Archive for Attracting Clients – Page 8

Engage Your Blog Readers with Meaty Content

Meaty-contentYou already know that, “Content is King” on the Internet, but great content is what helps you build a community of loyal blog readers who buy from you. Your goal should be to engage blog readers with the highest quality content you can muster, with absolutely no fluff. There is far too much garbage floating around online that doesn’t help to solve your target market’s problem or add anything new to a discussion.

Good business blogs – the ones that have large readership – are like good restaurants. You go there for a good meal and leave pleasantly satisfied. Compare that to fast food places that serve greasy high-fat meals: you feel bloated and stuffed but not healthy.

Keep in mind that many people and Internet users have short attention spans. Not only do you need to have great content, but you need to present it in the right way. Think of what food at a French restaurant looks like compared with your local McSnack basket.

Don’t run the risk of having visitors to your blog click away. Once they leave, it’s unlikely they will return. Seize the opportunity to capture their interest by giving them content they can sink their teeth into from the beginning.

Start with a Topic You Can Build On

Let’s say you have a financial site and you choose a topic such as payday loans. This is a tool many people are using these days and they have lots of questions about. How can you make meaty posts about this topic? Read More→

7 Content Marketing Questions to Ask
BEFORE You Write a Word

QuestionsHere are some key marketing questions to ask and answer before you write a single word of content, if you want to get good content marketing results.

When you outsource writing for your blog, newsletter, video or any type of content marketing, be very clear about your content marketing goals. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you’re outsourcing to another writer or doing it all yourself.

1. What do you want your visitor to do after reading or viewing your article, blog or video?

For example, do you want them to buy a product? Call a phone number?  Register on a form with their email address? You should have a specific action you want your visitor to take after reading your article or watching the video.

2. Who’s your target market or audience?

Be very specific here, for example you could say, “My target market is new real estate agents who want to generate more leads.”

3. What makes you better than your competitors? Read More→

Content Marketing Focus: Lessons from Steve Allen

SteveAllenHaving a hard time staying focused on your business content marketing? Focus-schmocus. Sometimes you start off doing one thing and end up an expert at something else. Life is like that.

I look at content marketing as an experiment or adventure. Some things work well and you do more of them. Others, well, let’s hope you haven’t wasted money as well as time.

Steve Allen was a famous comedian who started The Tonight Show, in 1954, long before Johnny Carson became the host (and later Jay Leno). Allen started off in radio but got his first TV job as an announcer for wrestling matches. Here’s what Wikipedia reports:

Allen’s first television experience had come in 1949 when he answered an ad for a TV announcer for professional wrestling. He knew nothing about wrestling, so he watched some shows and discovered that the announcers did not have well-defined names for the holds. When he got the job, he created names for many of the holds, some of which are still used today.

The point I’d like to make is that if Allen hadn’t taken that first job offer, he might not have had the same career path and ended up one of the most respected and admired comedians of all time. He could have just as easily become a jazz pianist in an orchestra.

Instead, he eventually created a new genre of entertainment, the late night comedy-talk show. And he was a pioneer in TV wrestling entertainment. And he still had time to publish over 10,000 songs and win a Grammy for The Gravy Waltz (1963).

Allen wasn’t following any guidelines for his career.  He went with what interested him. When people try to follow too many rules and guidelines, for example, for content marketing and social media, they end up with mediocre results. Why end up where everyone else is?

Read More→

When Should You Start a New Business Blog?

Blog-Social-Media-by-StuartMilesWhen should you start a new business blog?

Let’s face it, publishing frequently on a business blog is time consuming. Depending on how swift your writing and blogging skills are, it can take you 1-2 hours to publish a post of 350-500 words, including the writing, editing, linking, adding an image, and updating social sites. And you’ll need to do that two times a week, or more.

I usually advise my clients that a blog for your business should focus on communicating the solutions to the problems you solve. That’s pretty clear and direct. While a business may have many products and service offerings, and maybe several different buyer personas, it generally provides unique solutions to customers’ problems. Read More→

Is Your Business Blog Sexy?
4 Simple Ways to Get More Blog Readers

Like-Love-by-stuart-milesWhen it comes to business blogging, many professionals forget that there is more to it than getting information out on the page. The appeal of business blogs and sites has a lot to do with readers’ impressions.

How can you make your business blog visually appealing, even sexy? Blog formatting is key; in fact, it makes the difference between readers scanning and leaving, and staying to read. Here are four simple ways you can jazz up your site and get more blog readers:

  1. Add images –I have run across many business blogs that are nothing but pages and pages of text. While the information they provide may be valuable, it’s not very visually appealing. Try to add images to your blog posts to increase the appeal of your posts. Smaller images can easily be found for free on sites like Freedigitalphotos.com or you can pay a small amount for access to larger sized stock photos. By providing your blog post with a relevant image you can increase the number of readers and also grab the image search queries for your blog post topic. Read More→

Bloggers: Brush Up on Your Writing Skills

Content-Matters-Blog-Writing-TipsBusiness bloggers: just how good are your writing skills?

