Avoid False Guru Status to Boost Credibility

Want to know what one of the fastest ways to kill your credibility is? To pretend to have it when you don’t.

It’s an unfortunate reality, but the landscape of online marketing has been invaded over the past decade by those claiming to be experts in things that they, to put it politely, aren’t. The ‘fake it ’til you make it’ bravado approach was actually wildly effective for a number of years, but the reality now is one in which potential customers are much more skeptical.

Not only are they wary of falling victim to people pretending to be something that they aren’t, they’re also realizing that much of the information that false gurus put behind a paywall is available free elsewhere on the web (indeed, the expertise of fakers doesn’t allow them to create much exclusivity based on genuine, helpful content that no one else is providing).

Enter: The transparency trend. Believe it or not, there are some people out there who are up and coming and have been killing it with their audiences even though they haven’t done a whole lot yet. Instead of pretending they’ve executed in one market or another before they really have, these players are instead simply sharing exactly what they’re going through at the time to their audiences. In a way, this approach levels the playing field and makes communications more genuine.

Over the past half decade, there has been an enormous shift from consumers wanting to be told what to do by brands, or at least being convinced that’s what they want, and their realizing that they can lead the discussion more than just have it fed to them. As a result, personal communications win, and honesty is an often sought but less often delivered trait when people go looking to something from someone else online.

For an example of the effectiveness of this approach, the Groove blog, the blog of a small remotely managed helpdesk software, has openly admitted that the number one driver of sales and awareness for their product has been their blog; the Groove blog epitomized transparency.

The company began under the premise of writing out everything they do to try and reach $500,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Ultimately, they’re a couple of years into their project, haven’t yet breached even half of their goal, and yet their posts are wildly popular. Why is this? Because the folks at Groove simply write about what they’ve done and a lesson they’ve learned each week, good or bad, success or failure.

They’re not pretending they have the software as a service game figured out, their not padding the numbers (or downright falsifying them), and they’re certainly not renting expensive cars for the day in order to take pictures with them in front of a mansion they don’t own – I’m looking at you, mid 2000’s internet marketing ‘gurus’.

So keep it honest, keep it open, and you might be surprised to find out that you actually end up making more with, well, less.

How To Use “Help A Reporter Out” For Your Blog Or Brand

Ever heard of popular PR and journalism tool “Help A Reporter Out”? If you’re not acquainted but you have a brand or expertise to market, this quickstart guide will give you the basics.

At its core, Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, is a platform to help connect journalists with sources. Users can register as either sources or media outlets – or both. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be talking about using it as a source.

As a source, you’ll be able to sign up to HARO’s emails, which are sent out multiple times per day and include upwards of 100 stories that media outlets, from international news sites down to niche blogs, are working on.

The descriptions will call for specific experts or those with certain experiences to weigh in and share their advice, stories, and/or experiences. Clicking the reply link within HARO’s email will open up a new message window that, upon completion, will be sent off to the media outlet.

Responding to a call for sources is basically a pitch in which you can sell your brand’s story to someone who will publish a story about it. For example, you might find someone looking for B2B marketing experts for an interview. If you know about B2B products and write a great pitch to an outlet, they may publish your advice in their final piece. If this happens on a larger outlet, you can score some major exposure and credibility by being featured.

The great thing is that calls to action come in a number of categories, so even if you’re outside of the business and tech circles, there will be relevant lifestyle, fitness, travel, etc. prompts that you can respond to. You might not find anything in every email blast, but it’s easy to respond to a few relevant prompts per week.

A couple of tips:

1. Always be sure to deliver value in your pitch, and explain why the outlet’s readers are going to learn something from you. Never mention wanting your own exposure, instead focus on giving the journalist or outlet the best story and more useful information possible.

2. If a publication is listed as anonymous, try and feel out some details about the project in your first email to them to assess the value of being featured. That said, don’t be afraid of being featured in smaller projects, because these outlets are probably going to hustle to promote and squeeze every readership they can out of anything they publish.

The results of having your brand featured in a larger piece can be a huge boon for a small boon, and also help build credibility in your niche, as your input on a topic has now been published. Consistency is key with HARO; respond to every prompt that seems like a good fit, and eventually you’ll match up with someone who needs exactly what you have to offer.

Now get to pitching, good luck!

Using “Help A Reporter Out” To Find Experts

Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, is a PR and journalism platform. Journalists or users registered as media outlets can submit calls for sources for their story ideas, and experts and brands can pick and choose to email various prompts via an email newsletter that HARO sends out several times per day.

