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Social Pros 16 – Jay and Eric Strike Back

Posted on 18. May, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Customer Service, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media crisis management

This is Episode 16 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features special insights from hosts Jay Baer and Eric Boggs, Eric’s Social Media Stat of the week (this week: social media users will tell an average of 53 people about their bad customer service experiences), and some tough questions for both hosts.

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Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft, Janrain, and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; Janrain is our crackerjack social integration company, and Jim is our guest host for the podcast (and a smart guy).

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

Jay: Welcome all to Episode Number 16 and that is a 1-6, for you scoring at home. I am Jay Baer joined as almost always by my friend, the man, the myth, the legend of Argyle Social, Eric Boggs.

Eric: Ah, thank you for that kind introduction Jay. We’re 16, I think we can get our driver’s license now.

Jay: That is fantastic. Can we get a VH-1 reality show as well? Isn’t there some sort of a, we get a fancy dress…

Eric: My Sweet 16.

Jay: Yeah, like Red Hot Chili Peppers play this episode or something like that. That would be awesome.

Eric: Oh geez, I’ll be the petulant 16 year old. You can be the other petulant 16 year old.

Jay: Perfect, perfect, yes, the death of civilization is upon us. So, thanks as always to the sponsors of the Social Pros Podcast, Eric’s company, erstwhile Argyle Social, social media management software, data driven, in fact, who we use for all of our social media stylings, our friends at Infusionsoft who we use for email marketing, our new friends, our new sponsors at Janrain, all kinds of social sign-in and advanced craziness, and our good pal, Jim Kukral, from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Let’s talk a little bit about Facebook, shall we? Some of the people listening to this podcast may have heard of Facebook.

Eric: I think this is going to be the Facebook episode.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: It may be, so we are recording this in the shadow of the Facebook IPO, and two things actually happened today. This is real time podcasting, people. Two things happened today that were interesting. One, “research” was released by “news organizations” Associated Press and I think it was CNBC if I recall correctly, that purported to show that 46 percent of Americans believe that Facebook is a fad. Now, that surprises me, partially because when you have 900 million people doing anything, even like eating or sleeping, it’s hard to say that it’s a fad, and I also wonder, given the fact that I guess it’s good that they random sampled the survey, they actually controlled for population, et cetera. Number one, it was mostly a home telephone survey, so are the people who willingly answer telephone surveys at home, representative of people who would think Facebook is a good idea? I say, probably not.

Eric: Yes, Tom Webster would have something to say about the methodology, I’m sure.

Jay: Yeah, I would think so, and then the other question is, look, 56 or 54 percent of the people in the country are on Facebook, depending on who you ask, and 46 percent think it’s a fad. What I want to know, which they did not publish, is what percentage of the people who are not on Facebook thinks it’s a fad versus the people who are on Facebook? Look, I don’t know anything about a lot of things. If you ask me, “Hey, is this brand new sort of a mineral that we discovered in a mine in Botswana a fad?” If it’s a fad, I have no idea.

Eric: I’ve never heard of such silliness.

Jay: I mean if you ask people who have no frame of reference if that thing is a fad, they’re going to say, “Yes, it’s a fad,” so I think it’s flawed research to begin with. So, that’s my first sort of weird thing that happened today, and the second thing, we were just talking about this off air, the very interestingly timed announcement that General Motors is pulling a $10 million media buy from Facebook because they don’t believe that Facebook advertising is effective. That is interesting in the run up to the IPO.

Gary Vaynerchuk, tweeted right after, he thought GM was going to try to buy Facebook stock on the cheap now, which I thought was a pretty astute observation, but here’s the thing. Whether GM has success with Facebook advertising doesn’t necessarily weigh in on Facebook’s effectiveness as an ad platform. Maybe, it’s more about whether GM is good at Facebook advertising.

Eric: Yeah, I was going to ask, I wonder who is the agency of record for GM, for their social stuff. (Editor’s Note: It was formerly Big Fuel).

Jay: I mean it’s a focus group of one at that point, is it not? I mean it’s so anecdotal, but I think the bigger trend here, and not just those two data points, but what I’ve been reading in the paper, what I’ve been seeing on television, certainly what I see on the interwebs, is a crescendo of Facebook is overvalued, Facebook is over-hyped, it’s much ado about nothing, et cetera, and I think as part of a larger societal trend, which is that we move so quickly now that we actually tear people down before they even reach the mountaintop, right?

At least, in Groupon’s case, we waited for them to become a success before we shit on them. Now, we don’t even give people the luxury of their moment in the sun before the backlash occurs. We’ve actually gotten so fast and so rapid in this society that we’ve turned ourselves inside out. We’ve ripped a hole in the space/time continuum, so much so that we actually start to tear people down before they actually succeed all the way and I think it is dangerous and I think it’s foolish.

