Archive for Content Marketing – Page 20

Get Personal: 5 Tips for Putting YOU in Your Blog

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, August 26th, 2011

If you’re writing for your business, how much of yourself should you include? Everyone agrees that blogs are a place to have a conversation. How personal should you be? How do you keep the YOU in Business Blogging and still make it work for business?

There’s an ongoing trend to be personal with business communications. Rohit Bhargava’s written a whole book about it, filled with examples of how companies are successfully using personalities to market their business products and services: Personality Not Included.

I get updates from a professional who writes about arguments with her husband. I can’t help myself, I’m drawn into reading the damn things. And sure, she’s promoting a program…And there’s only a loose tie between the story, the husband, and the program she’s promoting!

But she tells the story so well, you don’t care! I can’t stop myself from reading her blog and newsletters. Why? As a psychologist, I can tell you why:

We’re hard wired to connect with others, especially about family stories, and we all relate to each others’ predicaments.

So, the dilemma remains: how do you do this successfully without embarrassing yourself – or worse – incurring the wrath of a family member? Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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Does Your Blog Post Answer These 4 Questions?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

This is important: You want your blog posts to educate, entertain, engage, and enrich readers of your business blog. Aim for all four of these goals when blog writing, and you can’t go wrong.

What do you need to remember when writing a post that’s designed to educate? I wrote about that here: Educate Your Readers, about the four different learning styles of blog readers.

According to the 4MAT system on www.aboutlearning.com, when you’re educating people you need to appeal to four different kinds of learning styles:

  1. Imaginative learners
  2. Analytic learners
  3. Common sense learners
  4. Dynamic learners

How does this translate into blog writing for your business? Think in terms of the questions each type of learner would be asking as they read your blog post:

  1. Why?
  2. What?
  3. How?
  4. What if? Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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Educate Your Readers: 4 Learning Styles

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, August 19th, 2011

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→

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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Say NO to Auto-Feeds:
Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

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, it may do you more harm than good.

Here are 5 reasons why you should NOT automatically feed your blog into these social media sites:

  1. You cannot personalize the content.  If you want to make your status updates more appealing,  post it in the form of a question and ask others to comment. You are more likely to get fans to “like” your post, comment and share.
  2. The inability to “tag” others in your status updates. This goes hand-in-hand with personalizing your status update, but it is important to “tag” either your friends or pages if the content is appropriate for them or their pages. This will not only show on your feed, but theirs as well.
  3. The content you feed into Facebook may not be appropriate for Twitter and LinkedIn. These social media sites are all different in as much as you are appealing to a different audience in each of these.
  4. Those that use the auto-feed are re-hashing material to all of the social media sites. If you have folks that are following you on all three, they will see the same materials and are likely to become annoyed and stop following you. Keep it fresh.
  5. Remember, keywords are essential when posting to your status update to your Facebook business page. On Twitter hash tags (#) are key.

Now, if you are gung-ho about the auto-feed I found a couple of ways in which to do this, but only feed to one network. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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Writing Great Blog Content: Painful?

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, August 12th, 2011

Rich Brooks of Flyte Media says that writing content is painful, and compares it to having dental work without novacaine! What do you think?

For me, writing – whether for my blogs, website, my email broadcasts and newsletters – is more like getting my teeth cleaned: it can be painful, but then you come out with a pretty white smile!

Take this series I’ve undertaken on how to write great content for your blog. The simplest of tips includes these 3 easy steps:

  1. Scan your favorite blogs for relevant ideas
  2. Take an excerpt from it and link to it
  3. Add your own comments.  (If you want to boost readership, go for disagreement and controversy. But that’s a different topic.)

Here’s what Rich says:

“No matter how much you love your job, no matter how passionate you are about what you do, writing content is going to be much more work than you think.”

The passion makes the writing start like a burst of energy. Education and discipline, however, are the tools that have to kick in to make your content readable, search engine optimized, and interesting to other people.

I agree with Rich that writing always takes more time and work than you think, even when it is full of passion. Passion isn’t enough, some hard thinking and decent grammar should back it up.

Your thoughts on this? Is passion enough? Does grammar even count?

What about time – how much are you spending on your writing and blog?  Is it pleasure, pain, or both?

I’d love to hear your comments.  Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

P.S. For more tips (and diagrams), read these other recent posts:

 

Categories : Content Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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How to Avoid Problems with Hyphens and Dashes…

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Have you ever encountered this problem when blogging or writing content marketing?

Because of the informal nature of writing on a blog, or for online ezines, people now write like they speak – you know what I mean? Instead of commas or semi-colons, everyone uses dashes to interject phrases – just like the way we talk.

But everyone uses them differently! Forget the Chicago Manual of Style! As I read through other great blogs, I see lots of variations on the use of hyphens and dashes:

1. People use a double hyphen–like this. Sometimes with a space on both sides — like this, sometimes with no spaces on either side.

2. People use a hyphen instead of a dash. This is most likely because the dash is not on the keyboard. You have to find it under symbols and who wants to take time to do that?

