Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Content Marketing Strategies for Smart Professionals

11.5 Steps to Video Blogging in 30 Minutes

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing

What’s the quickest way to use videos for content marketing? How can you shoot a video clip in your hotel room while at a conference? I’ll demonstrate here. I plugged in my Logitech Webcam, pulled up a previous post on my blog, and spoke into the camera.

It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough, and it was done start to finish in 30 minutes. Using video blogging, you can easily get found by clients who have problems you can fix.

Set up webcam, test for lighting
Used some content marketing text previously published about how to write a video script
Spoke spontaneously into the camera, trying to be as sincere and relaxed as possible
Reviewed the video clip, reshot it a 2nd time.
Uploaded to YouTube, named it, described it, tagged it.
Copied the embed code from YouTube and posted it into the html side of blog platform.
Wrote 300 words to accompany the post
Created a title, wrote a description into All-in-One SEO pack
Hyperlinked keywords
Ran Scribe Content Optimizer for an SEO analysis and tweaked it to 100%
Published blog
…Went to breakfast

Click here to watch the 1 minute video…. Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, blog content, blog marketing, Content Marketing, content marketing with blogs, video marketing

Vote: What Makes You Read a Blog Post?

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Content Marketing, Getting Read, Online Marketing, Promoting Your Ezine +/or Blog

What do you find is the most important thing about a blog post? What makes you read? Mark Schaefer over at {grow} blog asked this question and gives his opinion.

Here are the choices:

Online Surveys & Market Research

Take a few minutes to decide, then leave a comment about the top blogging elements that get you to read a post.

Tags : blog content, blog marketing, business blogging, content marketing with blogs, Online Marketing, writing on the web

Free Phone Consulting? 4 Reasons It’s a Good Idea

By Patsi Krakoff in Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing

Why should a professional or small business give away free consulting? I’ll tell you why. Here’s what’s happening…

I recently launched a new version of articles to my executive coaching clients and as a bonus, offered a free 20-minute phone session.

I’ve been spending more than 20 minutes with each person, and I’m loving it. Since I charge $200/hour for consulting sessions, why would I do this?

It gives me a chance to connect with clients: In an online business, I usually don’t have much contact with the clients who use my services and products. Some of my clients have been with me over 10 years, and we’ve never spoken by phone. To them, I’m faceless, and vice-verso. I want to feel some sort of connection on a personal level. Email can’t do that.
When people invest hundreds of dollars with you, they usually have questions, and even though these same questions may have been answered on your sales page, people need reassurance that answers apply to them. A personal conversation solidifies trust in you.
Sometimes products can be confusing to people. You see your products from your perspective, not from the perspective of the customer. A phone conversation ensures they get the best use out of their purchase. Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

Content Marketing Videos: Speak to Problems First

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Writing Great Copy

What’s the best way to write a script for a video? Content marketing with videos is a key marketing tool, and it’s getting easier to do.

Here’s a new video the folks over at iMotionVideo Studios produced for me. I just love this service. Left to my own devices, I’d probably make one video every few months. But with a low-fee monthly subscription for a year, I know I’ve got a one-minute video commercial coming every 30 days. This is key for content marketing.

Why would I want that many? I don’t really, but for content marketing to work you need as much content as you can, in all forms. I use them to submit to video directories, post to YouTube, and it all counts to get found in Google searches. Some content marketing things have to combine quality AND frequency.

Most of the time I focus on how important it is to write quality online content for your readers, and teach my clients to achieve maximum results, they have to be writing things that are relevant and important to their readers: how do you solve their problems. Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, Online Marketing, video marketing, video scripts

Punk Chihuahua Reveals 4 Secrets to Better Blogging

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content

How’s your content marketing with blogs? Are you brilliantly blogging several times a week?

There comes a time when we all run out of things to say (or at least most of us!). The blog must be fed anyway. Treat your blog like a prized chihuahua… feed it well and it will do wonders to attract readers…

But if you don’t feed it and take care of it, it will turn nasty, and bark and growl for attention. All of which will end up biting you in your traffic stats.

It’s not that we run out of things to say. I’ve got plenty to say about most things. It’s that it’s hard to perform on queue. It’s hard to be creatively brilliant when you want to be, in the time you’ve got available.