Eric: Yeah, well it aligns with my sweet 16 jokes at the top of the show, right? It’s kind of the same societal trend, not to turn this into a sociology dissertation, but it is sort of an acceleration of expectations, an acceleration of sort of growing up, I guess, both for people and for companies.

Jay: Yeah, and look, I don’t pretend to have any sort of disproportionate Facebook crystal ball, but what I can tell you is that I’ve been doing digital marketing for almost 20 years, and give it a chance, right? I mean to think that Facebook today is what Facebook will become is just ridiculous. If you sort of weighed in on what Google was going to become or whether Google was going to be a fad, just a few years after Google really had hit its stride, you would be very surprised in terms of what it is today and the same is true for a lot of other companies.

Eric: Oh yeah, well I have fuzzy memories of the Google IPO. I think it offered at like $80 a share or something like that. It was a Dutch auction, they very much kind of thumbed their nose a bit to the Wall Street establishment in the selling process, and everyone was up in arms about how it was overpriced and how Google didn’t cut in the bankers on the deal the way they should have, and it became Google, and it took another seven or eight years for that to happen, and we’re going to see the same thing with Facebook.

Jay: Well, and conversely, I remember quite clearly 1999, Yahoo had a 55 percent share of search in this country, and number two was Excite, number three was Altavista, number four was Infoseek, and number five was Lycos, and I am pretty sure you, Eric Boggs, have not used your Lycos toolbar today.

Eric: No, I have not.

Jay: And in ’99, we thought, “Hey, this game is over, Yahoo has won, mail them the trophy, let them wear the sash,” and then Google entered the market and turned it upside down overnight, but I can tell you, we thought it was done. We thought Yahoo had won the “search war”, and then Google comes along and now look at Yahoo, right? They can’t even keep an executive team, much less prosper.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: So, I think people who get so caught up in the pace of social that they make decisions day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, are going to look back at this time and say, “Maybe, we were a little rash.”

Eric: Well, this is sort of the salad days, right? I had a conversation with someone earlier today, that we’ve crossed the chasm in terms of social media being important, and we all have Facebook to thank for that, like our entire industry, all of my customers at Argyle, all of your clients for Convince & Convert, all of the people that listen, kind of owe a big fat thanks to Facebook for building our industry. This is sort of a massive milestone in the development of this new marketing channel or business platform, however you want to think about it, and I agree that it’s a little frustrating to see people kind of throwing rocks at it. What Facebook has built is unbelievably significant and unbelievably impressive.

Jay: Well, and the thing is, any organization that is of that breadth and magnitude, is going to have things that you can complain about. I mean, there’s certainly things about Google that we don’t love either, or Ford, or the U.S. government, or Apple for that matter. There’s a lot of exposure and a lot of chances to fall short of expectations when you have a company of that size, and I think people tend to keep Facebook in their mind as a plucky little upstart, when in reality it’s anything but, and Groupon’s the same way, right? I mean Groupon, I’ve said this in the past, I don’t think I ever said it on a podcast, but Groupon went from plucky upstart to evil empire faster than any company in world history. I mean it was literally like four hours. It was like, oh, we don’t like them anymore, what?

Now in that case, it was more of a suicide than a murder, but still, it’s still funny how much our perspectives can change about corporate America and really, corporate anywhere because we see so many tweets and updates and we believe, we believe what we read. In fact, speaking of believing what we read, what is the social media stat of the week?

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Social Media Users Will Tell 53 People About Their Bad Customer Service Experiences

Eric: That was an interesting transition. My stat of the week was going to be the $10 million account, Jay, but you kind of upstaged me on that one.

Jay: Sorry.

Eric: No, that’s fine. So, the stat of the week actually comes from, I actually had it in my web browser, pulling it up. It’s actually about complaining which aligns perfectly with our intro. It’s a study from American Express and Echo Research. They did a broad international survey back in February, a thousand adults over 18 about customer service experiences, and social media users who have had bad customer service experiences will tell 53 people about the misfortune of their event, on average, 53 people, as opposed to 24 people for people in the general population, so social media users are complainers. I think that aligns with a previous stat a few weeks ago where we sort of waxed poetic about social media strategies built around the idea of mitigating bad as opposed to amplifying good because there is so much negative chatter in social channels.

Jay: Yeah, and I don’t know if the takeaway there is that people in social media are disproportionately negative, or just that people in social media are disproportionately chatty, which absolutely stands to reason, that’s what the medium is for. I don’t recall if that particular article included it, but I would love to know whether they are also more likely to tell good things.

Eric: They are; social media users will tell an average of 42 people about a good service experience versus an average of 15 for the general population.

Jay: Yeah, and to me that’s just as interesting of a finding, right?

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: It’s that people in social media are your vocal critics, but as much so, they are your vocal supporters and insofar as your company does more good than bad, and I suspect mathematically that’s typically the case or you wouldn’t be a company, the fact that these people are likely to advocate on your behalf, I think, is really, really interesting.

