Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Content Marketing Strategies for Smart Professionals

Press Release: How to Jazz Up Your Announcements

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Writing Great Press Releases

Are you using the power of online press releases to promote your events, products or services? Anyone who uses the Internet to market should be posting as many press releases online as possible. They’re easy to write, and they contribute to getting found on the Web. You also benefit from links back to your site.

I recently posted about all the different kinds of writing tasks required when you promote an event or product. These include sales pages, email promotional messages, survey questions, video clip scripts, curriculum and messages on Facebook and Twitter.

Press releases are essential. The more you announce your event or product in different ways the better.

For example, we posted three different press release in the two weeks prior to an event start date. We didn’t just write an announcement about what we were doing. A press release to say we’re doing a teleseminar is boring. Who cares?

The focus of all three press releases was on the problems our audience faced.

Build a Better Blog: Going out of print…

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

In 2005 we published the first edition our premier blogging ebook: Build a Better Blog: The Ultimate Guide for Boosting Your Business with a Professional Blog. Later in 2005 the 2nd edition was introduced. And now, we’re taking the ebook off the market. Gone. No more copies available…

Build a Better Blog (BaBB for short), and it’s companion of 25 Interviews with Successful Bloggers, has become one of the best known guides for setting up and optimizing a business blog with TypePad.

The current edition will be updated soon with new material. After Thursday, July 31, Edition 2 will not be available for sale. We suggest you get it now. Essentially you can pre-order the 3rd edition, because when you buy the BaBB ebook at the old price, you’re entitled to free lifetime upgrades.

Writers Wanted: You can’t do it all yourself

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Buying Content, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, On Writing Better

"Where can I find someone to write and edit my blog posts?" a colleague asked me this morning. That’s a smart question. You can’t do it all yourself. You can, but there’s probably not enough time to service clients, make money, run a business and write on your blog. Get help.

The colleague who asked me this question is a great and prolific writer. He has more ideas and content than he has time to write up. A professional editor could turn his articles into dynamic blog posts that would make a huge difference in his search engine traffic.

But this takes time and energy. You have to look at keywords and be strategic with headlines.

Get someone who:

Knows blogging (your platform system, whatever that is)
Knows how to write
Knows something about content marketing and writing to persuade
Knows what a good headline is
Is keyword savvy
Knows something about your niche
Has impeccable grammar and editing knowledge
Has a journalist’s nose for news
Has personality and can be conversational in writing

Writing Survey Questions: 3 Things to Ask

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits, Teleclasses & Seminars

You need to survey your readers to find out what they want, what they need, and what their biggest challenges are. This is crucial information you need to know before promoting any event or teleseminar or informational product.

When we promoted our Law of Action 2.0 mentoring program, we used a survey to help us define what people wanted to learn the most when it comes to marketing their business online. We wanted to keep the survey short so people didn’t have to spend time filling out irrelevant information. We included 3 items:

One broad question with 10 choices where they were asked to rate degree of severity on a scale
One open ended question where they could write in anything they chose
One demographic question to define the number of years using Internet marketing

Writing survey questions can be tricky. There’s a reason most graduate schools require you to take a year of statistics. Unless you understand the pitfalls of surveys, you risk getting answers that tell you nothing. Keep it simple and make your questions as clear and neutral as possible.

Is Your Blog Working for You? How Can You Tell?

By Patsi Krakoff in About Blogs, Ezine & Blog Classes, Online Marketing, Teleclasses & Seminars

One of the mysteries of the universe may be measuring the exact return on investment for your business blog. You can spend a lot of time writing, tweaking, doing outreach in the Blogosphere, and still wonder what it all means.

Sure, you’ve got traffic stats. But what do they all mean? If you’re not using a blog to generate ad revenues, then sales are indirect. Indirect is hard to measure with any certainty.

The most important questions to ask are these:

“Does my blog do a good job for getting my business found online?”
"When people find my blog online, do they stay to read and do they subscribe to come back?”
"Will readers grow to know, like and trust me from reading my posts?”
“Does my blog make it easy for people to interact with me and use my services?”

Denise and I have invited Chris Baggott, an expert in measuring and tracking blog success for an interview. Won’t you join us? It’s free but you’ll need to register to get the call in number.

Get the Results You Want: How to track, measure and adjust your blog

Is Your Content Marketing Working for You? How do you know?

