Archive for On Writing Better – Page 8

3 Tips for Better Blog Writing

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, January 31st, 2011

I’m glad to see that there are more agencies focusing on content marketing for small businesses. I stumbled upon The Content Factor and found their approach to blog writing and white papers refreshing:

The Content Factor provides good advice for content marketing strategies:

But to be successful with blogging, you have to recognize some key differences:

  • The best blogs are personified. Readers like to feel like they know the blog writer and feel some of the blog writer’s personality and humanity come through. One good way to do this is via the slice-of-life approach; what happened to you today that relates to some business insight you can offer?
  • Blogs should not be looked at in the traditional sense as corporate communications. If you just regurgitate press releases, or take very little risk with your blog posts, you will not attract very many readers.
  • Blogs have to be kept up. Once you fall behind, you are dead. We should know. We struggle with our blog as well.

Three great tips to keep in mind for your blogging strategies: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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Content Marketing from the Inside Out

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, January 17th, 2011

In your opinion, what’s the single biggest factor that builds credibility and trust in content marketing? To me, it’s personality.

Readers and viewers want to feel a human connection. They need personal stories about people and about you. It doesn’t matter what form the stories come in.

We’ve come a long way from the days when ad men (and they were usually men) could represent products or services with snappy jingles and cute copy.  Online marketing today includes plenty of content in all forms, all of which communicate personality through stories:

  • Web pages
  • Blogs
  • E-newsletters
  • Social media profiles and updates
  • E-books, white papers and digital downloads
  • Video clips
  • Webinars

Some companies have personality through characters like the Aflac duck and the Geico gekko. Did you know they have their own Facebook pages?

Others use their company president like Razerguy for Razer and Ben & Jerry’s founders. Some use their customers:  Dove uses women and Old Spice uses men.

Obviously, if you’re an independent professional such as a doctor, psychologist, any kind of health professional seeking clients, you’ve got to have your own personality in your content marketing to stand out from all the others. Same for lawyers, authors, speakers. Yet how many professionals share their personal stories on the Web? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better
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Content Marketing with Stories: Why We Tell Lies…

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, January 14th, 2011

Telling stories is a fundamental part of good content marketing. Stories have so much marketing clout, they make it possible for little businesses to compete with the big guys.

Since stories are fundamental to the way our brains work, why don’t we tell more stories?

Why doesn’t every piece of online content we write use narrative to give a specific example of real people using our products and services or whatever it is we want to influence?

Here’s my guess: most people don’t think their stories are good enough. They don’t think they have a personal story to tell that’s worthy of people’s attention. Or, here’s a wild guess:

“Oh, I’m not sure my story is typical of the way other people think or act… I’m just different, maybe a little weird.”

Let me tell you a story about that. When I was first working online, all my web copy was as official and business-like as I could make it. I tried to hide the fact that I was not long out of graduate school and was sole-proprietor of a writing service with only 6-month’s Internet experience.

I was embarrassed. I thought the others online were computer wizards and knew secret coding language I didn’t. Never mind it was 1999 and many others had relatively little Internet experience as well.

So I didn’t tell much of a compelling story at all. I avoided getting personal. I believed that my writing products would sell themselves.

I struggled with my online marketing for years. It wasn’t until 2004 when I started blogging that I began to use story. I began telling it as it is, for me.

The difference was enormous. I suppose I had an “overnight success,” based on the number of people added to my marketing list (ten times as many), number of clients and amount of money coming in.

My story changed. I started speaking at conferences and I was able to tell people about the pivotal moments that made a big difference: blogging changed my life and exploded my business. As a small business, I was competing with much larger enterprises with staff and budgets. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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Content Marketing Tips: Get Your Stories Straight

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

Good content marketing requires good storytelling. Fortunately, the human brain is a story-creating machine. In our lives, we take whatever happens and impose logic and chronology upon it. Consider these common phrases:

  • Everything happens for a reason
  • One door closes and another one opens
  • More will be revealed
  • Things happen in threes

People have a hard time accepting the randomness of life. We refuse chaos and can’t stand unanswered questions. So we make things up.

