Archive for content marketing with blogs – Page 8

Better Blogging: Messages that Inspire Desire…

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Better-blog-writingWhy should you be writing and publishing blog posts and Web content for your business? No, it’s not because of search engines in order to get indexed and found. That’s important but it’s a side-effect of doing Content Marketing right.

The only reason “you should be blogging” is to get your message across to the people who need it. All the other reasons pale in comparison:

  • My business needs a good website/ blog to look professional
  • My company needs to build credibility and trust
  • A good-looking professional blog or website will build a marketing list

What’s your message? How can you inspire desire? I suggest that your blog messages should focus on what truly matters to your target audience of potential clients. What’s their beef? What problems do they encounter that your product or services can solve? How will you make a difference in their lives? Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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Content Marketing with Blogs: Online Persuasion

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

Want to know more about online persuasion and how you can write content that gets results? Here’s a quick one minute video promoting my Content Marketing with Blogs ebook.

The e-book formatting and design was done by my son-in-law, expert graphic designer and creative genius, Scott Krakoff. Tell me what you think…

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, be my guest: Content Marketing with Blogs…

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Marketing with Videos
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5 Steps to Quality Business Blog Writing

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

One of the most frequent question small business owners and coaches ask me is “What should I write about on my business blog?” It’s not as daunting as you might think, if you follow a few guidelines. These five steps will help you master business blog writing with quality content that attracts readers every time.

With practice, anyone can start and finish writing a blog post in under an hour. It may take longer to add an image, link keywords and edit, but aim for 30 minutes and 300 words and you’ll soon become good at it.

Most small business owners recognize that fresh content published on a blog is simply a required marketing tool. I like to point out that an online business blog is the smartest way to get found, get known, and get clients.

People – your target audience of ideal customers – want to know what you stand for and what you can do for them. A blog is your platform for establishing your business as trustworthy.

That said, I know not everyone loves writing, and as a business owner, you have a lot of plates to keep spinning in the air. Whether you write on your own blog, outsource to a ghost blogger, or have a designated writer on staff, you are still faced with a content marketing strategy for your business blog.

Here are five tips to simplify the process and save you valuable time.

  1. Get started, pick a topic.Getting started is often the hardest part, because there are a lot of choices. It’s never a good idea to start by staring at a blank screen. Keep a list of categories or major keywords that are important to your ideal customers. Here’s the way I do it. Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, Writing Great Blog Content
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Quality Content: How to Write Great Blog Posts Every Time

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

How do you create quality content that attracts online readers and yet works to promote the growth of your business?

Creating great content for your business blog is a what and how issue, as in what constitutes “good” content, and how does one produce that content so that it brings in the readers that a business blogger wants. Quality content stimulates reader/ customer engagement.

Here’s what quality web content looks like: It’s short, sweet, smart, and funny.

  • Content has to be short to accommodate the average reader’s attention span and need to scan quickly.
  • Sweet because it has to attract readers to your article (think arresting titles).  You want to hit that sweet spot right in the center of their curiosity and desire to know more.
  • It has to be smart to stimulate the reader to think, tell them something they don’t already know, and trigger them to join in on the conversation, to share or comment.
  • And finally, the content needs to be funny or at least clever to hold their attention and trigger good feelings. (Note: an alternative would be to be outrageously negative, which also stimulates comments and sharing.)

Without any of these factors, you risk losing readers to boredom. It’s click and bye-bye!

How do you keep readers interested and coming back to your blog?

Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing Great Blog Content
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Blog Like Perez Hilton: 10 Ways to Bring Traffic to Your Blog

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

The second-best thing about writing a blog is that you have an opportunity to express your opinions, thoughts, and viewpoints to the rest of the world. But the number one advantage to blogging is that it’s a meritocracy; in other words, anyone can be successful at it!

Just look at Perez Hilton. He comes from an unremarkable background far away from Hollywood, but his blogging has amassed thousands of followers and his approach has changed the way people view the entertainment industry

Of course, being a winning blogger is more than just creating good content. You have to be able to get people to read what you write on a consistent basis. Here are ten ways to increase traffic flow to your blog:

  1. Put your blog in your email signature. This is a task that you can complete in less than a minute. After you do so, every email that you send will be a marketing message that could bring you another reader. (Hint: check out WiseStamp!)
  1. Go to your target audience. Find the communities where your potential readers get together. Then determine which ones are more likely not only to read your blog’s content, but also share it with others.
  1. Use social media. Share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and the many other popular Internet gathering places. Enlist services like StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and Reddit to help spread your message.
  1. Optimize for search engines. This sounds technical and complex, but all you really have to do is watch a tutorial video and learn how you can leverage what you write without making many significant changes to it. (Handy hint: subscribe to ScribeSEOTool and learn how to optimize each blog post with a handy checklist!)
  1. Seek out similar blogs. You can comment on blogs that publish similar content, and in the process reference your own blog in the hopes of piquing the interest of that blog’s followers.
  1. Invite – and write – guest posts. Getting established bloggers to write a guest post for your blog can boost your standing in a social community – and being a guest poster can showcase your writing talents to a new audience. (See Patsi’s post about a nifty way to get guest authors to participate in an exchange program for your blog.)
  1. Conduct surveys. People love to express their opinions, and one easy way to let them do that is to conduct surveys on any topics relevant to your blog. You can either utilize a polling widget or plug-in, or just ask for responses in your blog’s comments section.
  1. Create your own graphics, photos, etc. How will this generate traffic? Because if you license them so that people who repost them must credit your blog, you can build another channel of traffic flow to your blog.
  1. Enable subscriptions. It can be as simple as creating an email newsletter or making your blog accessible to RSS feeds. Readers are great, but getting a good core of loyal followers can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
  1. Incorporate analytics – and study them. There are so many easy-to-use blogging analytics tools out there. But the real successful bloggers pore over their results and tailor their blogs accordingly.

