Archive for blog content – Page 12

Business Blog: 4 Reasons to NOT Write Your Own

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, February 7th, 2011

(Guest post by Adam Kosloff)

You’re swamped.

You barely have time to scan the headlines of your favorite news feeds. Probably the only reason you clicked on this article was to check out whether it might provide instant value to you. Can this article save you time and/or money and/or hassle?

Hopefully, it can. And not because this article will tell you anything you don’t already know – rather, it will remind you of business principles that you already apply in your everyday professional work but which you forgot once you started marketing online.

Here’s the message, loud and clear: 99% of busy business professionals and attorneys should not – repeat, not – waste their precious productive hours writing their own blog posts and website content. If you are guilty of this practice, stop it. You will burn yourself out, and your business will suffer – even if you enjoy doing the writing.

Not convinced? Consider these four arguments.

  1. You earn the most money – and generate the most productive return on your time – when you stay in your “area of strength. The more time you blog, the less time you will have available to serve your clients. Let’s do the math. Say you’re an attorney who bills out at $250 an hour. Currently, you write three blog posts a week. It takes you about an hour to write each post. $250/hour X 3 hours = $750.This means you are investing a whopping $750 every week into your blog. Are you really getting a return on that investment that justifies this practice?
  2. You are not a professional blogger.You have been trained as an attorney, corporate executive, or entrepreneur. Even if you consider yourself a master writer and communicator, web writing is its own very cagey animal.Creating ongoing, tonally accurate, riveting web content requires specialized skills that you must hone over years of practice. Undoubtedly, you could learn how to write more effectively for the web. But why bother? Your time and resources are extremely limited. You must husband them for the crucial tasks of operating your core business. Read More→
Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks
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3 Tips for Better Blog Writing

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, January 31st, 2011

I’m glad to see that there are more agencies focusing on content marketing for small businesses. I stumbled upon The Content Factor and found their approach to blog writing and white papers refreshing:

The Content Factor provides good advice for content marketing strategies:

But to be successful with blogging, you have to recognize some key differences:

  • The best blogs are personified. Readers like to feel like they know the blog writer and feel some of the blog writer’s personality and humanity come through. One good way to do this is via the slice-of-life approach; what happened to you today that relates to some business insight you can offer?
  • Blogs should not be looked at in the traditional sense as corporate communications. If you just regurgitate press releases, or take very little risk with your blog posts, you will not attract very many readers.
  • Blogs have to be kept up. Once you fall behind, you are dead. We should know. We struggle with our blog as well.

Three great tips to keep in mind for your blogging strategies: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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Blogging with Personality and Tim Ferriss

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

How much personality should you show on your blog without becoming an ego-blogger? Apparently you can share a lot of personal stories and anecdotes, even become a little outrageous and contrarian, according to Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and now The 4-Hour Body.

I recommend listening to his short video about sharing your personality on your blog, an interview done by Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included. I was at this Blog World conference when Rohit interviewed Tim, in 2008. While it’s not a new interview, there are several nuggets that are timeless.

I don’t know if you’ve read Tim or not, but he’s a master at blogging and marketing his books.  While he could come across as Mr. Big Ego (his accomplishments are many), he does not.

Tim masters two things that make him credible and trustworthy: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Coaching/Personal Development, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing from the Inside Out

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, January 17th, 2011

In your opinion, what’s the single biggest factor that builds credibility and trust in content marketing? To me, it’s personality.

Readers and viewers want to feel a human connection. They need personal stories about people and about you. It doesn’t matter what form the stories come in.

We’ve come a long way from the days when ad men (and they were usually men) could represent products or services with snappy jingles and cute copy.  Online marketing today includes plenty of content in all forms, all of which communicate personality through stories:

  • Web pages
  • Blogs
  • E-newsletters
  • Social media profiles and updates
  • E-books, white papers and digital downloads
  • Video clips
  • Webinars

Some companies have personality through characters like the Aflac duck and the Geico gekko. Did you know they have their own Facebook pages?

Others use their company president like Razerguy for Razer and Ben & Jerry’s founders. Some use their customers:  Dove uses women and Old Spice uses men.

