What content marketing is and why it works

Content marketing uses online content for promotional purposes. The objective of this is to get clients to buy what you are selling eventually. Of course, that will only happen after you have had the chance to build a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. Effective content marketing is appealing on many different levels. The writing must be of top quality and it must strike an emotional cord with your readers. Without the emotional (or human) factor, you won’t be able to build a relationship with your readers. Content marketing is a very effective way to increase your business’s success and to strengthen your relationships with your online connections.

The value of being online

There is a small possibility that you don’t really understand the importance of connecting with other people online. If you aren’t sure why online interactions and connections are so important, there is much to discuss here. On the other hand, if you do understand why online interactions are so important, you probably also get why it is important to reach the largest amount of people possible. The reality is that your existing customers and prospective customers are already online, waiting to interact with you. When it comes to getting your word out there, your website may not be enough to reach everyone you want to reach. It is important for you to understand the impact that your online content, such as a blog will make compared with your website. The reach results will come out differently, depending how you work the content. In fact, using content marketing is an excellent way to improve your ability to reach a large number of people. The way that it accomplishes this is through white papers, eBooks, blogs and case studies. In that respect, online content marketing differs from traditional marketing.

When it comes to content marketing, you are subscribing to the marketing principle of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). In other words, your professional purpose is to solve the other person’s problem(s). In traditional marketing, your purpose is to let the other person know how wonderful you and your business are. In actuality, the other person doesn’t really care how wonderful you and your business are. The only thing the person cares about is how you are going to solve their problem(s). With people connecting online, their goal is to gather information and to gain an education. The last thing that they want is to get a hard sell from anyone.

If you share valuable content with your online connections and it is of value to them, not only will they like what they are reading but they will share it with other people who they value and they will want to read more from you. That is exactly how you build a loyal client base. The more you interact with your online connections, they more they will begin to trust you and to find you credible, not to mention considering you a subject matter expert in your field.

Conclusion

It is important for you to understand that when you market your content online, you are using it as an educational, informative tool. You are not using it to directly sell your products and services to anyone. Marketing your content will help you to build and grow relationships with your online connections. You will find that those relationships will be mutually beneficial and extremely solid. When it comes to sharing your content online, your online connections will definitely appreciate receiving content that they can read and digest rather than receiving advertisements from you about your business. Remember, it is critical to the success of your business that you consider the needs and wants of your online connections before your own. If you can do that, they will do the same for you.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

The appeal of your business blog

You definitely understand by now that you need to write content that engages your readers and, at the same time, you have a responsibility to provide new, fresh content on a regular and frequent basis. If you can’t commit to doing that, don’t even bother because you won’t get anywhere. Your readers have a certain expectation by now and the bar has been set very high. It is very important to keep in mind that blogging is more than just writing and publishing content. Blogging is also about building relationships with your existing clients as well as your prospective clients. You may feel that blogging comes relatively easily to you but you still may encounter a writing block, at least once in a while. As you examine your blogging strategy, you may find that what worked for you originally, doesn’t work anymore. If you feel that your target audience is not as extensive as it once was or that you would like it to be, there are ways of improving that situation.

• Focus on your target audience: It is very important for you to always write with your target audience in mind. Whichever topic you happen to be writing about, you have to try to consider it from your audience’s perspective. You should consider which questions your audience may be inclined to ask. If you can identify those questions, you will succeed at creating content that is valuable to your audience and clear and concise. The reason that your audience has reached out to you in the first place is because they believe that you have something to offer that they need. Speak to them at their level and make sure that they understand that you are in this to try to help them solve their problems.
• Use valuable tips from experts to your advantage: Most people love to learn new things all of the time. It is up to you to provide them with new and exciting information that they can take with them and, in turn, share with other people. If you are not sure about any given topic but you feel that they would benefit by learning about that particular topic, enlist people who happen to be experts in that particular area and get them to share. Your audience will be grateful to you and will pay you back in some positive manner. You can invite your experts to guest blog or you can take the information that they share with you and share it with your target audience in some other, creative way.
• Expand your horizons: Your knowledge base is very important but, just like your target audience, you should be learning new things on a very regular basis. You may start your blog with a few topics and then branch out to other topics. A great way to guide your topics is by asking your target audience what they wish to read about. When it comes to writing blog articles, sometime the most difficult thing of all is coming up with a topic. Another good way to gather ideas is by looking at other people’s blogs. Remember, you should never, ever use someone else’s words and take credit for them. However, you can use their concepts and make the words your own.
• Use images creatively: Many people are visual and they relate to content more effectively if you show them graphic images. In fact, if your blog only contains words, it may be a big turn off for some people. The graphic images will make the content interesting and will break up the monotony of so many words. One of your main goals is to attract audience members and to keep them interested over the long term. Graphic images will help you a great deal with this.
• Don’t ever give them the hard sell: Nobody wants to be “sold.” The reason that people visit your blog is because they want to learn new and interesting things and so that you solve their problems, whatever they may be. If your audience thinks that you are only interested in selling your products and/or services and that you are not interested in them on a human level, you won’t have a prayer with them. Never go that route.

Conclusion

Getting people to read your business blog with enthusiasm, excitement and passion is not always easy but it is far from impossible. If you focus your content in the smartest way and you remember to put your target audience’s needs before your own, you will succeed at winning them over and in keeping them for a very long time. Make sure that you show your audience how flexible and open-minded you are when it comes to sharing information. Never make them feel as though your opinion is the only one that matters. Their opinions weigh very heavily as well. The key to your success is building your following and continuing to fulfill your audience’s needs.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

It used to be that marketers only had to write content when there was a necessity at that particular moment. Now, not only is it imperative for new content to be written regularly and frequently but it has to be of the top quality and it has to attract the audience very quickly. If the content doesn’t grab the readers quickly, they will go to someone else and you may never hear from them again. Knowing the wants and needs of the target audience is critical to the success of your business in the day and age of social media. The big question is how do you make all of that happen successfully? Building effective buyer personas, which define the ideal profile of your prospective buyers, will really make your work a lot easier.

Divide demographically

It is critical for you to have a deep understanding of who your target audience is and exactly what makes up your perfect client. What are the needs, wants and concerns of your clients and prospective clients? Where do you need to go in order to reach your target audience and exactly what types of content should you be writing for them? What you need to do is to create a persona (a representation) of your ideal client.

Creating personas

The personas that you create are based on real information. You gather information based on demographic information and your target audience’s online behavior, personal histories, motivating factors and what keeps them up at night. The way that you begin to develop the personas is by studying the customer base that you already have. You need to pinpoint the qualities of the people who buy from you the most. You will find that you have several different types of buyers and each one deserves a lot of attention and a great deal of thinking. You will need to attach a large amount of details to each person, such as a description of the person, name, professional role (including title, if you have it), the niche or industry with which they associate and demographic information.

Understand your target audience’s needs

When creating personas, you will need to ask yourself several questions:

• Which problems are the members of your target audience trying to solve?
• What does your target audience need the most?
• How can you help them to succeed?
• What specific information are they seeking?

If you truly understand your target audience, it is not a huge leap that you will need to take to understand the wants, needs and challenges of your target audience. If they have gotten to the point of connecting with you and your business, the chances are very good that they didn’t arrive at your doorstep by accident. The more detailed information you add to the persona that you are building, the simpler it will be for you to write the content that will benefit your target audience the most. The better your content, the more your target audience will relate to you. If you can do this, you are on your way to really creating fantastic content that will make your audience reach out and touch you.

Conclusion

Creating buyer personas is not as difficult as you might think it is. If you can do that, it is actually going to help your overall online marketing strategy and it will help you to create content that is exactly what your target audience needs. If you can succeed at that, it will convince your target audience that you are the person who they have been searching for and they will eventually be thrilled to buy what you are selling. If you are able to do all of the work ahead of time regarding building the personas, you will find the rest of your work to be much smoother.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

You have a tremendous amount of opportunities at your fingertips. There are certain rules that you need to follow when it comes to your content so that you are able to use it in different ways. You want to get the most mileage out if that you can. One thing that you shouldn’t do with your content is to write in a time-sensitive manner. For example, if Black Friday is coming up and you want to write content on that topic, you can only post it in November. If you are approaching the end of the year and you want to write 2013, it will only be applicable once. That is not content that will give you a great deal of mileage.

What you can do with your already-created content

Even though traditional book publishing has been on the decline for the last several years, publishing in other ways is not. Many people are publishing electronically and there is no reason why you can take your valuable content and turn it into several eBooks. You may be surprised to learn how many people will be interested in your eBooks. You have already chosen your niche. Now, all you have to do is share what you have written in another form.

The transition from blogging to writing

If you started out as a blogger, you have already developed the writing skills that will carry you into the future with your business. There are certain fundamental differences between bloggers and authors but all of them can easily be overcome. First of all, authors are used to writing long content while bloggers generally write shorter content that often uses colloquial language. Authors work on one project for a long time while bloggers work on much shorter-term projects. Additionally, authors are generally not involved with marketing while bloggers need to have an understanding of marketing so that they can get people to pay attention to their content. One of their main goals is to get people to interact with them so that the relationship becomes strong enough to get the other people to eventually buy what they are selling.

