Category Archives: Marketing

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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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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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Growth Hacking Day 1 – Goal Defining

If you’ve been around in the online marketing world for a while, you probably recognize the phrase ‘growth hacking’, but you might also get the impression that it’s a fairly new player in the online marketing sphere. And you’d be right. Growth hacking is an interesting way of building up a company or brand because it was literally grown out of the necessity to avoid old, more expensive tactics.

The tools and skills to develop apps, found a startup, and take an idea to fruition are more widespread than ever before, meaning that the rate at which new products and services are brought to market is extremely fast. The founders and marketing teams of these companies are usually small and in their experimental phases. Additionally, they’re usually fairly strapped for cash. This, combined with the fact that paid search advertising is more expensive and competitive than ever before, birthed growth hacking. Literally, growth hacking is the art/science of growing customer base without spending any actual money. Sounds great, right?!

Unfortunately, most people get it wrong. They jump straight to trying to hashtag their way some sort of niche popularity and people see right through it; nobody wants to interact with posts devoid of value. Before ever getting to this phase, however, these companies and individuals should have been defining goals.

That’s right, the first step to proper growth hacking is defining real, actionable goals. They can’t be obscure. They can’t be broad. We’re talking laser focus, and here’s how you find it:

First, let’s take the broad, universal goal of ‘getting more awareness for my brand’. What are some ways you can build awareness that are specific to your business? Let’s say you’ve got a referral plan in place, but people aren’t biting. The people who do become longterm customers, however, so it appears to be an area worth improving. Perhaps your incentive for referrals currently is access to a library of training materials, and you think that creating more content for your training library which you can then reference in sales copy will be the way to get more people on board.

Let’s say you then define your goal as “add five new lessons to the knowledge library,” and go from there. Is your goal boiled down enough yet? Because you can take clear, definable actions at this point to reach your goal. Once you can see individual steps (write one article per week, create promotional email for each article, etc.), then you’ve got something you can work with.

Of course, an equally important part of the goal framework is the ability to accurately monitor your results. You don’t want to have people hitting your new referral incentives and have no way of telling whether or not they’re engaging more or less than before. If you don’t have proper analytics in place to measure every facet of your business, you’re not ready for growth hacking.

Growth hacking is an agile process that requires adaptability, but more importantly adaptability that is based on sweet, sweet data.

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Why Surveys Are The Next Big Thing In Business

Admittedly, I know this title might provoke some head scratching at first: “SURVEYS?! How are boring old surveys going to all of a sudden become some major player in business?” And I’m so glad you asked.

Feedback-based marketing is nothing new. Everyone knows, or at least repeats, the mantra that ‘the customer is always right’ and that giving your customers exactly what they want is the key to the success of your business. It was true 50 years ago, and it’s still true today. That said, the growth you’re about to see from survey/feedback based business practices is due to the fact that new technology is vastly changing the ways we can and do interact with customers.

Traditionally, surveys have suffered from one of two shortcomings. The first, was that if you wanted to survey customers on the spot, or right after they had made a purchase in a brick and mortar store, you were likely going to have to use paper surveys. While you were collecting valuable realtime feedback, the tedium and cost of paper survey supplies and data entry was more than a little speedbump in keeping customer feedback a viable adjust-as-you-go business strategy.

More recently, we’ve had programs and websites which allow the creation of online surveys. These surveys can have their data indexed and organized in realtime, saving you hours or work and pay fishing through results. The downside was that there were no easy ways to execute these types of surveys when they were most needed (i.e. at a point of sale). Instead, customers would have to be emailed a link or asked to visit a website hours or even days later. At this point, the quality and accuracy of feedback and recall declines and you won’t get as good of insights as you could have.

Now, however, companies like Responster and Customerville have jumped on the rise of tablets and mobile phones to help bring the best of both worlds together. For your business, that looks like cross-platform surveys that are made to be integrated into touch and run on any device. Now, a business that invests in setting up a cheap iPad kiosk can all of a sudden be collecting helpful feedback from a large percentage of their customers within the first day.

