Archive for Online Marketing – Page 8

Blogging with Personality and Tim Ferriss

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

How much personality should you show on your blog without becoming an ego-blogger? Apparently you can share a lot of personal stories and anecdotes, even become a little outrageous and contrarian, according to Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and now The 4-Hour Body.

I recommend listening to his short video about sharing your personality on your blog, an interview done by Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included. I was at this Blog World conference when Rohit interviewed Tim, in 2008. While it’s not a new interview, there are several nuggets that are timeless.

I don’t know if you’ve read Tim or not, but he’s a master at blogging and marketing his books.  While he could come across as Mr. Big Ego (his accomplishments are many), he does not.

Tim masters two things that make him credible and trustworthy: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Coaching/Personal Development, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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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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3 Easy Tips to Target Readers with Your Content

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, January 3rd, 2011

This is a guest post from Sam Briones, a freelance writer, who explains how to get targeted traffic to read your online content.

You may be on your keyboard all day and night, writing about content that you are knowledgeable and passionate about. You know that what you are writing makes sense, and more importantly, your expertise could change someone’s outlook, or even their life!

However, you don’t seem to be getting responses. You check your blog, and the only comments are from your mother. What’s wrong, and how do you fix it?

While there are many writers out there who can really deliver, content-wise, the truth is, most of these writers aren’t marketers, or lack the marketing skills to get their work noticed by the people who may actually find the information they provide useful. If you’re one of those individuals, you can change that by following one or more of these easy tips.

1. Have the right domain name: You may love to write about web design, but if your domain name is something like Katlovesdogs.com, then nobody will ever associate your website or blog with design. In choosing your domain name, make sure that it states what your website is actually about. That way, it can also be searchable when people type in keywords.

2. Submit your work to article submission sites: You’ve gotten your domain right, but people are still not visiting your blog. Maybe you just need to inform a wider audience that you are indeed out there. Try taking a few blog posts or articles and submitting them to some article submission sites like ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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3 Online Marketing Tasks:
Get Found, Get Known, Get Clients

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, December 16th, 2010

How do you check your online marketing to see where it’s working, where it needs improvement?

Here’s my quick and easy end-of-year check up for your business. This always helps me see where I need to spend my energy and time to improve next year’s results.

Look at your marketing tasks as having 3 purposes:

  1. Get found: How visible are you online? How easy is it for someone to find you doing a search? What comes up for your name? What comes up for the keywords that describe what your business does? Are you everywhere, or at least in the key places your target audience is? Social sites, web, blog, articles, videos, etc. Is your content optimized for search engines?
  2. Get Known: How memorable is your name, your brand or tag line? Can people identify your business and know what problem it solves? Are you credible and perceived as trustworthy? Do you show some personality and faces of the people who work with you? Can people easily get to know you, like you and trust you?
  3. Get Clients: Is it easy for people to become a  client and buy something from you? Is it easy to download free offers? Do you have low fee products and a product funnel that includes higher-ticket offers? Is your sales copy effective? Are your landing pages clean and clear? Is your sales transaction process easy and smooth? Do you offer opportunities to upgrade or upsell to products? Are you converting readers to customers?  Read More→
Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

What Are Your Target Audience’s 5 Top Web Sites?

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

If you want to create content that engages readers, you have to know their online habits and interests. Yet how many of us scramble to post on a blog or upload a  video to YouTube without taking time to survey our target audience?

Here’s a quick list of survey questions for your target audience:

  1. What are the five top web sites you visit frequently in your work?
  2. What are your online reading habits, blogs, websites, articles, videos, podcasts?
  3. Do you use social media like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?
  4. Do you access web content via RSS feeds?
  5. Subscribe to e-newsletter and blogs?
  6. Do you read web content from a smartphone?

You have about eight seconds to engage someone before they click away. Clever headlines will get them to click over to your content. But unless you know what your audience wants, you’re shooting in the dark. They won’t stay. Click and bye-bye.

Good content builds momentum and always has an objective, according to Ann Handley and CC Chapman in their book Content Rules. Therefore your content needs to trigger to action. That’s the way you engage readers to respond. Your content should be created with the end in mind: to further a relationship. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing Challenge: What to Write?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

A survey of more than 1,000 businesses this past Spring found that “producing engaging content” is the top challenge for people charged with marketing. The Content Marketing Institute published these results here:

When 36% of marketers struggle with producing engaging content and another 21% with coming up with enough engaging content, well over half of content marketing challenges involves what to say or write.

