Archive for Online Marketing – Page 6

Content Marketing Videos: Speak to Problems First

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, March 14th, 2011

What’s the best way to write a script for a video? Content marketing with videos is a key marketing tool, and it’s getting easier to do.

Here’s a new video the folks over at iMotionVideo Studios produced for me. I just love this service. Left to my own devices, I’d probably make one video every few months. But with a low-fee monthly subscription for a year, I know I’ve got a one-minute video commercial coming every 30 days. This is key for content marketing.

Why would I want that many? I don’t really, but for content marketing to work you need as much content as you can, in all forms. I use them to submit to video directories, post to YouTube, and it all counts to get found in Google searches. Some content marketing things have to combine quality AND frequency.

Most of the time I focus on how important it is to write quality online content for your readers, and teach my clients to achieve maximum results, they have to be writing things that are relevant and important to their readers: how do you solve their problems. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Writing Great Copy
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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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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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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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Business Blog Writing and Content Marketing:
Come on, light my fire!

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, February 14th, 2011

Why is content marketing and persuasion so difficult, and what can you do to set people on fire? When it comes to writing content for a business blog, most professionals start from their point of view. Of course, who wouldn’t?

“We’ve got a state-of-the-art 128-bit secure site, offering the best rates on the Web.”

While this business understands that its customers want security and low prices when ordering services online, they fail to ignite passion or spark action in readers.

Stories of real people connect with readers in a way that data and words on a screen can’t. In his best-selling book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, published in 1997 by Harper-Collins, master screenwriter Robert McKee argues that stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”

There are two ways to persuade people.

The first is by using conventional marketing rhetoric, which is what most professionals use. It’s an intellectual process  in which you write, “Here’s our company’s biggest advantage, and here is what you need to do.” You build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. But there are two problems with this rational approach.

First, the people you’re talking to have their own set of experiences. While you’re trying to persuade them, they are arguing with you in their heads. Second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are inspired to act by emotions.

The other way to persuade people—a more powerful way—is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story.

In a story, you not only weave in a lot of information, but you also arouse your reader’s emotions and energy.

Persuading with a story is hard. It demands vivid insight and storytelling skill to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable.

In the sample quote I used about a “128-bit secure site,” wouldn’t it be more interesting if the business blogged about a client who had a bad experience using an unsecured website? Or, better yet, what if they featured a video clip of a client who saved “X” amount of dollars by coming to them instead?

Stories connect us to what really matters most in ways that rhetoric and facts can’t.

Categories : About Blogs, Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content
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When Business Blogging Works Too Well…

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Blogging for your business works like this:

  1. You blog about the problems you solve for your clients
  2. You get found on the Web by the people who need your services
  3. People get to know you, like you, trust you
  4. They email or call and hire you

But then your business grows, you get busy, and what happens to the blog? I’ve seen hundreds  of blogs written by smart professionals that haven’t been posted since last November.

Here’s my own example. I think I enjoy blogging for other people more than I do for myself! The more work I’m getting ghost blogging for executive coaches, the more interesting my writing becomes, and the more fun I’m having. It’s all good, really, except for a few problems…

I am quite simply more excited about creating content that markets for other professionals than I am for myself and my own  business. I have long since stopped worrying about being “normal,” so that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

But here are some problems… All the while, my ranking on the Top 42 Content Marketing blogs is slipping. I went from #4 to #10 to #17…to #45. I may soon be off the list entirely. Yikes! Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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Business Blog: 4 Reasons to NOT Write Your Own

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, February 7th, 2011

(Guest post by Adam Kosloff)

You’re swamped.

You barely have time to scan the headlines of your favorite news feeds. Probably the only reason you clicked on this article was to check out whether it might provide instant value to you. Can this article save you time and/or money and/or hassle?

Hopefully, it can. And not because this article will tell you anything you don’t already know – rather, it will remind you of business principles that you already apply in your everyday professional work but which you forgot once you started marketing online.

Here’s the message, loud and clear: 99% of busy business professionals and attorneys should not – repeat, not – waste their precious productive hours writing their own blog posts and website content. If you are guilty of this practice, stop it. You will burn yourself out, and your business will suffer – even if you enjoy doing the writing.

