Archive for Writing Great Blog Content – Page 6

5 Uses for Your Business Blog

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Maintaining a business blog is time-consuming. However, if you have clear objectives in mind, the effort very well could be worth your while. As you establish your blog, define your goals to determine whether to keep it alive. Below are five common uses for feeding regular content into a business blog. (photo courtesy digitalart)

1.  Raw Sales

For retailers and service providers, the most obvious reason to host a business blog is to peddle products or services. You want to show what you have to offer, and a blog is a great way to advertise deals to engaged customers who are clearly in the mood to buy and interested in your products (they are reading your blog, after all). If this is your intent, post product reviews, tell your readers about new products you’re expecting. Your blog works as an extension of your website, so provide more information than customers would receive from the product page. Let the reader feel as if he or she is getting the inside scoop.

2. Company and Industry News

Businesses of all types use their blogs to keep customers and clients in the know. If you’re hosting a company blog for communication purposes, include posts about company and industry news. These posts are especially useful for businesses catering to a tight niche. They also keep customers returning to informational business sites. These efforts help to establish a lasting relationship with customers who will return to a site if they know they can get up-to-date information. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, How to...Tips, Writing Great Blog Content
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Business Blogs and the Parisbas Tennis Open

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

Is your blog like my tennis, a hit or a miss? Are you writing posts that are clear winners for your readers? Are you serving valuable, relevant content within the lines of your readers’ needs?

This week I’m watching the world’s best players battle it out on the courts at the Parisbas Tennis Open in Indian Wells, California. I’ve noticed a few things that applies to content marketing.

Persistence and control is the name of the game. With me, I get impatient in a rally, and with a burst of aggression I’ll end the point with a whopping drive… clear out of the court.

I know people who blog like that. They write 600-900 words every few weeks, then wonder why they aren’t getting search traffic.

Blogging for your business doesn’t work that way. Steady as you go, writing at least twice a week, at least 350 words, focusing on the key words that drive results for your business, mixing information with stories, always keeping the reader in mind.

Business blogging is like tennis: you want to keep the ball in play. The “ball” is the conversation you have with your ideal clients, your readers. What problems can you solve for them? Keep the dialogue alive. You can’t do that when your blogging is inconsistent.

If you want to get found on the Web, you need plenty of content that’s relevant to your readers. The more you create new content, and publish on your blog, the better the possibilities your ideal clients will find you.

Get found, then get known by your readers. You are priming the pump towards getting new clients. Persistence pays.

If you’re an executive coach or leadership consultant who’s too busy with clients to manage your blog and content marketing tasks, consider outsourcing. Click here for information over on my site, Content for Coaches. I can help make your newsletters, blog, and Web pages rank high with both search engines AND your clients.

Categories : Attracting Clients, Getting Read, Writing Great Blog Content
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The Ladder of Emotional Values: Pleasure Reigns

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

What emotions are people seeking to satisfy online? What can we understand about human motivations and values in order for content marketing to work?

Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs tells us we are motivated to satisfy our basic needs first (food, shelter, clothing), before we seek to obtain satisfaction for social, intellectual and spiritual needs.

A similar hierarchy of emotional values exists. As incoming information from web and blog pages enters the brain and is processed, our emotional centers assign values to offers.

Brain science, along with studies on decision making from behavioral economics, has shown that people often don’t use logical reasoning. Instead they go with their gut reactions. They make decisions based on feelings.

Later, when that leads to a buying decision, people justify their actions with rational logic and intellectual “alibis.”

At the lowest level, people have a desire for security. The next thing they seek is comfort. At the top of the ladder, people will pay the most to satisfy a desire to experience pleasure.

Although these values are all emotional, rationality plays a part. Online, an offer must work properly for consumers to feel secure. A marketing offer also provides comfort through ease of purchase, and also by providing reasons to defend the purchase to friends and family. But rationality is never the deciding factor. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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The Naked Blog: Dress Up Your Words

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

What can you learn about blog writing and content marketing from the theater?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve attended local theater productions, including performances on The Naked Stage. (Photos courtesy Stuart Miles)

If you’re not familiar with this kind of theater format, the actors read their lines, sitting on stools, dressed in black, without benefit of costumes, scenery, makeup, or movement. Hence the name, Naked Stage: the presentation is devoid of any of the usual visual aids.

