Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Content Marketing Strategies for Smart Professionals

Email Marketing Messages: How to Promote a Program

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Email Marketing Tips, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits, Writing Great Copy

How do you write great email marketing messages to promote an event or program? After your landing page is up, with your well-crafted sales copy, you must drive people to that page with email messages. This is the next writing task you’ll need to master if you want to successfully promote a program.

In this series of posts, we’re using our Law of Action 2.0 mentoring program as example. We sent out several email messages during the month prior to the event, most of them during the week before.

Email marketing messages are challenging. Everybody gets too much email, and each time you broadcast you get people who unsubscribe because they aren’t interested or are annoyed. But you must send out enough messages to remind people to sign up, especially at the last minute. Otherwise you’re leaving money on the table. It’s a balancing act of risking so many unsubscribe requests and so many last minute registrations.

You need your email recipients to:

Open and read your message
Discover something important they can benefit from
Convince them they need to learn more about this
Trigger their desire to click over to the sales page to read details and register
Realize the some sort of urgency so they won’t put it off and forget to take action

The most important thing you can do is to write naturally and with sincerity. If you come across as promotional, readers’ BS antennae will get triggered. The delete finger goes into automatic action when you use hype and fluff.

10 Steps to Writing Sales Copy for a Free Telecall

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

When staging a major online teleseminar program, quite often we use a free preview telecall to generate interest. We make the subject of this call compelling in order to draw in as many people as possible to the free call. (Recently we presented The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business – And How to Avoid Costly Mistakes.)

The free preview call is not a marketing call, although we do warn them we will tell them about the project we have coming up. Nobody wants to be on a telecall for an hour to hear you market a program.

But people do want to learn how to save time, money and energy. So we deliver plenty of free information that people can use right away in their business. Then we tell them if they need or want to know more how they can access more with the paid teleseminar.

Even when a call is free, you still have to write marketing materials and promote it. In today’s busy world, people are cautious about signing up for
even free things, because they’re afraid of too many emails.

So you must write landing page sales copy that’s persuasive and compelling to get people to register for the free preview call.

Writing this sales copy is similar to the one for the paid project, but a little different. It’s much shorter for one thing. Here are the steps we took to write sales copy for this free preview call:

Branding & Blogging: Which Comes First?

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

Which comes first: a brand or a blog? And, is social media effective at reaching a corporate audience if that’s who your intended clients are?

There’s a heated debate about these questions on some popular business blogs and you’d do well to read up on these posts.

Before embarking on a marketing plan that includes blogging for your business, you need to be aware that there’s still one big-time consultant who isn’t convinced blogging and online social networking are worth it.

Alan Weiss is a self-proclaimed contrarian, and he says, "Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand… a blog follows a brand, not the other way around."

To which a whole bunch of famous bloggers left comments to dispute
Weiss. It got a little nasty and names were thrown around. Read our
complete article on Build a Better Blog along with the others
referenced in these posts:

12 Steps to Write Your Online Sales Copy

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits, Writing Great Copy

When you’re going to launch a money-making program on the ‘Net, the first step is to write your sales copy. Yesterday I listed 8 writing tasks necessary for an online campaign:

1. Sales copy
2. Email marketing messages
3. Thank you pages and thank you autoresponders
4. Survey questions & survey results report
5. Press releases
6. Video tips
7. Blog posts
8. Updates posted to social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, etc.

Each task is different, requiring you research and write different elements. However, all of them must be written to grab the attention of your targeted audience of readers and persuade them to take action.

In the case I’m using as an example, our Law of Action 2.0 program, here are the 12 steps I went through to compose the copy for the sales page at www.actandattract.com:

8 Writing Steps Yield $18,000 in a Month

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits, Teleclasses & Seminars, Writing for the Web

What are the writing tasks involved in order to promote a major teleseminar program on the Internet? Obviously, you have to write a sales or landing page. But that’s only one part of it. There’s so much more.

Recently Denise and I along with colleague Kathleen Gage promoted a 4-week teleseminar called The Law of Action 2.0: Attract Clients and Build a Money-Making Business on the ‘Net. We started by promoting a free teleseminar called The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. We got about 1,000 people to register for the call.

From that, we promoted the paid program, registering 94 participants and netted $18,000. The program is delivered in four 90-minute sessions and includes a private Facebook group, learning guides and many resources.

But it would be a gross exaggeration to say we’re earning $3,000/hour with the 6 hour program, although some Internet marketers would certainly use that calculation as bragging rights.

The truth is we spent considerable time writing the promotional materials and distributing our content in various forms all over the Internet long before the free program on June 24.

Denise is outlining all the promotional steps we did over on BizTips Blog this week. As a companion piece, I’m writing on this blog a series of posts to show you every piece of content marketing that was involved in the success of this program.

