I was reading the annual Content Marketing Spending Survey by Junta42 and was surprised that the list of content products users plan to take advantage of has Enewsletters and Blogs at a dead heat for second place. If you hadn’t guessed, first place is occupied by ‘Social Media’ including Twitter and Facebook.
The report surveyed 259 marketing professionals and asked them where they plan to spend their time and money in the coming year. A full 72 percent mentioned social networks as part of their marketing plans. Importantly, social networking was the number one position for marketers. Online newsletters and blogs are listed as second, with 63 percent saying they are engaged with these types of marketing tools. Another interesting result of the survey is that the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh positions of the report were strictly content, in the form of white papers, articles, case studies and online video.
The reason I was surprised that newsletters and blogs are tied for second is that blogs can be used as a newsletter, effectively killing two birds with one stone. I think it is both important and telling, too, that the positions just below ‘Blog’ are specifically content, all of which can be distributed via a blog (supporting my long-time stance that a blog is the foundation of any online marketing campaign).
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There’s no doubt that a newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your audience, and there are certainly reasons to use a newsletter. However if you are already a blogger, you may not have known that you are already on the way to hosting an newsletter. There are two ways to deal with this, and both help you leverage the concept of a newsletter or broadcast to deliver your blog content to your audience, and to attract them back to your site for more information.
The first way is probably already built into your blog, especially if you are using a ListPipe solution, or the popular Wordpress software. It’s called ‘RSS’, and it’s a built-in way for people to subscribe to your content. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication‘, and it’s a web standard that most browsers support automatically. When a visitor comes to your site they have an ability to subscribe to your RSS feed, and can receive content from you in their own browsers every time they post.
If you are using a ListPipe or Wordpress solution for your blog, simply type the word ‘/feed’ after your URL in your browser, and you’ll be asked to subscribe. Using this simple technique will allow you, and your readers, to receive an automatic update whenever you post new content.
Another way to deliver your blog content to your readers is to use a subscription service such a Google’s Feedburner. Feedburner is a free blog service that offers a subscription management tool. All you have to do is start a Google Feedburner account, and then direct people to your Feedburner subscription form to capture their email address. Whenever you post content to your blog, Feedburner will automatically email your readers with your article right in the email.
With Feedburner you also have a number of tools that allow you to manage your subscribers including adding and deleting them. Don’t worry about the management headache; Feedburner handles unsubscribes for you with a handy link at the bottom of every email they send on your behalf.
So if you are a blogger already, you are already ahead of the crowd when it comes to delivering an newsletter, you just need to make a few adjustments and let your readers know.
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As we move into the second month of the year and our New Year’s Resolutions begin to fade into our busy schedules and habitual routines, it may be time for a quick reminder to keep it up!
Marketing online is a relentless pursuit, and even the tiniest of breaks can literally break the chain.
In particular, when blogging you risk loosing the attention of the search engines if you stop posting great content on a regular schedule. Your social networks, too, depend on your constant attention in order to maintain a top-of-mind presence in the minds of your followers.
In my experience, most bloggers start off with strong intentions and then begin to wear out after three to four weeks of posting. Now is the time to pull ahead of the crowd and reinvigorate your online efforts. Here’s a few quick tips to keep your blog alive and your networks growing:
1. Create a schedule for yourself. Make a note in your calendar and set aside a specific time to organize, write and post to your blog. Also, make sure to set aside a specific time each day to check in on your social networks and to repost a few items. Set a calendar reminder and stick to it.
2. Organize your effort. Posting to a blog is a complex task and requires at least a little bit of planning for even the best of us. Take a moment to establish a plan for your weekly posting routine. Identify a process that suits you and practice following the steps each week. For instance; set a timeline, and make a list of items to check off for each post. Your items might include ‘Brainstorming’, ‘Defining a Topic’, ‘Research’, ‘Writing a Draft’, ‘Editing’, and ‘Posting Live’. Whatever your routine; get it down on paper and follow it each week.
3. Keep in Mind. Through your week you will be inspired by new ideas and topics to write about. Be prepared to recognize these moments and have some tools on hand for capturing your fresh ideas. Make a note on your phone, or keep a pencil and paper handy. Train yourself to recognize new ideas and to capture them for later blogging.
