ minds.

Really Big News: They’ve found this WIIFM center located in the old brain!

Thanks to advanced scientific formulas and algorithms, we can now market directly to the subconscious mind and get anybody to do what we want without even knowing it!

I’m just kidding you… If that were actually true, it’d be really scary. It’s not that easy, neither is neuroscience easily applied to content marketing. Every time I read about a new neuromarketing study, it seems they’re only confirming what copywriters and marketers knew all along.

But here’s some new information, which could improve your marketing messages. Although we can’t directly cause people to do something, we can use knowledge of the brain to improve our chances of influencing their buying decisions. We can write better content because we understand how consumers make decisions.

We know more about the subconscious functions than ever before. We know what kinds of messages reach the emotional brain and the old brain, even though consumers aren’t aware of their influence. More importantly, we now understand that much of our decision making goes on in the old brain, out of conscious awareness.

Neuromarketing and science can help improve your content writing so that it has more of an impact on people in your target audience.

I just love this site: SalesBrain, a neuromarketing company. Founded by Christophe Morin and Patrick Renvoise, authors of Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Button Inside Your Customers’ Brains. The company does sales training using neuroscience as it applies to what influences buying decisions.

I recommend you visit the site, as it is clear and easy to navigate to find great information about buying decisions. I found the page on 6 ways to stimulate the old brain especially illuminating.

Here’s an excerpt: Read More→

The B2B Manifesto: Trust Building Comes First

How good is your “trust-building?” I just read this term in a new digital release: The B2B Manifesto, just published by Velocity Partners in the UK.

Think about it. Before you can convert readers to clients, before you can get them to download your digital information and build your list, you’ve got to build trust.

The B2B Manifesto: 5 Imperatives and 6 Staples for Winning the Battle for Attention: page 19:

“You need to leverage trust-builders into each step of the (buying) journey:

  • case studies
  • awards
  • data
  • testimonials
  • analyst support
  • proof points”

I don’t think enough of you do a good job of trust building. Maybe you’ve not been properly taught or missed class that day? As for myself, I’ve never thought about “trust-building” as a defined goal, I’ve just always assumed I was doing it every step of the way. But am I? Maybe not as well as I could. Are you? Read More→

Writing Better Content: An Emotional Pathway

Writing quality content that markets your products and services online follows a logical progression, but it also follows an emotional pathway. You must engage the brains of your readers… as well as their hearts.

By that I mean, your content should follow a sequence, touching on the following emotions:

  • Negative, a painful problem, a fear
  • Positive, relief from a problem, benefits, imagine a better future
  • Neutral, rational, logical, analysis of facts
  • Curiosity, desire, imagination
  • Objections, reasons why and why not
  • Trust: social proof, statistics, case studies, personal stories
  • Scarcity, urgency, fear of consequences
  • Call to action, clear next steps, reassurances, guarantees, security

I been reviewing basic steps for writing quality content for the web that works to get you found, get known and get clients. According to Maria Veloso in Web Copy that Sells, there are 5 simple steps that will help you write quality content that connects and engages with readers: Read More→