Archive for content marketing with blogs – Page 10

5 Reasons Content Marketing is Getting Harder

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

I hate to be a purveyor of gloom, there’s too much of that around these days. But I’ve been thinking about this and want to share my thoughts with you.

Here are some reasons content marketing is getting more challenging. There exists:

  1. A shift away from focusing on your products and services (what you know well)
  2. A shift towards the reader/customer and their needs (what you may not know very well)
  3. A business environment that is changing rapidly (what is unknown)
  4. More people online in your field writing about the same things (some better, some worse)
  5. A huge volume of content about everything possible, creating information overload for readers

This makes it harder for you to grab readers’ attention and get through to them. However, readers are still hungry for solutions and are looking for trustworthy professionals to work with.

I know this because I’ve experienced it personally. In spite of the recession, people are still hiring consultants to help them with their content marketing strategies and with writing quality content for business marketing.

As marketing guru Seth Godin writes:

“With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.” Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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5 Content Marketing Questions:
Get Readers to Take Action

By Patsi Krakoff
Sunday, October 9th, 2011

What will make your web readers take action or not? Content marketing isn’t successful without results. So when writing a blog post or a web page, keep these key questions in mind. You want to inspire readers to pick up the phone, click here, sign up, register, or remember your brand.

Here’s a final note in my blog post series about writing good content on the Web that gets results.

In Maria Velosa’s 2009 edition of Web Copy that Sells, she suggests 5 questions your copy should answer:

  1. What is the problem (pain, predicament)?
  2. Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  3. What is possible?
  4. What is different now?
  5. What should you do now?

As you answer these questions, you lead readers down a path to take action. Good content on the Web, when it’s well written, should:

  • Educate
  • Entertain
  • Engage readers
  • Enrich lives

If at all possible, you should strive to enrich the lives of your readers as well. Try to make their lives better by showing them how they can save time, energy or money.

Question #4: What is different now? Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Persuasion, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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5 Content Marketing Questions:
#3 What’s Possible?

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, October 3rd, 2011

In Maria Velosa’s Web Copy That Sells book, there is a 5-step blueprint for writing on the Web. This is really what content marketing is all about. When you answer the following 5 questions, your writing tasks are simplified and your copy becomes clear.

  1. What is the problem (pain, predicament)?
  2. Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  3. What is possible?
  4. What is different now?
  5. What should you do now?

First answer question #1, what’s the problem. Then, answer questions #2,why hasn’t the problem been solved? Then answer question #3, what’s possible?

As you write out several sentences to answer these questions, you’ll lead your readers through a path that leads to action. Action is the goal for all good content designed to market your business on the Web.

In psychology, counseling, and coaching, when you describe how life could be better, you’re setting the stage for people to make changes. You’re engaging someone to start using the brain neurons involved in positive thinking.

Awareness that a change is needed is the first step (questions 1 and 2). Painting a picture of how things will be better is the next step (questions 3, 4 and 5).

In marketing and copywriting, this section is known as the benefits. The  key idea that makes a real difference happens when you drill down deep to core values in people’s lives.

Example: A pill that gets rid of back pain provides a big benefit: no more back pain. That’s obvious. As a writer, you must draw a picture of what is possible now that the pain is gone. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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5 Content Marketing Questions:
#2 Why Hasn’t This Problem Been Solved?

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, September 30th, 2011

In a previous post, 5 Content Marketing Questions: #1 What is The Problem?, I reviewed the content marketing questions that help you organize and simplify your Web writing by asking 5 important questions:

  1. What is the problem (pain, predicament)?
  2. Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  3. What is possible?
  4. What is different now?
  5. What should you do now?

Question #2, Why hasn’t this problem been solved?, is a great opportunity to address the challenges your readers and potential customers face.

You have a chance to show you understand your readers well, and you have an expert’s understanding of the subject matter. You can delve into the history of the problem, providing insights they may have never thought of.

The answers to this question serves to build audience anticipation for a new solution you’re about to reveal.

  • How is it they haven’t solved their problem?
  • Why is it that traditional solutions aren’t working?
  • Why are they still stuck?
  • What‘s new about this situation that contributes to more frustration?

This is where you can really hook readers into your story. Yet so many blogs and email messages skip this step. It doesn’t have to be long, but discussing these points in a few sentences will get your readers to say, “Oh, right, I’ve experienced this. She understands me. What’s the solution, then?”

What’s your experience?  Do you skip over this step when writing your own copy?  Or, have you honed this question – or answer – to a simple sentence or two?

Another added bonus of including this step when writing for your business is that it forces you to periodically ask yourself this question.  It can actually strengthen your confidence and help you focus, or if necessary, re-focus, your business. It’s a simple way to take a step back and look at the big picture, seeing the forest and the trees.

Next up: Questions #3 – #5 to ask when writing content for the Web that gets results.