Eric: This is a very broad and sweeping question, but sort of the long term viability of the social endorsement or the social sort of negative comment. I see so many tweets about horrible airline experiences, or so many things like, “Oh my God, this new record is the best thing ever,” that I almost don’t even listen to them anymore.

Jay: Yeah, I actually just got off a Webinar before we started the show, with Social Media Examiner, the Social Media Success Summit 2012, and I did a session on social media crisis management, and one of my key points was that you have to understand what constitutes a crisis, and a negative tweet isn’t a crisis. Somebody being mean to you isn’t a crisis. It has to be a deviation from the norm, and it has to have a potentially broad-based negative business impact, and you have to have some sort of information asymmetry where you don’t really know what’s going on. That’s a crisis. If your company sucks, Twitter’s not your problem.

So, the example I used was Nike, although perhaps a more modern example would be Apple, where both companies have been criticized for labor practices and their supply chain in the past, but that’s old news, right?

Everyday, somebody complains about how Nike shoes are made or how Apple computers and iPads are made, et cetera. That is table stakes for them. That’s not a crisis; that is the new normal. Just as you say, somebody saying, “Oh boy, Delta sucks,” you know what, do you know how many customers Delta serves a day? They have so many opportunities to get one small thing wrong. Their points of failure are in the hundreds of thousands a day potentially, right, so you’re going to get a few negative tweets a day just by doing business at that scale, so people tend to get a little too excited and as I said in my webinar, don’t be scared, just be prepared.

Eric: Yeah, well, this is actually a pretty cool study. We’ll link it up in the follow-up posts.

Tough Questions for Eric and Jay

Jay: Because we don’t have a guest on the show today, I am going to ask Eric a difficult question, and then Eric is going to ask me a difficult question. Then, we’ll do some Social Pros shout outs.

Eric: All right, well, you go first. I’ll have to think of a difficult question.

Jay: I’ll start. My question is this, so Argyle Social, as everybody knows, I use Argyle Social, love it, big fan, Eric comes from the email marketing space as I do, and so we are simpatico in how we think about social and testing and experimentation and data, but a lot of people who use social media management software are not from that school of thought, and there are a number of players in your category, i.e., HootSuite, people like that who actually provide a significant amount of functionality, I think you would agree, at a very low price.

It seems to me that the business you’re in, as well as things like Facebook management software, where you’ve got Buddy and Vitrue and those guys, and I’ve also used software from Agorapulse which is very good, and it’s like $100 a month as opposed to many thousands of dollars a month. It always seems to me like it’s a race to the bottom on pricing on all of that kind of stuff, and how do you handle that as a company? Doesn’t that concern you as an executive, like people just give stuff away, and what does that do to your company?

Eric: Yeah, boy, we could have a long conversation about things that worry me as an executive, for sure, so yeah, a very astute summary of the market and one that I absolutely agree with. You mentioned having a background in the email space, and in terms of a forward looking opinion on our market, I think that the social media marketing, social media management space is actually going to shake out a lot like the email space where there are high end, very expensive, very complex, very enterprise-y companies. In email, that’s Responsys and Unica and ExactTarget. In social, that’s Buddy Media and Vitrue, and then on the complete other end of the spectrum you have email products that are simple and small business-y and still kind of pack a punch, but they’re never going to fit sort of the significant businesses needs.

Jay: MailChimp, Constant Contact…

Eric: Exactly, and in social they’re the exact same equivalents, and you named a couple of them with HootSuite and Sprout Social. Then, there’s this big swath across the middle and in our space, no one is really, in the social space no one has really addressed that well, and we’re building products to address that segment of the market. It takes time for that market to develop in the same way it took time for that market to develop in the email space.

It’s just fascinating, the questions that our customers are asking us today are fundamentally different from the questions that our customers were asking us six months ago, and it’s really encouraging because the questions are about, “Hey, how do I integrate this with Salesforce.com,” or, “Can you just give me this data in a raw format so that I can build pivot tables and do all this complex analysis.” That makes us feel really good because it indicates that the market is getting a lot smarter and it’s maturing.

Jay: It’s a really interesting point you made about mid-market solutions taking longer to germinate, but it’s absolutely true because if you are a mid-market company, you have to understand either that the up-market software is not worth the money for you, you’re not going to get all the features out of it to make it worth your while and/or realize that the down-market solution is not going to satisfy your needs, and both of those scenarios take time to play out.

Eric: Yep, and we’ve won deals from Buddy Media and we’ve won deals from HootSuite. We have people trading down, and we have people trading up.