Bloggers have relationships with their audience and they communicate with them regularly. Authors generally don’t have relationships with their audience. Part of the interaction that bloggers have with their audience is the feedback aspect of it. Bloggers need audience feedback so that they can figure out how to improve upon what they are doing and thus offer improved and more desirable products and/or services.

Publishing makes natural sense for bloggers

The first thing that you need if you are blogger who wants to publish is self-confidence. You need to believe that you can successfully make the transition from blogger to author. Financially speaking, you will most likely see very positive results if you start to publish your content as eBooks. The fact is that you already have the niche audience in the palm of your hand. Now, all you have to do is expand the way that you were presenting your content to them. It is nowhere near starting from scratch.

Your edge as a blogger

You now understand that you have an edge if you started off as a blogger. The advantages that you will be able to enjoy once you are an author are:

• Subject matter expert: Once you slide into the author’s position, you will be regarded as the top expert in your field. Coming out with an eBook will really catapult your career.
• The process of selling your eBooks: Once you make your eBooks available, you will be surprised at how success comes to you.
• New opportunities: Once you have published eBooks, your name will become better known and a whole bunch of opportunities will open up for you. People will invite you to give presentations, be a part of strategic partnerships and co-author books with other influencers.

Conclusion

It is wonderful when you can figure out how to take all of your hard work (in the form of content) and get a lot more valuable use out of it. Once you have published eBooks, you can use them as incentive giveaways in return for people opting in. Everyone wins and you will feel that all of your hard work was leveraged and that your efforts gave something back to you. Inspiration comes from many different places, including from you at an earlier time when your perspective was slightly different than it is now. It isn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel every time if you have the tools and the material to share information that you created before if it still has the ability to give meaning to other people.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

In some respects, it is easier to get your writing read online than it is in print. However, it is very important to keep in mind that it is not sufficient to simply put words on a page and think that that is the end of that. Before you start writing for your online audience, you must understand what your audience needs and express it in such a way that the content is read and received very enthusiastically and with a burning desire to read more.

The basics of successful online writing

The basic writing skills that will be discussed here are essential whether you are writing for a blog, social media or your website.

Clear and concise content

It is a known fact that a very small percentage of online content is actually read. It is very important that you don’t allow your content to ramble on and on. Whatever content you do offer, it must be important enough for other people to want to actually pay attention to it.

Make sure that your content can be read

You need to make sure that your content can be read for several reasons.

• The majority of your online audience thinks in terms of tasks.
• Your audience doesn’t want you to waste time with large amounts of content. They also don’t have a great deal of time to spend with your online content.
• Don’t crowd your content too much. If you present 4 to 6 important ideas throughout your entire article, that is more than enough. You should try not to put more than one concept or idea per paragraph. Your paragraphs don’t have to be of equal length. You just need to break up the concepts and not have more than one in any given paragraph. If you do, it may be too much for your audience to absorb.
• Spread the content around. When it comes to online content, there is nothing wrong with spreading it out and making good use of white space. Of course, it also goes without saying that what you do present should be meaningful, compelling and valuable.
• Your headlines need to get to the point and grab the audience’s interest quickly and hold their interest for the duration of the article.

The value of a direct headline

It is critical to remember that you have no more than 3 seconds to grab your audience’s attention with the headline. If the language in your headline is confusing or ambiguous, you won’t succeed in holding their attention. If you can’t hold their attention beyond the headline, that will be the end of that. It is an excellent idea to go back to previous articles that you have written and look at t he headlines. Analyze what those headlines said and how they said it. The clearer and tighter your headlines are, the more positive the response will be from your audience.

Compartmentalize your content whenever possible

First of all, it is a very smart idea to use some kind of content management system. If you are, you should be organizing your content as much as possible. This is good for you and good for your readers. You can also compartmentalize the content that you find on other people’s websites and blogs. If it is valuable content in your opinion, grab it and save it in an organized manner. You will need to use it in some capacity later.

Make sure that the search engines can find you

It is very important for you to understand that if the search engines don’t pick up your content, nobody will know that you exist. You are often taught in life that it isn’t nice to “blow your own horn”; however, when it comes to online content and getting people to notice what you are offering, you need to self-promote in an effective yet subtle way.

Conclusion

When it comes to sharing your online content, make sure that you make it clear, concise compelling and educational. Your goal is to make sure that your audience members read what you are sharing, want to read more and share it with their friends. Viral is a very good thing in this particular medium. Always make sure to have your audience in mind when you are writing and when you are posting. They will appreciate it and your business will be better for it. Manage your content very carefully and make sure that it is all that it can be for everyone involved.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

You must realize how important your content marketing plan is to the success of your business. It will help you to build your brand, establish connections and eventually lead to conversions. Content marketing is critical for your business and it is important for you to understand what a mistake you will be making if you don’t take it seriously.

If you need to build a content marketing strategy, there is a simple approach that you can take, which will enable you to take your business to the next level.

Start blogging

Before you can blog (or offer any content, for that matter), you need to determine who your target audience is and to figure out how you can solve their problems. Your prospective customers and existing customers don’t care how wonderful you and your products and/or services are. All they care about is how you are going to solve their problems. If you can accomplish that, you will have succeeded at building a genuine, lasting relationship with them. It must always be about WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?).

If you think about the fact that you need to do content marketing for your business, it may seem like an insurmountable task. If you think about it in terms of one blog at a time, it will be much easier to accomplish. If you post blogs, you will be encouraging your audience to interact with you and to continue to want to read whatever you are posting. That is exactly how you build a relationship. You start to get to know each other as people and before you know it, those same people want to buy what you are selling and they will become loyal to you and your business. Remember to post blogs on a consistent and frequent basis. The more people read from you (on a reasonable schedule), the more they will come to understand what you stand for and respect will be an important part of the relationship that they share with you.

Share your content

Once you have written relevant content in your niche, you need to share it. Not only do you need to publish your content but you also need to syndicate it so that it reaches a large number of people. If you syndicate your content, it will give you an opportunity to turn some of your prospects into actual clients. The more people you reach with your content, the greater your chances of increasing your client base. You should make sure to cover all of your bases and syndicate content to the appropriate people and the appropriate groups. In many cases, your distributing your content won’t cost anything except for time and effort. It is critical, of course, that you only share relevant, valuable content.

Recycle your content

There is absolutely no reason to reinvent the wheel every time you want to publish content. There is no doubt that you have a nice amount of valuable content that you can either redistribute in the same form or update and turn into content that looks different than it did originally. You can share your content as eBooks, webinars, videos, podcasts, etc. Remember; however, not to give away the store too easily. You want to pique your audience’s interest but you don’t always want to give it away for free.

Conclusion

When you have published a particular blog, the posting will encourage discussions from your target audience. It is critical for you to jump in on the discussion once you see that people are reacting to what you have shared. The more involved the discussions are, the stronger your relationship with you target audience will be. Building a foundation with your clients and prospects will carry you very far. Make sure that your content is exciting and that it gives value and education to all who read it.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Capturing your readers’ attention

You have no more than three seconds to capture your readers’ attention. If you don’t entice them enough in three seconds to continue reading, they will move on to someone else’s content and that will be it for you. The good news; however, is that people are a lot more flexible than they used to be when it comes to their willingness to read whatever you are sharing with them. It is critical that you have a compelling and valuable story to tell. The only way that you will be able to forge a relationship with your readers is if you relate to them on an emotional level. That is where your story comes into play. Your story will communicate concepts to them about experiences that you have had in common. In fact, not only do you need to have a compelling story but you also need to tell your story in a way that captures the attention of your readers and holds it for a long time. In other words, you need to create a lasting impression.

Online marketing strategy

Your readers will respond to your story if, and only if, they can relate to it on some level. For that reason, it is essential that you put a great deal of time and effort into the writing of your story. In fact, if you aren’t getting as much reader response as you had hoped for, it very well may be because the writing is not what it should be. It is important to present your story in an honest and genuine manner; however, it is also important to make it interesting and compelling for your readers.

Avoid the hard sell at all costs

When it comes to the quality of your content, it is very important to understand how to take good content and turn it into great content that will provide you with really positive and exciting results.

The last thing that any of your readers needs or wants (nor would you) is to be given the hard sell. You need to make them understand that your purpose in sharing your content and in interacting with them is to impart at least some of your knowledge to them in order to help them solve their problem(s). The content that you share with them should focus on your customers and not on selling your products and/or services.

Exploring new content avenues

Before you share any of your content with your target audience, you need to do some homework. You need to understand as clearly as possible what your audience is all about and what they need and want from you. You can mix it up and present your content in several different ways.

Use a talented storyteller

It is critical that your brand and your offerings have a story to tell. However, the delivery of that story is also extremely important. If you feel that your story is not coming through to your readers as effectively and as interestingly as you need it to come through, find someone who can tell your story more effectively.

