Archive for Content Marketing – Page 75

Get Content, Get Customers – Get this book!

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I just got my copy of Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett’s content marketing book in the mail, and I’m happy as a pig!

Get Content, Get Customers is written exclusively to address a new style of marketing with content that is revolutionizing the way big and small companies attract clients on and off line.

This book has as it’s tag line: How to use content marketing to deliver relevant, valuable, and compelling information that turns prospects into buyers.

It is thanks to Pulizzi and Barrett that I embarked on re-purposing this blog. Finally I had a name for the kind of marketing I was helping our clients do: market themselves by providing useful and unique content to a targeted audience.

I realized I wasn’t just writing about ezines or blog writing. The big picture is content marketing, how to use content to attract customers and grow business.

Here are a few choice morsels from the book:

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3 Steps to Successful Writing on the Web

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There are really only 3 steps to becoming successful at writing:

  1. Keep writing – you have to write a ton of bad stuff before it can get better
  2. Keep reading – you must read good writers in order for the good stuff to sink in
  3. Keep learning – you need to take courses in order to really learn your craft

These three tips come to me by way of Paul Hollingshead, a co-founder of AWAI, a copywriter promoting good copywriting skills through the American Writers & Artists, Inc.

Even if you don’t want to become a full time, freelance copywriter, you’ll need to learn how to write your sales pages if you want to use the Internet to grow your business. That’s why I’ve signed up for the AWAI Copywriting Masters Program. I think they have a special discount rate on through Friday, July 18, 2008, so don’t delay.

In fact, I’d say that copywriting skills are important for more than just writing sales letters. You need to understand the psychology of copywriting so you can apply the principles to all of your content marketing. It just makes sense. Copywriting is any kind of writing to persuade and influence. And that means blog writing, articles, and web content.

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Video Promo Clips: Content Marketing Comes Alive

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People buy from people they know, like, and trust. Video clips will shortcut
the process of connecting with people quickly. Viewers can more easily
decide if they like and trust you when they can see and hear you.

How do you write a script for a video clip to promote a program or event? Posting video clips has become popular and easy to do. This is another promotional step you must include in order to boost your sales.

Video promotional clips are part of the various writing tasks necessary for making money online. It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting a teleseminar, publishing a book, or promoting a coaching or consulting program. You’ve got to get the word out to as many potential participants in many different ways, on Web landing pages, blog posts, email messages, ezines, and audio and video.

Marketing with content isn’t only about writing text. If you’re not using video yet, It’s fairly easy to get a Flip video camera and get started without any tech skills or expensive equipment. But be sure to write out a short script before recording so you don’t forget any essential details.

In the example we’re writing about here, Denise and I and Kathleen Gage promoted a free teleseminar on our blogs through posting a video each day, outlining each of The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. Kathleen and I each wrote out a script for these, presenting 5 Traps and 5 Truths, and then the information for registering. Each script was 2-3 minutes long. Here is the outline we used:

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Email Marketing Messages: How to Promote a Program

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How do you write great email marketing messages to promote an event or program? After your landing page is up, with your well-crafted sales copy, you must drive people to that page with email messages. This is the next writing task you’ll need to master if you want to successfully promote a program.

In this series of posts, we’re using our Law of Action 2.0 mentoring program as example. We sent out several email messages during the month prior to the event, most of them during the week before.

Email marketing messages are challenging. Everybody gets too much email, and each time you broadcast you get people who unsubscribe because they aren’t interested or are annoyed. But you must send out enough messages to remind people to sign up, especially at the last minute. Otherwise you’re leaving money on the table. It’s a balancing act of risking so many unsubscribe requests and so many last minute registrations.

You need your email recipients to:

  1. Open and read your message
  2. Discover something important they can benefit from
  3. Convince them they need to learn more about this
  4. Trigger their desire to click over to the sales page to read details and register
  5. Realize the some sort of urgency so they won’t put it off and forget to take action

The most important thing you can do is to write naturally and with sincerity. If you come across as promotional, readers’ BS antennae will get triggered. The delete finger goes into automatic action when you use hype and fluff.

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10 Steps to Writing Sales Copy for a Free Telecall

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When staging a major online teleseminar program, quite often we use a free preview telecall to generate interest. We make the subject of this call compelling in order to draw in as many people as possible to the free call. (Recently we presented The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business – And How to Avoid Costly Mistakes.)

The free preview call is not a marketing call, although we do warn them we will tell them about the project we have coming up. Nobody wants to be on a telecall for an hour to hear you market a program.

But people do want to learn how to save time, money and energy. So we deliver plenty of free information that people can use right away in their business. Then we tell them if they need or want to know more how they can access more with the paid teleseminar.

Even when a call is free, you still have to write marketing materials and promote it. In today’s busy world, people are cautious about signing up for
even free things, because they’re afraid of too many emails.

So you must write landing page sales copy that’s persuasive and compelling to get people to register for the free preview call.

