Posts Tagged ‘online marketing’

Does this sound familiar? You’ve read the books, blogs like this one and attended the webinars/conferences. You get it. Online content is important. You understand we are entering a huge shift in marketing and promotion going from product pushers to trusted resources and that drive, creativity and passion count more than a big budget, especially with all the amazing tools available online.

Trusted resources like you create valuable, interesting, educational and/or entertaining content.

This might be in the form of a blog, web show, online magazine, webinar series, ebook and the list goes on.

So, you decide to hop on the content train for your business either by creating or curating the best content in your niche.

But it isn’t spreading. Nobody is commenting. Nothing is really happening. You start to get nervous. “Is this worth it?” you begin to ask yourself.

Why isn’t it spreading? Sort of like looking in the mirror and saying, “Is it me or is it you?”

Normally there isn’t just one answer and it isn’t black and white. Some things directly matter and others go a little bit deeper with more abstract, yet equally important ideas like trust and authority. But, everything adds up.

Here are a few reasons why your content is lonely and how to get back on the right track with a few hundred or thousand friends:

1. Bad Web Design

If you website looks stuck in 1997 with a construction guy digging and music playing or like a run of the mill template, there is a lack of credibility and trust. Do you share content from sites that you don’t trust?

I wish it wasn’t true, but looks matter. Think about first impressions. It is worth investing in a site that is functional and reflects your personality and brand.

2. Lacking Ease Of Sharing

The best content is like peanut butter, easily spreadable. Easily spreadable doesn’t mean that it takes a scholar to find how to share easily via social networks, email, etc.

Enabling your community, no matter how big or small to share with ease can make a huge difference.

Do you have one click sharing?

3. Product Focused Content

The best content isn’t about your product. The harsh reality is nobody cares about any of our products. People do care about interests, passions, hobbies, solving their problems, getting answer to key questions, learning etc.

For example, let’s pretend you sell dog food. A mistake is to make the content about the food. Meaning features and benefits.

The fix here is to focus on an interest or passion. People aren’t passionate about dog food. Instead, I bet there are plenty of people passionate about dogs. Training dogs, dog health, etc. A better play is for the content to focus on the bigger picture and not just the product.

4. Not-You Focused Content

Injecting personality, passion and quirks into your content? Always a good thing. Making it about you and how amazing you are. Yikes.

Make it about them, not you. It will do better. Trust me.

5. Lack Of Passion

If you aren’t passionate about your content, it will show and will hinder progress. Nobody spreads half-baked material. If you can’t get excited and pumped up about your content, how can you expect anyone else to be?

6. Unclear, Boring Or Ridiculously Long Titles

I get it. Don’t judge a book by its cover or a piece of content by its title. Fair enough. However, the reality of the matter is titles matter, a lot. They matter for search engines and humans. When you have 50 titles in front of you, which ones jump out? Why?

Spending time on titles is worth the time.

7. Oops, I Forgot My Marketing

We have all fell into this trap. You spend all the time creating the content and posting it and then no time is left topromote it. You can have the greatest content in the world, but if you don’t spend time marketing and promoting it, then it will be the loneliest, saddest, greatest most useful content in the world.

My recommendation, especially when getting rolling is to spend 80% of total “content time” marketing and promoting.

This means creating one-on-one connections on social media sites, expanding your network, digital schmoozing, perhaps hosting an event or meet up. Often the best online marketing happens offline.   Content plus connections equals success. You have to give to get.

One bonus fun fact: Time. Trust, influence, authority and community isn’t built with just one post or overnight. It takes blood, sweat and tears.  While the opportunity to create has been democratized, that means you have to work hard to stick out. Keep at it, experiment, refine brick by brick, click by click, over time you might be the ruler of the next content empire.

What has been your experience? What would you add to the list?

This was a guest post by David Siteman Garland. Garland is the Founder of The Rise To The Top, The #1 Non-Boring Resource For Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, Cheaper.

Information Super Highway Search Strategies

1. business use blogs thinking that they will gain numerous subscribers. They assume that their blogs are going to attract many visitors who will comment and subscribe (or RSS) to their blogs, this does not happen often. Most people do not subscribe to any blogs. The chances of your blog aquiring many repeating visitors and subscriptions are extremely slim. It\’s possible, but not probable and should not be the main goal.