Many of the small business clients I consult with have this problem. They spend a nice sum on a good-looking website designed only to find that it’s delivered with “lorem ipsom” text as a place holder for content.

What do they write to replace the lorem ipsom? Of course it’s all about their company products and services, why wouldn’t it be? It’s their website and people want to know what they do.

Yes, except for the fact that people are bored, in a hurry, and completely focused on themselves. Web visitors only want to know what you’ll do for them, and if you are unique, amusing, shocking or outrageous they’ll stay and read your pages.

Only the problem is, if you’re in a field like leadership development or executive coaching, or a serious provider of any kind of services, you can’t grab readers’ attention by being rude like some of the videos on YouTube…

Here are three things the brain can’t ignore, to keep in mind when you create content for your home page:

  1. Novelty
  2. Human faces and eye contact
  3. Promise of rewards and satisfaction of desires

Can you see how hard this might be when you’re selling serious products and services? Let’s take life insurance, for example. Novel? No, not really. But wait a minute. The Aflac Duck is a very novel way to attract attention. The trick is tying it into what your staid company does for people.

The Aflac Duck story is brilliant branding. It contains three of the elements required for marketing to get actionable results:

  1. Attention
  2. Emotional response
  3. Memorable

What can coaches and consultants do then, to provide content that grabs readers’ attention in a way that makes an impact?

That’s right, you guessed. Tell engaging stories of real people with real problems and how you can help.

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

Content Marketing Tasks: Practice Makes Progress

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, December 13th, 2010

If you’ve spent your career avoiding certain marketing tasks because you don’t think you’re any good at them, you struggle each time you try, and you end up with weak results, take heart. Persistence has been touted by poets for a reason.

Your brain learns a lot each time you try something, even if you fail. If you stop trying, you’ll walk away with nothing. If you persist, however, the rewards are huge.

Example: public speaking. Many small business owners and entrepreneurs including many of my clients love getting the chance to get up and speak. The larger the group, the better. In my experience, they are extroverts. They love people and love conversations.

On the other hand, they usually don’t like writing. (Which is why they are my clients… they need content and they need to publish on the web – blogs, e-newsletters, ebooks, etc.)

Other people tend to focus their online marketing on content; they write books and they publish blogs and newsletters… and they hate speaking. They would rather have a root canal than deliver even a 3 minute elevator speech at a networking event. Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Writing Speeches
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My Most Painful Struggle on the Web

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

I don’t think I’m alone in my pain. What I find most difficult is having to juggle multiple tasks when it comes to marketing online. It’s not the tasks themselves – it’s the thinking clearly and maintaining focus that gets me down.

I can blog about business blogging and content marketing. I love writing about all things blogging and marketing online.That’s what I do here on this blog, WritingontheWeb.com.

But it’s difficult for me to shift gears and focus on writing content for executive coaches and management consultants, which is a big part of my business, with a different target audience and different message.

Leadership development is an area of expertise for me. I write Ph.D.-quality content for coaches and consultants. Although I love reading business books and crafting articles for my successful executive coaches, or ghost-blogging for them, I’m suffering from a split brain and it hurts!

Half my days are spent doing right-brained creative writing. The other half is left-brained managing the business, operations, accounting, client services, etc. I don’t do either well when I have to do both. I can focus on marketing and operations. Or, I can focus on writing and creating quality content. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Teleclasses & Seminars

Emotional Marketing Makes Memories

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

If you want your content marketing messages to be remembered, you must engage the emotional memories of your readers. Memory formation happens in two ways:

  1. A new memory is formed when it hits the amygdala and makes an emotional connection.
  2. A stimulus may hit the amygdala and be assimilated because it resembles a previously established emotional connection.

What results is a neural network of recalled associations that gets triggered by a memory of a hot-button stimulus. Everything we retain in memory is because it’s gained an emotional place in our brain. At some point, something was important enough because it was emotional. That’s what hot-buttons are… we feel as if someone has poked us.

What can you do to stimulate memory formation? Make an emotional impact.

How? As a content marketing professional, you have words and visuals in your quiver of tools. How do you poke someone and push their hot buttons?

Stories are key. Negative stories can get people’s attention, but can also leave a negative aftertaste, if not followed by positive stories. I’ve talked about this before:

► Grab the audience’s attention ► Stimulate desire ► Reinforce with reasons

What else can you do to poke someone’s hot buttons? How else do you make an emotional impact? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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