Stories impose meaning on chaos and organize and give context to our sensory experiences. In effect, we create our own reality. In fact, our stories matter more than what actually happens to us.

So if we’re making it up anyway, why not edit and rewrite your stories so that they inspire the actions you want? This was a theme in the wonderful book by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility.

I’m interested in the stories we tell ourselves, and how that affects the online content we write for our businesses. When you tell a story about your business, about your clients, and about yourself, you impose your version of the story upon your readers. You also reveal your values and purpose. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing with Stories: Better than Facts

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Good stories are what make a blog interesting and fun to read. More importantly, if you’re trying to influence people to buy into your ideas and ultimately your business, there is evidence that stories work better than facts.

A 2007 study by Jennifer Edson Escalas, a marketing researcher at Vanderbilt University, found that people had more positive reactions to advertisements that were presented in a story form than to ads that were factually straightforward about the products.

In another study, when information was labeled as fact, it was subjected to critical analysis. Apparently humans have a tendency to want to make factual information wrong, compared with information labeled as a story, which people accept more easily.

In his book Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin writes, “People just aren’t that good at remembering facts. When people do remember facts, it’s almost always in context.” The way to put facts into context is to transfer them through the use of story. A story is all about context.

So if you’re a professional with a blog, or writing content for your web pages or e-newsletter, what kinds of stories should you be writing? On a blog, it’s easier to do since it’s a personal communication tool. It’s easy to share client experiences and stories about the work you do.

I’ve written extensively about how to craft blog posts, and given you some outlines and templates for structuring blog posts. Most of them center on writing about how to solve a problem for your readers. The best way to gain attention and engage readers is through storytelling.

Here are some ideas for triggering stories: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing for the Web
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E-Newsletter Review: How’s Your Ezine?

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

You may be doing all the right content marketing things (e-newsletter, blog, articles, etc.) and still not get good results (get found, get known, get clients!) If all you’re doing is publishing good information, without personality, without offers, what’s the point?

I got an email from a client who lamented the poor results from her emailed newsletter. After a year she reported:

  • No new clients came to her after reading it
  • No new sign-ups were happening (or were rare)

She asked what she was doing wrong. Here were some of her questions, followed by my answers. This would be a good time to check your own e-newsletter for opportunities for improvement.

  1. Could it be the article is too long?
  2. Could it be I don’t know how to sell myself with my newsletter?
  3. Could it be that I don’t choose the right article for my clients (they are small business owners and at time managers in various companies)?
  4. Could it be that many people check their emails on their phone and do not have time to read my newsletters?

The person asking these good questions is an executive coach. She needs to “sell herself” by providing quality content that demonstrates her expertise in coaching matters and leadership and personal development issues. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Executive Coach Ezine Article Topics, Getting Read, List Building Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, On Writing Better, Promoting Your Ezine +/or Blog, Writing Better Ezines
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Content Marketing Tips to Get More “Juice”

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Here are some content marketing tips to save you time and energy while getting more visibility on the Web.

I began these writing tips when I wrote about taking one nugget of information, and instead of posting it as one blog post, you make a list of 3-5 sub-topics or issues. Then you expand each one into 3-5 blog posts.

The point is that as long as you are writing quality posts for your readers, use that content in multiple ways, at multiple points in time, and deliver it multiple ways.

