Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Content Marketing Strategies for Smart Professionals

Content Marketing Tasks: Practice Makes Progress

By Patsi Krakoff in Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Writing for the Web, Writing Speeches

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 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.

While you can outsource your written content, especially online, you can’t outsource your speaking. You’ve got to deliver a speech yourself in order to represent your business and get clients.

Make no mistake, there is magic that comes from speaking from the podium. It works like a magnet for drawing people to you, creating credibility and potential working relationships.

You have to persist at things in order to learn them. Writing gets better each time you write, the same goes for blogging, revising web pages, writing sales copy, email promotions. The more you practice the better you are and the easier the task becomes. Here’s an example: Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, brain science, Content Marketing

Content Marketing Tip: Start with Ready-to-Publish Articles

By Patsi Krakoff in Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Writing for the Web

Content marketing is easier when you can outsource some of the writing and researching to qualified writers. A great way to short-cut the time needed to research, write and publish quality online content is to find a good writer to supply articles.

For example, as a former executive coach and psychologist, I write for other coaches and consultants who are too busy with clients to write their own newsletters and blogs. You can find good writers in just about any field.

While this has created a good business for me, doing what I love, I don’t see many people using other people’s content for optimal results. Furthermore, when they do use writers, they don’t personalize it to make it their own.

Content marketing doesn’t work as well without unique and personalized copy. Some people use canned articles ‘as is’. They don’t take the time to add their own stories, to explain how it is for them in the work they do.

You need to connect the dots for readers.

Tell them why this article and these ideas are important to them.
Tell them about the work you do with your clients.
Tell them how they can learn more about what you’re publishing.

In my ebook Content Marketing with Blogs, I talk about the 4 Es: educate, entertain, engage and enrich the lives of people each time you write and publish on your blog. When you write, think about elements of each goal: Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, blog content, blog marketing, Content Marketing, content marketing with blogs, Writing for the Web

When Business Blogging Works Too Well…

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

Blogging for your business works like this:

You blog about the problems you solve for your clients
You get found on the Web by the people who need your services
People get to know you, like you, trust you
They email or call and hire you (photo courtesy ddpavumba)

But then your business grows, you get busy, and what happens to the blog? I’ve seen hundreds of business blogs written by smart professionals who haven’t been posted since last summer.

Here’s my own example. I think I enjoy blogging for other people more than I do for myself! The more work I’m getting ghost blogging for executive coaches, the more interesting my writing becomes, and the more fun I’m having. It’s all good, really, except for a few problems…

I am quite simply more excited about creating content that markets for other professionals than I am for myself and my own business blog. I have long since stopped worrying about being “normal,” so that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

But here are some problems… All the while, my ranking on the Top 42 Content Marketing blogs is slipping. I went from #4 to #10 to #17…to #45. I may soon be off the list entirely. Yikes! (List now defunct, but you get the point!) Read More→

Tags : blog content, blog marketing, business blogging, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

Business Blog: 4 Reasons to NOT Write Your Own

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks

Guest post by Adam Kosloff.

You’re swamped.

You barely have time to scan the headlines of your favorite news feeds. Probably the only reason you clicked on this article was to check out whether it might provide instant value to you. Can this article save you time and/or money and/or hassle?

Hopefully, it can. And not because this article will tell you anything you don’t already know – rather, it will remind you of business principles that you already apply in your everyday professional work but which you forgot once you started marketing online.

Here’s the message, loud and clear: 99% of busy business professionals and attorneys should not – repeat, not – waste their precious productive hours writing their own blog posts and website content. If you are guilty of this practice, stop it. You will burn yourself out, and your business will suffer – even if you enjoy doing the writing.

Not convinced? Consider these four arguments.

You earn the most money – and generate the most productive return on your time – when you stay in your “area of strength. The more time you blog, the less time you will have available to serve your clients. Let’s do the math. Say you’re an attorney who bills out at $250 an hour. Currently, you write three blog posts a week. It takes you about an hour to write each post. $250/hour X 3 hours = $750.This means you are investing a whopping $750 every week into your blog. Are you really getting a return on that investment that justifies this practice?
You are not a professional blogger.You have been trained as an attorney, corporate executive, or entrepreneur. Even if you consider yourself a master writer and communicator, web writing is its own very cagey animal.Creating ongoing, tonally accurate, riveting web content requires specialized skills that you must hone over years of practice. Undoubtedly, you could learn how to write more effectively for the web. But why bother? Your time and resources are extremely limited. You must husband them for the crucial tasks of operating your core business. Read More→

Tags : blog content, blog marketing, business blogging, content marketing with blogs, Online Marketing

Why Writing Like You Talk
Works Better for Your Brain

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web

Today’s guest post is by Barb Sawyers:

Many experts who try to write their own content need to rewire their brains, to abandon the lessons drilled into them at school in favor of the more conversational approach that works better online. The good news is that they can evolve.

