Archive for converting readers to clients – Page 3

Business Blogging: 4 Ways to Have Fun and Profits

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, September 9th, 2010

(Vacation time, so here’s another guest post, this one by Susan Long,  freelance marketing consultant.)

If you’re writing your blog for more than just fun, you’ve probably thought about how you can make some money from it. There’s plenty of ways you can make cash from your writing, and you might not have thought of some of them before.

1) Putting ads on your blog

This is the most obvious way to make money blogging. You can sign up for Google Ads and Adbrite, which are two of the most well-known. The best thing about Google Ads and Adbrite is that you don’t have to have lots of readers to put their ads on your site. If you’re just starting out blogging one of these is the best way to start. You can also sell links in your articles with companies like TNX.net or Text Link Ads.

Once you’ve got more readers – say maybe once you’re getting a thousand hits a week – you can think about approaching bigger ad networks like Chitika and putting more “mainstream” ads on your blog.

And if you have a specialist or local blog, remember you can approach relevant businesses directly and ask them to advertise. For instance if you write a blog about soccer in your country, you could ask sports stores in your city if they want to advertise

2) Putting ads in your RSS feed

If you use Feedburner to optimise your RSS feed (and if you aren’t, why not?), you can easily put ads in the RSS feed of your blog, so people who read your blog through RSS will see ads.

3) Pay-per-post Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Pathway to Profits, Profit, Promoting Your Ezine +/or Blog
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Compelling Content: Pushing Readers’ Hot Buttons

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, September 3rd, 2010

How do you write compelling content that attracts and engages readers? Ahhh, that question again…(followed usually by how do you turn readers into buyers?) This is the job of good content marketing and the challenge for online professionals who write blogs, articles, and  web pages.

First, let’s deal with the compelling content thing. Your content isn’t going to market anything if you don’t reach inside the heads and hearts of your readers.

Obviously it’s all about your readers. The better you know who they are and what they like, the easier it is to write content for them.

Use emotional words and phrases, and think about triggering their hot buttons. There are universal drives and human motivators. It doesn’t matter if your reader is a 20-year-old gamer or a 70-year-old retired professor.

Human beings are all driven by hot button motivators. (See the excellent book by Barry Feig for more about this: Hot Button Marketing: Push the Emotional Buttons that Get People to Buy). Some of these are:

  • The desire to be first
  • The desire to know it all
  • The desire for control
  • The desire to love and be loved
  • The desire to enjoy and have fun
  • The desire for values or feelings of moral righteousness
  • The drive for prestige
  • The drive for self-achievement
  • The drive for power and influence
  • The drive to help others

What drives your readers? Do any of these hot buttons seem similar to your clients? How can you test your assumptions? Maybe you could push a few buttons to see what reaction you get? Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Online Persuasion: Seeing Through the Eyes of Your Customers

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, August 5th, 2010

There’s an important shift in content marketing tactics that affects professionals who want to get found, get known and get clients online. And that shift means a different mindset.

I saw a great blog post the other day. There was a picture of a pair of glasses lying on a bench with this caption: Don’t you wish you could see through your customers’ glasses?

What if you could live in their shoes for a day? Or, track their brains as they go online to your website? What makes them click? What makes them take action?

Here’s where you should start thinking a little differently when writing content for the Web:

Smart content marketers are using persuasion tactics that appeal to emotions rather than reasons. They know that emotions not only guide our decisions and actions, they determine whether or not we buy.

When successful web writers create online content, they appeal to the senses and the emotions. They:

  • Grab attention through outrageous headlines and images
  • Appeal to basic human wants, desires
  • Tell a story of one person
  • Use emotional hot buttons
  • Use persuasion triggers
  • Motivate action with fear, scarcity, urgency

The most effective content marketing occurs with a mixture of both rational and emotional tactics. That’s because people use the emotional parts of their brains to make what they consider rational decisions. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Pathway to Profits
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The Brain Science of Online Persuasion

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, August 2nd, 2010

What has brain science taught us about how people are persuaded to take action online? And, how can we use that wisdom when writing content that serves to market ourselves and our businesses?

