Archive for Online Marketing – Page 10

Business Blogging: Blast Past the Blunders

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Here’s how to bust out of blog oblivion: Blogging 101: 6 weeks to Confident Blogging with the Queen of WordPress, Suzanne Bird-Harris.

The latest survey of small biz professionals revealed most people struggle with “Time:” 72% say they don’t have enough time to update their blog.

But we often say that, when in fact the reason we don’t have time is because we’re not sure what exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, or how to do it.

Once you master a skill, you can get it done quickly. And, if you’re successful at it, you want to do it again and again.

Here’s what the survey reveals:

  1. 72% struggle with enough time to blog
  2. 54% of people say they struggle  to know what to write about
  3. 52% aren’t sure how to apply SEO strategies to increase the reach of their blog

No wonder people run out of time. If you sit down to blog and have to figure out these two important things (#2 and #3), well, there goes your day!

To remedy this, Suzanne and I are going to teach the solutions to #1 and #2: blog writing and SEO workshop in January 2011.

In the meantime, get prepared by mastering the basics. If you’re struggling with your WordPress blog, don’t miss Suzanne’s Blogging101 workshop: 6 Weeks to Confident Blogging. (Don’t miss the early bird discount – you must sign up by Friday, Nov. 5,  2010 to save $50.)

You can read more about the details of the 6 week workshop on Suzanne’s Blogging101 web page here.

Here’s what one of her clients said about her: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Ezine & Blog Classes, Online Marketing, Teleclasses & Seminars
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Search Engine Results: 3 Tips for Savvy Bloggers

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

I don’t know why it took me so long to learn this SEO stuff, but I DO know that I wouldn’t post one more blog post without using Scribe SEO Tool. Thank you thank you, Brian Clark of Copyblogger. You’ve saved me from oblivion.

At first I thought, an SEO tool? – well, that must be for programmers and geeky types. Why would I mess with that, I’ve got too much information packed into my brain and the thought of learning SEO secrets made my head swim. Besides, blogs are naturally search engine friendly…Then I thought, oh heck, I trust Brian Clark, let’s give it a whirl and I can always unsubscribe after a month.

I can’t live without it now. I just love it when it tells me I’ve got a 100% score on a blog post. Now, when I hit publish, I’m confident my post will be understood for the right reasons by those search spiders. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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Smart Time-Saving Tips on Blogging…

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, November 1st, 2010

What are the steps you need to follow to ensure each blog post is optimized for search engines as well as 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.

I recently designed and recorded a presentation for the Content Marketing Institute on everything that goes into creating and publishing a quality blog post. It’s published on a neat tool called Brain Shark: you make a power point presentation, then record the notes over the phone. How neat is that?

I’d like to share it with you here. Tell me what you think:

I realized after I watched this that my diagrams are way too small on this screen. So I’ve decided to republish them below, larger.

And here is the flow chart of all the steps I use for posting on my blog: Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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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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Neuromarketing Books for Marketing to Brains

By Patsi Krakoff
Sunday, October 24th, 2010

If you want to know more about how to write content that makes an impact on the brains of your readers, here are some interesting sites and books about the emerging field of neuromarketing.

There are new neuromarketing companies and books galore, and I believe most offer important clues for content marketers. Here are a few of my favorites:

Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Copy
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7 Ways to Market to the Subconscious Brain:
The Homer Simpson Guide to Content Marketing

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Content marketing and the people who write marketing messages must understand how consumers’ brains work if  they want to engage and create trust and loyalty. The problem lies in assuming people are in charge of their own choices…

Everybody thinks they are in control of their behaviors and decisions. We think we are rational, logical, and smart human beings. But we may not be so smart if we don’t recognize our own and others’ irrationality.

Our behavior and decision-making is affected, 95% of the time, by the unconscious processing in the mid and old brains. 95% of our decision making and buying and Web actions are heavily influenced by unconscious processing.

85% of the time our brains are on autopilot. But marketers continue to write messages as if people were paying attention.

Market research: in 2005 corporations spent more than $7.3 billion in US alone. In 2007, $12 billion. That doesn’t include marketing, advertising, etc. which carries an additional annual $117 billion tag. Most of it is spent in the wrong places and fails.

Companies and brands are gathering the wrong information, because consumer surveys and focus groups can only report back what they consciously experience …and it’s falsified by biases and flaws. The only true market research comes from monitoring brains of consumers as they react to messages, through neuromarketing.

8 out of 10 new product launches fail. Could it be that we’ve misunderstood how to capture attention,  emotions and be memorable to consumers? Could it be we assume people are conscious and rational?