4. Don’t Cheat. It is tempting to cheat a week or two and procrastinate, especially at this time of year when the sky is a little extra grey, and the cabin fever starts setting in. As we all know, this is the first step to failure, and the first opportunity for our competition to get the upper hand. Don’t let them have it! Stay true to your plan and work hard to meet your schedule. As soon as you let yourself slip, it gets a little harder to get back on the saddle, and before you know it all is lost and you are starting over.
Take a few moments to reset your commitment to blogging and social marketing, and you’ll be glad you did as you pull ahead.
It’s the new year and you are hitting the ground running with your online marketing plans. While everyone else is talking about what to plan for, I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about the structure of your plan.
It seems that all we hear about at this time of year is ‘goal setting’, but most of us rarely pause to consider what goal setting is, and how it relates to our online marketing plan.
Whether you are concentrating on social media, your marketing blog, or a good old fashioned email marketing campaign, it helps to understand the difference between Tasks, Goals, and Objectives. Let’s break ‘em down with a quick analogy:
When playing a sport, for instance ‘football’, your objective is to ‘win the game’. This is your overarching reason for all the effort and sacrifice you invest. While playing football, you win by making goals. Simple enough; you achieve your objective by setting and reaching goals. A goal can be scoring a point, or a goal can be to post to your blog on a regular frequency.
Finally, goals are made by executing tasks. A task in football might be to count to ‘three alligators‘, run ten steps and turn around to catch a ball. In your business a task is the smallest increment of work that helps you achieve your goal. In this case it might be ‘writing a post’.
Your Strategy is the plan you assemble to organize and complete your tasks and goals in order to achieve your objectives.
So as you contemplate your social media strategy, first outline your objective by asking yourself ‘What do I want to accomplish with all my effort?’. It may be a specific financial objective for your business. Next, determine the goals you need to set in place that drive your progress toward your objective. Goals are shorter term, and you need to have several if not many of them.
Tasks are the basic components of your goals; the actual ‘doing’ that gets the job done. Many tasks comprise a goal, and many goals comprise an objective.
Note that the most important aspect of Tasks, Goals, and Objectives is that they are all specifically defined, measurable, and timed. Like a three legged chair; without these three elements, you do not have an achievable task, goal or objective.
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Of course you can always save yourself the time of performing many tasks by signing up for a ListPipe account. ListPipe provides regular customized content to your Wordpress blog to give you a leg up in your online marketing effort. We’ll do all the research and writing for you, and all at a very affordable price. Check out http://listpipe.com for more information.
A few weeks ago SEO.com posted a review of the top ten Internet marketing strategies for 2009 and it got me thinking about what we might be planning for 2010.
We have spent a good deal of time discussing social media networks like Facebook and Twitter; it seems these have been all the rage this last year and for good reason. However I don’t see these networks carrying the excitement throughout 2010. I agree these will remain important facets of our online marketing, and they will continue to be an important way to reach a close circle of friends and followers with your message.
Facebook and Twitter have achieved staple status and aren’t going away any time soon, but the early adopter wave is over and the laggards are now catching on. I see these as must-have commodities toward the end of 2010, but not the primary differentiators they were for 2009.
Facebook remains as the king of social networking, and new business tools being developed will help businesses take advantage of groups, pages and fans. Watch as Facebook evolves into a more mature business tool in 2010 as professional users give this environment the credibility it deserves as a powerful business forum.
Twitter is a great place to make quick announcements, but watch this space continue to evolve as a research platform where an instant pulse can be taken for messaging campaigns and streetwise advice.
I remain convinced that blogging will again shine through as the king of online marketing. Content is King of search results and there’s just no better way to present frequent, relevant content on the internet.
There are a lot of people blogging out there, but many have yet to find their groove, and most are still trying to capture an audience. Blogging is the perfect mix of story-telling, presentation, discussion and debate. For those that can concentrate on their niche and present content that is interesting, engaging, and optimized for search engines indexing, you’re blog will be the primary differentiator that sets up the reason to use Facebook and Twitter for your 2010 online marketing.
As always, your basic plan should be founded on a regular blog with featurettes and announcements going out as often as possible to your Facebook and Twitter audience.
As the year comes to a close, I wanted to spend a moment looking forward with a few ideas to add to your strategy.
With more and more marketers blogging these days, it’s getting harder and harder to make a splash in an otherwise crowded marketplace. But that shouldn’t stop you from having a plan to blog about your business in the coming new year.
With search engines concentrating evermore on organic writing, high frequency and relevant keywords, the notion that ‘Content is King‘ should be the foundation of your marketing strategy for 2010.
