by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Mar 20, 2014 | Blogging, Content Marketing, Social Media
Your business blog is an essential tool for your inbound marketing efforts in terms of SEO, generating social proof, credibility, creating a community, becoming known as a thought leader and generating visits, leads, and conversion to customers and brand ambassadors. It has to the opportunity to spin gold as if you have the Midas Touch.
It is THE most valuable piece of company real estate you own. With a little caressing and foreplay, it should resonate with your prospective buyers, meeting their needs, pain points and answering their questions. Whatever they may be.
“Companies that blog have 55% more visitors and generate 70% more leads than companies who don’t. Hubspot
Organizations are pumping up their online efforts to write compelling content and devour a piece of the market share, the hungry consumer. If you are not part of this bandwidth, churning out and feeding the insatiable, then you miss the train. It is a strong leader in your social media channels.
You write for them.
Not yourself.
Not the search engines.
They are the ones inputting the string of keywords to find YOU! Help them.
Laboring over content and strategy can present a challenge for many. Think about what you want to say to your readers.
Did you ever consider how much time and effort it takes to write, maintain and promote a blog? It is so overwhelming. Sometimes just coming up with the theme can be a challenge.
“Do not underestimate how vital it is to allot time to writing a post or creating an image specifically designed for each particular community. It could make the difference between comments and crickets.” Rebekah Radice.
While there are many helpful and educational posts regarding content, titles, SEO, buyer personas, best practices, tips, tools and other recommended suggestions, it can be a very large undertaking to sustain and not go insane in the process. We can also get buried in the learning process. You open one site and suddenly realize hours have gone by while you only began to research a simple topic but you sunk in the abyss of data and links.
Anatomy of a Blog Post
Begin by understanding your goals, strategy and tactics for your blog and content. Write them down and use an editorial calendar to help visualize and plan your content schedule. It is much simpler and easier when you see it “on paper.” It will also help to keep you accountable as well as organized with your writing, posting, sharing and analyzing of your metrics. This is just the bare bones, the skeleton for your writing and posting process. Read and research some of the best practices, save articles to refer back to you and put in your best effort. Guest author, Adam Connell shared some great tips and insight to help you enhance your writing and pique the interest of your audience, enticing them to share your post.
Blog
Write compelling and thought provoking content to reach your readers, answer their deepest questions and offer real solutions. That’s why you’re in business right? Not to push a product or a widget but to offer outcomes and resolutions to problems. Great content captures interest and engagement.
“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” Brian Clark
Why Should Your Business Blog?
Do You Make These 13 Content Marketing Mistakes?
The Benefits of Blogging: Why Businesses Do It, and You Should Too
Foolproof Formula to Incredibly Catchy Blog Titles
Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer’s Guide to Smart Keyword Research
Content Curation: 10 FREE Tools to Save You Time
3 Steps to Identify Blog Topics that are Relevant to Your Audience
HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
WP Plugins
The WordPress plugins you choose should solve a specific “problem” or add key functionality and ease of use, for yourself as well as your audience. There are thousands of WordPress plugins to enhance your SEO, website speed, social sharing, curation and function of your site. Investigate and test the ones you feel will add the most benefits and features; not just because it seems like a shiny new toy.
Top 10 Social Media Plugins for WordPress
40 Experts Share Their Favorite WordPress Plugins
Content curation is now push button simple on WordPress
8 Top Free WordPress Plugins To Speed Up Your Websites Loading Time
10 Essential WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO & Usability – Search Engine Watch
Distribution
Once you written a fabulous post, you need a strategic plan to share your content and ideas. It isn’t enough just to write a post and push it to your social platforms. Use a variety of tools and platforms to broaden your reach and your message.
“The biggest mistake that I see bloggers and marketers make is spending an incredible amount of time creating a really great piece of content but don’t put the time into promoting it.” Adam Connell
32 Experts Share Their Best Blog Post Promotion Tips
25 Smart Ways to Promote Your Latest Blog Post
Conversations
Social Media isn’t a hit it and quit it mentality. If you think like this and don’t engage or only self-promote, you will not experience the value and global reach of social media. Your blog and your voice will be lost amongst those who build their relationship and give back to their communities.
“You can’t just smash blast anymore.” Instead, you have to give them what they want and then strive to aggregate with yourself so you can control your own marketing.” Jay Leopardi.
13 Tips to Humanize Your Brand
Customer Relationships – Engage Your Audience: From Profile to Preference
3 C’s of Effective Relationship Marketing
Relationship Marketing for a Digital World
What about you? How do you manage your blog, content and communications?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Mar 13, 2014 | Blogging, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Writing great and ‘share worthy’ content takes time.
It takes effort and isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do.
The problem is that simply writing something that is ‘great’ doesn’t mean that it’s going to get any views.