Use the talent within

If you are part of an organization that has several talented people at your disposal, make full use of the talent. If you can get your staff involved in writing content, you will be at least one step ahead of the game. Using this approach will serve several purposes at the same time. It will keep your content very interesting because everyone has a different “voice.” It will also make your staff become intimately acquainted with your brand and what you represent as a business. This, in effect, causes them to become brand ambassadors. Also, from a financial perspective, this approach will save you money because you won’t have to hire outside writers to write your content.

Conclusion

Good content is nice (and necessary) to have but great content brings your business to the next level. It will make a huge difference to the success that you and your business are able to achieve. It is important to realize that, when it comes to content, your priorities lie with your target audience (who will hopefully eventually become clients). First and foremost, you need to find a way to solve their problems. If you can accomplish that, you will be creating loyal customers who will stick with you and your business for a very long time. It is essential to provide value for your target audience through your content. The better the quality, the more your readers will benefit. Make sure that your presentation of content is clear, concise and leaves a lasting impression.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

If you are a business owner who doesn’t feel that welcome Emails are critical, the following points will give you food for thought.

The benefits of welcome Emails

Welcome Emails minimize bounce rates. If you send one to your online connections, there is a higher likelihood that those people will open that Email than a generic marketing Email. If you manage to show some interesting value in your Email, that will increase the number of people who open the Email even more.

Deliverability increases

It can be a very effective approach is you ask your audience to put your Email address in their address book as soon as you send them the welcome Email. This may set a precedent for future communications with them.

It allows you to express your gratitude

If someone does something nice for you and your business, you have a responsibility to thank them in some way. All human beings love and need to be appreciated for their kindnesses. If they go out of their way to be nice to you, you must express your gratitude to them. Aside from saying thank you, you can also show your gratitude by giving them some sort of discount or sending them some content that you feel will benefit them.

Welcome Emails show the importance of opting in

When a member of your target audience receives a welcome Email from you, it reminds them that they opted in with you at some point. If they opted in originally, they will be less inclined to opt out later.

Cross selling

If your offerings include selling products, your welcome Email may include suggesting other products that they may want to consider buying. You can also use this approach for the services that you sell. Interacting through social media should never be about the hard sell; however, there is no reason why you shouldn’t let them know what you have available so that they can decide on their own (without pressure) if they want to buy what you are selling.

Deepening your relationship

Communicating with a welcome Email may have a more positive effect than you realize. By sending out the Email, you are letting the person know that you want to connect with him or her personally. It is important that you make the recipient understand that you want them to contact you as well. Relationships are never one sided. Let them know that you welcome their questions and their concerns.

Developing mutual trust

When you relate to your target audience in this way, you are building a relationship that is based on trust. You need to clearly convey that the other person can count on you and that whatever problems they are having can be solved by you. You need to show them that they can trust you and that at the same time, you trust them. If you can establish that kind of relationship, your relationship will go on for a long time and be mutually beneficial.

The value of education

You want to provide the other person with information from which they can learn and, at the same time, you want them to know that you are learning from them also. The more you can give to each other, the stronger your relationship will be.

Conclusion

Sending a welcome Email is a very smart move on your part as a business owner. People love to feel that they are important. It is your job to make them feel that way. They aren’t numbers to you. They are people with whom you share a relationship and whose feeling truly matter to you. If you relate to them as one human being to another, you will both benefit tremendously.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Understanding the importance of a CMS

A CMS is a system that enables the user to edit, publish and modify content without affecting the code of the website. This is a really good thing for people who don’t have a great deal of technical knowledge. When you are having your website designed, you will tell your designer the same things that you would have told him or her otherwise. The designer would then build your website. However, in this case, your designer will build your website in the framework of the particular CMS that you have chosen together. There are several different CMSs from which to choose. Some of the more popular ones are WordPress and Joomla. Many people think of WordPress as a blogging platform; however, it has a great deal of capability and it functions well as a CMS as well. In addition to the standard CMS, you can also have a customized CMS built for your particular needs. It really depends on what you need. In a lot of cases, one of the existing systems will suit your needs just fine.

There are several good reasons for you to use a CMS. Here are some of them:

You are the one in control

In the past, when websites usually contained static content, the owner of the website would have to pay their designer to update the site periodically. Most likely, the owner didn’t know how to use code so he or she would have to pay someone else to update. Because of this limitation, many people had websites that didn’t change at all for a long time.

Nowadays, websites are not generally static. Fresh content is being introduced on a regular basis. Because of the social media revolution, website visitors expect that every time they visit a person’s website, they will be reading new and exciting content. With a CMS, it is very simple to update your website’s content as often and as much as you would like. You don’t need to have an understanding of code. You can add new original content, videos, still photographs and news at will. You don’t have to wait for anyone to do it for you. Your content can be loaded instantly or it can be scheduled.

The possibility of growth

If your company is in its infancy, your business will most likely eventually get bigger. With a CMS, you can expand as you go. Your designer can put the template in place and you can add pages and content as the need arises. You can also add a new section to your website if you feel that you want to do that. The way that you would go about adding a page is by logging into the CMS, choosing a page template from what is offered, adding a title and putting in the content. After that, all you need to do is to request that the new page appears on the website (in the main menu) so that it can be selected for viewing by your website visitors.

You won’t spend a lot of money

In addition to not having to run to your web designer every time you want a change made to your website, you will also save money by doing it yourself. If you don’t want to update it yourself, you can ask a staff member to do it. In either case, it is less expensive than paying your designer to do it.

A CMS adds functionality

On a regular basis, new apps and other tools are being offered. You should take advantage of whatever makes sense to you for your business. They will increase your functionality tremendously. It won’t take much effort on your part to install the apps and other tools but the benefits that you will get from them will be amazing.

A CMS is now considered industry standard

Most people are using a CMS. If you don’t use one, you won’t be capable of all of the things that your competition is capable of. It is difficult enough to rise above your competition. The last thing you need to do is to make it easy for them.

Conclusion

With all that technology has to offer, there is no reason why you should even consider having a static website. Even if you don’t think that you are going to update it on a very regular basis, you should still use a CMS. Once you have it in place and you start to see how useful it is, you will wonder how you ever got along without it. It is very important that you have capability and control over your content and that you are able to share exactly what you feel you want to share. A CMS is easy to use and it will give you a sense of independence for your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

The many voices of social media

Technology has a great deal to say about how we communicate with each other online. Twitter only allows tweets of 140 characters or less. The use of acronyms has gone through the roof. Acronyms are not only used in personal communications but are also used in online business interactions. The way in which people relate to each other has changed dramatically. Social media plays a significant role in how we communicate as well as the new words that are being introduced on a very regular basis. This emerging manner of communicating affects many different people and marketers are among those most affected because of how essential their communications skills are. For adults, it is easy enough to learn new terms. For younger people, the influence that online language has on them can be sensitive.

The importance of language to marketers

It is important for marketers to learn from the language evolution and glean information that will help them to advance from a business perspective. There is a strategy to be had and if marketers can recognize how to leverage it, a great deal can be gained from taking advantage of the new communication. Marketers can use the knowledge that they gain to increase business.

Reaching out and testing new waters

Marketers can start to communicate with new terminology that is quickly becoming a part of everyone’s vocabulary. With social media interactions, it is very important to stay on the cutting edge as much as possible. It is important to eventually achieve a position of influence and you will want people to regard you as such.

The ever-evolving language

When it comes to social media, so much is changing on a regular basis. That includes technology and means of communications. Not only is everything evolving but it is evolving at a very rapid pace. Having dialogues through social media can really give marketers an edge that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Just like all business people, marketers need to keep up.

Staying engaged

Using social media to bring about new ideas and new means of communication is a very effective approach for marketers to take. A lot of people who drive business are young and the evolving language is a large part of their everyday practice. If marketers are going to gain the edge, they need to speak the same language.

Conclusion

Social media will be around for a very long time. It is important to realize that you have to adapt to the evolution and keep up with all of the new technologies and language that are being offered. If you don’t, it will be like the Tower of Babel. Everyone will be speaking but nobody will be speaking a common language. Language is alive and keeping an open mind about letting new concepts and new words in to be a part of it is generally an intelligent thing to do.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

There are always ways in which you can improve your content marketing and you will find that some are more effective than others for your particular business but having the essentials from which to draw is of the utmost importance. One thing that is very important for you to understand is that if your content is marketed effectively and properly, it will yield revenue for you and your business eventually. If you are working on your content marketing and don’t feel that you are achieving the results that you would like to see yet, there are some principles to which you should pay special attention and your editorial calendar should embrace all of them.

