Author Archive for Patsi Krakoff – Page 74

Why Your Website Is Not Enough (…and never will be, sorry)

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, April 27th, 2009

Global_search_concept Independent professionals who use the Web to promote their services are often surprised to learn, after spending big bucks and a lot of time getting their website designed and finally published, that it's not enough!

"What? Is this some sort of Internet marketing scam? Or some sort of evil hole I'm going to get sucked into?"

Nope. It's the solid truth. A website, no matter how spectacular, is not enough if you want to get found by clients and use the Internet to find clients and make money.

You're likely going to need an e-newsletter, a blog, and profiles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You need to publish content everywhere, in article directories, audio files for podcasts, and videos on YouTube.

If you want to get found by the people who have problems that you can solve, you must make it easy for people to find you. You must be everywhere. You need content, content, content and not just on your own web pages.

Digital Marketing on the Social Web

But don't believe just me, read the studies: Here are two recent research studies that tell you how companies are spending their marketing budgets in 2009 and 2010. Business blogs will continue to grow.

Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

5 Steps to Writing a Good Newsletter Bio

By Patsi Krakoff
Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Show-off How should you write your bio for your newsletter? I see many coaches and consultants use their resumes for their sidebar bio. ("Dr. Smith has 20 years experience in strategic planning and holds an MBA from Harvard, etc.") But really, this is pretty boring and old-school.

Then there are those who, wanting to get with the program and use newly acquired copywriting techniques, go to the other extreme. They tell too much about their achievements and come across like an ego-maniac.

While everyone wants to know about who you are as the author of a newsletter, mostly they want to know "what's in it for me."

Last week a client asked me for some guidelines on how to craft the side-bar marketing message for his ezine. Here are my 5 steps for writing a good bio/marketing message for an e-newsletter (new school).

When you write your bio, pretend you are talking to someone. Use the pronoun ‘I’ and speak with your readers like you would a favorite client. Use the pronoun ‘you’ often. (Unless, of course, you're a large firm with multiple authors.)

1. What problem do you solve?

Start with a question or statement about the challenges and needs of your readers. This will draw them into reading your bio. It is better to lead with "what's in it for them" than to start off talking about you and your accomplishments.

2. Offer Help

Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, On Writing Better, Writing Better Ezines

Content Marketing Defined + Top 10 Ways to Fail at It

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Education-dictionary-words Maybe I should back up here and cite some official definitions for Content Marketing. If everyone's talking about it, then we need to be clear. Like with any buzz, it can mean different things to different people.

First, from Wikipedia: "Marketers may use content marketing as a means of achieving a variety of business goals, such as thought leadership, lead generation, increasing direct sales, improving retention and more."

Content marketing's agenda is to educate and inform customers and prospects. Content Marketing's slogan is – "Don't pitch. Don't sell. Don't interrupt. Educate, inform and provide value to customers and prospects. Your business will grow."

Content marketing must focus on what is valuable to the customer and must solve their informational needs.

Sometimes listing what not to do can really help make a concept clear.

Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent writes a great post Top Ten Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Fails.

She says, "The definition – content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

It's the opposite of interruption marketing, aka advertising.

Most importantly, Valeria says this: "It is better to fail after trying something new, than to fail because you're not even trying."

Start writing content and post it everywhere: your web pages, blog, article directories, comments on other people's blogs, Twitter updates. Write valuable, relevant information that genuinely focuses on the needs of others.

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing

Content Marketing Cheat Sheet:
A quick summary of key resources

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Laptop-and-notepad There is a terrific summary of content marketing, a must-read for anyone getting started, over on the ClickDocuments' "Connect the Docs" blog written by Ambal Balakrishnan…

Content Marketing: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet

The shift in mind-set from copywriting-style marketing to content marketing takes a while for marketers and web authros to adjust to. There's more to it than first appears. And while this makes sense when people first think about it, actually applying content marketing in practice can be as uncommon as common sense.

Twitter-35b I "met" Ambal on Twitter and paid attention to her because for weeks now she's been re-tweeting everything about Content Marketing. I have this keyword phrase set up to get an email alert whenever someone is "Tweeting" about it. I use both Twitter and TweetLater services for this. So when I kept seeing her tweets, I knew she was gathering information for something. (Another reason to use Twitter.)

If you're interested in learning about a niche, I suggest you start by doing the same thing Ambal is doing for her company: gathering information, learning, re-tweeting, and forming connections with other experts in the field. You can't go wrong.

This is content marketing in action. A great demonstration of how content and social networking are a marriage made in heaven.

What about you? Do you have alerts set up? Are you actively re-tweeting? Go on, get with the program!

Categories : Uncategorized

Content Marketing Confusion? Get a review…

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Man-with-checklist The contest is open again, the 2nd Content Marketing Review is now open for submissions here. Sign up and you may win a review of your website or blog content to see how well it works for marketing your professional services.

Heck, I'll make it easy for you to sign up right here:








Name
Email

Why am I doing this, giving away free consulting? No, this is not a big lead generator to upsell my services as a consultant. I'm not sure I'd want that gig, I've got plenty of other work with Content for Coaches and Consultants.

I'm simply gathering real-life examples of how professionals are using content online for marketing. I may use such examples in a special report or blog post, or I may just use it to increase my knowledge of how content marketing works on the Web. I'm not sure yet.

Review Criteria

Your online content will be reviewed for how well it:

• Grabs readers' attention
• Focuses on a solution to a problem
• Educates and informs
• Entertains and engages readers
• Inspires action
• Gets search results

Rest assured that if your name is selected I will get your permission before publishing anything about you or your content marketing efforts.