Health warnings on cigarette labels actually trigger smoking behaviors, they don’t deter any smoking at all, quite the contrary. How do we know? Not because smokers report they ignore the warnings. They all say they read them and believe them and want to quit smoking. But their brain scans show they actually want a cigarette even more. (Buyology, Martin Lindstrom) Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Content Marketing that Speaks to the Old Brain

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

You get better results with your content marketing when you speak to the “old brain,” the one that’s also known as the primitive brain or the survival brain. Knowing how the brain works will help you write better as well as help you with presentations to influence others.

There are a few principles to remember, and here’s a great story that makes this come alive…

A Marketing Moment with a Homeless Man…

I want to share an excerpt of a story by Patrick Renvoisé, from his book Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Customers’ Brain. He tells the story of how he earned the equivalent of a $960/hour consulting fee from a homeless man…

One evening as I was entering a restaurant in San Francisco, a homeless person stopped me. His sign read, “Homeless. Please HELP.”

The man showed all the signs of distress with sad empty eyes. He looked me directly in the eyes, and I was compelled to hand over a few bucks. However, something led me to go further with this particular man.

Like many of my clients who try to get responses from marketing, his message was weak, and certainly not unique. So I gave him $2 on condition he let me change the message on his sign for at least 2 hours.

The man agreed, and I wrote a different message on the back of his sign. Later, we met up again.

He insisted on giving me $10, because he had made over $60 while I was having dinner. His usual take averaged $2-$10 an hour.

As my entire interaction had lasted only 30 seconds, this eight dollar profit translated into a $960/hour consulting fee, not bad.

All I did was apply what I know about the brain and marketing messages that get people to act.

Here’s what his new cardboard sign said: Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Copy
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Brain Scans Reveal 3 Elements of “Buying Brain”

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

As more brands are being studied in laboratories around the world, consumers are being hooked up to brain imaging machines, fMRI, EEG and other devices so that they are monitored while they read marketing messages and make decisions.

Neuromarketing is extremely expensive market research to do, but fortunately most brains work the same, with some exceptions for age and gender. So the results acquired for companies with big budgets are showing us how to create messages that have a powerful impact on the brains of all consumers.

So far, neuromarketing studies have shown that these three factors determine whether or not a consumer is inclined to make a buying decision:

  1. The degree of ATTENTION
  2. Whether or not there is emotional ENGAGEMENT
  3. How easily the message and the brand is encoded to MEMORY

Attention, emotional engagement, memory: 3 keys to priming the brains of your audience to buy or take the action you want. (Source: The Buying Brain, A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus)

And this makes sense, doesn’t it? … you can’t get someone to the point of wanting to buy something without first getting their attention. And if your message resonates with them on an emotional level, they’ll have trust. It’s well known that experiences that carry a strong feeling have better chances of being remembered.

In order to buy your brand, they have to remember where they saw it, and where they can go take action.

Think of a monkey waking up in a tree… he swings through the branches and he sees a bright yellow banana through the branches. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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What Drives Us? 4 Keys to Creating Compelling Content

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, October 18th, 2010

I’m extremely curious about the subconscious drives that compel people to do the things they do, in their work, in their choices, and their buying decisions, aren’t you? Sometimes, you feel driven to do things, and you don’t really know why.

Engaging the hearts and minds of readers through written content isn’t easy. The Content Marketing Institute recently surveyed content marketers who report that’s their #1 challenge:

How to write content that is “engaging,“ that gets readers to pay attention, the compels them to take action.

I think to be successful with content, one has to appeal to fundamental human drives and motivations, the ones that our primitive ancestors passed down to us over the last 100,000 years.

Recently, I came across a fascinating book I read 10 years ago, based on evolutionary biology, sociology, and psychology: Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Noria.

These two incredibly smart professors propose a theory of four fundamental motivations at the heart of all human behavior.

  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.

This theory says that humans and social groups will enjoy an advantage to the extent that they are able to fulfill all four of these basic human drives.

It suggests these drives have a strong emotional component, and would probably show up in the limbic system of the brain if monitored under brain scans. What that means is that they are embedded in the subconscious mind, out of our awareness.

After reading this book and a few others on human motivation, I can see how these four drives apply to writing emotionally engaging content that compels readers to take action:

Content written to appeal to each of these four drives will engage the emotional brains of readers.

Let me tell you a story that shows how this works. Information passes to the brain through the sense organs.

Let’s say Fred is reading the news online, and his eye catches a picture of an ad: a business man driving to work in a red sports car. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Copy
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