Be well acquainted with your target audience

It is critical that your content is geared toward the needs and wants of your audience. Before you can actually make that happen, you need to clearly understand what your audience’s wants and needs are. If you reach out to them through your content and they don’t feel that your content reaches them and actually helps them to solve their problems, they won’t continue to connect with you and your business. Before you actually put together  your editorial calendar, you must understand your target audience, what their wants and needs are, and specifically what types of content suit their needs. The way that you can effectively accomplish this is by creating profiles for your clients, giving your target audience a survey to understand more  precisely what they need and want, and (possibly) speaking with Customer Service to find out what discussions they have had with customers so that you have a deeper understanding of the customers. After you have learned that information, it will be easier for you to write the content that will be met positively by your target audience. Remember that when it comes to your target audience, you should go by the marketing principle WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). In other words, no matter how wonderful you and your business are, it won’t make any difference at all if you are not able to solve the problems that your clients are experiencing.

Find the gaps in  your content and identify them

As you are building your editorial calendar, you should try to understand any and all content gaps that you may have in the year to come. It is much more effective to anticipate and plan for the gaps earlier rather than later so that you won’t  have problems getting everything accomplished by the time you are about to reach your deadline. The last thing that you want to do is to scramble to come up with content. Writing top-quality content requires a great deal of thought and hard work and it should never be done on the fly because the result most likely will not be a good one.

Build special themes in your editorial calendar

When it comes to planning your content marketing, you can plan themes for the entire year at once. You can plan to present significant topics once a month and this will give your audience something exciting to look forward to. Some of your content themes can also include holidays or other important events throughout the year. Your editorial calendar will also tie in to your advertisers (if you have any). They will also need to be privy to your editorial calendar. Having themes will make it less difficult to plan and write the content and themes will also help your guest content contributors.

Set up a publishing schedule and stick to it

There are several questions that you will need to ask yourself as you are setting up your calendar:

• What content and how often are you planning to publish?
• Specifically who will be doing the research, writing, publishing and sharing of your content?

Maintain separate calendars for separate aspects of your business

You should have one main calendar, which allows a quick overview of all of your planned content, broken down by week and by day. Your other calendars should show more details (you can think of them as microcalendars). They will allow you to easily see if you are on schedule with all of your ongoing projects. A convenient way to approach this is by putting all of your calendars into one Excel spreadsheet with separate tabs for each one. You can also try other programs that allow you to create spreadsheets easily.

Conclusion

Keeping your content organized in editorial calendars is an extremely effective tool and it will help you to keep your projects at your fingertips and to always understand the status. Editorial calendars are very simple to set up and don’t require a great deal of effort to maintain. Interestingly, it is a tool that very few businesses actually use; however, the tool is extremely effective. By creating an editorial calendar, you are laying the groundwork for your content for an entire year and you intelligent planning will allow you to spend valuable time on other aspects of your business. Your investment of time is well worth it when you consider how much you and your business will benefit.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

With all of the time and effort that you put into your content marketing strategy, it is very important that you have a clear understanding of how to measure the success of that strategy and how well you are actually doing. You should be looking at your strategy from a broad angle, with the picture in mind. Your content marketing strategy should engage your audience and increase revenue in your business.

The questions that you should ask

A great way to work a research, analytical or creative task is by starting with pertinent questions, which you have organized in a way that will work for you. The responses to the questions will serve to make you understand which parts of your strategy are working and which parts need tweaking.

• Is the information that you use in your content marketing strategy relevant? If your content solves the problems of the people whom you are trying to reach, your strategy is relevant to your business. If you have been able to reach your professional goals, your strategy is working. If you aren’t sure of the answer, you may want to look at your audience and compare them to some of your metrics, such as “likes,” website visits, retweets, referrals and conversion rate.
• Is your content marketing consistent across the board? If your content marketing is going to be successful, you will have to be consistent with how you communicate the information. Your audience needs to be able to count on a steady flow of information and the type of information must be there for them when they expect it. This is one of the ways in which you are building trust with your audience. A metric for this is how depend you are about sharing your content in order to draw prospects as well as maintaining your existing clients. It goes without saying that if you are going to succeed at being consistent, you will need to keep to a consistent schedule (an editorial calendar can help tremendously with this) and make sure that you are fully committed to your posting schedule.
• Are you able to engage your audience? If your content is exciting, informative, educational and compelling, you will succeed at engaging your audience. It is critical that you write stories about which your audience can relate. If the content touches your audience on an emotional level,  they will want to interact with you and they will continue to read whatever you are posting. Of course, your particular voice is important when it comes to writing top-quality content. It may change over time but whatever you choose as your voice should be yours and yours alone.
• Are you using your time wisely? You need to make sure that you spend your time wisely when it comes to your content marketing strategy. It is a good idea to have a process in place before you do anything. If you don’t do that, you may be faced with frustration and a great deal of wheel spinning and stress. If you are working efficiently, that means that you will succeed at delegating responsibilities effectively, choosing great topics and accomplishing everything that you want to do in a timely manner. If you find that you are having difficulty meeting your deadlines, doing a lot of things at the last minute, rewriting content a lot of the time, etc, you are most likely not using your time wisely.
• Has there been positive improvement in your level of influence? It may seem that it is difficult to measure influence; however, it really isn’t that hard. It is very possible that the actual metrics may vary over time but the presence of influence will always be there (if you work at it). Influence is a broad quality and it should be viewed over a long period of time. If you are doing a good job, you should see positive progress in your influence from month to month.
• Does your content match the goals that you have established? Your content strategy should support all of your business goals (both long- and short-term). It is important that you don’t become obsessed with meeting deadlines because it can actually impede your being able to complete the particular project that you are working on.

Implementation

Now that you have successfully asked and answered the important questions, you need to implement your strategy. There are some tips that will surely help you to do that.

• Share the responses with your staff: It is an excellent idea to share your data with your staff. The information should be in front of them at all times so that they can refer to it. It should be their bible.
• Do your own rating: You should rate your own content marketing. You can use a scale of 1 to 5 where “1” is “very satisfactory” and “5” is “very unsatisfactory.” After you have finished rating the content, you can total everything and it will be easy to see your strategy’s strengths and weaknesses. You can then tweak accordingly. You can eventually use the information to identify patterns and trends.

The importance of feedback

Feedback is critical to your business. Without feedback,  you won’t know where you need to improve. It is also extremely important that you measure your results against the results of your competitors. It is a good idea to try to identify information that is missing and information that is not relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.

Conclusion

There is no point in putting a content marketing strategy together and implementing it if you just let it go after that. You need to work it as hard as you can so that your content eventually goes viral. You need to figure out if it is working and if it is not working, you need to figure out how to make it work. In a market that is so competitive, you need to grab a hold of any information that you can to give you a leg up on your competition.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Giving your headline a facelift

If you aren’t sure how effective your LinkedIn headline is, it is definitely time to examine it closely as soon as possible. If you read your headline and you aren’t sure of its potency, it is definitely time to reevaluate. You should never discount how important LinkedIn is for your professional reputation and for your online presence. If all you have is the minimum amount of information that you could possibly have, such as your title and the name of your business, your headline needs a facelift. It is common to see that many people don’t know how to write a really effective  headline. You would be surprised at how many people have headlines that have been there for a long time and have not changed the entire time. The reason for that is because many people don’t realize that you can actually edit your headline. You have the ability to change it any way that you want.

If you don’t edit your headline, LinkedIn will pull your title and business name from your profile. There is absolutely no reason for you to allow LinkedIn to control your headline. It is yours and you should make it whatever you feel it should be. Even though you have a 120- character maximum for your headline, it has the potential to be very powerful and you can really make it sing if you want to. You have a tremendous opportunity to sell yourself with your headline if you choose to do so.

The big question is how to write a headline that really has an impact on anyone who reads it. There are several rules of thumb that you should follow if you want to really make a big splash.

Really highlight your expertise, worth or your uniqueness

If you are aiming to get people to notice your through your LinkedIn headline, whether you want to be noticed because you are searching for a new job, trying to get your business noticed, etc, the action is the same. You must make your headline tell people what makes you stand out among the crowd and you need to do it clearly, concisely and brilliantly. If you can accomplish that, people will reach out to you and you will be one step ahead.

Connect with your target audience

It is critical that you think from the perspective of your target audience. It is very important for you to speak directly to your target audience. They need to understand without a doubt that their needs and wants are very important to you. If you can address the concept of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?), you will succeed at winning your target audience over and they will become loyal to you.

Never be vague

When it comes to your LinkedIn headline, it is critical that you get noticed above your competition. The less vague you manage to be, the more positively your message will be received. You need to communicate exactly what you can do for other people. With your competition being as stiff as it is, you want to be the person who attracts the attention of your prospective clients and who gets them to give you a second (and perhaps even a third) chance.

Use powerful and effective keywords

Using effective and powerful keywords is an art form that should not be disregarded. If someone is searching for a business that offers what your business offers, you want to be the one chosen for the job. You need to put your best foot forward and leave as little to chance when it comes to getting the person to choose a business that makes them  want to spend their money.

Be as creative as possible at all times

Creativity is generally something that your target audience will remember. If it is interesting to them, it will stay with them for a long time. You need to write headlines that capture the attention of your audience and make them want to continue reading your content, including your headlines.