There’s a narrator to explain the scenes and movements, including sounds, which in this case consisted of a gun going off. In one of these performances, the narrator yelled, “GUN SHOT!” Not “BANG” but “GUN SHOT!” It is truly minimalist and much depends on the actors’ voices. Everything, perhaps. They don’t even look at each other, they are reading their lines. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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Basic Human Motivation: 4 Ways to Engage Readers

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

If you are writing content designed to persuade and influence, you need to know what makes people tick. (photo courtesy of digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

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. Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content
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Content Marketing that Speaks to the Old Brain

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, November 18th, 2011

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… (photo courtesy Mantas Ruzveltas /FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

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 : Brain Based Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content
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5 Reasons Content Marketing is Getting Harder

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

I hate to be a purveyor of gloom, there’s too much of that around these days. But I’ve been thinking about this and want to share my thoughts with you.

Here are some reasons content marketing is getting more challenging. There exists:

  1. A shift away from focusing on your products and services (what you know well)
  2. A shift towards the reader/customer and their needs (what you may not know very well)
  3. A business environment that is changing rapidly (what is unknown)
  4. More people online in your field writing about the same things (some better, some worse)
  5. A huge volume of content about everything possible, creating information overload for readers

This makes it harder for you to grab readers’ attention and get through to them. However, readers are still hungry for solutions and are looking for trustworthy professionals to work with.

I know this because I’ve experienced it personally. In spite of the recession, people are still hiring consultants to help them with their content marketing strategies and with writing quality content for business marketing.

As marketing guru Seth Godin writes:

“With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.” Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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Writing Compelling Content:
What Drives Your Readers?

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, October 17th, 2011

In a recent blog post, Compelling Content:  What Are Your Readers’ Hot Buttons?, we explored the top 10 hot buttons and the use of emotional words and phrases to tap into these issues.  Here’s another model based on only 4 drivers.

4 Drives in a Nutshell

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (Jossey Bass, 2001), by Harvard professors Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria.

Based on evolutionary science, our drives can be categorized into four basic motivations:

  1. The drive to acquire
  2. The drive to bond
  3. The drive to learn
  4. The drive to defend

This is subtle and important. Let’s imagine you run an executive coaching business. You provide professional services to leaders in organizations. Since you work one-on-one with your clients, you probably have a pretty good idea of which of the above four motivators frequently come into play.

If your clients are results-driven competitive executives, you can’t assume that they’re motivated by the drive to acquire, but it’s a good bet. They may just as well be driven to succeed by the desire to form successful relationships with others, or to learn everything there is to know, or to defend their territory.

But one drive will probably be more motivating than the others, and it will be evident in your client’s priorities. Assuming your client is driven by the drive to acquire and to have more, you’ll need to write content to appeal to this need.

What is the fear associated with each drive? Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content
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5 Content Marketing Questions:
Get Readers to Take Action

By Patsi Krakoff
Sunday, October 9th, 2011

What will make your web readers take action or not? Content marketing isn’t successful without results. So when writing a blog post or a web page, keep these key questions in mind. You want to inspire readers to pick up the phone, click here, sign up, register, or remember your brand.

Here’s a final note in my blog post series about writing good content on the Web that gets results.

In Maria Velosa’s 2009 edition of Web Copy that Sells, she suggests 5 questions your copy should answer:

  1. What is the problem (pain, predicament)?
  2. Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  3. What is possible?
  4. What is different now?
  5. What should you do now?

As you answer these questions, you lead readers down a path to take action. Good content on the Web, when it’s well written, should:

  • Educate
  • Entertain
  • Engage readers
  • Enrich lives

If at all possible, you should strive to enrich the lives of your readers as well. Try to make their lives better by showing them how they can save time, energy or money.

Question #4: What is different now? Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Persuasion, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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5 Content Marketing Questions:
#3 What’s Possible?

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, October 3rd, 2011

In Maria Velosa’s Web Copy That Sells book, there is a 5-step blueprint for writing on the Web. This is really what content marketing is all about. When you answer the following 5 questions, your writing tasks are simplified and your copy becomes clear.

  1. What is the problem (pain, predicament)?
  2. Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  3. What is possible?
  4. What is different now?
  5. What should you do now?

First answer question #1, what’s the problem. Then, answer questions #2,why hasn’t the problem been solved? Then answer question #3, what’s possible?

As you write out several sentences to answer these questions, you’ll lead your readers through a path that leads to action. Action is the goal for all good content designed to market your business on the Web.

In psychology, counseling, and coaching, when you describe how life could be better, you’re setting the stage for people to make changes. You’re engaging someone to start using the brain neurons involved in positive thinking.

Awareness that a change is needed is the first step (questions 1 and 2). Painting a picture of how things will be better is the next step (questions 3, 4 and 5).

In marketing and copywriting, this section is known as the benefits. The  key idea that makes a real difference happens when you drill down deep to core values in people’s lives.

Example: A pill that gets rid of back pain provides a big benefit: no more back pain. That’s obvious. As a writer, you must draw a picture of what is possible now that the pain is gone. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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