The platform is a powerful tool for journalists, but often ignored is its enormous potential for up and coming bloggers and content producers. For example, instead of faking your expertise on a topic and risking losing credibility, you can submit a call for sources to HARO’s newsletter and have external experts weigh in with their advice and stories.

Not only can you use this to write engaging profiles of one particular brand, you can also aggregate many responses to create a large, varied, content-rich posts that offer a range of perspectives and information that would be hard to replicate with your own knowledge or independent research.

If that’s not enough of a reason to convince you to reach out to sources via HARO for your next post, consider this: Recruiting just one source to be part of your story doubles your promotion team. Get another source involved? Boom, your promotional force just went up again.

Most of the time, anyone reaching out to be featured in a story will be looking for exposure, which means they will also be happy to tweet, share, and shout out about your post once it goes live and you send them a follow-up email with a link to it.

Sounds pretty great, right?

To get started, you’ll need to make an account on HARO and register as a media outlet. At this point, you’ll be able to submit a request for sources through their online form. In this form, you’ll be able to put your contact information, along with a title and description of the project, where you can list out any special requirements, exclusions of what types of pitches you do not want, etc. Be detailed here, so that you can pre-filter the responses you receive and not have to worry about being flooded with irrelevant information.

At the same time, leave your request open and general enough that people won’t be afraid to get ahold of you if they think they can offer an interesting twist on your topic – you never know what great story you might get the exclusive scoop on.

Above, be polite to those you interact with, and always follow up with requests. If you are known to ignore incoming pitches, people might start to ignore your requests when they see them in the HARO newsletter email, effectively shutting you out of sources who may not have been right for one post, but have something great to offer down the road.

When following up with offers that you are interested in using, make sure you’re clear in your expectations and ask for any clarifications or details that may have been left out of someone’s original pitch. Other than that, enjoy your newfound blogging resource!

Why You Should Break Away From Title Conventions In 2016

How many times have you read a lame “5 Ways to Improve Your Bottom Line!” title, clicked through, and the been disappointed to find the same old generic, rehashed information on the other side?

If you roll your eyes whenever these titles come up in your Facebook feed or from some marketer’s Twitter account, you’re not alone. Unfortunately for marketers looking to take the easy way out, millions of other people are feeling the same way and are becoming immune to the type of clickbait titles that have dominated marketing communications for way too long now.

In the near future (actually, now), no one is going to be clicking on cheesy, cringe-worthy headlines that mask lackluster, uninspired content. Instead, you should be working to standout with your titles in other ways to help draw people in without misleading them. Of course, step one is to make sure your content is up to par; no great title or thumbnail image can lead to the conversions you’re after if you don’t have great words waiting for readers on the other side. Be valuable, be useful.

Next, consider tossing out additional hyped up adjectives and adverbs for statistics. Many of the most successful content marketing triumphs to pop up in 2015 were case study types which could boast a specific change in a variable in their title.

For example, the popular Groove blog wrote an article with a title along the lines of “How we raised our traffic by 12,267% with zero advertising.” It’s just about as enticing as a marketing blog post title could possibly be because it gives you an exact statistic that you can hold the author to.

By the way, that blog post really is excellent and outlines a bunch of free traffic generation methods that the company used to, no kidding, give an insane multiple-thousand percent increase to their traffic numbers in an impressive amount of time.

You should consider also making your titles platform specific. For example, WordPress has plugins which allow you to display different title and description tags for certain social networks. For example, if you know that Facebook shows only the first 70 characters of a link title and LinkedIn shows 110, you can create custom titles that fit those exact lengths and make the most of you allotted characters on each platform.

Titles which are native (made for) a platform will without a doubt perform better in terms of clickthrough and reader interest. Futhermore, platform specific titles can help you create clever synergies between the titles and preview images shown on each network, which can go a long way toward making your homegrown marketing efforts look more professional and thought out – and that’s never a bad thing!

Basically, titles still need to deliver clickthroughs and intrigue readers, but the way in which they accomplish these goals is going to need to be more genuine and helpful going forward. Working together to eliminate crappy content and titling is just one way to make audiences less skeptical of content marketing, which makes things easier on the rest of us, doesn’t it?

The Elements Of A Successful Content Marketing Piece

Content marketing: The creation of written, video, audio, or other content by a brand with the goal of garnering an audience or attention and establishing authority within a market.

Content marketing has proven, over the last couple of years, to be outpacing its more traditional media buy and advertising counterparts in terms of engagement with audiences and, ultimately, conversions. That said, not everyone gets it right, and some people have yet to start actually creating a content marketing plan for their brand.

Today, we’re going to go over a few ways you can audit any content marketing piece before you put it out in order to give it the best chance of success.

Make sure your target audience really, truly cares.

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make with content marketing is that they use their content as an extended ad for their product or service. The content itself delivers little value to the reader and doesn’t actually set them up to be any more knowledgeable on a topic or in a better position to solve their problems than before they read it.

Content marketing is about giving, and as such you should always place yourself in your target market’s shoes while writing. Ask yourself questions like:

– If I was in this market, would this content be useful to me, or does it just sound like someone trying to convince me to buy something?

– Is this genuinely interesting?

– Is this written like it’s honest and coming from someone who is knowledgeable on the topic?

Can it make it big?

Take into considerations the elements that make a piece of content go viral or stand out from the rest in terms of how much it gets shared around with others. In content marketing, learning to leverage your existing audience to spread your work exponentially to their own contacts and followers is key. In general, a few key items will help you achieve this with a piece of content:

– A title that is intriguing and clicky, but stays true to the content that’s on the other side.

– A piece that shows so much work, care, and time that it stands out as a resource above all others. For example, this is why list articles super high counts (i.e. “120 ways to share your content!”) often get shared 1,000’s of times – hard work shows.

– Have you designed imagery for promotion? Posts with images catch attention and perform substantially better, so you’ll want to design thumbnail images for social sharing even if your content itself is not visual (a written piece, etc.).

Can you hustle?

Content marketing is a numbers game, and those numbers are, largely, hours. Not only will you put in hours to create content that resonates and delivers, you’ll need to think about your distribution strategy.

This means manually posting to Facebook groups, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. Develop a distribution plan by starting broad and then narrowing in on the channels that are delivering results after a few releases. Most likely, this is a multiple month long process, but content marketing in general is playing the long game. Good luck!

The 10 Ways Marketing Will Change In 2016: Part 2

In part one of this series, we took a look at the first five predictions for changes to marketing trends in 2016. Many of our first half of the list focused on changes in tone of voice and public perception approach, let’s check out some other angles in the next five:

6) Managing your entire marketing cycle will be cheaper and simpler

As so many new companies have sprung up on online, the demand for awesome business to business software as a service (B2B SaaS) products has skyrocketed. Platforms like Hubspot, Kissmetrics, Intercom, and more have sprouted up to help manage campaigns, test conversions, schedule content, and more.

This innovation will only get more competitive and result in better platforms and tools for brands. More than a few brands in 2015 likely saved themselves a boatload of money by using such tools to bring their marketing efforts in-house.

7) Advertising and branding agencies will change

Let’s be honest, this one has been happening for a few years, but we’re really going to start seeing the dinosaurs die out in 2016. Agencies who are still only working with legacy brands, betting on them not bringing in fresh blood who want to expand beyond traditional advertising, or who want to simply ‘service’ social media and new communication platforms to appease clients rather than to actually innovate, are going to have trouble.

8) Consultants will have to get more clever

In the same way that agencies will have to adapt or die, those proclaiming to be experts or gurus who can do branding on a freelance basis will have to expand their skillset. For the most part, such people are driven to stay up to date and won’t have a problem with this.

That said, there will no doubt be those who struggle to adapt and want to keep on writing the same types of sales pages and pitching the same type of creative to their clients. As these wane in effectiveness, so will their businesses.

9) Wearable format

In 2016, wearable devices like the Apple Watch (and whatever gets rolled out in the next few months) will probably move from fringe and toward mainstream. With mass adoption comes mass opportunity, so brands will need to look into how they can get themselves in front of users of these devices in a native format.

Native means working within screen size restrictions, limited app offerings, and forming partnerships with companies who have some hold in relevant markets.

10) Smart automation

As time saving and automation tools become more prevalent, brands will develop best practices for automating their marketing process. Please note: this does not necessarily mean automating everything you can.

In fact, some of the strongest brands are able to pick out situations where automation can still be genuine while saving time, and then also hone in on areas where interaction should be kept more authentic and manual. Perhaps even a new meta market of products who help brands identify which parts of their process they should automate will even arise.

The 10 Ways Marketing Will Change In 2016 : Part 1

Much like the rest of the world, marketing as an industry has seen massive year over year changes over the past half decade or so. As technology and communication take mega-leaps in shorter amounts of time than ever imagined, we have to adapt quickly to stay ahead of the effective marketing curve.