Most bloggers and those who run small businesses that publish blogs are not natural-born writers, or even trained writers. Most businesspeople studied things such as marketing, communication, or business.

It’s not often they’ve studied English or creative writing. Yet it’s becoming expected that businesses have a well-written blog, as well as expertly-written content on their website.

Some businesses can afford to hire professional writers to author their blog and/or website. This is great, if you can handle the expense. Many small businesses are not willing or able to pay a writer when first starting out. So how can you brush up on your writing skills in order to maintain a professional blog and website for your company?

There are lots of resources for business bloggers available in many different mediums. Here are some ideas:

  1. Books: Good old fashioned reading can definitely help you to review grammar and sentence structure rules. There are many good books out there on writing. A search on Amazon for “writing skill reference books” turns up many titles that are well-reviewed by customers. Most can also be purchased in an eBook format for reading on the go. You could certainly purchase one of these books and read it when you have a few free moments. Any effort you put into learning more about writing well will show in your material. Read More→

Oscar Wilde: Advice on Better Blogging

OscarWildeYou know that your blog is a key part of your search strategy, but do you know how to get the most out of it?  What would Oscar Wilde advise for better blogging?

Thousands of blog guides exist, but do they really help or just cloud the issue further?

This is what you need to know when it comes writing to a better blog, one that’s really readable.

  • There’s no such thing as ‘blog style.’ However, the easier it is to read the better. Break it up, make it easy for the reader. That means short, sharp paragraphs and the same with sentences. If a paragraph is more than five lines, you’ve gone too far.
  • People don’t want to read blogs. At least, not ones that have no value. Put your point across early on, and they’ll read the rest of it.
  • The key to achieving a better blog, whether you measure that by how many people read it, share it on social media, or comment on it, is to make everything as clear and as simple as possible.

Cut It Out

Oscar Wilde once said that you should never use a long word if there is a short one available that means the same thing. Read More→

Online Content Marketing: Let’s Put the “We” Back Into Weblog

Follow-MeI get calls from small business professionals who want to start a blog or an e-newsletter. They’ve usually invested money in a nice website, and then suddenly realize that something’s missing… like customers and leads!

They’re genuinely surprised that with the money they spent on their website, no one is coming to see it, indicate they like it, let alone pick up the phone and call.

As for LinkedIn and Facebook, they’re baffled why people don’t interact with them. It doesn’t take a genius (and I’m no genius), but my guess is they have a “me-site,” a “me-blog,” and “me pages” on social media sites.

Instead of generously sharing information about their field of expertise, they share “me-formation.” There’s an “I” in information, but that doesn’t mean you should always talk about yourself. Content should be focused on readers, not you and your business. Sure, people want to know about you, but actually they want to know what you can do for them.

Start everything you write online with a focus on customers and the problems that you can solve for them. Then follow up with building trusting relationships with your readers that lead to sales.

Here’s how online content marketing works for small businesses:

  1. Relationships: Whenever you write content (blog posts, e-newsletter articles, emails), keep the focus on what problems you can solve for your customers. What are their struggles? What do they most desire? Connect with them by writing for them and about them. Read More→

Small Business Content Marketing: When to Hire A Freelance Writer?

Content-Matters-Blog-Writing-TipsWhen should you hire a freelance writer for your blog or website? Most small businesses don’t realize how much writing goes into publishing (and updating) a website or blog. Yet the content on your website or blog is the key component of your content marketing strategy.

In order to get the online results you deserve (leads: phones calls, emails, sales!) your web content should be well-written and SEO optimized — as well-thought out as anything else you do to market yourself and your small business.

So who writes the web content? That’s a good question. For small businesses, it’s often the owner or an employee who takes charge of producing and updating the website and blog content. And that can often be a poor decision. If your content is written by someone who’s not a professional freelance writer and isn’t trained to effectively write for the web, it’s usually fairly obvious. Read More→

Better Content Marketing:
Words and Numbers Matter

Content-MattersAs a psychologist, I’m fascinated by how our brains work. When writing online content, I try to apply neuroscience to understanding why some copy outperforms others. When writing for business, i.e. content marketing, you want to get the words right, so that  your web pages, blogs and e-newsletters get results for your business.

Words matter. Content matters. Sometimes it boils down to just one word or set of words that can make the difference between a customer who reads or one who clicks away. For example, which do you think has more impact:

  1. The surgery has a 95% survival rate
  2. One out of 20 patients die from the procedure

If you are like most people, you would find the second statement far more worrisome even though the odds are the same. Even in today’s marketing world, where we are inundated with images and sounds, words still matter a great deal.

There is a subtle but important difference between “10 percent” and “1 out of every 10.” Roger Dooley cites examples in his book Brainfluence: Read More→