There’s a lot more to it than that.
In this post I’m going to share a number of things that I do differently when I write content. Using these tips I have been able to generate thousands of social shares on a relatively new blog.
Identify a problem and solve it
In recent years the bar has been raised thanks to the level of quality content that other writers are producing.
The easiest way to compel your audience to share your content is by identifying what problem they are experiencing and then solve it.
When people have been searching high and low to find the answer to a problem and they finally find it, they can be very appreciative.
Get the timing right
Sometimes timing can be a big factor.
A great example is when Google first announced that Google Reader was closing. The keyword ‘Google reader alternative’ became incredibly popular overnight.
Within a short amount of time there was an incredible number of blogs writing about the topic which meant that the competition went up dramatically.
Although the first few blogs to cover this would have seen significant increases in traffic, mostly from organic search.
Also, one thing that I noticed was that even the blogs that were late to cover the topic generated an above average level of social shares.
This type of thing is often referred to as news jacking because that’s essentially what you’re doing.
If you publish a blog post just before journalists are scrambling for information then you have a great opportunity.
David Meerman Scott also published a great book on the topic, learn more about it here.
Keep it easy to read
Readability is an important factor and it’s important to keep your articles at a level where everyone can understand them.
Breaking your sentences up into smaller chunks, writing clear sub headings and utilising formatting are all a good way to do that.
A very helpful tool that I found recently was the Hemingway App that grades your articles readability and offers ways to improve it.
Add value and come up with a unique angle
Before you start writing anything you need to think about how you can add value to your content.
Check out what other people have wrote about the topic in Google and find out what’s missing:
- Do you have a unique perspective on the subject?
- Can you add more detail and make a more comprehensive resource?
- Is there a content type that isn’t used?
There are plenty of things to think about but what you need to identify in most cases is the content gap.
By finding what’s missing you can make sure that your content fills the gap and becomes what people have been wanting.
Mention influencers and tell them about it
There is a form of marketing that is trending right now.
It’s known as influencer marketing.
The idea is marketing directly to those that influence your target audience rather than directly marketing to your target audience.
I’ve found it to be very effective but another thing it can really help with is content distribution.
By mentioning influencers in your content and letting them know (using Twitter, Google+ or email works fine) you can skyrocket the amount of social shares for your content.
People love it when other people say awesome stuff about them.
Finding influencers
There are a lot of tools on the market that can help you, but as a starting point I’d recommend giving BuzzSumo a try. It’s free to get started while the tool is in beta and it’s very straight forward to use.
Contacting influencers works best from a personal account even if you’re working on behalf of a brand – the personal touch works best. Something Jennifer Hanford covered here.
How to incorporate influencers into your content
Simply linking out to influencers can work great and for a lot of people it does.
There is a way to get more influencers to share your content.
That is to involve them directly in the creation of the content – you may have seen this referred to as group interviews or crowd sourced content.
The end result is the same – a group of influencers contributing content and because of that they are more willing to share the content.
Here are a few examples that have generated an impressive number of social shares:
The reality of influencer marketing
Instead of my websites or my clients starting out and having no audience whatsoever we have used this to put tap into the established audience of market influencers to put their content, their brand and their message directly in front of their target audience.
It’s not an overnight strategy, it does take time and there are more steps involved, but that’s the same in any form of real marketing.
Clicking publish doesn’t mean the job is done
The biggest mistake that I see bloggers and marketers make is spending an incredible amount of time creating a really great piece of content but don’t put the time into promoting it.
The truth is that clicking publish maybe all you’ll need to do if you are Tech Crunch or Mashable but most of us have got a fair distance to go until we reach that point.
I’d recommend checking this post out because it goes into a lot more detail (and it’s a very large topic) but ultimately after every post is published you need to spend as much time promoting it as you have done creating it.
Think about your target audience and where they hang out online. Then put your content directly in front of them.
Don’t do it in a spammy way or just drop the link in online communities but actually engage with your audience and start building a discussion.
Engage with your audience, be present and help them.
Soon enough you will develop your own influence.
Summary
There are plenty of ways to help get your content shared, this isn’t an exhaustive list by any means.
Now I’ll put the question to you – what do you do to help make sure people share your content?
We would love to hear more in the comments below.
Guest Author Blog Post:
Adam Connell is the Marketing Manager for a UK based marketing agency; UK Linkology. In his spare time Adam trains people to get better results out of content and social media.
Connect with Adam:
Twitter
Google+
Triberr
Photo Credit: giulia.forsythe via Compfight cc
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Feb 26, 2014 | Blogging, Content Marketing, Entrepreneur
Marketing has drastically changed over the past several decades in terms of the delivery methods but no matter how you look it, it is still content driven and always will be. Remarkable content is written for your buyers and their needs; providing solutions to their questions and problems. You have the opportunity to attract your audience with compelling content and images through your blog posts, website, e-newsletters and online discussions.