You can drive traffic through your blog in three main ways; through:

1. Direct traffic, which can be obtained by people who are subscribing, typing your url and/or navigating directly to your blog.
2. Referring sites, or when people link to your blog because they enjoy your material.
3. Search, the largest area of success, which occurs when someone finds your blog through the use of a search engine.

As a marketer, you need to consider what aspect of this we can really control.
Direct navigation and referring sites cannot be controlled.
You can write great content and hope that people navigate to it, subscribe, and link to you, but you cannot make it happen. Search, on the other hand, is directly under your control.
There are rules that have to do with content, volume, and specificity that you can use to allow you to make your search results expand.

• Titles
  The most important piece of writing you\’ll do on any given page is your title page.
  Search engines consider your page title to be very indicative of what can be found on your page.
  Avoid weak, journalistic titles and focus on the keyword phrase that you are trying to target.
  Have many blogs, all specifically titled to the right keyword phrase.
  You stand a much better chance of explaining to the search engines and the searcher what this page is about.

  For example, http://www.lydiasuniforms.com/ has about 50 blogs that target specific keywords around people who are shopping for uniforms.
  If you search for \”stylish medical scrubs\” they are the first organic result and you observe the title is identical to your search \”stylish medical scrubs\”.
  By titling your blog with the keywords you are targeting, your chances of ranking high are multiplied.

• Keywords
  Think about the words people might use to find you and write those words in your copy; you willll get more traffic and more leads, but most importantly, more sales.
  Think about what people will type inn their search engines and talk about that.
  You should aim most of your focus to what is in the mind of the customers and how you should be using it to promote your blog.

  Let\’s use the term \”toaster\” as an example.
  The aim of buying a new toster has resulted to 3 million online searches a month.
  There are 200 different terms: anything from chrome toaster to antique toaster, and if you want to be the toaster expert and drive the traffic you need, use those terms.
  Only 200 different terms drive 3 million searches.

• Keyword ratios
  Experts agree that the keywords should be found in 7-10% of the information.
  As you are writing your content, you want to make sure you are not just stuffing keywords.
  The trick is to write keywords and still produce information that makes sense.
• Recency/Frequency
  New blogs should be posted as often as possible.
  In a blog, there is no such thing as too much content.
  Take into consideration that 80-95% of blog visitors are first time visitors.
  First time visitors will not know what you have posted in previous occasions, they will only see your recent posts.
  Also, the less competitive terms you are marketing, the less you have to write.
  However, if you are competing with 200,000-2 million pages, you should write everyday.
  Some organizations have their employees assist them in posting blogs daily.
  With the assistance of employees, online marketing goals can be reached.
• Links
  It has been proven that people are a lot more likely to link to a blog that they are to a website.
  Website are impersonal. Blogs, on the other hand, tell stories, share ideas, and seem more human.
  Linking is not as crucial as it used to be, but when linking you must be aware to who you are linking to and who is linking to you.  If you are linking to spammers or spammers are linking to you, search engines are going to associate you with those bad sites. Creating good content is the best way to get links.
• Blog volume
  The ideal situation would be to have as many blogs as you can manage with as much content that you can post to attract more traffic.
• Relevance
  http://www.brownies.com/ has a catalog and an online business store.
  They have created about 50 blogs, all with different titles such as Chocolate Brownie, Mail Order Brownie, etc.
  This company has their employees enter content about quality, shipping, customer reactions, post images of their warehouses, and more.
  This allows the blog to achieve high ratings in searches.
  The company receives several comments from customers, who are asked by employees to post their experiences and submit content.
  You should be familiar with the people you make business with, and that can be accomplished through blogging.
  Many people believe that if they were to host a social network, people would come.
  Therefore, if they were to build a blog, they will get comments, subscribers, and regular visitors.
  This, however, is false and is not likely to occur.
  Although, if you provide customers with happy, pleasant experiences and encourage them to visit and comment your blogs, they will assist in providing you with good content.