Conclusion

If, after you have evaluated your LinkedIn headline, you feel that you could use some serious help, click on “Edit Profile: and start editing. Come up with a headline that pops and that gets other people to notice you in a really big way. If you put your mind to it, you can totally be the one who stands out and who is not very easy to forget. Your headline is so important. Make sure that your headline is very catchy and that the language stops people dead in their tracks. Don’t waste an opportunity to really grab people with your creativity.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

In addition to making a commitment to your business and to your audience, you are also making a commitment to the blog itself. You are committing to consistently and persistently sharing valuable content with other people so that they can grow because of what you have given to them. When you first started blogging, you may not have been that comfortable. Perhaps you didn’t know what to say at first and although you might have understood the concept of how important it is to blog on a very regular (and frequent) basis, it may have felt more like a chore than a pleasure for quite a while.

There are several different rules that you should follow and if you do, you will find that your blogging efforts will pay off and you will enjoy a great deal of success.

1. Never use your blog like a personal journal

As easily as you might be able to fall into it, don’t give in to the temptation of using your blog like a personal soapbox or journal. You should use your blog as it was intended. It should be used to share top-quality, educational, informational and compelling content that helps other people to solve their problems.

2. Never, ever steal someone else’s words

People share concepts but they shouldn’t share words. The voice that you use to express your words is what makes you stand out from everyone else. What you need to do is to take the concepts and truly own them. If you do “borrow” from another writer, it is critical that you give him or her the credit that is deserved. The same thing applies to images. You should try to use images that you know don’t below to anyone else. However, if you need to use someone else’s images, make sure that you obtain permission first. Chances are very good that if you ask, the permission will be granted to you.

3. Never leave your blog unattended

There will undoubtedly be times when you don’t feel like blogging. However, remember that you have made a commitment and you must honor that commitment. It isn’t always easy to sit there and get the words to come spilling out. Sometimes, you have to work hard at getting inspired. Never forget that you are committed to making it work.

4. Always express your creativity

You should regard blogging as something extremely important for your business and, at the same time, something fun and creative and very worthwhile that truly helps others to achieve their goals and to get to where they need to be.

5. Tell stories that touch people

It is very important to humanize your blogs. If you want your readers to react on an emotional level, you need to give the story human qualities. Your blogs should contain anecdotes that are humorous and that demonstrate humanism and human qualities. You should also express what you learned as a result of whichever experience you are sharing. If you can learn from experiences, your readers can learn from them too.

6. Use graphic representation

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Of course, you need the combination of the words and the images to really work harmoniously. Many of your readers are bound to be visual people and they will definitely appreciate you helping them to visualize what you are trying to say through words and images.

7. Be open to feedback and improvement

You should definitely encourage your readers to send you feedback. Between the feedback and reading other people’s blog writing, you are are bound to improve your own writing.

8. Excite your audience by what you are writing

If you are going to be a successful blog writer, you will need to successful connect with people. If you can get inside their heads, they will want to connect with you and will want to continue to come back to you time and time again. Ask your readers questions and leave comments that stimulate them and provoke interesting thoughts in them.

9. Encourage people to interact with you

Your relationship with your readers is so important. Part of that relationship means that you need to come through for them if you make them a promise. It is very important for people to not only have a sense of belonging but to feel that whatever they are spending their time on is valuable and will make some sort of difference in their lives.

10. Build your blog audience to a comfortable number

You should encourage your online connections to subscribe to your content. There are so many helpful social media tools that can help you to achieve this with a minimum of effort. It is a very important part of becoming a successful professional blogger.

Conclusion

The art of blogging is not to be taken lightly. If you follow the commandments, you will see that positive results are yours for the taking. It is important to understand that each blog is important in its own way and that there are always pearls of wisdom that can be gleaned from them. Always focus your blog writing on being the best that it can be and on getting your point across in the clearest, most concise and most exciting way possible. As always, online interactions are all about the relationships that you work so hard on establishing and maintaining. Each and every one of those relationships are valuable and important in their own way.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

The brand has a direct connection to the clients  and you, as the business owner, are able to strengthen your relationship by building trust and credibility between you.

The way that Facebook Message works

The way that Facebook Message works is when a visitor lands on your page, that visitor clicks on the Message button, which will start the process and the conversation between the business owner and the client can begin. Interestingly, if there is to be any interaction between the business owner and the client, the client must be the one to initiate it.  Hopefully, some future iteration of Facebook Message will allow the business owner to initiate interactions with the clients also.

How will Facebook Message impact businesses?

The business owner has the ability to disable the functionality of the tool, if they choose to do so. The reason that some business owners may choose to disable the tool is that not every business has the resources to handle that type and volume of communication. However, if the business owner chooses not to enable that feature, he or she may be making fans feel like they don’t want to interact with him or her. The last impression that you want to give your fans is that you aren’t interested in what they have to say and how they feel. In fact, you should be bending over backwards to try and make sure that they feel valued and loved by you as a business owner. Lack of approachability may be the kiss of death for your business. Because social media and technology are so important when it comes to the success of your business, as a business owner, you can’t afford not to indulge. You need to be involved on a regular basis and you need to make sure that you keep up with the constantly changing technologies.

Facebook Message exposes a whole new set of opportunities for businesses, as long as the businesses are equipped with what they need in order to interact effectively with their clients and fans. Because of the fact that the fans are the only people who are able to reach out to the business owners, a great deal of the interactions are positive in nature. Many of the fans become loyal to the brand and they are often happy to share information about that brand with their friends and colleagues. A great deal of valuable information and insight can be gained from the fans, such as being able to pick out advocates for their brand, doing market research, and being able to use information that will allow them to understand exactly which direction they should take their brand and offerings based on the feedback and opinions of their fans. Another advantage is that because the people with whom the business owners are interacting are fans, they will definitely open communications when they see that they are from the business owners.

How does the business owner gather fans in the first place?

There are several possible ways in which the business owner can start to gather fans using Facebook Message.

• Use Facebook’s wall: Business owners can use the wall to encourage people to give their opinions about the business’s offerings, give their contact information, review products and/or services and offer ideas that they may have.
• An effective call-to-action: Including an effective call-to-action in the wall post will encourage the fans to share interesting information about the brand.
• After receiving the message: Once a message is received from the fan, the business owner is obligated to thank the fan in the name of their brand. Manners are critical in this situation.

What sort of strategy should you use?

Your strategy should be direct messaging to your fans, which includes your entire marketing, communications and social approach. It is very important that you don’t approach your fans only once but that you are persistent and consistent with your interactions. It is also very important to be organized when it comes to the information that you gather from your fans. You should categorize and arrange the data in a way that makes sense and that allows you to have the information at your fingertips.

Conclusion

Facebook Message is a powerful tool that will help you to get a firm hold on what you fans think and that will allow you to continue to improve upon your products and services more and more. Interacting with your fans on a regular basis will do wonders for your relationship with them and the closer you get to your fans, the more you will understand what they want and need. Facebook is very encouraging about allowing business owners and fans to communicate openly and easily. Facebook helps you to organize your communications and get the most out of the features that they offer.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

How should you respond to negative reviews?

When people like something, they can be very nice about it online. However, when people don’t like something, their words can be scathing at times. The important thing is not what they say. The important thing is what you do about what they say. The first question that comes to mind is whether you should respond at all to a really negative review. Of course, if you don’t respond, you are giving your online reviewers the fodder to think the worst. On the other hand, if you do respond but your response is not what it should be, you are running the risk of making things worse than they were before.

There are different ways that you can approach the people who have written negative reviews. The ideas will be laid out here and you can use them as is or adapt them to your particular business and hope that they work effectively for you.

The issue

Before you can even consider responding to a negative review, you need to try to identify the problem, especially if you see a pattern. If several people are saying more or less the same thing over and over again, you need to try to fix the problem before anything else. First and foremost, you need to protect your reputation. There are several reputation managements tools that can help you to identify patterns and once you have been able to accomplish that, you can begin to think about a solution.

The bottom line

No matter how negative the review was, your response must be well thought out, genuine and carefully written. It is important to remember that you represent your brand. In fact, you are your brand. With that in mind, you must protect your brand and your company’s reputation at all costs. It is very important that you pay close attention to details and that you articulate properly in your response. One of your goals is to positively affect the reviewer and you won’t achieve that if your writing is formal and impersonal. You must sincerely express your gratitude for the fact that the reviewer took the time to write to you, even if if was painful to read. Let your reviewer understand that you greatly appreciate the feedback and that you will use it to improve upon your products and/or services. It is critical that you respond to the reviewer quickly and express how important their feedback is to your business.

How to respond

If your reviewer’s subject matter in their review is concerning pricing, it is very important that your response to them is not in any way defensive, patronizing or hostile. You should communicate to them that you know that your prices are comparable to the prices of your competitors and explain why they should be choosing your products and/or services over your competitors’ products and/or services. Communicate clearly exactly what your edge is and why it will benefit them. Be careful not to knock them over the head with your sales strategy. Subtlety generally works most effectively and it is wise to employ that approach.