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Here is my quick list of reminders and tips to make your blog really stick out:
Organic Writing: Search engines are looking for original content. When you write on your blog, Facebook page or Twitter, your content is being scoured by the search engines and compared to other relevant content. When your content is deemed to be unique, you are awarded a higher organic status than with content that is copied or reproduced, and placed higher in the search results for your given topic.
Ways to make your content more unique, and more organic, include adding localization, personalizing information such as your contact address and phone number, putting the story into your own words, and allowing your own personality to shine through in the content.
Frequency. You have heard me talk about the importance of frequency before; basically the more you post, the more popular you will be in the search engines. This is a good time of year to establish a new goal to step up your frequency, and to expand your posting ritual beyond your blog to Facebook and Twitter. You should be posting once per week at a minimum, and more if you can. For serious marketers, I recommend posting twice per week with a daily post to both Facebook and Twitter.
Relevant Keywords. This, too, seems to be an overworked mantra. However, including relevant keywords in your content is the single most important way to let the search engines know where to include you in search results. The start of a new year is a perfect time to make a list and check it twice; revisit your keywords by doing a little research on what your customers are searching for, and physically write them at the top of your writing template. Review them often and include a selection from the list in every post.
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If you are a business blogger and are looking for great SEO content for your blog, consider a subscription to ListPipe; in just a few short minutes you can get us started writing original, personalized content for your blog that is search engine optimized and linked to your primary website from relevant keywords. Take a look at http://listpipe.com
Working with keywords has always been important, but now that Twitter and Facebook are being indexed by search engines, it’s even more important to watch what you are saying, and to optimize for the best possible result.
Keywords are the terms and phrases in your posts that are most relevant to your topic. For instance if you are posting in your blog about a healthy food product, then your keywords will of course be the product name. But don’t stop there; keywords will also include the product category, the product ingredients, and can also include the ways you can use the product.
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Your ultimate objective with keywords is to make a connection between your content and the terms your customers are searching for. While many customers search for generalized terms, some search for very specific terms. When you stick with the generalized terms on your site, you are competing with a million other sites for those terms. However, when you make your terms more specific, you reduce the number of competitors and open the door for more attention, albeit from a smaller crowd.
The wisdom follows that you would like to get more interest from a smaller, more focused set of customers than from a very small portion of a larger but less focused set. Would you rather be fishing with a big net in the ocean, or a small net in a barrel chock full of exactly the fish you like?
Keyword modifiers can help distinguish your product from a competitor’s, or can help refine your search for a more specific term. For instance you may add the word ‘chewable’ or ‘drink’ to your product name to help distinguish its specific product type. Adding words like ‘healthy’ or ‘natural’ can help refine search results for people looking for specific categories.
Modifiers are intended to make your keywords more specific, and thereby reduce the number of competing terms.
Associative Keywords are keywords that are related to your keywords, but that may not be precisely related to your product. For instance if you are selling a healthy food, you will want to add keywords that relate to proper digestion or good nutrition. These types of words will come naturally in your discussion, but it helps to be aware of them so that you can concentrate on using them in slightly more density than you might otherwise.
As you contemplate your keywords, don’t forget to consider misspellings or alternate spellings. If your keywords are hard to spell, or have a common alternative, intermingle these in your post to help the search engines identify your content with what your type-challenged customers may be entering into the search window.
Finally, remember to use localization terms with your keywords. The search engines are including localization tags in all their search results, meaning that it matters where you are from and where you are selling. Localized search results are relatively new and many users are only just catching on; this is a great way to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of local searches for your product. To add localization to your keywords, simply add the name of your city, state, and zip to your keywords.
Keep your keywords in mind as you write in your blog, on Facebook and Twitter. Optimize everything you write so that as the search engines index content from these sources, they know exactly how to match you up with the customers searching for your products.
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Looking for a great way to start a business blog? Check out our new Business Blog Content Service from ListPipe; We’ll get you started with a blog and even write the content for you, every week!
1. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – ListPipe is all about ‘organic content’, in fact we just released a new feature that allows us to deliver unique articles to a wider range of customers within a specific category. If you are a franchise organization or a corporate group with a large number of sales representatives and distributors, ListPipe can help you achieve an organic profile across your entire organization while delivering individually customized content for each participant.
2. Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn – Each ListPipe article includes a sharing tag for one-click sharing of your customized content into your social accounts. Most of our users are Facebook and Twitter users, and we have made it easy for them to share content from their blog to a wider group of people through their social networks. We also include with each ListPipe account an informative online training experience that teaches the basics of sharing content into social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.