Not convinced? Consider these four arguments.

  1. You earn the most money – and generate the most productive return on your time – when you stay in your “area of strength. The more time you blog, the less time you will have available to serve your clients. Let’s do the math. Say you’re an attorney who bills out at $250 an hour. Currently, you write three blog posts a week. It takes you about an hour to write each post. $250/hour X 3 hours = $750.This means you are investing a whopping $750 every week into your blog. Are you really getting a return on that investment that justifies this practice?
  2. You are not a professional blogger.You have been trained as an attorney, corporate executive, or entrepreneur. Even if you consider yourself a master writer and communicator, web writing is its own very cagey animal.Creating ongoing, tonally accurate, riveting web content requires specialized skills that you must hone over years of practice. Undoubtedly, you could learn how to write more effectively for the web. But why bother? Your time and resources are extremely limited. You must husband them for the crucial tasks of operating your core business. Read More→
Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks
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3 Web Tools to Make Money Online

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

I’m curious… what web tools could you absolutely not live without? To make money online, you need systems and software helpers. I don’t try them all out, it tends to drive me nuts to have too many distractions and things to learn.

As I got on the computer this morning, however, I’ve got to say that I couldn’t live without Roboform to keep my passwords easily accessible for various sites. I used to keep a word doc listing them all, yikes! Impossible to keep the list updated or alphabetized.

Roboform stores them all for you, and is right there in your tool bar. Check it out. (Not an affiliate!)

Here are my top 3 tools:

  1. Roboform
  2. Scribe SEO content analyzer
  3. WordPress Headway Theme
  4. KickStartCart

I know that’s 4, but I can’t live without the Cart either! Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Online Marketing, Pathway to Profits
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Content Marketing from the Inside Out

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, January 17th, 2011

In your opinion, what’s the single biggest factor that builds credibility and trust in content marketing? To me, it’s personality.

Readers and viewers want to feel a human connection. They need personal stories about people and about you. It doesn’t matter what form the stories come in.

We’ve come a long way from the days when ad men (and they were usually men) could represent products or services with snappy jingles and cute copy.  Online marketing today includes plenty of content in all forms, all of which communicate personality through stories:

  • Web pages
  • Blogs
  • E-newsletters
  • Social media profiles and updates
  • E-books, white papers and digital downloads
  • Video clips
  • Webinars

Some companies have personality through characters like the Aflac duck and the Geico gekko. Did you know they have their own Facebook pages?

Others use their company president like Razerguy for Razer and Ben & Jerry’s founders. Some use their customers:  Dove uses women and Old Spice uses men.

Obviously, if you’re an independent professional such as a doctor, psychologist, any kind of health professional seeking clients, you’ve got to have your own personality in your content marketing to stand out from all the others. Same for lawyers, authors, speakers. Yet how many professionals share their personal stories on the Web? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, On Writing Better
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Content Marketing with Stories: Better than Facts

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Good stories are what make a blog interesting and fun to read. More importantly, if you’re trying to influence people to buy into your ideas and ultimately your business, there is evidence that stories work better than facts.

A 2007 study by Jennifer Edson Escalas, a marketing researcher at Vanderbilt University, found that people had more positive reactions to advertisements that were presented in a story form than to ads that were factually straightforward about the products.

In another study, when information was labeled as fact, it was subjected to critical analysis. Apparently humans have a tendency to want to make factual information wrong, compared with information labeled as a story, which people accept more easily.

In his book Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin writes, “People just aren’t that good at remembering facts. When people do remember facts, it’s almost always in context.” The way to put facts into context is to transfer them through the use of story. A story is all about context.

So if you’re a professional with a blog, or writing content for your web pages or e-newsletter, what kinds of stories should you be writing? On a blog, it’s easier to do since it’s a personal communication tool. It’s easy to share client experiences and stories about the work you do.

I’ve written extensively about how to craft blog posts, and given you some outlines and templates for structuring blog posts. Most of them center on writing about how to solve a problem for your readers. The best way to gain attention and engage readers is through storytelling.

Here are some ideas for triggering stories: Read More→

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing for the Web
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