Jay: Yeah, it’s funny, Infusionsoft is in the same place, so they do a lot of mid-market on the email side as well. And so, they’re definitely more than what you would get from a Constant Contact, things like that, because they have CRM capabilities, quite robust CRM capabilities built into the system, but yet by their own admission, they’re not Marketo, they’re not Eloqua, they’re not Salesforce at scale, those kind of things. Certainly, they’re not ExactTarget on the email side. They want to play in that middle market, and I think that they’re in the same spot that you are in some ways, in that people have to try on some other clothes and say, “You know what, I look ugly in these clothes,” or they say, “Oh, these clothes that Argyle Social has…” In your case, it would be social or Argyle perhaps…

Eric: No, everyone looks good in Argyle.

Jay: No, that’s absolutely not true. I can say categorically that that’s not true. However, you look good in Argyle. We may have to link up the picture of you in your pants yet again.

Eric: You can never have too many pictures of Argyle pants.

Jay: That’s right. Actually, you know what, Jill looks better in the pants than you do.

Eric: I wholeheartedly agree. So, now I get to ask you a difficult question?

Jay: OK, I’m ready.

Eric: I still haven’t thought of a difficult question, your question was so difficult it required…

Jay: It was so difficult it prevents you from actually conceiving of a question.

Eric: It required such nuanced thought. So, one day you created a Twitter account and you had zero followers, and today you have a Twitter account and you have a kajillion followers. What are the things that you think have sort of amplified your status, in our business, someone with a platform who’s really smart and that people look to for opinion and thought?

Jay: Well, thank you, first of all. I try to reject the layer of self-importance that settles upon many people in my world like a cloak. I think there are a few things. One, I was fairly early in Twitter, not super duper early like Brogan, but pretty early and being early helps. Two, I believe very much what David Meerman Scott writes and what he told me a few times which is, “You are what you publish,” so I am very serious about quality. I try to share primarily good and useful things and I think over time that works, and I try to be approachable. I mean, I’ve been on a lot of lists of people who do this and people who do that, and that’s always gratifying, but some of the lists that I’ve been on that I’m actually happiest to be on, are the lists along the lines of “most approachable people in social media,” or “nicest guys in social media.” That’s the kind of stuff that really matters to me because I think over time it generates business, but again it’s over time.

This is my fifth start-up company and I have always been a big believer in where are we going to be years from now, not where are we going to be two months from now, and there’s certainly other people in the social media business who have up-leveled faster than I have, and that’s OK, that’s OK with me. It’s not a race. Partially I feel that way because I’ve been on the start-up merry go round several times in the past, and so I don’t get all hot and bothered by it, and partially I just don’t want to work that hard. I think part of the reason why it works is because I’m not trying to game the system although certainly given my background and yours, I do pay attention to the science of it, no question about it, but I just generally like people and what I really try to do is educate.

As I’ve said in the past, if the stock market wouldn’t have collapsed, and the real estate market wouldn’t have collapsed at the same time, I’d be teaching in college right now because that’s what I was going to go do when I sold my last start-up. I was going to go teach at a university, but I couldn’t afford to do it, so I said, “All right, one more trip on the merry go round, let’s start another company,” and here I am, but I feel like what I do now is just teach, whether it’s the blog or the podcast or the email or my speaking or the books. I feel like what I am now is the world’s best paid college educator.

Eric: There are a lot of college educators who would probably love to get half the salary that you get, Jay.

Jay: Well, you know, it can be done, and maybe that’s the solution, right, is that maybe education and maybe teaching and maybe information conveyance needs to be removed from institutions and distributed one tweet at a time. I think that’s one of the things that’s really, really fascinating about social media and content marketing is that the knowledge, the cutting edge knowledge isn’t in institutions. It’s in individuals and I think that’s, I don’t want to say unprecedented, but certainly unusual.

Eric: Yeah, that is another conversation for another episode, I think. The higher education needs to get disrupted episode.

Jay: Yeah, it’s getting there, it’s getting better, so much better now about social and digital than it was when I used to run agencies, and they didn’t even teach digital marketing, and that was not that long ago, right?

You’d get interns and they literally didn’t know what Google was. It was scary.

Eric: Yeah, that’s cool. I appreciate you sharing, Jay. It’s cool to hear you open up and sort of share some of the deep thoughts of Jay Baer.

Jay: Well, one of these times we’ll talk about my background in politics and giving prison and landfill tours. It’ll be a great episode. That’s what we should do one of these times is “other jobs that we’ve had before this job.” That would be a fascinating episode.

Eric: Let’s mark that one down for Episode Number 17.

Jay: Okay, great. I like this, just me and you rapping, it’s fun. All right, do you have a Social Pros shout out before we wrap it up?

Social Pros Shout Outs

Eric: I do have one quick shout out to Nick Westergaard, @NickWestergaard on Twitter, who tweeted a couple of days ago, “My lawn mowing ritual is listening to Social Pros Podcast with Jay Baer and Eric Boggs.” Thanks for listening, Nick.