3. Keyword Research – Our custom content is chock full of keywords that we have researched for you. Keyword research can eat up a lot of valuable time, but we recognize (as does SEO.com) that it is critical for any online marketing strategy. Get yourself a ListPipe account, and we’ll take care of this tedious task for you!
4. Video Marketing – Like SEO.com, we saw this one coming; and for this reason each ListPipe account hosted on our servers includes an easy to use plugin that allows you to add your own video content to your blog. In addition, an increasing number of our posts include video content from your proprietary sources as well as from popular video sites such as YouTube.
5. Online Public Relations – Because we are working with the corporate umbrella for many of our blog networks, we have direct access to news and announcements that we republish into your blog so that you can repost to your social networks with the confidence that any readers will be able to find their way back to you with customized links and contact information designed to lead readers to your door.
6. Link Building – This is one of the primary reasons we invented ListPipe, and remains one of our cornerstone strategies. Every ListPipe post includes a strong linking strategy designed to direct traffic to your main site as well as lend Authority to your site from the keywords and phrases we are linking from.
7. Blogging – Need we say more? ListPipe is a blog content service; we publish content each week into your blog for you so you can focus on the important aspects of selling your business. And for you eager bloggers, we provide full administrative access to your Wordpress blog so that you can add supplemental content and keep your readers informed at a more intimate level.
8. Conversion Web Design – Our articles and the keyword linking strategy we employ is designed to lead visitors to your blog directly to your site for more information. Links, encouraging language, and a ready-built Contact Me page direct your readers back to you every time.
9. Paid Search Marketing – We don’t offer Pay-per-click advertising services; we’re all about the organic content side. If you are interested in adding PPC to your blog marketing effort, we recommendSEO.com, the original publishers of this awesome top ten list.
10. Email Marketing – Communication is what blogging is all about, and for this reason we occasionally publish your email address within a post to help your readers find you. More importantly, we include with your blog a full-featured Contact Form that allows you to collect leads right from your blog. When a visitor contacts you with their email address from your Contact Form, add them to your marketing list and keep them informed!
ListPipe provides professional blogging services for sales and marketing organizations who want to increase their presence in search engine results. Contact ListPipe for more information.
Thanks to SEO.com for providing this great top ten list.
For any marketing website, conversion goals are the single most important feature, so understanding what conversion goals are is the first step in building an effective web marketing campaign.
A conversion goal is basically a step in your sales process. Specifically, it is the ‘next step’ that you want your customers to take when they visit your site or complete a previous step.
As we talk through this, remember that a conversion goal and a sales process is not necessarily tied to the sale of a product; we could easily be talking about supplying a service, generating a membership, or asking for simple participation. In this context, your ’sales process’ is the collection of steps you want your visitors to complete, and a ‘conversion goal’ is a milestone of that process. Bare in mind, too, that a conversion goal can be the completion of a single step such as the visitation of a specific page, or the completion of the entire process such as a sale or a signature.
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In a nutshell, a conversion goal is the specific task you can measure that demonstrates when you have achieved success. The easiest way to come up with your conversion goals is to ask yourself ‘What do I want my visitors to do when they come to my page?’
Examples of conversion goals can include any of the following:
Completing a form
Making a payment
Forwarding information
Subscribing
Leaving a comment
Note that on a website the measurement of a conversion goal is in loading a specific page. For instance if your conversion goal is to complete a form, the measurement of that goal may be the loading of a ‘Thank You’ page that is triggered when the visitor hits the submit button. In this way you are measuring the results of an action that confirm the action.
When it comes to blogging, you’ll want to think through your conversion goals each time you write. Ask yourself how your subject is going to support your conversion goal, and how you can direct your readers to complete it. In this way you can support your conversion goals with links, calls-to-action, and supporting information.
Every post should contain some form of direction toward your conversion goals, and you should be focused on measuring them for success.
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Social Media Marking is all about marketing your tangible and intangible assets through social networking tools. You do this by engaging and interacting with your fans.
So in this basic definition of Social Media marketing we have defined three basic elements: Assets, Social Networking Tools, and Fans.
Let’s take a look at these, and think about using them all together to encompass the opportunity to engage and interact.
Here’s the Audio:
First are your assets. Assets in this case include everything you want to market, from the tangible (your website) to the intangible (your personality) and everything in between. As you perform your social media marketing, be aware of your assets, what type of asset they are, and when it is best to market them.