Over time, it will become more apparent that the businesses who take advantage of platforms that allow them to better interact with and respond to customer feedback will perform better. Whereas the marketplace used to be largely dictated by what businesses told the public they needed in the past, we now exist in a consumer controlled world. The internet was the first wave of customer empowerment, social media overhauled it altogether, ensuring that customer complaints and suggestions could be heard around the world as soon as they were thought of, and now we’ve arrived at the third era. Mark my words, feedback is going to separate businesses more and more in the next few years, because no one is going to turn away from a brand that designs their product and service offerings in direct response to something that customer suggested 3 hours ago.

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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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Three Emotional Triggers to Drive Sales with Words

The reasons we buy things vary greatly from person to person. For one, the need to fix a leaky roof might be the most immediate need in their life. To another, a new flat screen TV may seem like a necessary update to keep up with all that the entertainment world has to offer. While the motivations behind specific purchases do seem vastly different, many of the most important buying motivators can be boiled down to a few needs and emotions. Today, we’re going to take a look three different universal purchase motivation factors that you can use to enhance any part of your sales funnel. Traditionally, these triggers have resided solidly in the copywriting world, but keeping them in mind when creating all kinds of marketing materials, when designing your sales funnel, and more can be a great way to implement these triggers above and beyond the standard sales letter.

The Need for Shelter & Comfort: There are few things that motivate people more than an uncomfortable or uncertain living situation. A great example of this is the seemingly miracle stories of internet marketers who may have been homeless or couchsurfing when they started out, doing whatever they could on their local library’s internet to make ends meet.

If your product solves a problem within this niche, you’ve already got some of your work done for you, because you’ve essentially got automatic demand. That said, if you can work into your copy and funnel that your product can improve living conditions or comfort, you can tap into this trigger as well from other markets.

The Need For Love and Companionship: Let’s be honest, no one is surprised by this one! With the amount of ‘get your ex back!’ and ‘seduction’ products out there, it’s pretty clear that romantic prowess and success are important to most people. This issue has only been exacerbated by modern dating apps and sites (Tinder, etc.) which focus almost exclusively on looks and nothing else. Many people feel slighted, and like they won’t be able to perform well on these platforms, making this trigger even more potent than ever.

Think about how you can suggest that your product, training, course, etc., whatever it is, can help people to increase their romantic value. Many products that don’t even directly sell dating advice can still have strong tie-ins. For example, products on public speaking can be marketed as products that help boost confidence in most any social situations, not just speeches, which can translate into a more confident dater.

Financial Success: People love to make money. Money makes the world go ’round. Whatever other cliches you want to drop here. Whether they admit it or not, most people have a large monetary motivation, and helping someone get ahead in this way is a major conversionary selling point. Again, this motivator is not only tied to products geared toward ‘making money’, but it can also be used with educational products that increase earning potential, lifestyle products that increased perceived wealth, and more.

The bottom line: Any time you’re creating communications, you should be putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and hitting them where it, um, ‘motivates’ most.

If you can work these emotional triggers into your product’s hook then you’re in good shape!

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Top 5 Reasons to use Pinterest for Your Business

Pinterest only started in 2010, yet millions of users flock to the site daily. What sets Pinterest apart is that there has never been anything quite like it before. Imagine being able to pin just about anything you want on a virtual corkboard and you’ll get the essential idea of Pinterest. In addition, you’ll be able to organize these boards into topic-specific scrapbooks.
For businesses, Pinterest provides a way to pin a variety of company information, products, and services onto organized online boards. If you’re wondering if Pinterest is right for your own business, here are 5 benefits to consider:

* Pinterest will help drive more traffic back to your company website. Each time you pin something to a board, you can link what you pinned directly back to your site or blog by using the provided description area below the pin. Each pin comes with its own description box which allows you describe the product in 500 characters or less.