It is not personal

When a reviewer write the review, as difficult as it is to remember, the person has probably not written the review because of any personal feelings. If the reviewer in any way makes it personal, you will respond in a certain way. On the other hand, if the review is all about business, you will respond in a different way. Personal attacks can be very upsetting and the situation should be handled carefully. You will most likely understand how to respond based on what is being said and hopefully, you will handle the situation effectively.

Circumstances: in and out of your control

There are times when you make mistakes. It happens to everyone. If that happens, recognize the error to the reviewer, apologize for it and move on. If you don’t demonstrate a gesture of good faith, you may be damaging your reputation and that is the last thing that you need to do. For those things that are under your control, you need to tackle the problem so that it doesn’t happen again. It all goes back to reputation.

Conclusion

There is no business in the world that has never experienced some negative feedback. It is bound to happen. What is important is what you do with that information. You should regard it as a learning experience and a chance to improve your business. It is important to have a strategy in mind for when you receive the negative reviews. If you have done your homework and are prepared, you won’t have any problem. It is important for you to pay attention to what people are saying and make sure that the perception that you create of you and your business helps you to build valuable and sustaining relationships. Remember that it is usually the negative experiences that will teach you the most and that you will remember the most clearly.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

The big challenge is getting older people to spend the time and effort in social media that is required to really make a difference to their business. Before any work at all is done, you need to understand what a powerful tool is at your disposal.

Older business people may feel that they are more comfortable relying on traditional marketing. If it worked okay in the past, why mess with it now? Many business people who are involved with social media for their business know that although traditional marketing is a worthwhile form of marketing, social media marketing (working alongside traditional marketing) will bring even greater success to their businesses.

There are several different benefits to social media for business, including:

• Cost-effective: It most likely won’t cost you a lot of money to market using social media. Of course, you will be making an investment of time and effort. It is very important to understand that consistency and persistence are extremely important when it comes to sharing content with your online business connections and it is also critical that you understand that as a business owner, you must be committed to working online dia for your business on a very regular basis.People who are not so familiar with social media should start with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (and perhaps, Google+). Once he or she has become more comfortable with using those channels, others can be explored. Those channels don’t have a joining fee associated with them. However, it is recommended that the profile for the respective channels should be completed entirely. The reason for that is to allow other people online to get to know the person whose profile they are viewing. Hopefully, it will eventually lead to the establishment of a relationship that will go far into the future.
• You can measure your results: There are several effective social media analytics tools available that are also free of charge. Google Analytics is one example. You can track the number of fans (on Facebook), followers (on Twitter), shares, website visitors, and “likes” (on Facebook). You will see a direct correlation between those aspects of social media and the increased success of your business. Another good thing to do is keep a close watch online on the keywords that are connected with a particular business or brand. What you will want to pay attention to is every time the brand is mentioned (by anyone). This will convince you that social media holds a great deal of value and is an extremely useful marketing tool.
• You need to jump on the bandwagon: Because so many people have started to use social media for their businesses, it is important that you (no matter what your age and level of experience) join in as well. Having an online presence for your business is critical to the success of your business, whether you realize it or not. If you aren’t engaging, you are missing out on a large opportunity to bring your business to the next level. On the other side, your business may not be looked upon favorably if you don’t join in since everyone else is using it and interacting. Your competitors (whether they are younger or older) are using social media and if you want to stay in the race, you need to use it also.
• Your results will increase over time: If you have been in business for a long time, you may not fully understand the power that social media holds when it comes to your business. This is a different world than it was many years ago and the way in which people communicate now is different. They are used to communicating online, where everything is easy, far-reaching and thought-provoking. In the days gone by, your professional network was as extensive as you could grow it. Nowadays, there is no limit to how large and extensive your network can become.

Conclusion

As an older business person, if you are not used to conducting business using online tools, it doesn’t mean that you won’t find it useful if you do get involved. You have nothing to lose by trying. You shouldn’t let the fact that you don’t understand it yet get in the way of applying it to your business. There is no reason why you can’t learn to work social media efficiently and have fun with it at the same time. In most cases, social media is very easy to learn and use and you may very well get a great deal out of it personally as well as reaping the many benefits for your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Sharing your story online

There are many different ways to share your brand’s story online. Content is definitely king and it is through well-written, top-quality content that you can really make your audience members be drawn to your brand and the story behind it. Of course, the first thing that you must do when it comes to your brand is to have a story that is expressed in the most effective way possible. There are several steps that you should follow in order to build your story. Your story will be a combination of details and facts and what distinguishes one story from another is the way in which the story is actually expressed.

Start with the pioneers

The person who founded the company, whether that is you or it was someone else, is where you should go first to gather facts and details. That person would be the one to have lived through the experience. It is essential that you record as many accurate facts as you can get a hold of and details are critical the story.

It can be somewhat subjective when it comes to identifying the source of the heart of the story. There are those people who believe that the true story comes from the clients and the people who have pushed the brand in a loyal fashion from the beginning and not the business itself. To a great extent, the clients own the brand. With the extreme use of social media, it is easier than ever for this to be the case. If the clients react positively to your brand and your offerings, your business will be successful. On the other hand, if the clients are not behind your brand, you will have a more difficult time of achieving business success.

If you want to learn about what your clients and brand advocates are saying about your offerings, you can use monitoring tools to collect data so that you will get a sense of how well received your products and/or services are. Two of the more popular and really effective tools for “listening” to your customers’ discussions are Google Alerts and Twitter’s Advanced Search. Those tools don’t cost anything and they work very well. Collecting the data should give you a great sense of how your clients are feeling. Another effective way to gather important data is to give your clients a short survey to complete online. You can ask questions that really provide you with valuable information.

Collecting different perspectives

Gathering perspectives from several different people can be extremely valuable. Sometimes, the perspective of the person who has been with the company for a very short time is as valuable as that of the person who has been with the company from its inception. You can really learn a great deal from many different people. It isn’t a bad idea at all to gather information from people in various departments of the company. The chances are very good that they can offer you all sorts of insight. Another great way to gather data is by searching through archives that the company keeps.

Ask the right questions

As you are gathering information, it is important to come up with the questions that will help you to gather the most relevant information for your business. The following are examples of the types of questions that you may want to consider asking:

• What are the major differences between the company now and when you first started working there?
• What makes a brand stand out?
• Why do you love to work at the company?
• How do you explain what you do?
• If you had an opportunity to lead a marketing effort, what would you do?
• How would you guide sales?
• Who are your customers and potential customers?

Conclusion

As you are figuring out how to craft your brand’s story, it is critical that you make it compelling and enticing. Of course, it must also be written extremely well it you should make sure that the language is clear and concise, whenever possible. However, it is also very important to understand that your work is not finished once you have created the original story. You will have to tweak the story along the way and continue to improve upon what you have so that it is always relevant to your audience. After all, you must always keep them interested.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

The next concern that you have is how to get your Email recipients to click on your links and for a positive result to occur as a result of what you are sharing with them. If done appropriately, Emails can be a wonderful and extremely effective tool when it comes to engaging your target audience. It is extremely important to understand exactly why you are sharing the particular links that you are sharing. It should never be done inadvertently. The links that you post in your Emails will truly be a driving force when it comes to attracting increased quality traffic to your business. With that said, being able to identify what works the best and what doesn’t work is critical to the success of your business. There really is a science behind your links and which types will entice people to open them and to perform some sort of action.

The many different types of links to include in your Emails

Call-to-action: Your principle call-to-action is one of the most critical links that you can possibly put in your Email. It will tell your audience members clearly what you want them to do and they will understand what they will receive in return for going to the next step and interacting with you on a deeper level. Your requests to your Email recipients may be downloading your Ebook, signing up for your monthly newsletter or registering for an event that you are either hosting or actually conducting.

Links to other social media channels: This type of link allows your target audience to share your links with other people with whom they share social media channels. If they feel connected to your business and want to tell other people about what you are doing, this is an excellent way to do it. Generally speaking, people are willing to share information about businesses that they feel have something valuable to contribute. Inserting a link into your Email will really allow you to broaden your reach and people will generally find your content valuable, educational and worth sharing.

Following links to social media channels: If a person wishes to follow your business and your branding, they can click on one of these links via a variety of social media channels. If your Email recipients like the information in the Emails that you have sent to them, they may very well be willing to receive additional information from you and the relationship will start to deepen. When this happens, they will potentially connect with you through channels such as Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Insert a “P.S.” into your Email with a link: This can be a very powerful approach because your readers will notice the link immediately. It is an excellent idea to put a call-to-action link in your P.S. since you really want people to click on that particular link and to follow through with some sort of action.

Insert a link to your logo: If you have a brand and you have a business, you should definitely put a logo link in your Email. This is important for your audience members so that they understand clearly what your business is all about. Your logo link should always appear in a prominent place in your Email so that it is seen easily.

Plain text: You should have the capability of creating a plain-text version of your Email in addition to the html Email. The plain-text version will remove all images and coding and your Email recipients will only have to deal with text. That is simpler for your recipients in a lot of cases. With regard to the clickable links in plain text, you need to type out the whole URL for it to function properly.

