Archive for Content Marketing – Page 13

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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Is Your White Paper a Sales Pitch in Disguise?

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, April 4th, 2011

I asked Lauren Carlson to share with you here some important perspectives on content marketing. It doesn’t matter what you call your information (white paper/eBook, microsite/landing page), what matters is using information wisely to get found, get known and get clients.

Is Your White Paper a Sales Pitch in Disguise?
Guest Post by Lauren Carlson, SoftwareAdvice.com

When was the last time you read a white paper that added real value to your research process? I’m racking my brain and finding it quite difficult to come up with any good examples.

More often than not, today’s white papers are really just masked sales pitches, too long to keep the attention of today’s buyer. They aren’t engaging the customer and are therefore not serving much of a purpose. So, now what?

It’s time for companies to turn to 2.0 technologies to reach the 2.0 buyer. Twitter is extremely powerful for reaching audiences and building relationships. Advances in graphic design and technology leave no excuse for not having vibrant, captivating content.

There is even software that makes it easy to create, manage and track buyer activity on your site so that you know the kind of information your potential customers want.

With all of these advancements for content marketing, it’s about time we shred the white paper. Marketing Automation Software Guide (MASG) posted an article on this topic. Below is a summary.

Introducing the new buyer Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff, Writing Great White Papers
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Marketing with Videos: What’s Wrong with the Script?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

I was shocked to read some sample scripts for video commercials being filmed at the studios of iMotionVideo last week in Orlando. People are still confusing features and benefits in their marketing messages.

Some videos are great to watch, even if you’re not interested in what they’re selling. But others…OMG, it’s just sad.

The iMotionVideo service allows businesses to write and submit their video scripts, then they format and use actors or voice-overs to turn your script into great video commercials.

But many people aren’t clear in writing their marketing messages, confuse features with benefits, speak in jargon, and assume their viewers know what they know.

It’s a good thing iMotionVideo provides a professional actor, John Eastman. His rich baritone voice can make even the worst marketing message sound good.

Here’s what small businesses and independent professionals are doing wrong with their video scripts that they submit for one minute commercials:

  1. Some marketers try to promote the features of their products and programs instead of benefits. “Our ABC program is offered at a one-time only discount,” instead of promoting what the ABC will do for them, what benefit it will provide to the viewer, such as save them time, make them money, make them happy. Half the time, I couldn’t figure out what their “ABC” was.
  2. They assume the viewer knows what their company does, and use insider jargon and terms.
  3. They try to appeal to everyone, and don’t clarify who their target audience is. Since videos are posted to YouTube and other video directories besides their own website pages, their viewers need to know who the commercial is for. Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, Content Marketing with Videos, Online Marketing
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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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Free Phone Consulting? 4 Reasons It’s a Good Idea

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Why should a professional or small business give away free consulting? I’ll tell you why. Here’s what’s happening…

I recently launched a new version of articles to my executive coaching clients and as a bonus, offered a free 20-minute phone session.

I’ve been spending more than 20 minutes with each person, and I’m loving it. Since I charge $200/hour for consulting sessions, why would I do this?

  1. It gives me a chance to connect with clients: In an online business, I usually don’t have much contact with the clients who use my services and products. Some of my clients have been with me over 10 years, and we’ve never spoken by phone. To them, I’m faceless, and vice-verso. I want to feel some sort of connection on a personal level. Email can’t do that.
  2. When people invest hundreds of dollars with you, they usually have questions, and even though these same questions may have been answered on your sales page, people need reassurance that answers apply to them. A personal conversation solidifies trust in you.
  3. Sometimes products can be confusing to people. You see your products from your perspective, not from the perspective of the customer. A phone conversation ensures they get the best use out of their purchase. Read More→
Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing
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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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Feed Your Blog Automatically to LinkedIn & Twitter

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, February 21st, 2011

Update From Patsi, February 2012: We apologize for not updating this post earlier. I no longer update any social media automatically, but am posting manually (read why here, Say NO to Auto-Feeds: Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites). This is time-consuming and may require a virtual assistant for some of you. I recommend SerenityVA.com.

How do you get your blog posts to feed into your LinkedIn profile and Twitter automatically? I asked social media expert AnnaLaura Brown to write a guest post. This is the 2nd part of her post Connect Your Blog to Facebook.

For LinkedIn you have a couple of options as well.

Your first option is to add the WordPress blog option to your Linkedin profile.

To do this:

  1. Go to edit profile and scroll down to the bottom. You will see a link that says Applications- Add an Application.

Click on that link and you will see this page of options. There is an option to add your blog link with Typepad or WordPress.

Click on the link and you will be taken to a page where you can add in the RSS feed for your blog.  From now on your new posts will be automatically posted to this section of your LinkedIn profile.

The second option is to add your Twitter stream to LinkedIn and then by default as long as your blog posts are appearing in Twitter they will also appear on LinkedIn.

You do this by going to the same page where you added your blog and clicking on the tweets application.

Twitter Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Social Media Stuff
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Connect Your Blog to Facebook Automatically

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, February 18th, 2011

UPDATE: From Karen, January 21, 2012 

Unfortunately, Facebook has disabled this process as of September 2011 and it no longer works. We have to post a link to our blogs in the status or copy and paste as a rich text note.

From Patsi, February 2012: We apologize for not updating this post earlier, but things change constantly on the Web, and Facebook is notorious for it’s constant shifts. I no longer update any social media automatically, but am posting manually (read why here, Say NO to Auto-Feeds: Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites). This is time-consuming and may require a virtual assistant for some of you. I recommend SerenityVA.com.

Guest Post from AnnaLaura Brown:

Are your blog posts fed automatically into Facebook?

The other day I was horrified to learn that a dear client was manually posting his blog articles to Facebook. Yikes! No wonder blogging seems tiresome and time-consuming.

I took my pencil and rapped him on the knuckles, gave him a virtual scowl and promised to write a post about how to do this. It had been so long since I set this up myself, I was a bit rusty on the steps required. So I asked Facebook expert Annalaura Brown to write this guest post.

How to Automatically Link Blog Posts to Facebook

Automatically linking your blog posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin can get you some great publicity and traffic but it can be challenging to figure out how to make it all work. Fortunately you have a couple of different options for each one.

Facebook

1.       Use the networked blogs application. This is my personal favorite.  To get started type in networked blogs into the search box and you will pull up the application.

You click on the ‘register a blog‘ link you see in the capture photo above and it will walk you through the process.  The first time you will have a few extra steps to complete to verify that you are the blog owner but after that you can register as many blogs as you own. Read More→

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