To help facilitate that, here are some of the biggest ways in which marketing will likely change in 2016.

1) Content marketing will eclipse paid acquisition

Already a prominent trend, content marketing is something smart brands have latched onto over the past year or two (and some even longer). The basic premise is that content, in the form of writing, video, audio, etc., should be put out by brands.

This content veers from traditional paid advertising by making sure that it actually delivers some value or utility to the reader, rather than just being an extension of an advertisement. Brands that practice content marketing are continually seen as in-touch and willing to help prospects, even before they hand over their money.

2) Live-streaming

If you’re not already on Periscope or Facebook’s live video streaming platform, look into it. It is now easier than ever to incorporate live streaming events into your marketing wheelhouse, and these can be excellent ways to stay connected with customers and come across as more authentic and human as a brand.

For example, many popular figures host Q&A’s. Consider bringing on well known figures or celebrities in your market as guests for live interviews, or starting a daily series to keep followers updated on what your office is cooking up, etc.

3) The “I” will die

Simply put: communication has long been two-way, and is now all but consumer controlled. That means that switching to another brand is as easy as a couple of taps on a screen, and that leaving a hilariously tarnishing review of a company that gets retweeted 13,000 times is a reality of the landscape we live in.

For this reason, brands who aren’t on board yet will need to catch up by getting comfortable with talking with their prospects, not at them. It’s a concept that some from the old school have trouble grasping, but it will have a huge impact on how relevant your brand is perceived as.

4) Tone of voice will experience a shift

As an extension of number 3, you’ll likely witness many brands trying to come across as more ‘fun’ or ‘playful’ in their social media and public communications. Some will miss the mark awkwardly, while others will score big wins through their community interactions.

In any event, look out for a shift in what is considered appropriate for
a corporate voice.

5) Advertising costs will fall

Alright, to be honest, this still might be a year or two away, but think about this: Ad networks like Google Adwords have hit a critical mass of competition, or are approaching it in many markets, where prohibitively expensive bids of $10+ per click are a reality in many industries. As such, people are getting more creative: They’re taking their dollars to social, or to content.

Eventually, older networks that have fallen out of favor will have lower bids, and those clever enough to use them and not look desperate might have an opportunity.

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.

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.

Genuine SEO Isn’t Going Away, So You Might As Well Get On Board

Let’s not kid ourselves, the state of SEO 4+ years ago was laughable, a joke, if you will. Google’s own search results were so easily manipulated with “backlink packages” and the like that it was straightforward to a fault to get a new site ranking, even for a competitive keyword, provided you had the money (or the time).

Over the past few years, Google – and other search engines, too! – has wised up and started making it more difficult to game the system. While some lamented the downfall of blackhat, spammy techniques, it was a game that was doomed from the beginning, and an equal number of people recognized the value in Google’s new incarnation.

Right now, the social and link cues that tell Google a page is important and relevant are more closely aligned than ever with the actual relevance and genuine popularity of that page. This has been Google’s goal for years, so it’s no surprised that they’ve worked extremely hard to move this direction as quickly as possible. I’m sure they’re quite happy with themselves, and they should be.

Is there still some way to game the system? I’m sure, but it’s not worth it, because every loophole gets closed, and at a rate that is gaining speed with every single day.

So, if the old kinds of link building aren’t effective, what does work?

Social cues are big.

Social media is the currency of a generation right now, and content that is blowing up with links, likes, shares, and retweets on social media is going to make a blip on Google’s radar. Google knows that these are often real indicators of people thinking something is valuable and worthwhile, and they’re all about that positive end user experience.

Leverage and squeeze every drop out of your social networks. Repurpose your tweets and posts to help appeal to different people and at different times. Try scheduling posts to go out on social at various times of day, with different images, and try alternating your headline with a quote from within the page itself.

Mobile is king, for now.

While we can’t know exactly what the future holds, one thing is for sure: Google is big on the mobile trend. It’s for good reason, too, seeing that internet usage on phones has skyrocketed over the past few years, meaning that websites who are responsive to various screen sizes and who don’t have a crappy mobile experience are going to be rightfully propped up in the search results.
This trend is also true of tablets, and any new device that comes out and begins to gain popularity.

Don’t stop building links.

Backlinks are still a big deal, but the focus now is on the quality of the links you’re bringing in. When it comes to lone links with suspiciously consistent anchor text, your efforts are going to get ignored at best or earn you a penalized site at worst. Instead, focus on building contextual links through creating products and services so good other people write about you, through stellar guest posting gigs, and by leveraging the press.