Inspired by Maria Velosa’s Web Copy that Sells, a blueprint for creating simple copy that works to market your products and services

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content, Writing Great Copy
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5 Content Marketing Questions: #1 What’s the Problem?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

In a previous post, Writing Web Content that Gets Results: Questions, I reviewed the basic rules of writing web content.

In this post, we’ll explore the 5 content marketing questions that will help you organize and simplify your web page and blog writing by asking 5 important questions:

  1. What is the problem (pain, predicament)?
  2. Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  3. What is possible?
  4. What is different now?
  5. What should you do now?

As you write your content, you should cover each of the answers. This will keep you on task, and lead your readers through to action. I suppose it depends on what you’re writing, but I can’t think of many web pages, blog posts, newsletter articles where these 5 questions wouldn’t be appropriate.

I’ve been re-reading Maria Velosa’s Web Copy that Sells this week. Her blueprint for creating simple copy that works to market your products and services is clear. There’s a reason it’s organized this way.

Psychologically, we’re hard wired to sit up and pay attention to problems. This is why it’s a good idea to lead off with your headline and first paragraph addressing readers’ pain. Negative emotions are strong enough to wake us up and get us to read the rest of the story.

There are two things you must realize about this seemingly obvious and simple question: Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content, Writing Great Copy
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Writing Web Content that Gets Results: Questions

By Patsi Krakoff
Saturday, September 24th, 2011

The rules haven’t changed, but it’s surprising how many people start writing web content without regard for the basics. Many people focus on the medium, the latest shiny tool: the blog, the Twitter tweets, and Facebook updates, without regard for the basic rules of writing copy for the Web.

Content marketing is a buzz word not just because marketing people like new buzzes. Smart marketers know the rules and follow them. Even if the Internet changes at lightening speed, the writing basics for content remain the same.

I’ve been writing on the web for twelve years. Before that, I was a journalist and a psychologist and wrote feature articles and academic papers. Writing content for marketing is different. It’s designed to produce an action, most often sales.

Every once in a while, I go back to the basics. A standard learning tool for many copywriters is Maria Veloso’s Web Copy that Sells, originally published in 2004. The 2nd edition is now out and I’ve been reviewing and re-reading it. Good stuff.

Here’s a recap of some really key nuggets from this book:

Before you write one word, you must first:

  • Know your objective
  • Know your target audience
  • Know your product or service

I know this seems so common sense it’s not worth spending time on, but the time you take to write down a few notes on each of these things will be well worth it.

For example, writing on the web can have several objectives, besides making a sale. What is it you’d like readers to do? Contact you for more information? Sign up for a digital report? Leave a comment, watch a video, fill out a survey?

It’s okay if you’re a teacher and enjoy educating people without any sales objective in mind. However, if you’re not asking readers to think, ask, remember, or act, then you’re not really teaching, are you? Don’t let readers leave saying, “That’s nice, so what, bye-bye…”

Who are you trying to write to and reach? The more you know about your audience of readers, the easier it will be to “speak their language.” You can’t really connect if you don’t know to whom, can you?

And of course you know your products and services, especially if it’s your own business and you’ve been working in it for a while. But how well do you know what the benefits are to your end users? How well do you know your customers’ challenges and problems?

Example: one of my clients is a talented artist who sells original painted greeting cards for various occasions, online through her website. When I asked her what problems does she solve with her cards, she said she provided a thoughtful way of connecting with someone on a special occasion. She hadn’t thought out all the other ways she helped her customers:

  • Her cards were unique, and therefore said much more than a store-bought card from a large company
  • Her cards were original art work which recipients were more likely to keep
  • Her cards saved people time from having to go to a store to browse through hundreds of cards
  • Her cards saved people the hassles of getting into a car and driving
  • Her cards offered a large selection of messages, including many blank

The more you can dig deeper into all the challenges your customers face, and the more content you can create that addresses solutions, the better your writing will resonate with readers. The stronger your online writing will be. Readers will subscribe, keep coming back, sign up for more, and become loyal fans.

I want to give you this simple 5-step blueprint for writing web copy that sells, as explained in the Velosa book, so stay tuned. If you want to be sure to get an email notice when I publish the next post, use the subscription form in the upper right hand corner to subscribe.

In the meantime, have you identified your first things first?  If you haven’t, why not?  I’d love to hear from you.

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content, Writing Great Copy
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Edit Your Content: 12 Things NOT to Miss

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, September 16th, 2011

Here’s a checklist for editing your blog content before you publish. For any content that is vitally important, i.e. sales content or articles delivered to clients, I use Barbara Feiner, a professional editor. She not only corrects errors, but evaluates for clarity and flow.

But for blog posts and everyday content creation, I put on my editor’s visor, and act like a grumpy newspaper editor with a red pencil. Here’s what I look for:

Language

1.  Common typos like theirs for there‘s, your for you’re, that or which for who, and all those pesky things a spell check won’t pick up.
2.  Grammar goofs: The most common ones are when the verb doesn’t agree with the noun, as in “Here’s my mistakes…”
3.  Review for commas, semi-colons, ellipses and em dashes. The important thing is for it to read well, read clearly. Helps to read it out loud.
4.  Review for paragraph and line spacing, since I like to break up long blocks of text.