Jay: Oh, he’s a good guy, he’s a really, really good guy, very loyal listener. I think he does that while he’s lawn mowing so he can’t hear us actually. I think he doesn’t even use headphones. Nick is great, thank you, and we should just take a moment, because it’s just the two of us and just really, seriously, if you’re listening to this, thank you. We do see your tweets and we see your emails and we see your expressions of support out there. Podcasting can be a little bit of a lonely endeavor, more so than blogging I’ve found, but I know that there are people out there who really like the show and thank you. We enjoy doing it, and please keep telling us that you like it because it makes us want to keep doing it.

Eric: Yeah, likewise, I echo the thanks.

Jay: Just a quick Social Pros shout out from me. I just want to say a shout out and really just congratulations to my friend and yours, Mark Schaefer, who is just blowing up. I mean such a humble guy, talking about somebody who was a college professor at Rutgers teaching social media and other things, and his book, “Return On Influence,” went super Nova and sold out the first run in eight weeks. Now, he’s in New York and he posted a picture the other day with him and Seth Greenberg and he’s just gone like super celebrity on the Today Show, stuff like this, and he’s sort of gone Gary V, and he is an unlikely suspect for that kind of ascension because he’s so humble and so down to earth and such a great guy, and so I’m really, really, really happy for him.

Eric: Yeah, very cool.

Jay: We’ll link up some of his stuff in case you don’t know his work, although that’s probably unlikely. All right, this wraps it up for Episode Number 16 of the Social Pros Podcast. Thanks as always to Eric and his company, Argyle Social, also our friends at Infusionsoft and Janrain and our buddy, Jim Kukral, from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Next week, we’re talking a little internal social media with Yammer, is that right?

Eric: Yeah, Maria Ogneva from Yammer. She’s as smart as they come. She’s going to be great.

Jay: Yeah, she is super sharp. I unfortunately will be on the road that day, but Jim will be sitting in for me. I’m sorry I’m going to miss that because I like Maria a lot, she’s great.

Eric: Yeah, Jim and I will make as many disparaging comments about you as humanly possible.

Jay: As expected, as expected. I’ll just edit them out of the transcript. Thanks everybody, we appreciate it. Take care now.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Social Pros 16 – Jay and Eric Strike Back is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

Ways to Win Customers and Influence Rankings – Whiteboard Friday

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by randfish in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Posted by randfish

Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don't forget to leave your own advice in the comments below.

Happy Friday Everyone! Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, "Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?"

We've done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who've had success in-house, who've had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz's membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I'd start with a few of those.

So number one, if you're just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you're very early stage. Even if you're saying, "You're my first professional customer," that's fine, that's okay. But have a few things that you've done in the past to show off your work.

So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you've helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you've helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you've helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend's got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she's going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You're going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that's going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there's a personal blog, either one that you're running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.

Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, "Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it's ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff." Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.

Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, "Hey, I don't want you discussing my particular project. I'd prefer you didn't share and disclose which types of things you've worked on for me or what you've done." That's okay, and that's another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, "Hey, here's a few clients we've worked with" or "I can't tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I'll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we've worked on, and those include some of these other ones."

A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here's Adorable Adoptions. It's an animal shelter. It's not actually an animal shelter. It's an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.

The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it's somebody's personal project, something they're putting on Kickstarter, or something that they're launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you've seen that they're launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don't have a lot of venture backing and they're kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. "Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I've done some things. I'm trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network." They're going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don't have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.

But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there's just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you're committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, "Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you'll recommend me in the future. I'd love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get." Fantastic, but you've made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don't, you can get into a messy territory.

Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you're an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don't love to go networking, that's okay. That's fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you're in and whatever geographic region you're in. By being on top of what's happening in the field, you can say, "Hey, I noticed that you said you're looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I'd be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it." Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn't need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you've connected in the future will say, "Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her." Great way to get business.

Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it's critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.

I'll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I'm going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He's the only person I see in my stream who's really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He's made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he's showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that's connected to Google+, there's AJ, the stuff that he's Plus 1'd and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he's done a great job of this.

There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who's getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you're going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.

Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you're most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I've talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, "Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in." So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn't. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you're not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It's actually a great idea when you're desperate to be able to say to someone, "Hey, I'm sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You're not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you'll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit." That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, "Yeah, let's start some client work. Well, I can't pay you that much, and besides I know you're desperate for business. So I'm going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you're going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I'm unpleasant to work with." This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.

Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I've got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, "Man, that guy's pretty cool. I'd really like to know him. You know what? I've got a van. I'm going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I'll reach out over Twitter or maybe I'll reach out over email." Fantastic, right? You have a friend who's out of work. I know you're struggling as well, right? You're trying to find clients. You obviously don't have a position for them, but it doesn't matter. As you're looking across clients, you're meeting with someone, maybe they don't take you up on it and you say, "Hey, I know that we didn't end up being your SEO agency. I didn't end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who's really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I'd love to make the introduction." Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There's a new local news site out there. There's a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you've done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.

All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Stalk Your Competitors in 10 Minutes [Marketing Hack]

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by Amanda Iglesias in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

You’re a rockstar inbound marketer. You spend your time figuring out how to increase your web traffic, generate more leads, and analyze your marketing analytics so you can keep your competitive edge on the web. Come on, what’s more rockstar than that?

There’s just one thing getting in between you and inbound marketing dominance — your competitors. And what you don’t know about your competitors may actually be doing more harm to all your hard work than you realize. But what’s a marketer to do?

Luckily, in the immortal words of Apple, there’s an app for that! It’s called the Marketing Grader app, and with it, you only need about ten minutes every week to stay up to date on your competitors. This ensures you’re doing the work you need to maintain your stellar online presence and slowly overtake that your competitors. Learn how you can monitor your competitors in just 10 minutes a week with this free marketing web app — let’s get started now by setting it up!

Set Up the App

Go to marketing.grader.com and run a free Marketing Grader report — it’ll be done in a flash!

Once you’re in the report, click on the Sign In link on the top, right-hand corner of the application.

If you don’t already have a HubSpot account, Register for a free Marketing Grader Account. If you already have a HubSpot account, sign in!

Enter your competitors’ websites so the tool can start tracking them. For the sake of this example, we’ll pretend we’re Dunkin’ Donuts, and we want to track Starbucks.

Voila! You’ve just set up competitive tracking in the free Marketing Grader app! Now, let’s learn what to do with the information.

Weekly Check-in (5 Minutes)

Now that you’ve set up your Marketing Grader app, set aside 5 minutes each week to log in at marketing.grader.com to see how you are faring against your competitors. When you first log in, you will see the Grade History tab. The Grade History tab lets you see how the Marketing Grade for your website and your competitor’s website has changed over time. To get really specific feedback, click on the By Metric button, as indicated by the blue arrow in the screenshot below.

When you click on the By Metric button, you’ll be able to explore the following metrics Marketing Grader is tracking to get specific ideas for ways to improve:

• Indexed Pages – We all know that Indexed Pages can increase your website visitors by up to 55%, so it’s no surprise that this is a big metric to keep an eye on for your competitors. You don’t want them stealing your traffic, do you?

• Linking Domains – Inbound links are the best way to increase your web authority, but the key is breadth of links rather than depth of links. Make sure your inbound links are evenly distributed across a number of domains to get the most impact!
  

• Facebook Fans & Twitter Followers - Sure, social media is a great way to build a community to evangelize your products and service. But the bigger your social media following, the more eyes on your oh-so-valuable content — that’s what we like to call “reach,” and it’s critical for getting traffic and leads.

All of this nitty gritty analysis is great, but the Marketing Grader report you know and love is still available to you, too. If you want to see that analysis broken down into the three sections that matter to you most — Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, and Analytics — you can always head back to the Reports tab. In case you forgot, the top of the funnel addresses how you bring in traffic, the middle of the funnel addresses how you convert that traffic into qualified leads, and analytics addresses which marketing activities work, and which do not.

Develop an Action Plan (5 Minutes)

So you’ve set up your Marketing Grader app, you’ve seen the competitive data — now what? Now, it’s time to craft your plan of attack! Start by asking yourself 2 questions:

1) Where did you underperform against your competitors?

2) What actions can you take to improve your performance in these areas?

Let’s use Dunkin’ Donuts as an example. Here in New England, there’s a pretty big loyalty divide between Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks — except on the web. Dunkin’ Donuts has a lower overall Marketing Grade and is lagging behind Starbucks when it comes to indexed pages, linking domains, and Facebook fans.

So what would you do if you were Marketing Director of Dunkin’ Donuts?

That’s right! You would need to beef up your content strategy; I’d get started with more frequent blogging as the most efficient way to solve your problem with indexed pages and linking domains. Think about it — every new blog post you publish is a brand new page for your website, a brand new opportunity to generate inbound links, and a brand new piece of content that you can feed to your social media followers. Talk about a powerful marketing opportunity! And you’ll not only be able to identify this opportunity with the free Marketing Grader app, but track the impact of your efforts in just a few minutes every week.

See? You can handle this! Take your competitors by storm with this new weapon in your arsenal! Now, let’s get started…

Have you started tracking your competitors’ online performance yet?

Image credit: Gamma Man

20 Things Every Graduating Marketing Student Needs to Know

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by Anum Hussain in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

It’s college graduation season! Graduation caps are flying through the air, names are being mispronounced, and awkward questions about future careers are being asked. What’s missing? A crash course when it comes to what marketing students actually need to know to enter the real world of marketing.