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

How do you know if your content is working for you? Everybody says they want more traffic, but quite frankly, traffic stats leave me scratching my head and saying "So what!"

Maybe it’s because I’m not an analytical type, I prefer big picture thinking and gut feelings and intuition. But if I had a metric I could look at and be able to tell if my content is working, then maybe I’d become more analytical.

You know how those yearly physical exams give you a print out of your lab test and tell you if you’re in the "normal" range or not? Why can’t they have those for blogs? Or for ezines? Or for overall Web content marketing?

On Monday mornings, for example, you log into your Content Marketing Analytical Account and get a print out of how well your content has been doing:

Ezine: …75%
Blog: …82%
Articles…56%
Landing pages…
White Paper…
Free Report… etc. etc.

This software would compile all the results from your content including sales, referrals, downloads, subscriptions, and inquiries and give you an overall success rating. It would also tell you where you needed to make improvements.

Video Content Marketing: Learn how to create video

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Teleclasses & Seminars

How to Use Videos to Boost Your Business
A 2-part teletraining with our colleague Leesa Barnes
July 23-24, 2008, 8 p.m. Eastern Time

Use VIP coupon VID723 to pay only $20 for the program

If you want to learn how to create videos for your business without blowing your budget, then check out Leesa Barnes’ program now. She’s got a lot of knowledge when it comes to creating awesome video on a budget.

I’ve sign up for this to learn more about how to save time and energy with video.

Get Content, Get Customers – Get this book!

By Patsi Krakoff in Books, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits

I just got my copy of Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett’s content marketing book in the mail, and I’m happy as a pig!

Get Content, Get Customers is written exclusively to address a new style of marketing with content that is revolutionizing the way big and small companies attract clients on and off line.

This book has as it’s tag line: How to use content marketing to deliver relevant, valuable, and compelling information that turns prospects into buyers.

It is thanks to Pulizzi and Barrett that I embarked on re-purposing this blog. Finally I had a name for the kind of marketing I was helping our clients do: market themselves by providing useful and unique content to a targeted audience.

I realized I wasn’t just writing about ezines or blog writing. The big picture is content marketing, how to use content to attract customers and grow business.

Here are a few choice morsels from the book:

3 Steps to Successful Writing on the Web

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing Great Copy

There are really only 3 steps to becoming successful at writing:

Keep writing – you have to write a ton of bad stuff before it can get better
Keep reading – you must read good writers in order for the good stuff to sink in
Keep learning – you need to take courses in order to really learn your craft

These three tips come to me by way of Paul Hollingshead, a co-founder of AWAI, a copywriter promoting good copywriting skills through the American Writers & Artists, Inc.

Even if you don’t want to become a full time, freelance copywriter, you’ll need to learn how to write your sales pages if you want to use the Internet to grow your business. That’s why I’ve signed up for the AWAI Copywriting Masters Program. I think they have a special discount rate on through Friday, July 18, 2008, so don’t delay.

In fact, I’d say that copywriting skills are important for more than just writing sales letters. You need to understand the psychology of copywriting so you can apply the principles to all of your content marketing. It just makes sense. Copywriting is any kind of writing to persuade and influence. And that means blog writing, articles, and web content.

Video Promo Clips: Content Marketing Comes Alive

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits

People buy from people they know, like, and trust. Video clips will shortcut
the process of connecting with people quickly. Viewers can more easily
decide if they like and trust you when they can see and hear you.

How do you write a script for a video clip to promote a program or event? Posting video clips has become popular and easy to do. This is another promotional step you must include in order to boost your sales.

Video promotional clips are part of the various writing tasks necessary for making money online. It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting a teleseminar, publishing a book, or promoting a coaching or consulting program. You’ve got to get the word out to as many potential participants in many different ways, on Web landing pages, blog posts, email messages, ezines, and audio and video.

Marketing with content isn’t only about writing text. If you’re not using video yet, It’s fairly easy to get a Flip video camera and get started without any tech skills or expensive equipment. But be sure to write out a short script before recording so you don’t forget any essential details.

In the example we’re writing about here, Denise and I and Kathleen Gage promoted a free teleseminar on our blogs through posting a video each day, outlining each of The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. Kathleen and I each wrote out a script for these, presenting 5 Traps and 5 Truths, and then the information for registering. Each script was 2-3 minutes long. Here is the outline we used: