Category Archives: Blog

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How to Promote Your Blog Posts as an Online Marketer: Part 2

So you’ve churn out a stellar blog post. I mean a real whopper, something that will make people say, “wow, I’ve never thought of it like that!” Packed with data, case studies, and references, written with the eloquence of a modern day Shakespeare, your article is going to take the internet by storm, if only it finds a few interested eyeballs.

Hold on there, cowboy or cowgirl, it’s a long road ahead. Not that that’s anything to be afraid of. Once your blog post goes live, here are a few ways you can kickstart its ability to gain some attention.

Email sources. The advantages of citing actual sources and other authorities in a niche are twofold. First, they give your own writing extra authority because anyone can just say something, but once it’s backed up with facts and figures you can show that you’ve done your homework.

The second advantage is that you can actually try and leverage the people and sites you’ve used as sources to help share your article.

If you wrote in an article on top resources for bloggers (please, don’t actually write this article unless you can do something better than the 40,327,811 out there that already exist), you might have mentioned someone’s software that you use on a daily basis.

Once your article goes live, send the company an email and/or tweet at them, letting them know you’re a fan and saying you mentioned them in your latest post. At the end, politely ask that they consider sharing the article with their own audience if they enjoyed it.

Make friends with the big dogs, even when they seem out of reach. Every big content marketer whose blog posts now get 1,000+ shares each week started out where you are. They were grinding when no one paid attention and they recognize the struggle.

If you can offer them some sort of help in their business, if you can consistently network and show them that you ask smart questions in their comment sections, or that the posts of yours that you’re tweeting show that you’re putting in the time and effort and aren’t going anywhere, they’ll notice.

When the time comes, it might just not be too much of a stretch for you to reach out and ask if they might give some super cool thing you’ve written a nudge. That’s pretty cool (so make it happen!).

Of course, you should also be making sure that you give your own channels a mega nudge on your own.

Post to Facebook, schedule several tweets to go out over a few days using tweetdeck, post images to tumblr that link back to your content, take advantage of Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn groups, as these can be deceptively good places to get your content seen by those who would find them relevant.

More sensitive communities, like Reddit and Inbound, can also be great places to share, but will require some more finesse.

Whatever your promotional tactics, keep them constantly evolving, and don’t be afraid of trying something that might not work, because it just might be a gold mine for you.

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How to Promote Your Blog Posts as an Online Marketer: Part 1

Content is king, queen, and the whole royal court these days. In fact, the nod given to creating longform, rich content by traditional ad agencies, who themselves have rebranded in droves to ‘media agencies’, should give you some indication as to the way of the online marketing tides right now.

Consistently, brands who embrace the content creation trend rather than throw more money at legacy methods are scoring bigger than their more stubborn counterparts, and that’s because it’s mostly a win/win scenario: Brands who are willing to work consistently build their followings, and consumers get something with a little more thought than a banner ad.

Naturally, the charge on content marketing was led by savvy content marketers long before mega-brands and agencies caught on, but the particulars of its evolution have little relevance today.

For marketers, this can be viewed as a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, you can come up with great ideas that people love and share and put those great ideas down into writing without being a bigtime agency. The bad part, however, is that they’ve got the chance to churn out a lot more content when working in teams.

How do you compete? Well, for one, you should always be striving to do what someone else does better than they have. Because content marketing is a value game, a vast library of past projects and work can be completely obliterated and made obsolete by one game-changing piece that’s so amazing, so legit, that people can’t help but pay attention.

The next step is to make sure that you’re giving every single post the ‘after-care’ it deserves. For independent content marketers, you’ll probably be looking to spend at least as long promoting an article as you do creating, and preferably 2-3 times that amount.

To achieve this, start putting together a promotion list with the different places and ways in which you will share every single post. As a new avenue comes to mind, add it. As you check analytics and find certain methods aren’t actually generating any interest or traffic for you, drop them and try and find something else to replace that method.

Content marketing fits, in many ways, with the concept of growth hacking, which has grown to relevance in the past year or two especially. Growth hacking is about leveraging creative product and promotion hack that can help to give a business a viral growth factor in which every user you gain recruits at least one other user to the service or customer to the product, which means that a brand’s growth is, at that point, self-perpetuating.

Getting these tactics to culminate in a success story is the stuff of legends, but those who have been successful (like Dropbox, for example) know that the core is testing and tweaking constantly. Content marketing can be an excellent means in driving people into the top of that funnel.

In part 2, we’ll get into a few of the specifics for sharing a blog post once it’s been creative, and how you can even growth hack the reach of your articles, to an extent.

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The Art of the Guest Post

Left and right, entrepreneurs and businesses are using blogs to help build their businesses. From transparency blogs, which follow a journey, to straight up authority resources, people still like to read, and content marketers who can give them something nice to look at and valuable to read will have no problem expanding their reach with a blog.

While there are a number of ways to start gaining initial traction and readership, few are more effective – provided you’re willing to put in the time – than a genuine guest post. Guest posting doesn’t have the SEO and backlink umph that it used to, but it certainly is still highly effective as a means of leveraging an already established audience or readership to help grow your own.

Unfortunately, the way that many people go about guest posting is, well, just plain awful. They reach out with cold emails, beg, plead, or send half-baked ideas to editors and bloggers that have way too much on their minds to entertain the thought of babysitting someone who isn’t willing to put in the effort. Let’s learn how to overcome that.

Guest posting is about leverage

Leverage is a two-way street, and when you’re guest posting, you have to understand that you need to be able to offer another blog owner enough value that they are willing to give you their readership. Essentially, they’re risking their audience and credibility by letting someone else pen something for them, so they need to be convinced it’s worth their while.

This generally comes down to two factors:

Can you write as well and generate as good of a post as their readership is used to, and

Is your own audience, who you will be promoting your guest post to, large enough to help garner the blog owner some new owners.

The first is qualitative, and something that some people will just be naturally better at, and to develop with practice will take lots of time and study. The second is much more easily measurable and readily apparent: if you pitch a blog post to someone who gets 10,000 daily readers, and your social media followings are hovering in the 100-200 range, they probably aren’t going to see how putting the time in to partner with you is worthwhile for them, as there isn’t a large potential to gain new readers.

Instead, work on a stepping ladder type approach, in which you work with those who are just a small notch or two above you. If you get an average of 20 shares or so on each of your posts when you write it, look for blogs in the 50-100 per post range, this is a level of engagement that is above your own and is growing, but it’s not excessive and doesn’t indicate someone who is going to ignore you completely.

As you progress with this technique, you will be able to reach out to larger and larger bloggers each time, and before long you yourself just might be one of the big guys.

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SEO’s Outer Appearance Finally Resembles Its Inner Working

Were you involved in the online marketing world back in 2010? Earlier? Ever as recently as a couple of years ago, actually, the strategies that were considered surefire paths to SEO domination were completely different from what they are today.

Interestingly enough, however, Google was saying the exact same things about how you should try and rank a website then as they are now: Provide detailed, relevant, helpful content, network naturally with others, and Google would notice.

Unfortunately, their desired reality just wasn’t the case for most marketers. Hitting the top of search results meant putting in the hours to create backlinks, make sure the anchor text of your links matched the phrases you wanted to rank for, etc. These practices were considered spammy by Google, but they worked… and so people kept right on doing them.

Now, however, Google has finally caught up with its own mantra, and since early 2014 those adhering to old school link building practices are probably walking away a little disappointed.

For Google, it’s a win.

For us marketers, it makes things more complicated, but it’s a win as well.

Right now, SEO is actually simpler than it has ever been, but it’s not easier. That is to say, there’s a lot of work involved, but the work you put in is more valuable to all parties involved now.

In fact, pages are ranking fairly easily for many website owners now, provided they do a great job of providing content. A key component now is Google’s paying attention to social media cues when determining how much of a buzz a page is creating, and therefore how many people find it interesting and useful.

Right now, you can create a page and be ranking on Google within a couple of hours, provided your piece catches social media fire and gets shared around.

Of course, that means you’ve got to come up with something really good. Honestly, though, this can only serve to elevate the level of content that gets produced, as webmasters will be able to spend more time focusing on creating really useful, interesting content for their sites instead of focusing on the post-care SEO of creating countless backlinks.

In order to win, then, you need to be onboard with this new thinking. In fact, if you’re still working within the old framework of SEO, you’re likely going to see more problems than benefits. Sites are constantly being penalized and thrown into the SERPs abyss because they have tried to game a system that has always been about staying one step ahead of those trying to game it (and a goal they’ve finally achieved).

Will SEO professionals still have specific strategies you can take to give your site a leg up?

Absolutely.

Will they work? Probably, but you need to think of SEO best practices these days as a side dish, because there is no longer a substitute for the main dish of hard work creating genuinely awesome pages for Google to crawl.

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How Internet Marketers Can Hit A Grand Slam With Guest Posting

Recently, content marketing has been all the rage. It isn’t that it’s only now that content marketing is starting to be effective, but more so that larger, more traditional media and advertising powerhouses are finally starting to take the trend seriously.

Content marketing, for several years now, has been the true language of the blogging community, and the businesses who were smart enough to narrow in on and take advantage of these networks.

Content marketing itself rests on one of the founding principles that most of you reading this will understand: providing value before asking for it.

Content marketing also has major crossover with “relationship marketing,” which is what we’re going to get into today. Specifically, those who have worked with content marketing have also found value in maintaining a blog or similar platform to regularly share content with and grow their audiences through.
Guest blogging is the act of posting on someone else’s blog, largely in the hopes of getting some attention and exposure for your own web property. The problem, however, lies in how to reframe that goal in a way that it becomes mutually beneficial.

If it’s your first time trying to land a guest blogging gig, you need to understand that these relationships are all about leverage: What can you offer someone else? What are you getting in return? In order for your offer to write a piece for another blog (even if it’s really good) to be tempting, you need to make sure you frame it in the right way. Here are a few steps you can take to massively boost your chances of successfully integrating guest blogging into your content marketing strategy.

Identify blogs in your weight class or just above it. Look for blogs in your market than have similar audiences and are getting some social engagement and shares on their posts, but who are not yet massive.

Make contact in a helpful way. Do not just blurt out that you want a guest post and try and pitch cold via email. Instead, leave insight comments over a few days and interact with the blog owner on twitter or another social platform. Share their content to show you like it.

Make a careful pitch by asking permission via one of these platforms to reach out via email. Once you have the greenlight, send an email with your idea, and highlight why it would be well-received by their audience and what you will do to help share the piece and grow their blog.

Write something truly amazing. If you get the honor of having a guest post pitch accepted, do it justice and get invited back by really creating something special. Whatever time you put into researching and creating your own posts, double it. Go above and beyond and make an infographic or embedded slideshare to help out – that kind of thing.

Promote like your life depends on it in order to get the blog you’re working with the biggest return possible and show that partnering up with you was worthwhile.

Simple, yep. Easy? Well, you’ll be putting in some work, but it’s nearly always worth your time.

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Your 2015 Holiday Content Marketing Checklist

Targeted content is key for success in internet marketing, and there’s no other time quite like the holiday season for creating time-targeted content. Consumers spend with reckless abandon during the holiday season, so if you aren’t creating content specifically geared towards this time frame, you’re seriously missing out on a big opportunity. From Thanksgiving to Christmas to Kwanza to New Years and all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in between, it’s time to get cracking!

 

Holiday Content Marketing Checklist

Here’s a quick checklist for your holiday content marketing campaigns. Choose one, all or any combination thereof, as long as it fits your demographics’ preferred wheelhouse of data relay:

– Blog and Articles. The quintessential content marketing piece, it’s doubtful you will forget about this one. Try to capture the holiday spirit if you want them to go viral, or talk about the best deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday or gifts for Christmas, etc. Publish on your site and share vigorously through social media.

– Video Content. This is a great time of year to get inventive and festive with your marketing campaigns, even giving you a better chance at going viral if you pick the right theme and content. Stake out YouTube and Vimeo here, since Vine died off a bit (Instagram has 15 second videos, or if your market demographic fits, SnapChat can even be used).

– Holiday Podcasts. These are a great way to reach your mailing list members or site visitors that don’t have time to read through your content. You can also offer special deals and incentives for those who listen. Get up on iTunes, Blubrry and Stitcher Radio.

– Teleseminars and Webinars. Have products, concepts or services that can be best sold by demonstration or live talks? Then webinars and teleseminars are a great way to connect with your audience. Be sure to follow up with links to the webinars and teleseminars on your seasonal newsletter, as well as upload any slides or recording to your site in a blog or vlog.

– Interviews. Interviews with other sites or blogs are great, no matter what form they come in. Remember, any type of information is content, so even if it’s a speech or a workshop, it can all be used in the same manner (especially if you incorporate it into other types of content to add value e.g. turning a workshop into a webinar, turning a speech into a podcast, turning an interview into a blog, etc.).

– Using Powerpoints. If you have created, or are going to create, powerpoint presentations, turn them into content profit by uploading them to Slideshare, using them in a blog post or turning them into infographics.

– How To’s, Tutorials and Guides. Have some knowledge that you’ve been saving up? Is it extremely helpful? ‘Tis the season for giving! Provide your expertise to the world and make yourself an authority.

– White Papers, eBooks and Special Reports. Depending on how much time you have and how much content you need to cover, all three of these forms of content marketing will serve as enticers to sign up for an email list, opt in, or even just be enjoyed as a premium or free-mium item.

– Newsletters. If you already have one, craft a holiday edition with specials and deals. If you don’t have a newsletter, start one—it’s high time.

– Infographics. Wrap those boring facts and figures up into a visually fun infographic and start sharing it.

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4 Of The Best Entrepreneurial Blogs You Can Start Reading Right Now

One of the best ways to learn anything in the internet marketing world is to get out there and take action. There is absolutely no substitute for finding out what works for your exact business model and personality than by experimenting and tweaking what you focus on based upon your results.

Having said that, the second best way to learn has to be from other companies and individuals who have been through the phase you’re at already, and have been kind enough to package their own lessons into easily consumed content for you.

Often, this comes in the form of a blog, where you can regularly get updated on whatever the topic that person or company has expertise in. For entrepreneurs, here are 4 that are especially awesome and go out of their way to deliver constant value to readers.

1. The Groove Blog

Honestly, this is one of the best transparency blogs around for entrepreneurs. Run by Groove CEO Alex Turnbull, the blog follows this customer support startup every step of the way as they journey to $500k per month in recurring revenue.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of insights to be learned from a company well on their way to hitting those ambitious numbers. The nice thing is that they share a lot of things that didn’t work as well, and provide the data to back up anything they say or recommend.

2. The Daily Egg

Crazy Egg is a product all about data, so it’s not surprising that the research that goes into posts on the Daily Egg (CE’s blog) are packed with awesome research. Plus, they have a great track record of securing some awesome guest posters, which help to flesh out the blog as an authority on a wider range of subjects.

As if all of that weren’t enough, the blog is one of Neil Patel’s projects. If you don’t know Neil, he’s one of the most prolific writers and content marketers around, and just about everything he touches is gold.

3. Swift Branding

A new player on the scene, Swift Branding is run by George Karboulonis over in Greece, and it’s got a good thing going for it right now. The blog does a great job of committing to providing as any useful resources, freebies, and guides for IM’ers as possible.

While some of the content is more general or entry level, there are some real gems as well, and George seems to have a knack for getting people to share their interesting stories with him in the form of revealing case studies.

4. Copyblogger

Finally, Copyblogger. Copyblogger has been around for a long time, and even has a now-rebranded media branch you can find at rainmaker.fm

While CB’s original focus was, no surprises here, copywriting, the team have really branched out over the last few years and broadened their topic reach without any falloff in quality.

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Growth Hacking Day 2: Leveraging Your Strengths

One of the biggest mistakes one can see marketers making again and again is trying to replicate the success of others. I hear you now, “Wait! You’re saying I don’t want to follow the example of someone who has been wildly successful in growing their business?! You’re crazy!”

But hear me out: While there is of course much to be learned from the triumphs of those before you, the approach I see too often is straight up copy and paste. Ew. It’s both sad and ironic to see, because most of the social and growth hacking thought leaders preach day in and day out that you need to learn how to tailor your communications to your business and audience. Obviously, this means that a golf brand is not likely to find success by following the social media plan of McDonald’s.

Instead, you should be looking at what successful brands are doing, and then thinking about how you might be able to attack the same channels with similar quality content, but not simply copying. Copy = bad. Emulating = good.

So, how do you identify your strengths and put them to work promoting your brand. For most people, identifying some obvious strengths will come the quickest when they look into what exactly it is their business already does. For example, an obvious strength of almost any business is going to be their knowledge of the market within which they operate. Obviously, if you own a golfing company, you’re going to know a thing or two about the sport of golf.

One great way to leverage your strength for engaging social posts is looking at what insights you have about golf that others haven’t acted on yet. Do your products have a unique selling point that is extremely relevant to golfers? That sounds like a good jumping off point. Alternatively, you might find that you can use this knowledge to drop yourself into social conversations on twitter, tumblr, and other platforms that are very conversation based. People get hung up on creating their own content on social media, but some platforms are better suited so most of your content is actually repurposed and the result of interactions with others (but that’s topic on its own could take up books on end, and does).

Leveraging your strengths doesn’t just mean working within the niche your business exists in, it also means playing on the actual skills you’re good at. So if you’re a strong writer, content marketing might make sense for you. Alternatively, if you’ve never studied paid marketing and advertising, your best path to growth is probably not through paid social ad campaigns. Of course, you may have other team members involved in your brand that can fill in the gaps that you have in your skillset, leaving you more strengths to play on.

Above all, be consistent with the efforts that represent your strengths.

Often times, you will try 20 things that yield mediocre results before you hit the one approach that starts getting you big amounts of attention, traffic, etc.

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3 Ways To Make Readers Stop And Pay Attention To Your Writing

Even in a world where live-streaming video and podcasting are gaining popularity amongst knowledge consumers at a breakneck pace, there’s still immense power in the written word. Not only is reading still the preferred medium for consumption by many, but it can also be essential in cases where streaming connections aren’t practical or when consumers want to engage deeper with their content.

Let’s face it, you are reading this right now. That has to count for something, right?

Right?!

Despite its importance, many people still have lackluster writing skills, or at least don’t ever bother into the intricacies that professional writers sweat over their perfection of day in and day out. Today, we’re going to go over three ways you can make your writing more effective by increasing reader comprehension.

Be a factbacker.

One of the things that becomes quickly apparent when you start reading through successful blogs and publications is that research efforts are never an afterthought. When writing pieces which largely consist of your own opinion or which are based primarily on your own experiences, it’s easy to just ramble and say what you want to say without too much of a basis.

One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd is to get used to infusing your writing with links to other sources that can back up what you want to say. If your goal is to say something completely new or put an unwritten spin on a topic (which is awesome, by the way!), then try and source some of the articles that got you thinking or that could help lead readers to your own conclusions. This push for credibility can really help the effectiveness of your messages.

Invent words.

What the hell is a fact-backer? I don’t know, I made it up! One of the greatest things Shakespeare and others like him did for the English language is add words to it. In fact, you’d be surprised at how many of the most common, normal-sounding words we use today were invented in the last few hundred years by a handful of creative minds.

Doing this not only makes people stop and really think about what they’re reading – you probably stop and try to figure out new words immediately when reading – but it also creates a mental association with your writing by forcing more engagement.

Get smart with formatting.

Finally, get spacey with it. Time spent reading a webpage increases with the general readability of that page, and a major contributing factor to this in the online space is how well your text is spaced out and formatted.

Unlike writing a formal article, let alone a research paper, writing for blogs and casual online properties should never exceed a couple of lines per paragraph. In fact, unlike in other forms of writing, it is perfectly acceptable for each sentence to be its own paragraph.

Beyond these three, it’s practice, practice, practice to get as good as you can at bringing concision and persuasiveness into your written words – good luck!

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How to Stay True to Your IM Vision

Remember when you first made the decision to pour yourself into internet marketing? Maybe you’ve felt the rush of quitting your 9-to-5 in favor of starting off on a venture where success or failure rest squarely on your shoulders and yours alone, where earning potential is virtually unlimited and the possibilities seem endless. It’s an exciting moment, to be sure… but are you still excited?

Far too many marketers find themselves ambling down a boring dirt road that started out as a gold-paved promenade. In other words, they burn out. They get discouraged as they hit a ceiling, or maybe they just get bored in their routine. Whatever the reason, it’s always important to have a few tools for getting out of a rut on hand.

For starters, the biggest obstacles are always mental: While you want to be constantly learning and getting smarter from your experiences, you don’t want to lose sight of your original vision and mindset. There’s a talent to learning from experiences without letting them make you overly cynical or discouraged. Remember how excited you were to be your own boss? Remember how excited you were to bring your business/product/vision to the world? Good. Now be that person again.

Of course, it also helps if you’ve got the concrete routines and systems in place to help foster such mindsets. Often, the hardest part about working for yourself is, well, making yourself work. Having a strict daily schedule in place can help you stay on task. Many pros use their first few actions of the day as a psychological trigger and launching pad for the rest of the day. For example, you might begin each day by doing a 30 second speed organizing of your workplace, then a 5 minute email blitz, followed by brewing your morning cup of coffee. Repeating your process each day can get you in the mood to work.

Don’t be afraid to expand. Sometimes, you’re starting off with next to nothing and have to do the grunt work for a while, but even someone with the smallest of starting capital (or none at all) should be looking to move to delegation and expansion as soon as possible. A couple of years ago, article/content marketing was huge. The people who made a substantial living off of it, however, weren’t those writing articles day in and day out. Instead, these people quickly hired a writing and website team under them to allow for rapid growth. Or perhaps they started a large writing outfit to cater to the marketers working with content volume. Either way, they were running a business, not a self-employment hobby.

In a business, you would work toward hiring and expanding, and that’s exactly what you should do. Take stock of your resources, and look at which tasks can be quickly contracted to someone else to help give you more time to plan company growth. For many, the first task to go is content creation. For others, it might be SEO efforts. Whatever isn’t exciting to you and is within budget to hire out, do it.

Finally, don’t be afraid to adapt. You may have started your IM venture two years ago, and a lot changes in two years these days. Constantly be learning, researching, and ensuring that your own methods are still considered the best practice today; never mistake comfort with effectiveness.