But I’ve got a lot of cheat cards up my sleeve. Here are my favorite tips for coming up with a blog post when you’d rather be out playing tennis:

Start with a picture. iStockPhoto.com has some amazingly creative photos and drawings you can use for just about any topic. An unusual photo, like a punk chihuahua, can be used as bait to draw readers’ eye into your blog post. Just be sure you can follow up with good tips or content that’s relevant to your readers.
Start with a shocking title. Use the checkout stand at the grocery store to review the latest National Enquirer or other tabloid headlines: “5,000 Year-old Man Frozen in Ice Had Affair with Palin.” The idea is to use shock and humor and turn it into valuable content for your readers.
Start with a video. Turn on your web cam and talk to your readers from the heart. Sometimes this comes spontaneously, other times it might require a little thought and scripting. Some people are better at this than others. (For myself, by the time I get my hair and makeup and the lighting right, I’ve forgotten what was so important to say…)
Start with OPC… other people’s content. Go find a brilliant post by one of your favorite authors, say for example, one you can easily find on AllTop.com. Use excerpts but add your own opinion and perspective.

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

8 Blog SEO Tips for Top Search Results

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content

What are the most important SEO tips for your blog to get good search results? It may be easier than you think to start getting onto the first page for keyword searches.

Most of what I’ve learned about search engine optimization techniques I learned from Scribe SEO Content Optimizer. This honey of a software tool tells me how well a post is going to be understood by those search robots.

Since search engine spiders are nothing but algorithms, I don’t understand how they work, but Scribe sure does. I just follow what the Scribe report on each post tells me. I don’t have to understand it, I just follow the blog SEO tips and I get better search engine results.

I can tweak the title and the keywords before I publish. Once I get a Scribe score of 100%, I can pull the publishing trigger with full confidence.

Here are a few things I’ve learned:

Put your keyword phrases first in the title if you can.
Spell out the key concepts in your first sentence, either by asking a question, or summarizing.
Link to an important keyword in the first paragraph if you can.
Link to definitions on Wikipedia of the most important keywords whenever you can.
Write at least 300 words.
Link to sources, other web pages, books, other experts as often as you can.
Each post should have hyperlinks for every 120 words.
Each post requires me to fill out the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin with title, description and keyword tags. Scribe tells me what I need to do to make this description better.

I don’t publish unless I get a 100% score. If I’ve used my keywords too much, it tells me and I can go back into my post and use synonyms.

Sometimes this happens when I write about topics that don’t really have synonyms like Facebook, or “search engines.”

When I first started blogging in 2004, I did it intuitively. I wrote for my readers. I knew nothing about search engines, keyword indexing, SEO. I just wrote what was most important to me, and what I thought was most relevant to readers.

I was lucky. Blogs are naturally search engine friendly. I got good results without knowing what I was doing. I don’t leave that to chance and luck anymore. Competition is much more than it was back then.

I use Scribe for my own blog and won’t work on a client blog who doesn’t have it. I am an affiliate and encourage everyone to use it… and not because I get a few pennies for referrals. I don’t think anybody should be blogging without Scribe.

Tags : Attracting Clients, blog marketing, Content Marketing, content marketing with blogs, Online Marketing, search engine savvy, SEO

A Simple Way to Get SEO Inbound Links: Be Nice

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

One of the important ways to keep your search engine rankings up is through building quality inbound links. For those of you less familiar with SEO-talk, backlinks are when other sites link to the content on your site. It tells the search engines you’re important.

Here’s what Mike Phillips writes on Website Magazine:

Solicit quality inbound links. High-quality links will remain a pivotal factor in search engine rankings. Be diligent about networking with like-minded content producers and work to get links – quality links, including those with keyword-rich anchor text. In no way is it recommended to purchase links.

That means your blog and website need to encourage others to link to you, through quality content that provides solutions to people’s problems.

One way to do this is through blog outreach. When you form relationships with other experts and point them to information that can be helpful to them in their work, you are extending a hand and creating possible reciprocity opportunities.

Ah, that’s not very clear. Let me give you an example, in fact, a great illustration happened to me the other day from a nice reader and a very smart person, Richard Hawk.

I got an email yesterday, it said:

Thank you for the recent e-zine with the tip about including your blog on Linkedin. I just finished adding the app.

Your messages are helpful. I don’t get to read every one but I do give most of them a quick view. You’ve given me other ideas I’ve used and I mostly wanted to thank you.

This is a new habit of mine to thank authors and other writers who have helped me. I know that the feedback I get from my work keeps me energized, especially when things aren’t going the way I hoped.

I’m a professional speaker, author and musician who has an exceptionally popular weekly e-zine “Safety Stuff.” I just celebrated my 500th issue.

Thank you again Patsi. You’ve made a difference in my life.