Organizations are pumping up their online efforts to write compelling content and devour a piece of the market share, the hungry consumer. If you are not part of this bandwidth, churning out and feeding the insatiable, then you miss the train. It is a strong leader in your social media channels.
Adam Connell of the Blogging Wizard wrote this dynamic post full of marketing tools to help you find, organize, post and promote your content.
Content is one of the most powerful ways to get more traffic to your blog and sell more products. To put things into perspective, $43.9 billion was spent on the production and distribution of content in 2013. That’s a crazy amount of money but illustrates the extent to which companies are investing in content right now, and that figure is set to increase. And the beauty of it is that over 60% of that is outsourced putting the power back into the hands of bloggers, freelance writers and professional copywriters.
Click to read more: bloggingwizard.com
Image courtesy of bloggingwizard.com @adamjayc
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Feb 20, 2014 | Blogging, Content Marketing, Social Media
Social media tools and platforms to help you manage, curate and post are developed at such a furious pace that it is almost impossible to keep up and test each one, all the while operating your business. Implementing a few of the platforms are sure to save you some time and a few headaches. As a business with an online presence, managing your social media is a full time job, not a hobby. It does require goals, strategy, tools, time, and manpower or womanpower. Just creating a few social profiles and a blog page are not enough. You should be actively engaging consistently and frequently to build your following, credibility, community and reputation.
It is important to humanize your brand and personally engage versus 100% automation. THAT isn’t social at all. You are not a robot and neither is your audience. Social media is relationship marketing to reinforce and support your brand image and establish long term connections.
In order to make your time most useful, investigate which tools work best for your needs, as well as which ones you will actually commit to using on a daily basis. They do help to simplify the process and minimize some of your valuable time online.
“Marketers are under pressure to find more cost and time effective ways to meet the increased demand for content marketing. The way to meet this need effectively is to add content curation into the content marketing mix.” Heidi Cohen, Content Curation In the Content Marketing Mix
Content Curation: Find, organize and share relevant, enriching content for your audience. Your curated content should focus on educating your readers and helping them to solve their greatest business issues.
Finding educational and newsworthy content takes time and effort. It isn’t just a matter of a quick search and click of a share button. There is such a surplus of data and intelligence flying through the airwaves that you should be particular about what you share.
“Content curation should be part of every content marketing strategy. There is no need to create all the content ourselves.” Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute
OneIMS
Follow your industry favorites, add their RSS feeds to your aggregator of choice, sign up their newsletters, listen to their podcasts and monitor their social networks. This will help you to filter the noise and receive only the content you want.
You can take a step beyond your standard social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn and try some of these other aggregators to reach further into the quagmire of content on the web. People consume hundreds of thousands of bits and bytes of data all day so filter your sources, provide something to tempt their palate and become a trusted, sought after resource. Many of the available curation tools are FREE!! Simply sign in with your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account and you are good to go.
Using some of the tools below, you can curate content based upon your interests, industry, keywords, hashtags and even user names in a few of the platforms. Some of them can be utilized for social search, analytics and real-time trending topics as well as having a multipurpose of posting and scheduling. THAT is a bonus as it saves a few steps in sharing your trusted content.
- Prismatic
- Tagboard
- Scoop.it
- everPOST
- Paper.li
- Flipboard
- Zite
- Topsy
- Listly
- Content Gems
Word to the wise: Just because you see something populated, doesn’t necessarily mean it is enriching and valuable for your followers. Make sure you click on each post and read it too, putting your trusted name behind your content.
Be selective and have a laser focus. Don’t simply share “just because.” Each piece of content you post, share and annotate is a representation of you and your online brand image; become the go-to source in your industry. A thought leader.
“I think curation is usually something people lean on when they are looking for something they can put together quickly. But if you’re doing curation right, you actually have to put a lot of time into researching things so you can serve the best content possible. Do not underestimate the amount of time it takes to curate content properly.” Corey Eridon, Hubspot
Image Credit: OneIMS
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jan 7, 2014 | Blogging, Productivity, Social Media
Find me! Find me!
We all hope that our SEO knowledge and efforts can help us rank a little higher on Google. You certainly don’t have to be a superhero to boost your pages and your posts but you need a little bit of know how. A few tips to help get your blog seen, read, and shared.
Inbound marketing and alleged best practices are changing all of the time. It can prove challenging to stay up to date, never mind modifying everything you do on a daily basis. Read, learn and understand the basics. Never stop educating yourself. Employ and test different tips and tools. Find what works for you and your audience. Stay social!!! Engage and share.
