Archive for content marketing with blogs – Page 13

Content Marketing Tips: Find Your Online Voice

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

How do you find your voice and create your brand story so that readers are inspired and emotionally triggered? How do you get content marketing results?

This and other key tips will be discussed Wednesday April 20, 2011 on an open webinar I’m giving:

Time-Saving Tips for Content Marketing Results

Register to get the recording if you can’t come at 5 pm ET, plus I’ll send you handouts, a list of outsourcing resources, a marketing road map and discount coupons for services.

“Before you can truly understand your customers, you have to understand yourself,” says author and content-marketing evangelist Joe Pulizzi.

If you are a coach, doctor, lawyer, any professional, you are trying to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. There are a gazillion websites in your field. To succeed, you need to forge a separate and unique identity and create an enduring and memorable brand.

You need a brand story. You need a brand personality. You need to stop sounding like everyone else.

I think this is one of the hardest things for busy professionals to communicate in writing content for the Web.

Why? Because it involves personal creativity. It’s one thing to write what you know. You can type 350 words of knowledge into your blog post in about 10 minutes or less. That’s the easy piece.

Don’t believe me? Come on, you explain stuff on the phone to clients all the time. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Teleclasses & Seminars, Writing for the Web
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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 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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Vote: What Makes You Read a Blog Post?

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, March 21st, 2011

What do you find is the most important thing about a blog post? What makes you read? Mark Schaefer over at {grow} blog asked this question and gives his opinion.

Here are the choices:

 

Take a few minutes to decide, then leave a comment about the top blogging elements that get you to read a post.

Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Getting Read, Online Marketing, Promoting Your Ezine +/or Blog
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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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A Simple Way to Get SEO Inbound Links: Be Nice

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, February 28th, 2011

One of the important ways to keep your search engine rankings up is through building quality inbound links. For those of you less familiar with SEO-talk, backlinks are when other sites link to the content on your site. It tells the search engines you’re important.

Here’s what Mike Phillips writes on Website Magazine:

Solicit quality inbound links. High-quality links will remain a pivotal factor in search engine rankings. Be diligent about networking with like-minded content producers and work to get links – quality links, including those with keyword-rich anchor text. In no way is it recommended to purchase links.

That means your blog and website need to encourage others to link to you, through quality content that provides solutions to people’s problems.

One way to do this is through blog outreach. When you form relationships with other experts and point them to information that can be helpful to them in their work, you are extending a  hand and creating possible reciprocity opportunities.

Ah, that’s not very clear. Let me give you an example, in fact, a great illustration happened to me the other day from a nice reader and a very smart person, Richard Hawk.

I got an email yesterday, it said:

Thank you for the recent e-zine with the tip about including your blog on Linkedin. I just finished adding the app.

Your messages are helpful. I don’t get to read every one but I do give most of them a quick view. You’ve given me other ideas I’ve used and I mostly wanted to thank you.

This is a new habit of mine to thank authors and other writers who have helped me. I know that the feedback I get from my work keeps me energized, especially when things aren’t going the way I hoped.

I’m a professional speaker, author and musician who has an exceptionally popular weekly e-zine “Safety Stuff.” I just celebrated my 500th issue.

Thank you again Patsi. You’ve made a difference in my life.

‘till next time.
Richard
www.makesafetyfun.com Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing
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High Quality Content Sites Is What Google Wants

By Patsi Krakoff
Saturday, February 26th, 2011

There’s been an important update to the way Google runs their search algorithms, designed to weed out the number of junk content farms. You and your pages shouldn’t be concerned, except if you’re trying to game the system.

But you should always be alert for how such changes affect your site and make corrections when needed. If your search results have changed lately, this may explain why.

For professionals who use online content to market their services, you need to keep an eye on your analytics, and continue to follow good advice for content marketing. Here’s an excerpt from Website Magazine, an article from Mike Phillips that constitues good search marketing advice:

From the Official Google Blog: “Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

Be aggressive about building your user base. Search is powerful but it’s not the only way to ensure visitors to your website. Build a strong following on social networks and work hard to increase email sign-ups and newsletter subscribers.

Solicit quality inbound links. High-quality links will remain a pivotal factor in search engine rankings. Be diligent about networking with like-minded content producers and work to get links – quality links, including those with keyword-rich anchor text. In no way is it recommended to purchase links.

Produce varied forms of content. Search engines like a little variety. In addition to a company blog, consider producing video for a YouTube channel, a photo log on Flickr, or a podcast on iTunes. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing
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