Formatting

5.  Review for bolded words and insert subheadings where needed.
6.  Separate a blog post after 2-3 paragraphs so that it goes to the extended post feature (“read more…”
7.  Review for eye-candy: Where would an interesting photo clip add interest to your blog post? I always start a post with a photo, usually from iStockPhoto.com.

Value  

8.  Review for external link opportunities. I always link to a person’s name (to a page on the web where you can learn more about them), to a book, or to a Wikipedia definition when useful. This is really important for building relationships with the people you respect.

9.  Review for internal link opportunities. Surely you’ve already written more than once about something; you should link the keywords to that post on  your own blog or website.

Optimization

10.  Review for keywords. Do you make it easy for search engines to know what this is about? Come on, help the poor little spiders out, they’re not exactly geniuses.
11.  Review your headline for how compelling it is. Does it draw the reader into the post to learn more? Is it keyword-rich?
12.  Description.  If you’re using a Scribe SEO Optimizer (you are, aren’t you?), make sure you’ve created a short description using the All-in-One SEO Plugin (160 characters maximum) containing keywords.  Be sure to check your tags and categories, too.

What else?

You tell me: what other things do you check for before you hit the publish button? Hit the comment link and leave me your ideas.

Categories : Content Marketing, Grammar & Common Usages, How to...Tips, Writing for the Web
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7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

This is a little story I share with new blogging clients who get hung up about keywords. One client in particular (let’s call him Ted) had written about 10 blog posts which were saved as drafts because he was worried about keywords.

Let me say that there’s a learning curve involved in writing for your blog, and there’s no way around it. The only way to learn to write good blog posts is to write and publish blog posts—a lot of them. Saving them as drafts won’t work.

Being that it’s U.S. Open time, I was thinking about how this relates to tennis (of course!). You can practice your serve on a tennis court by yourself too. But until you serve the ball to someone on the other side of the net and keep score in a game, it really doesn’t count. You can’t learn from your results.

Here’s what I told Ted, “When you sit down to write a new post, focus first on these steps:

7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

  1. Write to deliver valuable information that solves a problem for your typical reader
  2. Grab their attention and make it interesting to them through stories or examples Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web
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Say NO to Auto-Feeds:
Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

Today’s guest post is written by Christine Buffaloe, of Serenity Virtual Assistant Services, a great resource for social media know-how, for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Many people who think they don’t have time for social media use applications that automatically feed their blogs into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Although this seems like a good idea, it may do you more harm than good.

Here are 5 reasons why you should NOT automatically feed your blog into these social media sites:

  1. You cannot personalize the content.  If you want to make your status updates more appealing,  post it in the form of a question and ask others to comment. You are more likely to get fans to “like” your post, comment and share.
  2. The inability to “tag” others in your status updates. This goes hand-in-hand with personalizing your status update, but it is important to “tag” either your friends or pages if the content is appropriate for them or their pages. This will not only show on your feed, but theirs as well.
  3. The content you feed into Facebook may not be appropriate for Twitter and LinkedIn. These social media sites are all different in as much as you are appealing to a different audience in each of these.
  4. Those that use the auto-feed are re-hashing material to all of the social media sites. If you have folks that are following you on all three, they will see the same materials and are likely to become annoyed and stop following you. Keep it fresh.
  5. Remember, keywords are essential when posting to your status update to your Facebook business page. On Twitter hash tags (#) are key.

Now, if you are gung-ho about the auto-feed I found a couple of ways in which to do this, but only feed to one network. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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Writing Great Blog Content: Painful?

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, August 12th, 2011

Rich Brooks of Flyte Media says that writing content is painful, and compares it to having dental work without novacaine! What do you think?

For me, writing – whether for my blogs, website, my email broadcasts and newsletters – is more like getting my teeth cleaned: it can be painful, but then you come out with a pretty white smile!

Take this series I’ve undertaken on how to write great content for your blog. The simplest of tips includes these 3 easy steps:

  1. Scan your favorite blogs for relevant ideas
  2. Take an excerpt from it and link to it
  3. Add your own comments.  (If you want to boost readership, go for disagreement and controversy. But that’s a different topic.)

Here’s what Rich says:

“No matter how much you love your job, no matter how passionate you are about what you do, writing content is going to be much more work than you think.”

The passion makes the writing start like a burst of energy. Education and discipline, however, are the tools that have to kick in to make your content readable, search engine optimized, and interesting to other people.

I agree with Rich that writing always takes more time and work than you think, even when it is full of passion. Passion isn’t enough, some hard thinking and decent grammar should back it up.

Your thoughts on this? Is passion enough? Does grammar even count?

What about time – how much are you spending on your writing and blog?  Is it pleasure, pain, or both?

I’d love to hear your comments.  Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

P.S. For more tips (and diagrams), read these other recent posts:

 

Categories : Content Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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