Obviously, if you’re an independent professional such as a doctor, psychologist, any kind of health professional seeking clients, you’ve got to have your own personality in your content marketing to stand out from all the others. Same for lawyers, authors, speakers. Yet how many professionals share their personal stories on the Web? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better
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Content Marketing with Stories: Why We Tell Lies…

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, January 14th, 2011

Telling stories is a fundamental part of good content marketing. Stories have so much marketing clout, they make it possible for little businesses to compete with the big guys.

Since stories are fundamental to the way our brains work, why don’t we tell more stories?

Why doesn’t every piece of online content we write use narrative to give a specific example of real people using our products and services or whatever it is we want to influence?

Here’s my guess: most people don’t think their stories are good enough. They don’t think they have a personal story to tell that’s worthy of people’s attention. Or, here’s a wild guess:

“Oh, I’m not sure my story is typical of the way other people think or act… I’m just different, maybe a little weird.”

Let me tell you a story about that. When I was first working online, all my web copy was as official and business-like as I could make it. I tried to hide the fact that I was not long out of graduate school and was sole-proprietor of a writing service with only 6-month’s Internet experience.

I was embarrassed. I thought the others online were computer wizards and knew secret coding language I didn’t. Never mind it was 1999 and many others had relatively little Internet experience as well.

So I didn’t tell much of a compelling story at all. I avoided getting personal. I believed that my writing products would sell themselves.

I struggled with my online marketing for years. It wasn’t until 2004 when I started blogging that I began to use story. I began telling it as it is, for me.

The difference was enormous. I suppose I had an “overnight success,” based on the number of people added to my marketing list (ten times as many), number of clients and amount of money coming in.

My story changed. I started speaking at conferences and I was able to tell people about the pivotal moments that made a big difference: blogging changed my life and exploded my business. As a small business, I was competing with much larger enterprises with staff and budgets. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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3 Easy Tips to Target Readers with Your Content

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, January 3rd, 2011

This is a guest post from Sam Briones, a freelance writer, who explains how to get targeted traffic to read your online content.

You may be on your keyboard all day and night, writing about content that you are knowledgeable and passionate about. You know that what you are writing makes sense, and more importantly, your expertise could change someone’s outlook, or even their life!

However, you don’t seem to be getting responses. You check your blog, and the only comments are from your mother. What’s wrong, and how do you fix it?

While there are many writers out there who can really deliver, content-wise, the truth is, most of these writers aren’t marketers, or lack the marketing skills to get their work noticed by the people who may actually find the information they provide useful. If you’re one of those individuals, you can change that by following one or more of these easy tips.

1. Have the right domain name: You may love to write about web design, but if your domain name is something like Katlovesdogs.com, then nobody will ever associate your website or blog with design. In choosing your domain name, make sure that it states what your website is actually about. That way, it can also be searchable when people type in keywords.

2. Submit your work to article submission sites: You’ve gotten your domain right, but people are still not visiting your blog. Maybe you just need to inform a wider audience that you are indeed out there. Try taking a few blog posts or articles and submitting them to some article submission sites like ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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Emotional Marketing Makes Memories

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

If you want your content marketing messages to be remembered, you must engage the emotional memories of your readers. Memory formation happens in two ways:

  1. A new memory is formed when it hits the amygdala and makes an emotional connection.
  2. A stimulus may hit the amygdala and be assimilated because it resembles a previously established emotional connection.

What results is a neural network of recalled associations that gets triggered by a memory of a hot-button stimulus. Everything we retain in memory is because it’s gained an emotional place in our brain. At some point, something was important enough because it was emotional. That’s what hot-buttons are… we feel as if someone has poked us.

What can you do to stimulate memory formation? Make an emotional impact.

How? As a content marketing professional, you have words and visuals in your quiver of tools. How do you poke someone and push their hot buttons?

Stories are key. Negative stories can get people’s attention, but can also leave a negative aftertaste, if not followed by positive stories. I’ve talked about this before:

► Grab the audience’s attention ► Stimulate desire ► Reinforce with reasons

What else can you do to poke someone’s hot buttons? How else do you make an emotional impact? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Customer Media Congress: Patsi’s in Dutch…

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

There aren’t many conferences that I’d fly 5700 miles to get to, but the 5th International Customer Media Congress looks as if it’s going to be another smash hit. I’ve been invited to speak, by uber-publishing-content-marketing icon, Sak van den Boom.