You've got nothing to lose. Sign up, put your name into the virtual hat, and on Friday at noon I'll announce the next winner of a free content marketing review. You could be the next big weenie.

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing

Content Marketing Review: Sales Autopsy Alive & Kickin’

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, April 20th, 2009

DanSeidman Dan Seidman of Sales Autopsy was the lucky winner of a Content Marketing Review in our random drawing. Dan is a keynote speaker who provides unique sales training based on his best selling book, "Sales Autopsy: 50 Post-mortems Reveal What Killed the Sale."

Dan provides excellent examples of great content marketing through his web pages, book, articles, and unique products. For this reason, Dan's Content Marketing efforts get a 4 out of 5 possible stars.

I rate my content marketing reviews on the following criteria:

1. Grabs readers' attention
2. Focuses on solutions to problems
3. Educates and informs
4. Entertains and engages readers
5. Inspires action
7. First page search results for main keywords

Dan's site is particularly strong for grabbing people's attention, providing solutions to problems, and entertaining readers. He also offers a variety of ways visitors to the site can get information, respond and engage further with him. He offers video, audio and text for readers.

Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Online Marketing

7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Lady-tennis-forehand I was working with a new blogging client (let's call him Andy) yesterday who was stuck. Andy had written about 10 blog posts which he saved as drafts because was worried about key words.

Now there's a learning curve involved in writing for your blog, and there's no way around it. The only way to learn to write good blog posts is to write and publish blog posts. Saving them as drafts won't work.

You can practice your serve on a tennis court by yourself too. But until you serve the ball to someone on the other side of the net and keep score in a game, it really doesn't count.

Here's what I told Andy. When you sit down to your "compose a post" page, focus first on these steps:

Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content

E-Newsletters vs Blogs: The View of Dr. Ralph F. Wilson Web Marketing Today Expert

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

In_the_news I get emails from professionals new to Internet marketing, "Which is better, an ezine or a blog?"

Please read this article from Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, a long time email marketing expert who has over 32,000 subscribers to his successful e-newsletter Web Marketing Today. Wilson has decided to start a blog, and gives his reasons:

Of course, "Which is best?" begs the real question that you must ask yourself, dear friend: Are you communicating with your customers by any regular means?

So which is better, an e-mail newsletter or a blog? Each has its place. For my carefully written and (hopefully) enduring articles and stories, an e-mail newsletter and website archives will be my medium of choice. For short, transient comments on books, articles, and current events, blogging is best.

You are right to stop and consider both of these marketing tools carefully before jumping in. Of course, if you're like me, you may just want to jump in and learn as you go, making mistakes along the way…

As long as you share your stories with your newsletter subscribers and blog readers you can't go wrong and you'll be leaving a trail of keywords all over the net like spilled milk and cookie crumbs…;-)

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson is one of the pioneers of Internet marketing, founding the Web Marketing Today newsletter in 1995 at the beginning of the commercial Internet. He is the author of hundreds of articles and more than a dozen books on Internet marketing and e-commerce.

Categories : Uncategorized

Ajijic, Mexico on a Sunday

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Categories : Uncategorized

The Big Mexican Tweet-Up at Dona’s Donut Shop…
6 Reasons to Use Twitter

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

BlogSquadAug9-08032  I'm not a real big user of Twitter and the other popular social networking sites online. Sure, I believe in their value, no doubt about it. I'm just not big on socializing with strangers, period.

But I may be changing my mind. Here are my 6 reasons to set up a profile and use Twitter a couple times a day:

  1. The movers and shakers are there. I don't know about you, but I like to know what the trend setters are up to. I like to know what's going on so I don't get taken by surprise when a major shift happens.
  2. The buzz is there. Here's up-to-minute stuff, really up-to-minute. If pirates are shot and a captain rescued, I learn about it first from the Twitter buzz.
  3. I track keywords like "content marketing" on Twitter and I can read blogs I've never heard of before that talk about this topic.
  4. Some of my favorite clients use Twitter and I can learn what they're doing. If I see an opportunity to help them, I jump in.
  5. My competitors are also using Twitter, so I can keep tabs. I can even look for opportunities to jump in and help them, you know, turn them into partners instead of rivals ;-)!
  6. My blog posts are fed into Twitter, and new readers come from there to find my posts. Twitter is a good way to drive traffic to your blog, and Twitter readers tend to comment more.

But here's the most fun thing that happened this week on Twitter: I ran across two people who were tweeting how beautiful Lake Chapala looked on Easter Sunday here in my village in Ajijic, Mexico. We're having a Tweet-Up today at the local donut shop!

My village is only 15,000 people or so, and only maybe 20% Gringo, so what are the chances of encountering a Tweet that comes from a neighbor across the street from me? Thomas Hellyer is a real estate professional who lives with his family just two doors down from me.

MejicoJoe "Mejico Joe" lives only a couple of blocks away. It was through his posting of a photo view of Lake Chapala from his roof top that I found him on Twitter, which led to finding Thomas. I don't even have keyword alerts set up for local words like Ajijic, Mexico, or Lake Chapala but maybe I should…

If you're not yet using Twitter, or haven't understood it's value, give it a try. Check out Patsi's on Twitter and follow me. I'll follow you back.

If you've had any similar stories from Twitter, please share, I want to hear from you.

P.S. Here's my little photo animation with music of a recent walk around Ajijic and back home…

Categories : Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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