Keywords: 3 Steps to Knowing What, Which & Why

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Online Marketing

(This is a guest post by Heather Lloyd-Martin of SEOCopywriting.com. Even if you focus on gaining organic search results with your Web content, you need to understand the basics of which keywords and key phrases are important for getting your business found online.)

Your customers are out there. Are you making it easy for them to find you in the search engines?

As Patsi wrote in a previous post, Relevant Content: Search Engine Bread Crumbs, "If you’re running a business and
you want to get found online, you need to know which keywords are
relevant to your business, i.e. what words do your
readers/users/clients use to find you or to find similar businesses
like yours?”

Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO and PPC campaign. Think
about it this way: If you optimize your site or PPC campaign for
keywords your customers don’t type into a search engine, you won’t see
search engine traffic. Additionally, if you mistakenly choose a highly
competitive key phrase (like “travel,”) your site will be pushed to
number 1,982,653 in the organic search results…guaranteeing that you’ll
never be found.

So, understanding keyword research is pretty darn important.

The good news is, you don’t have to guess what keywords and key phrases
are best for your online business. A little bit of brainstorming plus
access to specialized tools is all you need to start your key phrase
research campaign. If you’re new to the keyword research scene, here’s
a three-step process for success.

Content Feeds: Your first 20 words count

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

Are you feeding your blog posts on Twitter and Facebook? If so, you need to pay attention to the first 15-20 words or 100 characters – usually the title and first few words of the first sentence.

Not only are keywords important here for the search engines, but you also need to see what your feeds are going to look and feel like when limited to only a few words. Make people want to read the full post with those first few words.

It’s fairly easy to set it up so your blog posts are automatically fed to your Facebook and Twitter pages. I’m no tech wizard, but I was able to do this, following instructions that I’m sure you can find on the web through Google searches. Denise has posted about this on Buildabetterblog.com. (See related posts at the end of this).

When you do, however, pay attention to the first 15-20 words of your post, including the title. These words are what will show up in the short little feeds on Facebook and Twitter. Make them count.

Here are some examples: Today on my Facebook and Twitter pages, I’m seeing this:

BlogSquad: 8 Reasons Why Client Questions Make Great Blog Content: Questions from clients make great blog posts.

I wonder if this could have been more interesting if I hadn’t repeated what I just said in the headline in the first sentence of the post.

Other examples:

Repeat the Benefits: Create a Placebo Effect

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

"Should I reinforce the benefits of my product on the thank you page?" One of our clients asked this question while we were reviewing his autoresponders and online content.

Of course. While this may seem obvious and common sense, many online business professionals forget that all content, even a simple thank you page or a thank you autoresponder, is an opportunity for marketing with content. But it’s more than just content marketing good sense.

There’s a psychological benefit. You create a placebo effect.

Scientists have proven that some pills can work to create a desired result based on the expectations of the patient. Sometimes when a medication is replaced with a sugar pill, the patient will still get the desired benefits, simply because the expectations are strong and somehow the body responds in the desired direction.

Social Writing: Don’t ignore networking sites

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Promoting Your Ezine +/or Blog

There’s a lot of buzz online right now about whether or not one should use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Are these sites important for content marketing? You’ll have to decide for yourself and for your business. But it sure does look like you can’t ignore this trend.

I try to stick to writing topics on this blog, and our other blogs, BizTipsBlog and BuildaBetterBlog, focus on online marketing.

But let’s face it: there’s a lot of overlap when it comes to writing content to market your business. What you write on your blog can easily get pushed to your Facebook profile and to any other places you choose.

I’ll be brief. Our friend and colleague Kathleen Gage has been writing a series of posts at www.themarketingmindset.com about social networking. Go read her recent post because what you learn may surprise you. Denise has also written about social sites a lot.

If you want to integrate all these new tools into an effective and time-saving marketing system for your business, register for our 4-week mentoring program The Law of Action 2.0 – Attract Clients and Build a Money-Making Business on the ‘Net, starting July 1, 2008.

Related Posts:
Social Networks – Are they for you?
Don’t become a social networking snob!
Twitter Feedback – Gotta love it!

Relevant Content: Search Engine Bread Crumbs

By Patsi Krakoff in Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Teleclasses & Seminars

On our 5 Traps of Internet Marketing teleclass yesterday, almost 1000 people registered and we got some interesting questions. Here’s one:

"What is the most important thing to do to get people to find your site when you cannot afford to buy placement on search engines?"

Getting found once you’ve got a site (website or blog) is what Denise and I call The Great Internet Challenge. We even wrote a white paper on it (if you want the long answer to this question, www.onlinemarketingchallenge.com

Short answer: Write relevant content. Then write more content. Then publish even more content on other sites such as article directories, press release sites, white papers, newsletters archived on your site, etc.

Each time you write content about your key topics, you are seeding the Internet with keywords. Like bread crumbs that lead back to the gingerbread cottage, those keywords will help readers find you.

Search engine optimization experts charge you an arm and a leg and then still ask you to do the same thing as I’m telling you here: write relevant content.