Archive for Attracting Clients – Page 15

Content Rules: Insight and Originality Attracts Clients

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Content marketing works: you can publish online content – blog posts, videos, webinars and web pages – that attracts clients to you. Using content marketing, you don’t have to chase after them, spend money on advertising, direct mail, or printed newsletters. Or as the authors of Content Rules say,

“Produce great stuff, and your customers will come to you. Produce really great stuff, and your customers will share and disseminate your message for you. More than ever before, content is king! Content rules!” ~ Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars and More that Engage Customers and Ignite Your business (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011).

Wonderful. And, a lot of work. Getting other people so excited about your work they tell others about it is a challenge, unless, of course, your name is Seth Godin, Joe Pulizzi or Tim Ferriss.

If you’re a service professional, say a doctor, therapist, lawyer, financial adviser, or health expert, you need to create content that will help your clients. You need to become a trusted resource and go-to curator of tips and information that is helpful to people who are interested.

And you need to create strong feelings around your published content so that people will take action and keep coming back. You need them to subscribe, to sign up, to download, to ask you questions and engage with you so they become clients when they are ready.

Content Rule #2: Insight inspires originality. In their book Content Rules, Handley and Chapman lump two concepts into rule #2:

  1. Know yourself
  2. Know your customers Read More→
Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Teleclasses & Seminars
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Content Rules: Secrets of Writing Compelling Content

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, April 11th, 2011

Marketing nowadays requires writing and publishing great content in multiple ways. That’s why there’s a tsunami of information online about content marketing.

But the hard question comes when you sit down to a blank computer screen and outline what sorts of pieces of information, web pages and blog posts, need to be published for your business. What exactly is going to interest your ideal readers and clients?

Many experts echo: tell stories. All good films and good fiction are about a compelling, conflict-driven story. But you run a business, maybe you’re a professional who offers services such as coaching, health care, financial planning, speaking? You’re not selling widgets or software. Some people just tell it like it is:

“Here’s what I do. I solve these problems. Here are some of the customers who say we’re great. Now please go sign up for my newsletter. I’ll send you more of my propaganda/information. I hope you’ll call me one day and hire me for my services.”

Sadly this classic marketing approach is everywhere. And, it gets multiplied on websites, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and videos on YouTube, to the point that people tune out.

How can you introduce storytelling into your marketing mix? How can you make your writing interesting, more like a good movie or book? I wish I knew, but like great art, it’s hard to define.

I’m reading a book by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars and More that Engage Customers and Ignite Your business (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011). Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing
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Content Checklist: Don’t Publish Without It

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, April 7th, 2011

I love checklists because I’m always forgetting things. Once I published a post without a title. Yesterday I almost forgot to hyperlink anything in a post. Fortunately, before I publish I run an analysis for how a post will score with the search engines using Scribe, a great tool.

Scribe catches everything and tells me things like “there are no primary keywords found.” Yeah, I know that’s ridiculous. But if you don’t use Scribe you could be publishing stuff that search engines don’t grasp.

Here’s a great checklist, just published over at the Content Marketing Institute, authored by Ahava Leibtag.

The checklist is designed for digital content creators and marketing teams, but it can and should be used by anyone writing a business blog or other content for the Web. It defines valuable content using five benchmarks:

  1. Findable                               
  2. Readable
  3. Understandable
  4. Actionable
  5. Shareable

If this image is too small, go to the post over at the Content Marketing Institute and download the PDF version.

This is a great checklist to keep handy for anyone creating content for blogs.

For example, there’s a difference between “Readable” and “Understandable” and both are important. Readable refers to formatting, bullet points, etc.

Understandable means you take time to re-read your post with the eyes and brains of your typical readers and take out any ambiguity.

As you can see in this checklist, it’s also important that your content be actionable and shareable. This is similar to what I write about in my ebook, Content Marketing with Blogs. If you haven’t downloaded that yet, be my guest, click here.

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing
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Is Your White Paper a Sales Pitch in Disguise?

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, April 4th, 2011

I asked Lauren Carlson to share with you here some important perspectives on content marketing. It doesn’t matter what you call your information (white paper/eBook, microsite/landing page), what matters is using information wisely to get found, get known and get clients.

Is Your White Paper a Sales Pitch in Disguise?
Guest Post by Lauren Carlson, SoftwareAdvice.com

When was the last time you read a white paper that added real value to your research process? I’m racking my brain and finding it quite difficult to come up with any good examples.

More often than not, today’s white papers are really just masked sales pitches, too long to keep the attention of today’s buyer. They aren’t engaging the customer and are therefore not serving much of a purpose. So, now what?

It’s time for companies to turn to 2.0 technologies to reach the 2.0 buyer. Twitter is extremely powerful for reaching audiences and building relationships. Advances in graphic design and technology leave no excuse for not having vibrant, captivating content.

There is even software that makes it easy to create, manage and track buyer activity on your site so that you know the kind of information your potential customers want.

With all of these advancements for content marketing, it’s about time we shred the white paper. Marketing Automation Software Guide (MASG) posted an article on this topic. Below is a summary.

Introducing the new buyer Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff, Writing Great White Papers
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Content Curation: How to Become a Thought Leader

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Here’s an important post from Joe Pulizzi’s Junta42 blog, Content Curation Grows Up, Original Content Still Key . I share these key points with anyone who struggles with writing online for their business and needs ideas for what to write.

I first heard the term content curation is this post by Rohit Bhargava back in 2009.

Rohit positioned that, as more corporations and individuals create content, the role of the content curator is needed.  Rohit describes this position as:

Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward.

I know many of my readers and clients who want to become thought leaders in their field. The thing is, Joe and Rohit are absolutely right: you don’t have to be the one with all the ideas. But you do need to gather all that’s relevant and being said in your field and summarize the key points that are most important to your audience.

And, you do need to add your point of view. That’s what makes you unique and a thought leader.

Here’s what else Joe says in his post: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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11.5 Steps to Video Blogging in 30 Minutes

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, March 24th, 2011

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.

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

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

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing
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Free Phone Consulting? 4 Reasons It’s a Good Idea

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, March 17th, 2011

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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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→
Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing Videos: Speak to Problems First

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, March 14th, 2011

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→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Writing Great Copy
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Punk Chihuahua Reveals 4 Secrets to Better Blogging

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, March 10th, 2011

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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…)
  4. 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.
Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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8 Blog SEO Tips for Top Search Results

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, March 7th, 2011

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:

  1. Put your keyword phrases first in the title if you can.
  2. Spell out the key concepts in your first sentence, either by asking a question, or summarizing.
  3. Link to an important keyword in the first paragraph if you can.
  4. Link to definitions on Wikipedia of the most important keywords whenever you can.
  5. Write at least 300 words.
  6. Link to sources, other web pages, books, other experts as often as you can.
  7. Each post should have hyperlinks for every 120 words.
  8. 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.

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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