Archive for Online Marketing – Page 12

Social Networking for Business: What’s Right for Yours?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

(As I’m on vacation for a week, I’ve invited Sydni Craig-Hart to share social networking tips.)

The big 3:  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Everybody who’s anybody has a profile in each.  And it seems everybody is preaching the same thing:

  • You HAVE  to have a Facebook Fan Page
  • You HAVE  to be on Twitter
  • You HAVE  to join LinkedIn and participate in groups

But, do you HAVE  to this?  Will your business fall in the water if you don’t?

The answer depends on your target audience.

Remember,  your target audience determines where you should be and how you spend your time.  If your target audience spends their day on Twitter, then that’s where you should be engaging with them.  While it may be a little challenging to have a full-fledged conversation, you can still interact and find out what their challenges are, participate in the conversation when they are looking for solutions and be a trusted advisor.

The same could be true if your target audience hangs out on Facebook.  Maybe they prefer to interact there because there’s no character limit (like the 140 characters on Twitter.)  They may like the back and forth conversation of posting comments on each others’ wall and seeing their updates throughout the day.

The point is, participating in social networking is like participating in live networking.  You should only attend the “events” that make sense for you and your business.  You should only be spending your time where your target audience is hanging out – otherwise you’ll miss the boat completely.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending your efforts pursuing a particular marketing strategy only to find that it generates ZERO results.  Has that ever happened to you? If so, it’s likely because the strategy (or in this case the platform) didn’t fit your business.  You may be chasing an opportunity that doesn’t even interest your target audience — and they’re not going to go looking for you either.

In order to provide the solution to a problem, you need to be visible when your ideal prospects need you.  Marketing you and your services is simply about educating your target audience about how you can solve their problems. You can’t be a day late to the party.

Take the time to do your research and find out EXACTLY which social networks your target market is hanging out in. This will tell you where you should be spending your time.  And most importantly, you will see the return on your time investment as you’ll be connecting directly with the people who are already looking for you. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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No More Geek-Speak: SEO for Smart Bloggers

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, September 6th, 2010

How can you learn basic search marketing for blogging in 5 minutes or less?

Scribe SEO Copywriting is a practical tool you install and use for each blog or web pages you want to publish. Once installed, you can get a report BEFORE you publish, which tells you how optimized your content is for search engines.

Before I started using Scribe, I assumed (because I’m pretty smart and I’ve been getting good search results) that if I wrote quality headlines and posts, using the keyword phrases I wanted to focus on, those little search robots would be pleased…

Wrong! By using Scribe, I learned which pages and posts were getting 100% scores… and which were only ranking 52%, 78%, and 90% with the little darling spiders. In seconds, after writing a draft, a report is generated, telling me what’s wrong with my headline, use of keywords, description, etc.

All I have to do is make a few corrections and usually I can get a 100% score on the 2nd try.

Trust me, I’m no geek. This is so easy a 3rd grader can use it. Do yourself a favor and try it out, you can always unsubscribe from the monthly fee ($27 for 300 analyzes a month). I am an affiliate, I recommend it, and I love it.

Here is a sample analysis… Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing
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Compelling Content: Pushing Readers’ Hot Buttons

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, September 3rd, 2010

How do you write compelling content that attracts and engages readers? Ahhh, that question again…(followed usually by how do you turn readers into buyers?) This is the job of good content marketing and the challenge for online professionals who write blogs, articles, and  web pages.

First, let’s deal with the compelling content thing. Your content isn’t going to market anything if you don’t reach inside the heads and hearts of your readers.

Obviously it’s all about your readers. The better you know who they are and what they like, the easier it is to write content for them.

Use emotional words and phrases, and think about triggering their hot buttons. There are universal drives and human motivators. It doesn’t matter if your reader is a 20-year-old gamer or a 70-year-old retired professor.