Conclusion

If you put links in your Emails, you are doing so because you want your Email recipients to follow through with something and interact with you in an active way. The quality of the links in your Email is just as important as the links themselves. It is critical that you test the links before you send any Emails so that you know that they are high quality and that they lead your target audience to even more valuable information. It is very important to remember how important it is to insert high-quality clickable links that will help your target audience.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Transparency is critical

You owe it to your online business connections to be transparent with what your policies are and how they will affect them if they decide to interact with you in business in some way. It is also extremely important that you notify your online connections of important information as it occurs (and if, of course, it is relevant) and that you offer them a way to opt-out if they should choose to do that.

The following are important points to emphasize in your privacy policy, if you haven’t covered them already:

• When giving notice: When notifying your connections (that includes prospective and already-existing clients) about how you will be gathering and using information about them, you must be very clear, comprehensible and transparent. There should be nothing left to doubt in their minds. You should be sure to tell them who you intend to share their information with and ensure that they can get in touch with you easily, if they would like to do that.
• Your customers have a choice: It is extremely important that you understand that your online connections have a choice when it comes to sharing their information and that it is perfectly acceptable if they choose not to do so. It is possible that they may not be comfortable with your sharing their information with third parties and/or used in a way that is not synergistic with the way in which the content was originally supposed to be used. This is where your online connections may choose to opt-out.
• The integrity of the data: It is critical that your data is clean (always). It is clean, that means that it is complete, up-to-date, dependable and accurate.
• The importance of compliance: It is important for you to make your online connections understand that you are being consistently compliant with all of the regulations and laws that protect people and businesses. You also need to communicate clearly that will respect every person who does not wish to be contacted and that your privacy policy includes that and does not deviate from it. It is a regular part of your practice.
• Keeping your online connections secure: It is critical that you take all necessary measures to guard against misconduct in the form of misuse of the data of your online connections, use without permission, altering the data in any way, disclosing the information, or destroying the information.

Having a privacy policy that protects your online connections has many advantages in addition to the ones that have been mentioned here already. First of all, it adds to an improved electronic environment on the Web and it protects everyone who has any business to the Internet. You are creating a transparent environment that gives people a sense of confidence, security and trust. It takes away some of the stress that may be present otherwise. As technology advances, privacy policies are being revised to fit the technical environment. What might have applied some time ago may no longer be relevant at this point.

Reviewing current privacy practices

Assuming that you already have policy practice in place, you should take a long, hard look at it to determine if it is relevant as is or if it needs to be revised. You should be able to determine what needs to be done quite easily. It is also possible that the laws that existed when you wrote the policy have either changed or new (and more relevant) laws may now be in effect. In any case, it bears close, periodic examination to make sure that you are always up to date.

Conclusion

Your privacy policy is critical to the success of your business. Make sure that your policy truly applies to your business and make sure that your online connections are comfortable with what you need from them. If you work together and everyone agrees, you will be able to go the distance with your business and success will be yours.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

If you own a business, you most likely have a content strategy, which consists of planning, developing, delivering and managing your content online. If your strategy has been build and executed well, it will be instrumental in achieving your business goals by sharing your content on a broader basis and bringing more Internet traffic to your business. There is a correct way to present your content and an incorrect way to do it. The following are what you should do for increased success:

• Write a great teaser paragraph: Your introductory (or teaser) paragraph must really grab the reader quickly (you only have 3 seconds). It needs to attract readers enough to read the entire article that you are sharing with them. Your introductory paragraph should be a quick summary of the entire article so that you are giving your readers enough of a taste that makes them want to go for the details. Using a quote or humor are both good tricks and may serve you well.
• Putting all of your eggs in one basket: Of course, first and foremost, your content must be of the highest quality and must entice the readers into wanting to keep reading and interacting. That is the basic principle. The search engines react favorably to high-quality content and react unfavorably to poorly written content. The quality of your content will make a huge difference in your business’s success through social media. You should also seriously consider inserting top-quality links and interacting as much as possible with your online audience.
• Choose your audience carefully: When you write content, you need to make sure that you are very certain of who your target audience is and what they need from you. It is critical to know your target audience so that you can focus your content around their needs and wants. Of course, this will also affect how high you appear on the search engine pages. Additionally, other websites will be able to find you easily and will include links to your website in their website. Of course, that will result in increased traffic. Based on all of the wonderful benefits that you will get from this, it is worth doing your homework so that your content is exactly what it should before your target audience.
• Make sure that you content is of the best quality possible: If the quality of your content is not what it should be, people won’t continue to read it. Instead, they will choose to read the content of your competitors. Your content should be consistently clear, concise and well-written. Make sure that it never has the flavor of being sales copy. Instead, it should be content that is pleasant for your audience to read and it should cause them to react emotionally. If you cannot succeed at touching them on a human level, you will never succeed at selling them anything.
• You should try to avoid publishing your content on sites that profit from other people’s high-quality content: Those websites may help you to gain exposure for your business and your content; however, it is actually the wrong sort of publicity for you and your business. Those types of sites are not generally discriminating about the quality of the content that they share with other people. You won’t gain a better reputation by going that route. It is better for you to post on your own blog or website. It comes down to a question of integrity.
• Make your content as appealing as possible: Your content should be as enticing as you can possibly make it. If images are necessary, you should use them. However, if your writing is compelling enough, you should also be able to succeed at creating wonderful images with the words that you use. Additionally, using videos is very often effective and captures the interest of many different people.

Conclusion

The content itself as well as the quality of the content are both critical to the success of your business online. It is extremely important that you remain cognizant of what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. It is your content that is going to draw people to your website and you need to make sure that it is compelling, exciting, enticing and educational. Your content should always be fresh. You should constantly be coming up with new ideas and new ways of presenting topics so that your audience remains engaged.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

As you post more and more blogs, you see that the relationship that you have started to develop with your online connections is becoming deeper and more meaningful. One of the more significant results that occur from blogging is that you are building trustworthiness and credibility. In fact, the better the quality of your content, the more attention you will get and the better your professional reputation will be. People will start to believe in your knowledge and the next time that they need help with a problem that involves issues about which you are knowledgeable, you will be the first person whom they think about contacting. Of course, it isn’t always so easy to keep the creative juices flowing when it comes to a steady stream of fresh content on relevant subjects. However, there are several different approaches that you can use to make it as painless as possible.

Make sure that your reader is your main focus

When you sit down to write your blog, make sure that you have your readers in mind. It is critical that you keep in mind that your objective is to solve your reader’s problems. It is very important for you to try to think from their perspective. It will help you if you can come up with the types of questions that they would want to ask you. At the very least, that should be your starting point. From there, you can draw on your own experience and you will see that the content will start to flow from there. You will want to make sure that the blog content that you share helps your readers and that the language is clear and concise. The simpler you keep it, the more effective it will be. The reason that your readers are drawn to you is because they believe that you have the answer to their problems. That is precisely why you need to be as clear and straightforward as you possibly can. Speak to them in a language that they understand and they will respond positively to what you are communicating.

Listen to the experts

Your readers will most definitely respond to you in a positive way if you offer them advice and tips that they can use right away. It is important that your readers have learned something every time they are finished reading one of your blog articles. Remember that it is important to address their needs and wants at all times and you should try to apply your own experience whenever possible to the information that you are sharing with them and which you feel will help them in some way. If you don’t have the self-confidence that you would like when it comes to a particular subject, seek out other people who you deem to be experts and influencers in that particular niche and get as much valuable information from them as you possibly can. You don’t necessarily need to speak with them directly. You can read what they are writing and undoubtedly, there will be a wealth of incredible nuggets of information that will be at your fingertips. If those experts offer tips and advice, make sure that you share the information in your blog with your readers. Drawing information from the experts will not only be valuable to your readers but it will also provide a unique perspective with your readers will just eat up.

Diversify

It goes without saying that you should concentrate initially on your particular area of expertise. However, it is also very important to identify a niche for your blog so that people can really begin to connect you with that niche. Your goal is to get them to have you in the forefront of their minds when they need to discuss that particular topic. The last thing that you want to do is to continue to concentrate on a very limited number of topics. The more well rounded you become, the more valuable you will be to other people. A great way to become knowledgeable outside of your original niche is to read as much as you can from other people’s blogs (and other types of content). The more you diversify the more ability you will have to come up with new, fresh and innovative blog ideas.

Never use the hard sell

It is an established fact that nobody wants to be “sold.” The reason that people read your content is so that they can become just a little more knowledgeable. People love to learn and you have something to teach them. Together, you are a perfect match. Everyone understands that, as a business owner, your ultimate goal is to get people to buy what you are selling. However, it is truly all in the approach. If you communicate interesting pieces of information that will help other people grow and develop, you will eventually be in a position where they will want to buy from you. However, it is very important to remember that it takes a great deal of effort to bring the relationship to that point.