“This type of person thinks that they need to know everything and never implement anything that they learn. If you want to succeed you must take action now and start learning from your failures. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn, what it means is that you need to implement what you learn and see what works best for you and your market.” Garret Peirson – searchenginejournal.com
Writing rich and valuable content is to serve and engage your audience; to solve their biggest pain points and enrich their brain matter. Think about the reasons you are drawn to particular posts, bloggers or other newsworthy sites. Write the blog posts that capture and maintain your audience.
“The success of a page should be measured by one criteria: Does the visitor do what you want them to do?” Aaron Wall
Google rewards remarkable content, the customer experience and social engagement. Google’s mission is to retrieve data that is relevant and useful to the user’s search query based upon their algorithm and several other factors related to SEO, relevance, popularity, quality and content.
“Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing.” Rebecca Lieb
What satiates your appetite for knowledge?
You probably have some favorite “go to” sites and authors of your own but when you are searching for more data or need to answer a question, how do you retrieve the information?
KISS Your SEO
- When you start your post, consider: What is the core challenge or problem your article will help your audience to solve?
- Understand your consumers and what motivates them.
- You use a string of words versus just one key phrase.
- How does your audience search?
- What means the most to them?
- Your goal is to optimize your post with longtail keywords and phrases that would be a deeper representation of what your ideal buyer persona is looking for.
- Communicate without selling. Tell your story, offering solutions. Tweaking the ache for answers and information.
- Your content and keywords should serve your audience and their topics of interest NOT the search engines.
- Internal links within your site help to increase your rankings and direct readers to your other posts and pages, further enriching their experience.
- Make sure your metadata, including your image descriptions include your keywords.
- Updating existing content WordPress content also tells the search engines that your content is still relevant and current.
- Leverage your Google+ profile for better return on posts. Don’t forget the hashtags too.
According MOZ, here is the basic beginner checklist for SEO keywords in your blog post:
- At least once in the main title (H1).
- At least in one or two headings.
- At least 3 times in the body of the article.
- At least once in “bold” and “italics”.
- At least once in the “Alt” of a picture (below we’ll show you how to do it and why).
- Once in the URL.
- At least once in the Meta description.
Your KISS SEO strategy is just one simple step toward moving your blog post up the ranks in the search engines and gaining social merit. Remember to add social share buttons on each post, share it in your communities, syndicate it on various social channels and sites, ping each time you post, comment on other blog posts, engage your audience and most of all:
BE social. Don’t DO social.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Sep 12, 2013 | Blogging, Marketing, Social Media
BOOM! Information overload. Noise.
Cut through the clutter – but how?
Searching for rich and valuable content to share or repurpose with your audience is a social media essential to creating trust, interest and loyalty. Remarkable content is written for your buyers and their needs not just as a self promotional tool. Be the resource that readers turn to for information and answers. Know and understand your audience to feed their social media content appetites.
Traditional marketing and advertising is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content Marketing is showing the world that you are one. Robert Rose
Where do you look? You probably already have your list of RSS feeds from industry thought leaders, Twitter lists, feedly, your trusted network, keyword searches and various other news feeds but what if you had a few other news aggregators to easily compile your interests and top trends into one place? How cool is that? It certainly saves time and weeds out the “blah” that isn’t truly of value.
Prismatic: displays articles based upon your network shares. It is simple to use. Sign in with Facebook or Twitter. Pick topics, publishers or exact matches. Share your comments or “likes.”
Tagboard: is a social media hub for hashtags. It searches through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, App.net and Google+ for the hashtag you entered and presents you with the results, noting the platform. You can tweet, reply or comment right within the search results. You can also create your own personal Tagboard with a keyword and images.
Paper.li: Create your own daily newspaper in just seconds. The free version permits 25 resources to populate your content from your social media community. Paper.li processes more than 250 million social media posts per day. Personalize your paper with a custom title and tagline, set up a promotional tweet upon publishing and even add the news widget to your website. They also offer a bookmarklet to add to your browser to quickly add great content.
Inbound: Great source for content especially revolving around social media, SEO, and inbound marketing. Register with Twitter, submit content and join the conversation. Simple keyword searches deliver valuable content right to your fingertips.
Flipboard: Magazines on the web for iOS and Android phones. Curate from newsworthy sites, magazines and other uses to populate remarkable content to share with your audience. Browse sections based upon interests and categories. Choose and arrange the sections according to your interests and industry. Find, subscribe and share! #thatwaseasy
Now that you have a few places to curate content, share it with your community.
Tips:
- Make sure you tag the author’s Twitter handle.
- Use appropriate hashtags, but don’t overdo it.
- Schedule your posts using Buffer, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or your tool of choice.
- Read about the best times to post.
- Track and measure the results of your efforts.
Your turn. What are your favorite content curation sites?