Unfortunately, featuring your fancy new diploma with the words “B.S. in Marketing” does more for fantastic graduation photos than it does for fantastic post-grad jobs. The sad truth is that most marketing students aren’t adequately prepared for the real world.

To all you current and future marketing students, here’s a list of 20 things, under the umbrella of five key categories, of what you actually need to know before entering the professional marketing world. The list is a collection of advice from current members of the HubSpot marketing team — including full-time marketing professionals who have graduated in years past as well as marketing interns who are graduating this year or in the future.

Academics

1. Don’t be afraid of numbers.

I can’t tell you how many students I’ve come across who tell me they avoid taking any classes that involve quantitative analysis or statistics. News flash: marketers need statistics. You need to be prepared to analyze everything you do. Don’t use the excuse that you plan on being a “social media marketer.” I’m on the HubSpot social media team, and I spend every single day looking at and interpreting charts and graphs. You need to be able to look at a spreadsheet of numbers, make the proper calculations, and analyze what they mean. Otherwise, you’re wasting a whole lot of time making decisions without proof that they work and/or benefit your business in some way. So pay attention in stats.

2. It’s not all about the Four P’s and C’s of Marketing.

Whether your marketing classes preach the P’s or C’s of Marketing, it doesn’t matter. While they can help introduce you to the core concepts of marketing, the chances of you dealing with a real-world marketing situation by brainstorming how you meet price, product, place, and promotion is unrealistic. You need to be thinking about much more, which will come in later parts of this list.

3. Your classroom doesn’t teach you to think on your feet.

Simulate “real-life” scenarios as much as you want, but you won’t actually learn to make important decisions in tight time frames until you’re managing real dollars, working to uphold a real company’s reputation, and investing your energy in real projects. You can’t practice it either. You have to be there and do it a few times, and then you’ll learn. Use internships as an opportunity to do this, which takes us to our next section.

Experience

4. Having an internship on your resume isn’t “impressive.”

You had a summer internship at a marketing agency last summer? Great! So did everybody else. The fact that you had an internship is not impressive, it’s what you did while you were there that is (or isn’t). Students have accepted this false notion that even if you’re just answering phones, the fact that you had some big company’s name on your resume will get you a job. It might get you in the door for an interview, but if you can’t share the benefit you provided to the company, you won’t be seen as a valuable resource.

5. Prove your value and capability. 

On the topic of using internships to think on your feet, don’t be afraid to take initiative either at your first job or internship. Don’t just let your boss tell you what to do. I once had a professor ask my class, “How many of you would dare say something against your boss?” I was the only student to raise my hand. If you think your boss is wrong, there’s nothing wrong with speaking up — so long as you do so respectfully and with sound reasoning to back yourself up. You’re never going to learn if you just take what people tell you for granted. The same goes for professors. I once started a “marketing war” with one my professors by debating his suggestions. Which one of us was right, no one can say, but the value we both got from discussing our opinions was much greater than knowing who was right. 

6. Make the most of your internships.

Okay, so we’ve already established that it’s not just about having an internship; it’s what you do there. A subcomponent of having great internship experiences is trying different things. If you’re interested in marketing, don’t just apply to internships at marketing agencies every summer. Switch it up and test your skills in different marketing environments, such as at a company that executes its marketing in-house. That way, you’re staying true to your ultimate goal while also using your talents in different types of environments. Another great thing about this is, you’ll learn which type of marketing job you’re best suited for.

7. Your laundry list of extracurricular activities doesn’t make you an expert.

I get it — you love being involved in every organization you can possibly be a part of. You think putting it all on your resume will show your great versatility and extensive experience. But all it really does is confuse recruiters. I’ve heard employers say they get turned off by students who seem too involved because they don’t show any one true strength they can bring to the table. Instead of being an expert in one area, they just have their toes dipped in a bunch. Employers are looking for something unique that you can do, not that you have tried everything — that’s what marketing teams are for. If you’ve participated in a lot of different activities in college, narrow down the few that you can actually say you’ve learned from, excelled at, and helped you grow.

8. Don’t make your skills sound more impressive than they are.

Don’t set yourself up for failure. If you make your accomplishments sound better than they actually are, you’re setting up high expectations for yourself. And if you fail to meet those expectations, the trust an employer has in you will fade away instantly. You may even get fired, and that’s probably worse to explain in future interviews than having no prior job at all.

Marketing

9. Marketing moves fast.

Chances are, whatever your professor taught you your freshman year of college no longer applies. Need an answer to a pressing marketing problem? You won’t find it in that years-old textbook. Effective marketing isn’t about looking up the answer, it’s about creating the answer. For example, social media wasn’t taught in a classroom until recently, yet it’s been around for years. Nobody taught professional marketers already in the business how to “do social media”; they had to figure it out on their own. That’s your future: figuring out marketing. Forever.