For example:

  1. Take a 300-word blog post, write an introduction, a conclusion and make it into a stand alone article of 450-500 words you can submit to article directories. Be sure to name it using a keyword-rich headline, and include your resource box with links to your blog, website and ezine sign up page.
  2. Write one longer article (600-850 words) that ties together the 3-5 blog posts you used in your series. Write an introduction, a conclusion, and add your resource box including links to sign-up for your ezine and your blog. Submit it to article directories with different a title. Read More→
Categories : Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, On Writing Better, Writing Better Ezines, Writing Great Blog Content
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Neuromarketing and How Content Marketing Works

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

What are 3 ways to frustrated your reader’s brains? Last week, I presented a speech at the 5th International Customer Media Congress in Haarlem, The Netherlands. Besides sharing what neuromarketing is teaching us about the brain and marketing, there are tips here for most web-based content publications.

I hope you enjoy it and learn something. Let me know if you have questions…

Categories : About Blogs, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Persuasion
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Basic Human Motivation: 4 Ways to Engage Readers

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, October 28th, 2010

As content marketers, if you are writing content designed to persuade and influence, you need to know what makes people tick.

There are universal drives that are common in all human beings, across cultures, across the globe. When you create content that appeals to either of these four basic drives, you can’t help but engage the hearts and minds of readers on a profound level.

We can learn a lot from evolutionary studies. Our brains haven’t changed much, nor have our fundamental motivations.

I suggest a frame work for understanding basic human motivations: the Four Drive Theory, presented by Professors Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Noria in their 2001 book Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices.

There are many theories about what motivates behaviors, but I like this Four Drive theory because it is based on studies of primitive man, primitive societies, and the evolution of brain functioning over the last 100,000 years.

It doesn’t matter if you view humans as being motivated according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, or Freud’s Pleasure/Pain framework, or any other drive theory. What matters for marketing is that you understand basic human drives, and what drives peoples’ behaviors at their most fundamental sources.

This theory doesn’t exclude other theories, but as a framework for marketing, I think it works quite well. Keeping these four things in mind, you can create more effective marketing that reaches the subconscious brains of your consumers.

These four fundamental drives motivate all human beings. Some are stronger drives than others, but we all have all four operating in the background of our lives.

Neuroscientists and anthropologists know that our brains haven’t changed much over the last 100,000 years. We are still driven by four key motivators. Everything the brain does is strongly motivated by these four drives:

  1. The drive to acquire objects and experiences that improve our status relative to others.
  2. The drive to bond with others in long-term relationships of mutually caring commitment.
  3. The drive to learn and make sense of the world and of ourselves.
  4. The drive to defend ourselves, our loved ones, our beliefs and resources from harm. Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Engaging Content: Get Emotional, Really Emotional

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

How can content  marketers create content that engages – truly engages – the emotions of readers?

When Harry Met Sally, Sally insisted men could never tell when women were faking an orgasm. To prove it, she demonstrated her own audio version, fully clothed, sitting in a crowded restaurant. The diners at Katz’ Deli were shocked and amused, as were millions of movie goers.

The scene features one of the funniest lines ever, “I’ll have what she’s having,” spoken  by Estelle Reiner, the director’s mother who played one of the restaurant patrons.

This is important stuff for content marketers to grasp and use when creating content that engages the hearts and minds of readers.

If you want your readers to be so moved that they ask you for some of what “she’s having,” then make your stories emotional.

Scientists have shown that humans have an innate ability to feel what others feel through neurons called mirror neurons. These are what allow us to feel empathy, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

Our brain neurons fire just as if we were actually doing or feeling what we see another human doing or feeling. Each time you tell a story about a client, we put ourselves into the picture.

Telling stories about clients who use your services and products isn’t just a marketing tactic. It’s neuroscience in action. Your readers can feel the pain of the client who was frustrated, angry, disappointed… and feel their relief when you helped them out. In those moments, they are that client, they get it. They are right there in the story.

How many of you did that when you watched Meg Ryan fake an orgasm? The director tells us that in test showings, the women in the audience were all laughing. The men were silent. Maybe they were worried…  I don’t know. For sure, no one was bored or unengaged…

Try to imagine the feelings your audience of readers will experience when you tell a story. Will it make them want “some of what you’ve got?”

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing
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