How do you find your voice and create your brand story so that readers are inspired and emotionally triggered? How do you get content marketing results?
This and other key tips will be discussed Wednesday April 20, 2011 on an open webinar I’m giving:
Time-Saving Tips for Content Marketing Results
Register to get the recording if you can’t come at 5 pm ET, plus I’ll send you handouts, a list of outsourcing resources, a marketing road map and discount coupons for services.
“Before you can truly understand your customers, you have to understand yourself,” says author and content-marketing evangelist Joe Pulizzi.
If you are a coach, doctor, lawyer, any professional, you are trying to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. There are a gazillion websites in your field. To succeed, you need to forge a separate and unique identity and create an enduring and memorable brand.
You need a brand story. You need a brand personality. You need to stop sounding like everyone else.
I think this is one of the hardest things for busy professionals to communicate in writing content for the Web.
Why? Because it involves personal creativity. It’s one thing to write what you know. You can type 350 words of knowledge into your blog post in about 10 minutes or less. That’s the easy piece.
Don’t believe me? Come on, you explain stuff on the phone to clients all the time.
But here’s the tricky part: How do you write it the way you’d speak to an ideal client that you know really well? Write like you speak, only without all the grammar mistakes.
Here’s something every busy professional should be doing on their web and blog pages:
Write your back story, the story of who you are and why you do what you do. People are inspired by the why. One of my clients is a successful business coach. When I asked her why she went into coaching, she told me her story of the many years she spent working for a large telecom corporation.
She loved her job until the day she realized that bureaucracies were squeezing the life juice out of her. In her office, energy and creativity were stifled by rules and regulations. She was determined to not let that happen to others. She became a coach because she is driven to help people find more satisfaction and meaning through work.
It’s a simple story, but if you’re in a similar situation, wouldn’t you be attracted to working with someone like that?
I think this is one of the biggest challenges people have in publishing content on the Web: telling their own stories. Maybe we can do some more webinars exclusively on this topic. I’d like to interview some authors who have written about it.
Three books I highly recommend to get you started:
- Content Rules by Ann Handley and CC Chapman
- Personality Not Included by Rohit Bhargava
- Get Content, Get Customers, by Joe Pulizzi
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