Somewhow in my family it meant you were in real trouble when you were “in dutch…”

Patsi Krakoff keynote speaker op 7 november: een effectieve tekst raakt je onderbewuste

Met wat voor tekst scoor je nu het beste op het web. Internetguru Patsi Krakoff uit Mexico blogt dagelijks en heeft wereldwijd veel volgers. Ze komt speciaal voor het jubleumcongres naar Haarlem om haar kennis te delen. 11 topvrouwen in marketing en communicatie op het netwerkcongres over customer media in de Philharmonie in Haarlem. Verzeker jezelf van een plaats. Schrijf nu in.

I don’t suppose I’ll see you there, but consider yourself invited. Here’s the line-up: 11 top notch experts in creating content that engages the hearts and minds of customers through custom publishing. Who says print is dying? Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, In the News..., Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Content Marketing to the Male Brain

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

What can we learn from brain science about how to market to men?

79% of men are alienated and barely able to recognize themselves in the ads portraying their gender (Business Week, 2006)

The Old Spice site has some great TV clips that do a good job of appealing to men’s views of themselves, using humor and exaggerations of stereotypes.

Here’s what else grabs the attention of male brains…

Attention: They live in the ‘now.’ They are concrete thinkers that like to consummate, finish. Men are goal-oriented. A male axiom is “get it done.”

Men are interested in power and in looking good, even more than being good.

Time– Men tend to hone in, more quickly than women, on what they’re looking for. Men are not browsers. A male motto, “Get what I want and move on.”  Provide clear links to what they are looking for.

Causality– Men are concrete and tend to tightly focus their awareness. Their notion of cause and effect is linear and men are visually-oriented because of this concrete perspective.

Seeking clarity, men create absolute distinctions: black-white, yes-no. First- last, winner-loser.

Men like to feel unique and special, and as such they will follow their gurus, heroes and sports stars and teams.

Celebrity endorsements and affiliation – If Michael Jordon wears them, they’re good enough for men.

Look at Steve Jobs, Richard Branson: If the company president is a rebel and a renegade, then others will join their cause and identify with the company and their products.

Other people – For the male it’s every man for himself. Men prize individuality and self-reliance. They conceive of other people as “my competition.“

They ask, “What will your product do to make me better than the others?”

Look at Razerzone.com, a manufacturer of PC gaming hardware such as mice. This company publishes a gaming guide to show “noobs” how to rapidly improve their online game scores. It’s a list builder that is responsible for the company going from a list of 8,000 to 200,000 in less than 2 years.

It’s their key content marketing piece, and there are others. The president, RazerGuy, has his own blog, and they have active participation on Facebook. There are even Razer fan sites built by evangelists, and many tattoo the company logo, a three-headed snake, on their bodies.

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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The Senior Brain: How to Market to Oldies but Goodies…

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, November 8th, 2010

Something’s wrong with the way marketers are trying to reach people over 65. I know this from personal experience.

I am learning new stuff about the brain all the time, and since I have one myself, older brains are particularly interesting to me.

If marketers don’t get wise to the way seniors perceive their marketing messages they are are in for a rude awakening. Marketing to the older brain isn’t done by showing pictures of frail people, confused people, or trying to frighten them into buying stuff.

Wake up, folks. “Seniors,” doesn’t mean senile. Older people aren’t all decrepit and stupid. Not only that, but we’ve got more of the money, honey.

Let’s just take the young seniors, those Baby Boomers who are just coming of age now. The 44 million baby boomers are maturing rapidly, and represent the richest generational cohort in history. In the US, they control 77% of all financial assets. They use ½ of all credit cards, and spend 2½ times the per capita average on discretionary purchases.

The level of spending by those over 45 will soon exceed that of people between 18 and 39 by $1 trillion US. Yet, despite these statistics, only 10 percent of all branded marketing target older consumers (Wolfe and Snyder, 2003).

I know that neither myself, my husband or any of my friends of similar ages are attracted to the way seniors are depicted in marketing messages.

Some of us don’t use a cane or a walker. We actually play sports and even dress like younger peeps.

Here are a few facts about the older brain and how it likes to be marketed to. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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