Writing this sales copy is similar to the one for the paid project, but a little different. It’s much shorter for one thing. Here are the steps we took to write sales copy for this free preview call:

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Branding & Blogging: Which Comes First?

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Which comes first: a brand or a blog? And, is social media effective at reaching a corporate audience if that’s who your intended clients are?

There’s a heated debate about these questions on some popular business blogs and you’d do well to read up on these posts.

Before embarking on a marketing plan that includes blogging for your business, you need to be aware that there’s still one big-time consultant who isn’t convinced blogging and online social networking are worth it.

Alan Weiss is a self-proclaimed contrarian, and he says, "Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand… a blog follows a brand, not the other way around."

To which a whole bunch of famous bloggers left comments to dispute
Weiss. It got a little nasty and names were thrown around. Read our
complete article on Build a Better Blog along with the others
referenced in these posts: 

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12 Steps to Write Your Online Sales Copy

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When you’re going to launch a money-making program on the ‘Net, the first step is to write your sales copy. Yesterday I listed 8 writing tasks necessary for an online campaign:

1. Sales copy
2. Email marketing messages
3. Thank you pages and thank you autoresponders
4. Survey questions & survey results report
5. Press releases
6. Video tips
7. Blog posts
8. Updates posted to social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, etc.

Each task is different, requiring you research and write different elements. However, all of them must be written to grab the attention of your targeted audience of readers and persuade them to take action.

In the case I’m using as an example, our Law of Action 2.0 program, here are the 12 steps I went through to compose the copy for the sales page at www.actandattract.com:

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8 Writing Steps Yield $18,000 in a Month

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What are the writing tasks involved in order to promote a major teleseminar program on the Internet? Obviously, you have to write a sales or landing page. But that’s only one part of it. There’s so much more.

Recently Denise and I along with colleague Kathleen Gage promoted a 4-week teleseminar called The Law of Action 2.0: Attract Clients and Build a Money-Making Business on the ‘Net. We started by promoting a free teleseminar called The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. We got about 1,000 people to register for the call.

From that, we promoted the paid program, registering 94 participants and netted $18,000. The program is delivered in four 90-minute sessions and includes a private Facebook group, learning guides and many resources.

But it would be a gross exaggeration to say we’re earning $3,000/hour with the 6 hour program, although some Internet marketers would certainly use that calculation as bragging rights.

The truth is we spent considerable time writing the promotional materials and distributing our content in various forms all over the Internet long before the free program on June 24.

Denise is outlining all the promotional steps we did over on BizTips Blog this week. As a companion piece, I’m writing on this blog a series of posts to show you every piece of content marketing that was involved in the success of this program.

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Keywords: 3 Steps to Knowing What, Which & Why

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(This is a guest post by Heather Lloyd-Martin of SEOCopywriting.com. Even if you focus on gaining organic search results with your Web content, you need to understand the basics of which keywords and key phrases are important for getting your business found online.)

Your customers are out there. Are you making it easy for them to find you in the search engines?

As Patsi wrote in a previous post, Relevant Content: Search Engine Bread Crumbs, "If you’re running a business and
you want to get found online, you need to know which keywords are
relevant to your business, i.e. what words do your
readers/users/clients use to find you or to find similar businesses
like yours?”

Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO and PPC campaign. Think
about it this way: If you optimize your site or PPC campaign for
keywords your customers don’t type into a search engine, you won’t see
search engine traffic. Additionally, if you mistakenly choose a highly
competitive key phrase (like “travel,”) your site will be pushed to
number 1,982,653 in the organic search results…guaranteeing that you’ll
never be found.

So, understanding keyword research is pretty darn important.

The good news is, you don’t have to guess what keywords and key phrases
are best for your online business. A little bit of brainstorming plus
access to specialized tools is all you need to start your key phrase
research campaign.  If you’re new to the keyword research scene, here’s
a three-step process for success.

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Content Feeds: Your first 20 words count

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Are you feeding your blog posts on Twitter and Facebook? If so, you need to pay attention to the first 15-20 words or 100 characters – usually the title and first few words of the first sentence.

Not only are keywords important here for the search engines, but you also need to see what your feeds are going to look and feel like when limited to only a few words. Make people want to read the full post with those first few words.

It’s fairly easy to set it up so your blog posts are automatically fed to your Facebook and Twitter pages. I’m no tech wizard, but I was able to do this, following instructions that I’m sure you can find on the web through Google searches. Denise has posted about this on Buildabetterblog.com. (See related posts at the end of this).

When you do, however, pay attention to the first 15-20 words of your post, including the title. These words are what will show up in the short little feeds on Facebook and Twitter. Make them count.

Here are some examples: Today on my Facebook and Twitter pages, I’m seeing this:

  • BlogSquad: 8 Reasons Why Client Questions Make Great Blog Content: Questions from clients make great blog posts.

I wonder if this could have been more interesting if I hadn’t repeated what I just said in the headline in the first sentence of the post.

Other examples:

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