3. People use an en dash instead of the em dash. An en dash is the shorter version of the em dash. With an en dash there is a space on both sides – with an em dash, there are no spaces—you just put it in.

Am I the only one who cares about this? If we are not going to follow the rules of academia as outlined in the manuals, are we inventing new usages because of the lack of a dash on the keyboard?

(WordPress tip: you can insert custom characters found in the omega icon in your wysiwyg editor.)

I feel like the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Lynn Truss)…my inner stickler is on the loose.

Let’s all get together and decide: if we use a hyphen instead of a dash, let’s make it just one with spaces on both sides – like this, okay? Personally, I prefer the em dash with spaces on both sides — but that’s not supposed to be correct.

Unless you write in to tell me you’d prefer something else, I’ll keep on doing that and assume you agree with me…

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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Social Proof: Are You Using Client Recommendations?

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, August 5th, 2011

This weekend I got a call from a person who wanted to buy a subscription to executive coach articles to use for his newsletter. What sealed the deal? The testimonials from other subscribers.

Recommendations, testimonials and client stories are a powerful persuasion tactic. It’s one of the key persuasion triggers that get people to take action. It’s called social proof.

Robert Cialdini wrote about six weapons of influence in his landmark book Influence. Social proof is one of the most powerful mechanisms for triggering buying decisions. Here’s why:

Customer ratings and reviews are one of the ways we decide and choose to buy products online. I use them all the time to click and buy: I glance at the number of gold stars other people have given a book on Amazon, or a pair of tennis shoes on Nike.

If there are two pairs of shoes I’ve selected for my size and price, I’ll go with the one that has 5 stars over 4. Think about it: I don’t know these people, they may have feet completely different to mine, they may not play tennis as often as I do.

Yet when I see a customer rave review and 5 stars, I’m all in.

We are heavily influenced by social persuasion, we can’t help it. Our brains respond to our strong need to belong and fit in, and it all happens in our unconscious minds.

Do these same persuasion tactics work for sites and businesses that aren’t selling physical products? Does social validation work for businesses selling services and experiences? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Landing Pages: Get Readers to Take Action

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

How do you get readers to take action? Short answer: a landing page. (Also known as a sales page, squeeze page)

You can’t get results from all the content you’re creating and publishing on your blog, e-newsletter, social media sites, unless eventually you send people to a landing page and ask them to take action.

Otherwise, you may be creating a great brand, great thought leadership, great content… and so what? Sooner or later, you need to ask your readers to actually do something. You need a landing page to do that.

Landing page definition: An attractive, compelling page:

  • Published on the Internet that is
  • Optimized for search engines and
  • Designed to persuade a defined group of readers
  • To take one specific action

Here’s what I created (yes, again with the Smart Draw) to illustrate:

Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits
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Tips on Blog Post Optimization

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, July 29th, 2011

What are the steps you need to follow to ensure each blog post is optimized for search engines as well as well-written for your readers’ interests? Oh my… there are a lot. But to keep me out of overwhelm, I wrote them down, and put them into a flow chart.

This is good for days when I’m brain dead and likely to forget something important. But it’s also a good chart for anyone working with a V.A. or assistant who needs to take over some of the tasks for you.

After I decide what it is I want to write about (see my earlier post, Blogger’s Block: Writing Tips to Get “Unstuck“), I follow these steps for posting on my blog:

Flow chart, continued: Read More→
Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing
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Blogger’s Block: Writing Tips to Get “Unstuck”

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

What do you do when you’re stuck and can’t write on your blog? Here are some blog writing tips. I diagrammed them out.

It’s the rainy season here in Mexico – a great time to do a lot of reading and writing.  At least, that’s what one would think…But…I’m having trouble.  I’m stuck.  I’ve got Blogger’s Block.  (Yes, even experienced bloggers can get stuck from time to time.)

Solution? Start writing about where I’m at, what’s going on here, and then tie it in with something useful and relevant to readers. That’s one blog writing tip that usually bails me out.

Source of problem? I’ve been blogging so much lately for my clients that I’m dried up and stale for my own blog.

So what? I’ll bet some of you have the same blog writing problem or similar. You give your all to your clients, then when it comes time to do your own content marketing you’re as dry as toast without butter.

It’s no wonder the cobbler’s children have no shoes.

What to do? One blog writing tips is to “Just do it,” just start writing and see what comes out. You may surprise yourself. One of my clients tells me he doesn’t write that much anymore. He finds it easier to hook up the Web cam and post a video clip. Hmmm…wait a sec.

Just by starting to write, I had to trace my thought processes to find what I usually do when I am stuck. This time I diagrammed it out using SmartDraw.

It’s interesting, no? Much easier to show than tell, and you can clearly see my four favorite resources for breaking bloggers’ block.

I will now go walk my talk and come up with some good blog posts.

And if you’re still having trouble, I’ve got more tips in a great little package you can have called Time Saving Tips for Smart Bloggers, audio, transcript, PDF handouts. You can solve your blogging blues with all the tips in this program.

What resources do you use to find ideas? Hit the comment link and share.

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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