These two questions have been fueling my mental energy for the past few years. As a journalist-turned-psychologist, turned-online-content-marketer, you might imagine that these issues keep me up at night … or not! I believe this is important stuff for any professional who wants an effective online presence.

Here’s what I see as an important shift in online marketing tactics. It has significance for you if you’re trying to create content for your own business.

Business persuasion skills, whether for presentations in person or for web pages online, have always centered on problem solving using rationality and logic. Smart professionals believe that people make decisions based on clearly laid-out arguments and intelligent thinking.

  • What’s the problem?
  • What does this mean to your target audience?
  • Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  • What is your solution?
  • What should people do now?
  • What will happen if they don’t?

Business professionals approach online content marketing and writing for the web with this mentality. It makes sense and there’s nothing wrong with it… except it’s probably not getting good results.

Ad people, however, copywriters and marketers don’t use this approach. The people who write ads for TV, or print, or direct mail letters have been using persuasion tactics that appeal to emotions rather than reasons. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Pathway to Profits, Writing Great Blog Content, Writing Great Copy, Writing Speeches
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Video: How to Create Great Sales Pages in WP

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, July 30th, 2010

Here’s a quick video I’m  using to promote Suzanne Bird-Harris’ fabulous WordPress Sales Page Template.I love the image of the “web designer thief” that sneaks across the screen about half way through… 😉

Take a look, and if you haven’t downloaded the free audio interview and transcript we did together, go to PatsiPicksWPSalesPage.com and do so now.

What do you think about the video? I think the folks at iFlashVideo.com did a super job!

I want to share with you this nice email I got from Kathy Porter, who was on the actual teleseminar call:

“Hi Patsi – your webinar training on how to incorporate a sales page into a WordPress platform is one of the BEST things I’ve participated in this year.  (I’ll be creating my own WordPress blog shortly, now that I’ve gotten my feet wet using Typepad.)

Think I can help you expand your reach with this product by tweeting and “face-booking” your affiliate link as my heartfelt thank you for making this info available.”

Kathy Porter
Creator and Owner, MrsBizWhiz
Web site/blog: www.MrsBizWhizConnects.com

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits, Promoting Your Ezine +/or Blog
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How to Make Social Proof Work Online

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Do some client recommendations work better than others? Social proof is such a strong trigger for online action, it’s good to know what works best for your Web content marketing strategies.

In a previous post, What Clients Say, I reported on research that showed people selected travel destinations 20 percent more with a client recommendation and a photo of the reviewer.

Research studies show that some ratings and reviews will influence more than others: This report is taken from Dr. Susan Weinschenk’s book Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click:

  • We are most influenced when we know the person and the person is telling a story. But quite often, it’s unlikely we will actually know a person doing an online review, unless they are a well-known author or respected expert in the field.
  • We are somewhat less influenced when we don’t know them, but we can imagine them because their is a name, a company name, a link to their site, and maybe a persona description of them (like, for example, a stay-at-home mom, a runner, a CEO, a Ph.D.) Read More→
Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Pathway to Profits
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Online Persuasion: What Do Clients Say?

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

How are you using client recommendations in your online content marketing? Do you add them as an afterthought?

Maybe you just collect them and put them on a separate page for testimonials? Or are they a major part of your content creation strategies?

Recommendations, testimonials and client stories are a powerful persuasion tactic. It’s one of the key persuasion triggers that get people to take action. It’s called social proof.

Robert Cialdini wrote about six weapons of influence in his landmark book Influence. Social proof is one of the most powerful mechanisms for triggering buying decisions. Here’s why:

Customer ratings and reviews are one of the ways we decide and choose to buy products online. I use them all the time to click and buy: I glance at the number of gold stars other people have given a book on Amazon, or a pair of tennis shoes on Nike.

If there are two pairs of shoes I’ve selected for my size and price, I’ll go with the one that has 5 stars over 4. Think about it: I don’t know these people, they may have feet completely different to mine, they may not play tennis as often as I do, or on the same court surfaces.

My foot is narrow and bony. Not everybody’s version of a comfortable fit is going to be mine. And I know this. But when I see a customer rave review and 5 stars, I’m all in.