Think about the conclusions of Dr. Norman Doidge in The Brain that Changes Itself, and other neuroscientists who have confirmed that people can recover or develop new regions to compensate for brain damage caused by strokes or congenital defects.

If they can make changes this profound, certainly you can rewire your writing process, even if it’s deeply entrenched from higher education, professional experience or other neural programming. Your neuroplasticity, as the brain geeks call it, means you can move from an objective style that builds walls to content that sticks to emotions and subconscious longings.

Yes, this takes practice, discipline and an open attitude, but luckily some of these changes come easily because they’re based on talking, the communication mainstay we all learned before writing.

I don’t have a million dollar research grant, but let me share what I’ve learned as my writing has adjusted. If you compared scans of my brain before and after writing for the web, I bet you’d see different areas light up, maybe new synaptic tangos too. Read More→

Tags : blog content, blog writing, brain science, Content Marketing, Writing for the Web

Basic Human Motivation: 4 Ways to Engage Readers

By Patsi Krakoff in Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content

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→

Tags : brain science, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, persuasion triggers, Writing for the Web

Content Marketing that Speaks to the Old Brain

By Patsi Krakoff in Brain Based Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content

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→

Tags : Content Marketing, neuromarketing, persuasion, persuasion triggers, Writing for the Web

Entering the World of Social Media:
Better Late than Never

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Social Media Stuff

(A guest post by Frank Anderson.)

The younger generation is, without fail, the heaviest participant in social media. Born straight into the world of online dependency, the art of social media is considered just another common form of innate communication. (Image by Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot, freedigitalphotos.net)

However, while Generation Y was spending their younger years amidst the World Wide Web, those born in the era of picture books and hand-written correspondence suddenly find themselves faced with an intense learning curve.

Engaging in social media in any capacity can be quite intimidating. The great thing is, however, at one time or another, we all start at the same level. Each of us faces similar challenges while striving to build an online reputation.

While one inquiry of interest can come in seconds or another in a matter of months, the recipe for success remains the same: maintaining discipline and a unique spark of creative will.

This great element of equalization is part of the magic that makes social media so unique. For anyone, anywhere, and most importantly ̶ at any age, social media can provide a new and exciting world of engaging opportunity.

The ability for potential consumers to recognize and relate to you or your business through social media is proving successful for those willing to make the effort. If you’re not doing so already, no worries ̶ it’s never too late!

Find your voice. Promote your business by promoting your personality. In the limitless world of social media, without doubt there is a group of like-minded individuals waiting to spot you in the crowd. Social media might lead to that breath of fresh air you never knew you needed.

If you don’t know where to start, turn first to a little self discovery. Explore your intended niche, your personal interests. Here are four tips to getting started: Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, social media marketing

The Homer Simpson Guide to Neuromarketing

By Patsi Krakoff in Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Persuasion

Content marketing experts and the people who write marketing messages ought to 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 lower brains. 95% of our decision making and buying and Web actions are heavily influenced by unconscious processing.

Approximately 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 this 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.

Almost 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. Read More→

Tags : Content Marketing, neuromarketing, persuasion, persuasion triggers, Writing for the Web

Neuromarketing Books for Marketing to Brains

By Patsi Krakoff in Brain Based Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Persuasion

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:

Neurofocus.com: The Neurofocus CEO, A.K. Pradeep, has authored a book, The Buying Brain –Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind. I loved this book for it’s ability to translate brain scan results with a marketing perspective in layman’s terms. However, much of it seems to promote the services of their company. Well, of course it would. The site set up especially for The Buying Brain book has a page of “cool brain facts,” that are fun to read.

Salesbrain.net: Founders of this company, Patrick Renoise and Christophe Morin, are also authors of Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Customers’ Brains. They also founded an excellent social networking site, Neuromarketing.com, a Ning group, for people interested in how brain science can be applied to marketing. Read More→

Tags : brain science, Content Marketing, neuromarketing, persuasion