I’ve got my head buried in books as I am researching ideas for an advanced blog writing class. My question is this to readers: What would you like to learn that would make your business blog writing easier, faster, and more effective? What questions do you want answered? Just hit the comment link below and submit your question. You can win a book of your choice:
Archive for Content Marketing – Page 80
Why is some blog content better than others? The real question is what makes a blog post effective for your business. You want to entertain and educate at the same time, of course. Many blog authors do one but not the other, and the really good ones do both.
It’s important to open up the windows into your business and show some fresh ideas and reality to your clients and readers.
Take Brian Clark of Copyblogger, for example. He often tells stories to make a point, and often those stories come from respected books in the field. Brian then conjectures about what history and the present suggests: he predicts the future. That makes for great content that entertains while it educates and also stimulates your thinking.
Here’s an excerpt from Brian’s Teaching Sells that points to what you should be doing for your blog writing:
I’ve been in an unsubscribing fury this week. If your newsletter bored me, not only did you get deleted, I took myself off your list entirely. And there you go…
I realize it’s not easy to capture my attention and get me to read all the way through to the end. I’m a tough customer. So I got to thinking, what makes the difference between a fascinating newsletter that I actually read, and one that puts me to sleep or makes me hit the delete key faster than a dog can salivate?
Stories will get me reading, for one thing, but they’ve got to have the "curiously thing" going. There has to be some suspense…
Now I know this is all subjective and in the eye of the beholder, so the best way for me to teach you what I’m talking about is to send you over to read Michael Katz’ latest ezine, "I’ve Got a Crutch on You."
He hits a home run every time with his newsletter, but this one is full of great tips you may be able to copy – er- I mean, model and learn from. This is just one great newsletter, entertaining AND educational at the same time. It just happens to be about writing great newsletters and you all can do this better, I know you can.
Denise and I both own Flip video cameras and have blogged about how we use it to interview people whenever we’re at a seminar. This really makes creating valuable content for your blog easy.
Now, I hear a lot of accomplished speakers complain about how they’d rather speak than write…actually they say they’d rather get a root canal than write…but here’s a way to make creating content fun and easy: record a tip using your keywords and post it on your blog.
It’s so easy even I can do it. (Of course, it helps that Denise is handy at editing and adding the URLs), but even so, the Flip is easy because the software is contained inside the camera which plugs into your computer USB port. You can even edit as soon as you plug it in. No downloads required. Just follow the steps, upload to your account on YouTube, grab the code and copy and paste into your blog.
Take a look at the way we interviewed other professionals at Adam Urbanski’s Info Profits Success Intensive last week. Denise is posting them every day over at her BizTipsBlog. Hear what smart people like Adam, and Joe Nunziata have to say…
Remember when Time Magazine proclaimed YOU, the readers, to be "Persons of the Year?" It was 2006 and they highlighted all the ways online readers were contributing content through blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia and social sites like MySpace…
It’s two and a half years later, and it’s all coming true in spite of the predictions of the idiocy of crowds…
It’s common to see companies running contests for best video commercial for their products now.
I’m a little curious how many readers are actually contributing content on the web, either writing your own profile pages on Facebook, etc., posting video clips on YouTube or other photo sharing sites, or guest blogging? Do you use the Internet for your own marketing, or are you contributing content to other sites as well?
Like these two engineers who put together this amazingly creative cat video, are you doing things like this? I mean, who has time for this?
Info Profits Success Intensive: Three days in a room full of 50 small business owners all learning about the power of marketing with information, that’s Adam Urbanski’s idea of fun! And boy, can he orchestrate fun even while he over-delivers information and tips about how to make money with information products.
The Blog Squad was graciously invited to share a piece of the information marketing puzzle: how to use a blog to spread your words and get business.
Adam is an amazingly refreshing master of marketing for coaches, consultants and service professionals. He came to this country in 1989 with $200 in his pocket and now has a huge following of clients. Spending 3 days with him is intense; he doesn’t hold back on any of the insider methods of making money both on and offline.
He has an amazing ability to simplify the complexity of marketing into clear action steps. If you get a chance to hear him speak don’t miss it. Oh, and by the way, he’s going to be at the Speak Your Way to Wealth seminar August 22-24, sponsored by Arvee Robinson, along with The Blog Squad, in Manhattan Beach.
Part 2 by guest author Joe Pulizzi, Junta42
How to turn off your customers…
The fact is that consumers are turning away from anything that directly markets to them without first having a relationship with your brand. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to create a sustainable relationship with a customer without first delivering valuable content.
Marketers may long for the good old days of mass marketing, but those days are dead and gone. Those were easier days.
Today, marketers cannot rely solely on creative ads and traditional ad buys, they have to work for it by delivering consistent and valuable information.
To overcome some of these barriers to content marketing, I’ve been pushing the concept of positioning content marketing as, yes, a product.
What do I mean by that?
By guest author Joe Pulizzi, Junta42 Blog
To follow the philosophy of content marketing, you’ve got to want it bad. Content marketing is all about your customer…that one customer who needs just the right information from you to do their job better or make their lives easier.
Doing that is anything but easy.
I speak to a number of audiences around the country about content marketing as not just a marketing strategy, but an organizational strategy. More people are starting to get this, but many, sad to say, just don’t get it.
"You mean I create content for my customer, but don’t pitch them anything in it?" is a usual response. The answer to that question is whole-hearted YES!
How does content marketing work for your business? You need to write 2-3 times a week in order for your content to work as an automatic marketing tool for your business. But it’s easier than you might think.
Six months ago I hadn’t heard the term ‘content marketing,’ but I liked it immediately. So much so, I put it in the tag line of this blog when I redesigned it: How to Use Content Marketing to Attract, Sell and Profit Online.
Most people I talk to guess that content marketing means writing, publishing, and distributing content that ultimately sells your services or products.
Joe Pulizzi, of Junta42 blog, defines it like this:
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.
Understandably, you may not be clear what that really means or how important it is for your business yet. Quite frankly, I’m not sure anybody can really tell you what that specifically means for you. You might have to do some serious thinking…like, for example:
Content for Coaches and Consultants
Serenity Virtual Assistant Services
Social Buzz Club