Human beings are all driven by hot button motivators. (See the excellent book by Barry Feig for more about this: Hot Button Marketing: Push the Emotional Buttons that Get People to Buy). Some of these are:

  • The desire to be first
  • The desire to know it all
  • The desire for control
  • The desire to love and be loved
  • The desire to enjoy and have fun
  • The desire for values or feelings of moral righteousness
  • The drive for prestige
  • The drive for self-achievement
  • The drive for power and influence
  • The drive to help others

What drives your readers? Do any of these hot buttons seem similar to your clients? How can you test your assumptions? Maybe you could push a few buttons to see what reaction you get? Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Blogging Services: Content Marketing for Coaches

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Here’s my latest video about my executive coach blogging services produced by iFlashVideo.com. I think they do a good job, but unfortunately, because they are a monthly service with a one minute limit, the voice is a little rushed.

Instead, they could have edited out a few words to make it a little calmer, in my opinion. But since they are a standardized service, they don’t do any editing or make suggestions.  They just deliver what you give them, even though as clients, we aren’t always knowledgeable about what the results will be like. What do you think?

I have several executive coach clients for whom I ghost write and manage their blog updates, including updates to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

I absolutely love doing this, since I’m writing about leadership development, organizational change, and human behaviors. It keeps me on my toes with reading Harvard Business Review and the best business books around. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing with Emotions: Write with Feeling

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Are you writing with feeling? Does your blog trigger emotional reactions? Next time you review your writing, try to identify possible feelings in the reader.

Content marketing that doesn’t resonate emotionally can’t do a good job of building relationships, inspiring trust, and moving people into taking action.

Blog writers need to step away from their anonymous masks and get real, get emotional. It doesn’t mean you get all new-agey, touchy-feely. It means unless you get real with readers, readers won’t respond to you. You can still be professional and reveal your true feelings.

Emotions are either positive or negative. There are relatively few pure emotions:

  • Anger
  • Sadness
  • Fear
  • Enjoyment

These elemental feelings are universal. Specific facial expressions for fear, anger, sadness and enjoyments are recognized by people across diverse cultures.

Emotions can be complicated because they get combined, like primary colors. Jealousy may be a mix of anger and sadness. Guilt may be a combination of enjoyment and fear. Fascination may be an excited version of curious.

Authors Dan and Chip Heath, in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, mention Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Brain-Based Blogging: The 4 F’s of Action

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, August 30th, 2010

How is blogging and online content marketing like psychotherapy?

One of the things I like about blog writing and publishing content on the Web is the connection to people. While “real life” connections put you face-to-face with people you know, publishing content on the web connects you distantly with people you don’t know.

You get a chance to poke the brains of strangers within a certain niche. The only thing that makes your readers similar may be their interest in the niche you are writing about, because you solve problems they have, because you share interests and passions with them.

And yet, in  our mammalian brains, we all react to similar things, even when we’re brought up in different cultures across the globe. There are similar persuasion triggers, similar drives, similar emotional hot buttons.

Although I no longer work as a psychotherapist, I apply psychology and knowledge about the brain and human responses to everything I do and write. Let me share some thoughts I had this week about how people respond when they read online.

In the brain, emotions are closely linked to action. In our mammalian past, they were the single most important function of our brains. Our survival depended on quick action. If we had to think first, we’d be some tiger’s lunch before we decided where to jump.

Feelings do not require reflection or thought. We feel, we act. We think later and justify our actions based on input from our more highly advanced reasoning brain.

Strong feelings are hot-wired into the brain’s action centers, provoking any one of the “F” actions:

  • Feeding
  • Fleeing
  • Fighting
  • Fornicating

Emotions are simple and clear so that action is easy and fast. We wouldn’t be here talking about content marketing if our ancestors hadn’t become good at all four “F” actions, especially the last one.

How does this translate to Web usage? Read More→

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

Content Marketing Tips from Computer Games

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, August 26th, 2010

What can we learn from online computer games about content marketing for business? A lot, apparently. If you write content designed to trigger action in readers, pay attention to this.

My husband, Attila the Honey, plays World of Warcraft, an online game that’s part of the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. If you think computer games are just for kids or young people with too much time, think again. Money spent on games has now surpassed movies and books.

(He swears that his online gaming is market research for his company Razerzone.com, but I don’t buy it.) I do believe it’s true that online games are good for your brain as we age. He’s speaking this weekend at the local Lake Chapala Society about this.

I just watched Seth Priebatsch, a Princeton dropout (something he’s proud of), who’s chief ninja at SCVNGR (“scavenger”), on the online speakers site TED.com. If he’s speaking at a TED conference in Boston, he’s got to have something important to say, right? You can watch it here. (A big thanks to Susan Weinschenck for this link.)

