Is your blog content compelling? Are you attracting new readers, engaging with them, and growing your reader base?
In my last post, I shared an acronym that you should be using when writing blog content:
Content (compelling)
Assets (free)
Social Media
Track
Hemingway did not have the technological advantages that we have, nor a blog, but he knew how to engage his readers. As Larry W. Phillips describes in Ernest Hemingway on Writing:
Congratulations! Your reader base has grown to 5,000! You had 4,277 hits on your blog last month, and 737 legitimate comments!
If you’re a solo professional trying to get found online, these numbers could be PDG: pretty darn good. Small businesses, however, might find these figures PDA, pretty darn awful. My point is whatever the size of your biz, you want to grow your reader base, increase hits on your site, and stimulate comments, on your blog, social media, and LinkedIn.
If you’re not seeing growing numbers, take heart; you’re not alone. I know this because it’s one of the frequent concerns and questions my clients have: “How do I grow by reader base?” Here are 4 techniques you should be using to engage readers, and grow your reader base.
“Quality online content” depends on what business you’re in, who your ideal clients are, and how you can reach out and attract them with your solutions. Here’s a memory device when writing for your blog or website. Read More→
Do you know how to blog for your business using personality yet remaining professional? No, seriously – there’s an ongoing trend to be personal with blogs. I see it everywhere – blogs, email, newsletters. If you’re writing for business, you want to connect with your readers by using personal stories. But how much is too much?
Rohit Bhargava’s written a whole book about this, filled with examples of how companies are successfully using personalities to market their business products and services: Personality Not Included.
This is an important skill to master when it comes to writing a business blog that attracts readers yet keeps a professional brand. Where do you draw the line when it comes to sharing personal stories? Read More→
Are you writing stories with feeling on your business blog? If your blog post doesn’t resonate emotionally, you can’t do a good job of building relationships, inspiring trust, and moving people into taking action.
As I mentioned in my last post, great blog content appeals to people who are both thinkers and feelers. To do this, blog writers need to get real with readers – they need to step away from their anonymous masks and get emotional. If you don’t, readers won’t respond to you. Read More→
What’s the best kept secret of a newsletter bio? As I mentioned in my last post, your bio on your blog or website About page should be current and tell a story, rather than be a resume written in the third person. The same is true for an email newsletter bio.
Unfortunately, I see many coaches and consultants use their resumes for their sidebar bio. (“Dr. Smith has 20 years experience in strategic planning and holds an MBA from Harvard, etc.”)
Then there are those who go to the other extreme: They tell too much about their achievements and come across like an ego-maniac.
While everyone wants to know about who you are as the author of an email newsletter, mostly they want to know “what’s in it for me.” (WIIFM) Read More→
When’s the last time you updated your bio on your About page on your blog or website?
Smart bloggers know that this is one of the most visited pages: People want to know who’s behind a business. Personalities count. Yet many blogs and sites have a standard resume written in the third person, boring as all get-out.
Certainly client lists are important. But so are you. An About page is an important content marketing opportunity. Tell your story, your real story. If you are the sole author of your blog, write it in the first person. Read More→
Do you use story telling on your blog or website?
For anyone involved in persuading others (i.e., everyone), success depends on cutting through the noise and clutter to make the sale or persuade others to adopt our point of view.
Storytelling sells and persuades because it’s an innate skill that has evolved over centuries—something we all know how to do.
In fact, a storytelling gene (FOXP2), discovered in 2001, gives us the physical and neurological skills needed to speak words rapidly and precisely. We use these language abilities to form complex sentences in the proper storytelling sequence. Read More→
What’s the scariest blog post you have ever read? For me it’s a blog or website without any personality.
Storytelling and personalization is the key piece in content marketing as I see it. People are good at writing about what they know. They aren’t as good about expressing who they are and why they do what they do.
If you’re not writing real stories, your content – on your blog, in your newsletter, on your web pages – runs the risk of being boring. You may be excited about what you do as a professional, but your clients will get bored or overwhelmed if you just throw information at them.
What’s your back-story? Read More→
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. You say or do something that makes an emotional connection.
2. Something happens that closely resembles a previously established emotional connection.
What results is a neural network of associations that get triggered by 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.
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, and here’s a graph to illustrate this: Read More→