* Most Pinterest users are shoppers. In fact, Pinterest users typically buy more products and services than any of the other top social media sites. According to Nielson, many consumers purchase products and services after seeing them on Pinterest. Furthermore, numerous users visit Pinterest with the intention of purchasing. Although this doesn’t mean that every user will purchase a product, the chances of consumer purchases on Pinterest are favorable when compared to popular social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

* Pinterest offers business accounts. With a business account, you’ll be able to verify your company’s official website, which promotes trust and credibility to consumers. In addition, Pinterest offers a plethora of educational materials and tutorials to help businesses effectively market their services. For instance, some of the tutorials show businesses how to effectively create a company story, how to increase product exposure, how to build a Pinterest community, and practice tips to help your customer base grow.

* You can run contests on Pinterest. Creating a contest is an excellent way to drive in new customers by offering an incentive to those that help spread the word. Pinterest business users can create colorful product and service photos, pin them to a contest board, then offer a prize to the winner who re-pins or gets the most shares from one of your contest pictures. This will not only help your followers get more exposure, but it will allow your pins to be seen by their followers as well.

* You can have as many boards as you need. For example, you can use one specific board to organize conference notes and charts, another board for product photos, and yet another board for service descriptions. Pinterest also offers a simple way to organize the information on each board with a few simple clicks. Keep in mind that although Pinterest is an effective tool to get exposure for your products and services, you can also use boards for company conferences, training materials, and networking.

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Top 5 Reasons to Use LinkedIn for Your Business

LinkedIn is a powerful social networking site that attracts millions of worldwide users. Although it’s similar to other popular social media sites, LinkedIn is also a bit different in regards to its unique approach to professional networking.

In addition, while other sites may focus on business pages and professionals, they also focus on personal entertainment games, videos, chatting, and more. LinkedIn, however, is strictly a professional social networking website for businesses, professionals, customers, and companies.

With more than 200 million users, LinkedIn has helped build professional rapport, find jobs, close sales deals, and build customer bases for numerous companies.

If you’re still wondering if LinkedIn is right for your own business, consider the following 5 reasons it could be just what you need:

* LinkedIn’s ad campaign application exposes your company to millions of professionals, businesses, and consumers. The application allows you to create your own ad campaigns, promoting your business, which will help drive a bigger audience to your page. It also allows you to choose which audience can see your campaigns. For example, you can cater your services towards a particular like-minded audience or you can set it as public which allows anyone on the site to view.

* LinkedIn offers interactive tools for your business page to help you promote your company. For instance, your business page can be customized to showcase what your business has to offer, including news updates, product and service information, recommendations, and more. The “Products and Services” tab provides a way for you to create a custom list of each product and service that you offer, as well as pictures and rotating banners next to each description.

* LinkedIn’s customer recommendations provide ways to endorse your business and products through testimonials and reviews. In fact, many users look at the “Recommendations” tab before deciding to check out a business. As the administrator of your business page, you have complete control over which recommendations make it on your list. Keep in mind, however, that LinkedIn users are typically savvy, so the products and services should always match the recommendations. People are more likely to trust your company and services if it has legitimate and positive recommendations from other customers.

* LinkedIn’s analytics helps you to determine your customer base and who is most likely to purchase your services. You can analyze how many visitors you have, visitor location, and what keywords attract these visitors through an easy-to-follow chart. Furthermore, you can compare your analytics chart to the charts of your competition. You’ll be able to see where your business is lacking compared to the other companies in the same industry. This will help you determine what areas in your social media presence need to be worked on. You’ll also be able to determine which areas you are doing the best in and what you’re doing exactly that garners the most customer attention.

* LinkedIn provides each user with an overview tab that can help your business stand out. The overview tab is what other users see before actually going to your page. You can customize your tab with service promotions, embedded YouTube videos, or anything else that will attract customers.