Here are three dynamics we can learn from online games that can be applied to content marketing:

  1. Appointment dynamics: this persuasion trigger is probably what Cialdini would call the scarcity or urgency factor. There’s no greater example than Happy Hour in bars: show up at a certain time, you get rewarded. It’s also at play in the game Farmville, a popular game that already has 70 million players. How can you use this to persuade readers to take action? Think about your business and how you could include an appointment dynamic to urge responses. (Like all things, there’s a cool way to do this, and a way NOT to do it!)
  2. Influence and Status dynamics: When games confer a red badge or gold or virtual money to players, their ego and pride causes them to continue playing. What ways can you inspire loyalty and engagement with your readers/ clients /prospects? What’s in it for them? How can you use the status trigger to persuade people to use your services or products? Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Copy
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Ghost Blogging for Executive Coaches

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, August 23rd, 2010

If you’re a busy professional, you know how hard it is to run your business and provide quality services to clients, and have enough time to take care of your online marketing and publishing tasks.

You may be a thought leader in your field, but if you’re not publishing content on  the Web, you’re not going to get found, get known, and get clients.

You need to be blogging 2-3 times a week, submitting articles to directories, participating on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook… impossible for one person to manage and still have a life.

Somethings like social media updating and article submissions can be handled by a V.A. But others, like blog writing, needs to be very good so that it sounds like something you’d say, professional and informed.

There are a lot of outsourcing solutions but very few good ones. When it comes to quality content for executive coaches, I don’t recommend you hire anyone who doesn’t have experience in your field, a thorough understanding of your clients and target market and good Web knowledge and experience.

Good help is hard to find, as they say. If you’re an executive coach, let me know if I can help you. If you’re in another field I probably can’t write for you, but I can revise what you’ve written, edit it, make it suitable for Web publications.

Click here for more information.

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Executive Coach Ezine Article Topics, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Writing for the Web
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Get Search Engine Optimized- Fast

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, August 13th, 2010

How do you know if your blog posts are optimized for search engines?

Good question… and no  easy answer… well, except for one which I’m going to share with you here!  Here are a few options for optimizing your content for search marketing:

  1. Study Google and search engine optimization (time-consuming)
  2. Hire an SEO person to do some optimization for your web content (expensive)
  3. Become a subscriber to a service called Scribe Content Optimizer (easy, instant & affordable)

Here’s how it works. You go here, you sign up, you install it to your WordPress blog. You start using a free plug in called All-in-One SEO Pack.

You write a blog post, you fill in the information on the SEO plug in, you click the Scribe analyze button, wait a few seconds and get a review of how well your content will do with search engines. You then get a list of things you can do to raise your search engine optimization score.

Okay, seeing is better than me telling you. Here’s a snapshot of a blog post that didn’t score well, and here’s one that got a perfect score. You can see for yourself that the Scribe report tells me what I can do to raise my score, to improve my search engine optimization.

And here is a screen capture of a post that got a perfect score: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing for the Web
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Tell Your Story: Why Are You Here?

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, August 12th, 2010

How do you connect deeply with blog readers and gain their trust? Through stories.

There are six types of stories you need to know about yourself, and two of them you need to be telling your blog readers, clients and prospects if you want to gain their trust.

I’m reviewing Annette Simmons book The Story Factor, Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling. These are the six types of stories that are really important for your to know about yourself, if you want to influence others:

  1. “Who am I” stories
  2. “Why am I here?” stories
  3. “The Vision” story
  4. “Teaching” stories
  5. “Values-in-action” stories
  6. “I know what you’re thinking” stories

The first two are essential to establishing your brand, your mission, and your core values. It should be obvious why this is so important, but let me spell it out.

What better way than to tell you a story about myself, right? Don’t worry, I’m far too old in years to tell you my complete story of “who” I am, and I’m not sure you’d be interested in the full story anyway.

In order for you to believe me, in order for me to build trust with you that I have credibility and expertise in Writing on the Web, here’s an abbreviated version of why I write this blog.

In  2004 I had been working online for 5 years, doing okay, but not really. I was completely baffled by html coding and working on the web was a lot more complicated than it is today. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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