For instance, when you are meeting with someone in person for the first time, you are working at a very emotional level, which is the best time to focus on your personality. Focus on getting to know the person and remember to be genuine. Once you get to know a person, or have time to engage with people online you can focus more on driving traffic to your website to learn more details about your products and services.
Second is your social networking tools. The three I most commonly address are your blog, Facebook, and Twitter. These are of course the most common and most important tools, but don’t forget that your social networking tools including business networks like LinkedIn, and even entertainment networks like YouTube.
Start with your blog by posting original content that is relevant to your cause, and then repost and engage your audience with that content on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure your connections on LinkedIn know what your business is doing, and have some fun creating interactive content on YouTube. Even Facebook allows you to create video now, and it’s a fun way to get your fans involved and to generate interest with creative communications.
And Third is are your fans. Fans are everyone from family and friends to employees, channel partners distributors and customers. Everyone is a potential fan, so watch for opportunities to interact and engage with them. Primarily, look for opportunities to include the people you meet in all your social media networks. Whenever you meet someone in person, ask them for a card or information so you can follow up, and invite them to participate with you in your social networks.
I often get invitations the next day from people I meet at an event. I was a little uncomfortable with this at first because I wanted to maintain a private network of close friends, but I soon learned that I could create a robust network of friends and business associates, and that people in either category could participate with me in the other; in other words; you never know where that next opportunity will come from, so work to capture them all.
As you repost your blog content to your social networks, one of your big concerns should be getting traffic to visit your site. One of the best ways to encourage the people in your social networks to click through or even share your content is to add interest. Spice it up a bit.
This isn’t to say that your original post isn’t interesting on it’s own. But I’ve been doing a few experiments and reading around on this subject lately and there are two distinct ways I have discovered for building interest and gaining clicks.
One I’ll call ‘The Introduction‘, and the other ‘The Tease‘.
Here’s the Audio:
Think about the last movie trailer you saw on TV or at the cinema while you were waiting for the feature to start. An interesting clip swaths the screen that frames the story and piques your interest, followed by an alluring sequence that stops short of the big payoff. The premise is interesting to you, and you are intrigued by the possible scenarios that might play out from what you just saw; Will they get their man? Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Will she find out the truth? By the time the roll is finished you lean to your date and whisper ‘We’ve gotta see that one!’
What you have just experienced is a well-crafted introduction, and a big fat tease all rolled into one tantalizing taste of what may come. Years of refinement and research have gone into the creation of the common movie trailer to make sure you are interested in the premise, and wanting some answers. If you could buy tickets right now you probably would.
Enter the re-post: Reposting is when you transfer content from your blog to your social network, for instance Facebook or Twitter. Your intention is to share an excerpt from the article and get people to click back to your blog to read the rest of the story.
For the untrained reposter, it is simply enough to restate the title of the post and to include a picture. But you’ll need an edge to get past the onslaught of posts and tweets that face our social associates. Use the movie trailer formula for the best results.
Whenever you blog, repost the content twice to each of your social networks; this will let them know that you are excited about the information.
Make sure the first one introduces the subject of the post. I have found that writing in the form of a question is the best way to get attention and to set up the intro. For instance if you have posted an article about the nutrition of applesauce, you might write a short introduction in the form of a tantalizing question: “Does an Apple A Day Really Keep The Doctor Away?”
Your readers will be compelled to find out, and are more likely to click through when there is something to find out.
In your followup repost, take an excerpt from the article and give your readers a small taste of the story. Make sure it is compelling and that it generates more questions than it answers. For instance you might write “My doctor says that an apple is one of only three fruits he recommends…” In this case you want your readers to be interested in the rest of the story.
Of course the most important thing is to include a link back to your original article.
Practice makes perfect, and don’t be afraid to experiment with the types of questions and excerpts you post. It will take a while to get the hang of it, but as long as you stay with the proven movie trailer formula it is sure to pay off.
Here’s the Audio:
If you haven’t started a blog yet, check out ListPipe for SEO blogging.
I was reading the annual Content Marketing Spending Survey by Junta42 and was surprised that the list of content products users plan to take advantage of has Enewsletters and Blogs at a dead heat for second place. If you hadn’t guessed, first place is occupied by ‘Social Media’ including Twitter and Facebook.
My good friends at 
Social Media Marking is all about marketing your tangible and intangible assets through social networking tools. You do this by engaging and interacting with your fans.