Image credit: wikipedia.org

About our Guest Author: Chris Martin is a freelance writer and blogger who writes about the hottest topics on the Web at www.business.com.

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing: What Are Your Target
Audience’s Interests, Needs, and Wants?

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

Content marketing is all about quality content that grabs the attention of your ideal prospects and clients. If you want to create content that engages readers, you need to know their online habits and interests. Yet how many of us post on a blog or upload a video to YouTube without taking time to survey what are our target audience‘s interests, wants and needs?

Content marketing requires that you publish frequently on your site, your blog, and in social media. You want to focus your content on the keywords your prospects are likely to use in searches. You can’t do that without asking them what their interests are.

Here’s a quick list of survey questions to ask your target audience to help define what they want to read:

  1. What are the five top web sites you visit frequently in your work?
  2. What are your online reading habits, blogs, websites, articles, videos, podcasts?
  3. Do you use social media like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?
  4. Which e-newsletter and blogs do you subscribe to?

You have about eight seconds to engage someone before they click away. Clever headlines and intriguing social updates will get them to click over to your content. But unless you know what your audience wants, you’re shooting in the dark. They won’t stay. Click and bye-bye. So how do you keep them on your site to read your stuff? What makes for effective content marketing? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing
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Guest Blogging: How to Write a Compelling Email Offer

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

Too busy to keep up with posting on your business blog?

A very smart tactic for small business professionals is to invite guest bloggers. Let’s face it, publishing frequently is time consuming. Guest blogging is wise but only if done appropriately. It can cause more work if guest writers are not selected prudently.

Lately I’ve been getting one or two emails a week from aspiring freelance bloggers asking to submit guest posts. Some of the emails are well-written and I’ve said ‘yes.’ But many aren’t writing a compelling offer in their emails. And some are committing writer suicide by proposing samples and topics unsuitable for my audience (“Abraham-Lincoln-Vampire-Hunter-Slays“?!).

One invitation stands out far above the others and I’ll share it with you here. The email is very effective and can be copied by any small business professional as an outreach offer. I’ll even spell it out for you as a template. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Writing for Others, Freelancing
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Keyword Research: What Smart Professionals Know

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

We have at least two audiences when we write on the web: people and search engines. My clients tell me it feels hard to write well for both, and in my experience, it’s because they’ve skipped the first step in the process: Keyword research. (Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

If I were to optimize my web copy for what I believe to be my main keyword phrase, I’d certainly be helping Google know when to serve up my post in search results. But my post still might never show up if the keyword phrase I’ve used and optimized for is not one that anyone uses to search!

That’s why keyword research is so important – I want to use keyword phrases that people are actually using when searching online! Then, not only does Google know when to serve up my post, but now I match how people are looking for what I have! The likelihood that I’ll get found, get known and get clients has just increased dramatically. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Writing for the Web
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Social Media for Busy Business Bloggers

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

With the onslaught of social media in the last 10 years, the ever constant question is, what can it do for my business and my business blog?

First, why should you bother with social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) if you’re in business? It’s the numbers. If you want customers, you need to go where they are online. Let’s be clear:

  • Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the US.
  • Twitter processed more than one billion tweets in December 2009 and averages almost 40 million tweets per day.
  • Over 25% of U.S. internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up from 13.8% a year before.
  • The number of social media users age 65 and older grew 100 percent throughout 2010, so that one in four people in that age group are now part of a social networking site.
  • As of June 2011 Facebook has 750 Million users.
  • Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
  • Social Media has overtaken pornography as the No. 1 activity on the web. Read More→
Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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Using a Business Blog:
Are You Hard to Find on the Web?

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, June 29th, 2012
Have you ever tried to find yourself on the Web? No, I don’t mean by searching for your name or the name of your business – that would be too easy. Try searching for a solution to the kind of problems your business solves, using keyword phrases your typical client might use. (Image: Freedigitalphotos.net)

Search for your business the way new prospects would search for you, without knowing your name.

When you do, you’ll know that it’s difficult to be found on the World Wide Web, because there are a lot of people and companies doing what you do. Okay, maybe not as brilliantly, and granted, maybe they have bigger marketing budgets than you, but the thing is, those search engine robots don’t care who’s big or small or even who is a qualified professional doing great things.

That’s right, search engines like Google and Yahoo only care about words and links. I know, cold and cruel, nasty little algorithms, but that’s life on the Internet. A business blog is the most common publishing platform that smart professionals use to get found on the web.

So what do the others (not-so-smart) do? Some people have found success by using expensive web site designs and hiring Search Engine Optimization experts, but there’s only so much Google juice they can get out of a site. You still need content and lots of it.

What’s needed in the online search world is a lot of content, using keywords, published frequently and attracting inbound links from other people and connections. This is why a business blog is what successful people use to get found, get known, and get clients.

I don’t want to confuse you, so let’s cut to the chase: what’s needed is for you to publish 2-3 times a week on a business blog, writing about the problems you solve for people. Oh, and it helps a lot to have some video. …And to update social media sites about what you’re blogging about. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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