Conclusion

As a business owner, blogging is an extremely powerful and effective way that you can reach many people on a very meaningful level. One of your biggest challenges as a blog writer is to come up with fresh, top-quality content on a very regular basis. What you say and how you say it are both very important and they may both require a great deal of thought at times. Your inspiration can come from many different places. Make sure that you tap all of the possible resources that you can.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

From the angle of objectivity

Interestingly, the success of social media (which includes blogs) is based on successful relationships. Of course, Successful relationships can’t exist without an emotional connection. This seems contradictory to objectivity. However, it is not actually impossible to affect a reader emotionally and still not surrender your objectivity as a writer. If you write your story effectively enough, you will succeed at touching your readers on a level that makes them feel something. Journalism should never be so objective that it totally loses its humanism. Otherwise, you may as well consider the writing a report rather than a story.

The right to write

Nowadays, you don’t have to be an established journalist (or any other type of writer) to be able to write, publish and share your content. The idea that the public is willing to read what other people write no matter what they happen to do for a living is extremely widespread. People are much more accepting than they ever were before. Of course, there are many different levels of involvement with which “regular” people can become engaged. In fact, there are many times when a blog writer is more accepted and his work is taken seriously more readily than a journalist’s writing. The blog writer is often regarded as one of the people and the readers can relate more easily to what he or she is writing, thinking and feeling.

Acquiring the cutting edge

In all writing (blogging and journalism), you would never want to write about old news. If you do that, people won’t have any interest in reading your content because it doesn’t interest them anymore. However, bloggers and journalists both need to grab the story before anyone else has a chance to get there. When it comes to the structure of your writing, you need to answer a series of questions on any given topic. You need to answer what, where, who, how and why. If you can cover all of those on a cutting edge topic, you will succeed at getting your readers to read what you are publishing. Of course, in your great effort to get there more quickly than someone else, you also need to make sure that your content is accurate and precise. Fact checking must be a part of what you are doing.

Different types of writing

There is no question that blog content and journalistic content are not exactly the same thing. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t both possess their own form of integrity. For one, bloggers are able to accomplish a great deal (research, writing, etc) from the comfort of their own desk whereas journalists need to be physically in the middle of whatever they are writing about. That is just the nature of what they do and the extent to which they need to be taken seriously.

Blogging that leads to journalism

There are many people who believe that blogging is a stepping stone to journalism. There is possibly something to that theory, however, it is not always the case. If someone has never written before and he or she gets started by writing blogs, the skills that are needed to be a professional journalist can be acquired that way. However, blog writing and journalistic writing are definitely not one and the same. Being a journalist and the approach to writing at times requires a very different skill set.

Conclusion

Bloggers and journalists each hold a tremendous amount of value and their contributions are vast. Of course, they are not interchangeable and it is important to be able to take what you can from each and apply it to your content in an appropriate way that will help to improve the content that you are sharing with your readers.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Content will always be necessary to the success of your business. It is how you communicate on every possible level with other people. Great ideas are essential to your success but, at the same time, you need the words to execute the ideas that you have created. Of course, you are an extremely busy person and you may think that you couldn’t possibly spare the time time to write content. After all, content writing isn’t usually something you can merely spit onto the page. It probably requires a lot of thought and a lot of personal effort. Additionally, you need new content all of the time. It will never be enough for you to write one or two articles and leave it at that. You will need to post new, fresh content on a regular basis and keep posting fresh content on a regular basis. If you need to write all of that new content, when will you have any time to do any of your other work? Well, that is where the recycled content comes into play.

Recycling different types of content

There are many different types of content that you can recycle. There is content that you wrote once upon a time. There is also content that other people have written and, as long as you attribute the content to the correct person, you will absolutely be allowed to use it. There will be some editing involved and very possibly some rewriting; however, you won’t need to reinvent the wheel every time  you wish to post content on your website or blog. Using recycled content can be an important part of your content strategy and not only will it save you time and effort but it will also save you money, which is always a good thing. You can collect content from a bunch of different places, some of which may be obvious to you and some that you may not have thought of before.

Content from and offline source

You should start with your own materials. Over time, you probably accumulated a great deal of content (online as well as print materials) that you can easily recycle and most likely the content has a lot of value, provided that it is not dated material. Even if you aren’t able to use it in its original form, with a little bit of revising and tweaking,  you can probably use it and feel satisfied that you have given it a fresh twist that will appeal to your readers. It may be as simple as plugging in new sales statistics to your sales materials, for example. Another possibility is a promotional video that your public relations department uses. It may take a small amount of tweaking but it will undoubtedly be useful for you and your new purposes.

Clients

Undoubtedly, you have had a great deal of interaction with your clients over the years and there is a wealth of material there that will be extremely useful for your business. Testimonials are excellent forms of communication to use as recycled material. They are always positive and they will never go out of date. You may not realize  yet how helpful your clients can be when it comes to making the best use of recycled materials. Of course, you need to make sure that either you or someone you trust reviews all of the materials before you actually use it. Of course, that applies to all materials in all businesses.

Customer service

Your customer service department has the most direct relationship with your clients. Because of that, they have tremendous capacity to help you with content. Because they have developed relationships with your clients, they have a deep understanding of what they need and want and what you need to do to keep them satisfied. It is a great idea to take interactions that your clients have had with your customer services department and turn it into a Question-and-Answer document, which you can include in your recycled content.

A repository of archived content

You should take a good look at what you have in the way of potentially recyclable materials and create a repository so that you can draw from it as you need the content.  You can organize it in a way that makes sense and is easy to gather as you need it. You will be surprised at how much valuable information you have at your disposal.

Conclusion

You have a wealth of content and tremendous capability of wowing your readers with new and recycled content. You can use newsletters that you have written previously, blog articles, white papers, and other written materials. If they had merit the first time around, they will be just as interesting the second time around. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should be recycling older content exclusively. You need to offer both new and recycled content in correct proportions. It just takes a little bit of creativity, ingenuity, and hard work and it will help you to bring your business success to the next level.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Creativity is not always an easy thing to tap. It would be great if you could come up with new and exciting content every time you sat down to write; however, unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. If you are like many business owners today, writing content is not the only thing that you have to do all day. You are most likely busy running your business (although creating content is an important part of your business’s success) and unfortunately, writing is not always at the very top of your priority list.

If you have been writing content for a while, the chances are very good that you have accumulated quite a bit of it. If you do plan on eventually recycling your content, it is a good idea to follow a few rules when you are initially writing the content. First of all, try to avoid writing articles that are time-sensitive. If you do write time-sensitive articles, you will be restricting when you can post them, depending on what the exact time context happens to be. It is important to remember that valuable content comes from many places and your ideas will not necessarily become out of date quickly. You should bear that in mind when you start to write. Another thing to avoid when you are writing your content is a lot of statistics. The problem with that is that the numbers may change (depending on what the numbers represent, they may change quickly or they may change slowly but they will change). If you do plan on recycling content, there are several different approaches that you can take:

Start with your own content

The first place that you will want to go is into your own archives of content. You can draw content from your printed materials, brochures, flyers, white papers, graphics, etc. Remember, of course, to review the material that you are planning to recycle before you actually post it anywhere. You want to do this so that you ensure that everything is up to date. You certainly don’t want to have any content posted that has errors or inaccuracies. That will make you look like you weren’t paying attention. If you don’t feel like you can use your content as is, you need to figure out exactly how to repackage them so that they get the most attention from your audience members.

Work the customer service angle

Whether you want to admit it or not, customer service is an extremely important part of business. If you are trying to come up with interesting content that you feel your audience will appreciate, having an in with customer service is an excellent idea. You would be surprised at how much interesting information you can write about as a result of your customer service interactions. You should incorporate the customer service perspective into your overall content strategy. You can present the information as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), bullet points (people love to read valuable nuggets of information that they will remember), blog articles, etc.

Consider the customer

Potentially, there is a wealth of possible content that originated with your clients. You can use information from letters, comments that you clients have left on articles that you posted, and testimonials. A great way to generate the information from your clients is to ask them questions. You will find that there is a willingness to respond and you may come across some gems. It is a very good idea to encourage your clients to communicate with you on a regular basis. You can draw ideas from their communications.

Really examine your content

It is critical to your business’s success that you take a very close look at  your content and figure out how to use it most effectively. Try to see your data from several different perspectives (if at all possible). You never know what exciting and creative ideas you may be able to come up with and interestingly, you may not even realize what a wealth of information you have at your fingertips.

Do the research

A wonderful way to gather information that you can use and use again is by doing extensive research. The research will reveal all sorts of interesting things, such as pairing products and/or services with different people, getting to really understand people’s needs and wants and figuring out how to solve their problems most effectively, and looking at new ways to present ideas.

Conclusion

Recycling content is an extremely valuable and sensible thing to do when it comes to your business. With that said, however, you must remember that recycling content doesn’t mean that you use it over and over again verbatim. An advantage to recycling is that you are constantly calling on your creativity and you do less work and get more results. It is important to try to look at it with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective each time that you consider posting it again.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.