‘till next time.
Richard
www.makesafetyfun.com Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, blog marketing, blog traffic, content marketing with blogs, persuasion triggers, reciprocity, SEO, web traffic search traffic

High Quality Content Sites Is What Google Wants

By Patsi Krakoff in Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing

There’s been an important update to the way Google runs their search algorithms, designed to weed out the number of junk content farms. You and your pages shouldn’t be concerned, except if you’re trying to game the system.

But you should always be alert for how such changes affect your site and make corrections when needed. If your search results have changed lately, this may explain why.

For professionals who use online content to market their services, you need to keep an eye on your analytics, and continue to follow good advice for content marketing. Here’s an excerpt from Website Magazine, an article from Mike Phillips that constitues good search marketing advice:

From the Official Google Blog: “Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

Be aggressive about building your user base. Search is powerful but it’s not the only way to ensure visitors to your website. Build a strong following on social networks and work hard to increase email sign-ups and newsletter subscribers.

Solicit quality inbound links. High-quality links will remain a pivotal factor in search engine rankings. Be diligent about networking with like-minded content producers and work to get links – quality links, including those with keyword-rich anchor text. In no way is it recommended to purchase links.

Produce varied forms of content. Search engines like a little variety. In addition to a company blog, consider producing video for a YouTube channel, a photo log on Flickr, or a podcast on iTunes. Read More→

Tags : blog marketing, blog traffic, content marketing with blogs, Google, Online Marketing, SEO, Web traffic, web traffic search traffic, Writing for the Web

Feed Your Blog Automatically to LinkedIn & Twitter

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff

Update From Patsi, February 2012: We apologize for not updating this post earlier. I no longer update any social media automatically, but am posting manually (read why here, Say NO to Auto-Feeds: Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites). This is time-consuming and may require a virtual assistant for some of you. I recommend SerenityVA.com.

How do you get your blog posts to feed into your LinkedIn profile and Twitter automatically? I asked social media expert AnnaLaura Brown to write a guest post. This is the 2nd part of her post Connect Your Blog to Facebook.

For LinkedIn you have a couple of options as well.

Your first option is to add the WordPress blog option to your Linkedin profile.

To do this:

Go to edit profile and scroll down to the bottom. You will see a link that says Applications- Add an Application.

Click on that link and you will see this page of options. There is an option to add your blog link with Typepad or WordPress.

Click on the link and you will be taken to a page where you can add in the RSS feed for your blog. From now on your new posts will be automatically posted to this section of your LinkedIn profile.

The second option is to add your Twitter stream to LinkedIn and then by default as long as your blog posts are appearing in Twitter they will also appear on LinkedIn.

You do this by going to the same page where you added your blog and clicking on the tweets application.

Twitter Read More→

Tags : Attracting Clients, blog marketing, blog traffic, Content Marketing, content marketing with blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Online Marketing, social media marketing, Twitter

Connect Your Blog to Facebook Automatically

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

UPDATE: From Karen, January 21, 2012

Unfortunately, Facebook has disabled this process as of September 2011 and it no longer works. We have to post a link to our blogs in the status or copy and paste as a rich text note.

From Patsi, February 2012: We apologize for not updating this post earlier, but things change constantly on the Web, and Facebook is notorious for it’s constant shifts. I no longer update any social media automatically, but am posting manually (read why here, Say NO to Auto-Feeds: Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites). This is time-consuming and may require a virtual assistant for some of you. I recommend SerenityVA.com.

Guest Post from AnnaLaura Brown:

Are your blog posts fed automatically into Facebook?

The other day I was horrified to learn that a dear client was manually posting his blog articles to Facebook. Yikes! No wonder blogging seems tiresome and time-consuming.

I took my pencil and rapped him on the knuckles, gave him a virtual scowl and promised to write a post about how to do this. It had been so long since I set this up myself, I was a bit rusty on the steps required. So I asked Facebook expert Annalaura Brown to write this guest post.

How to Automatically Link Blog Posts to Facebook

Automatically linking your blog posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin can get you some great publicity and traffic but it can be challenging to figure out how to make it all work. Fortunately you have a couple of different options for each one.

Facebook

1. Use the networked blogs application. This is my personal favorite. To get started type in networked blogs into the search box and you will pull up the application.

You click on the ‘register a blog‘ link you see in the capture photo above and it will walk you through the process. The first time you will have a few extra steps to complete to verify that you are the blog owner but after that you can register as many blogs as you own. Read More→