Think about it: we let other people influence our buying decisions even when we have nothing in common with them.

We are heavily influenced by social persuasion, we can’t help it. Our brains respond to our strong need to belong and fit in, and it all happens in our unconscious minds.

Do these same persuasion tactics work for sites and businesses that aren’t selling physical products? Does social validation work for businesses selling services and experiences? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Online Persuasion, Pathway to Profits
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Blog Marketing: How Readers Find Your Business

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, July 26th, 2010

What’s your favorite excuse for not blogging for your business? Here are some that I hear:

  • “I don’t have time to blog.”
  • “My clients aren’t surfing the Web reading blogs.”
  • “Oh, that means I’ve got to write about my business every week?”

And yet, if these same professionals realized that a business blog is the best way to get found online, the best way to connect with potential clients, and the pathway to turning readers into clients, they might see things a little differently.

Here’s a drawing I made that shows how readers find your blog and become clients.

There are over a billion people connected to the Internet. I’m willing to bet my lunch money that quite a few of them fall into the category of “your ideal clients.”

It’s not likely they go online looking for you, your business or your blog. I’m not saying that. But they do go to search engines and they type in questions with keywords.

And they do  go to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Here’s what this looks like, how readers find your blog, in this Smart Draw diagram I did:

Like any diagram, it’s simplified. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits, Social Media Stuff
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Attractive Content: Speak to the brains

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

How do you write content that attracts readers to your products and services?

I read somewhere that most of what goes into our brains never reaches our conscious mind:

Our five senses are processing 11 million pieces of info per second. Of these only 40 enter our conscious awareness.

Which means our subconscious mind does a terrific job of filtering what we need to pay attention to.

And…which is why there is new research about how to reach consumers based on how the brain works: neuromarketing.

The brain is made up of three parts, the old brain, the mid-brain, and the new brain. The first two are operating out of our conscious awareness, and they help decide what we need to become aware of.

What this means is that most of the time, we’re operating on auto-pilot. Especially when it comes to TV, but maybe we’re cruising when we’re online and even reading. We scan while thinking of other things. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, Getting Read, On Writing Better, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing Ideas: Rethinking Blogging

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, July 15th, 2010

There was a time I was in love with blogging… I had already been in the business of content marketing for 5 years on the Web, using an old-fashioned website platform.

In 2004, I started blogging. It changed my life and opened doors and filled a few piggy banks. But my lover wasn’t really “the blog.” It was being able to speak with a world-wide audience. It was like magic.

Writing on my blog is my way of reaching out to people looking for ways to write content on the Web so that they can get found, get known and get new business.

A blog is still “The best darn content marketing tool on the planet!” But it’s not about “the blog…”

This year I switched from Typepad to WordPress, and I’m creating a new banner to reflect the changes.

When’s the last time you reviewed your site or blog banner?

For a while now I’ve been playing with some ideas. The name will remain the same, but the tag line will read,

“How to Use Online Content Marketing to Get Found, Get Known, and Get Clients.”

I wrote about these three big marketing challenges a few days ago, and I’ve blogged about them over the past five years.

Without doubt, people who use the Internet to market their services must find ways to solve these three issues, or they won’t stay in business long.

You might notice there’s nothing in my new tag line that mentions blogs, blogging, or WordPress. Because, just as I predicted a few years ago, it doesn’t matter if you’re blogging or not. What matters are results.

(I predicted the buzz about blogs would die down simply because everyone would be using a blog platform, such as WordPress, to build and manage their websites as well as blogs. The blur between the two has already merged.)

We’ve been told that world-wide, there are a billion people online, and we can reach a global audience for free. So it doesn’t matter if you’re using a traditional website platform or WordPress, or even Blogger (well, why not?), if that’s working to get you found, get people to know, like and trust you, and you’re converting readers to clients.

It’s not the messenger, it’s your message. It’s not how you do it, what matters is that you do it effectively.

For myself, I’m constantly learning, reading, and evolving (hopefully!)… I’m not sure where I’m going to be in 5 or 10 years, but I am intuitively following a direction. I’m sharing these ideas here with you, about changes to how we process Web content and marketing, and would love to hear your thoughts. Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing
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