10. Marketing isn’t about pretty pictures and viral videos.

Effective marketing campaigns focus on creating content that benefits your audience. You can’t spend your marketing career creating humorous videos for the sake of bringing attention to your brand. You need to be prepared to think critically and analyze the needs of your target audience. What do they want? What are they confused about? How can you best serve them while serving your business? Answer one of these questions correctly, and your content will naturally become viral.

11. Marketing is not just about branding or awareness — it’s about making money.

Gone are the days of going to the marketing department for happy messages and to Sales for revenue — today, the two must work together. We keep talking about how everything you do should benefit your company, but haven’t said what that benefit is. The benefit is simple: revenue. What is the return on investment of that email send? That tweet? That press release? Each of these efforts should be positioned to represent your company culture, but they need to fit into the sales cycle. They need to have a monetary value.

12. Marketing doesn’t have to be evil.

The negative connotation surrounding “marketer,” “public relations professional,” etc. is pretty pervasive. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to live up to those standards. Don’t lose your morals and ethics when you graduate — they need to be omnipresent in your marketing career. And yes, it is possible to create marketing that people actually like.

13. There’s more to marketing than big brands and agencies.

Yes, you can work at a marketing agency. And yes, you could work for a big brand like Nissan or Pepsi. But there are SO many more options. What about working in-house at technology company? A small business? A hospital? Just because your professors only talk about the campaigns big brands have executed, doesn’t mean those are the only marketing jobs out there. 

Personal

14. Don’t be afraid to be wrong.

How many times have you said, “I thought that but didn’t say anything.” Well, if you ever get to that point, it’s too late. If you have an idea or opinion on something being discussed, speak up! Experience helps create proper judgment, not ideas. Anyone is capable of thinking of the next big thing; it’s just a matter of not being afraid to share it.

15. You are your own best case study.

Prove your skills by marketing yourself. Don’t wait for someone else to give you the opportunity. Start a blog about marketing (or something else you’re passionate about) and demonstrate your knowledge of the industry, your writing ability, as well as your ability to build an audience online. Invest time in building your social media reach, and leverage LinkedIn to connect with other marketing professionals. Demonstrate your passion for marketing by properly marketing yourself. If you can’t market yourself, how will you market for others?

16. Grow thicker skin.

As a marketer, you’ll have to deal with complaining customers, social media bashers, unresponsive sales reps, frustrating clients. The list goes on and on… and through it all, you have to bite your tongue and let them feel like they are always right. If you get too emotional over how people treat you, you won’t last in the business. Take all negative feedback as constructive criticism, and spin it into something positive. 

17. Never burn bridges.

That annoying teacher’s pet who never stops talking in class next to you? She may end up being your manager one day. Or your co-worker. Or the woman who gets to decide if a company hires you. You never know where people end up.

18. Network like crazy with everyone. 

Yes, you’ve heard this before. But the important part of networking is doing it with everyone. If you decide you want to work at XX company, don’t only find ways to talk to people from XX company. Maybe that random stranger in the corner from Y company will one day be an employee at XX company, and then you’ll be bummed you missed the opportunity to tell that person why you rock. Point is, you never know who could end up helping you out the future. Get to know as many people as you can.

Miscellaneous

19. Get Familiar With HTML/CSS

You don’t need to be a webmaster, but you do need to understand the basics. What happens when your web designer goes on vacation? What happens when you need to make a quick fix on your website? Or even just need to talk to your web designer? You don’t want to sound like a complete doh-doh head. Understand how coding works and be prepared to make little tweaks. 

20. Understand the difference between B2B and B2C.

I’m surprised I was never exposed to such basic acronyms at school, but most businesses are classified this way. B2B = business-to-business. B2C = business-to-consumer. Look up the difference; it’ll teach you a lot about different forms of marketing, and possibly where you want to work one day.

From the marketing team at HubSpot, we hope you found this list beneficial in planning your marketing career. Cheers to you!

Have any additional tips for 2012′s marketing graduates … and beyond? Is there anything else you wish you’d known before graduating? 

Who Doesn’t Need Great Free Stuff?

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Next week is National Small Business Week in the United States and to help celebrate all things small business I’m holding a live webcast where, among other things, I’m going to give a number of lucky participants some awesome business tools like:

• A copy of Premise Landing Page Software from Copyblogger
• A copy of the Ultimate Marketing System from Duct Tape Marketing
• A year access to Live Plan from Palo Alto Software
• A year of Spring Metrics Analytics
• A year of Nimble CRM
• A Pro Membership to Marketing Profs
• Tickets to Social Media Explore Events
• A bundle of books, iStockphoto credits and more

But, in order to have a chance to win one of these great prizes, you have to attend our small business educational webcast event being held Wednesday, May 23rd at 11am CT (http://worldtimebuddy.com to check time zones)

I’m going into a television studio and broadcasting a live streaming video presentation on the very important topic – 5 Ways to Use Online Tools to Drive Offline Sales.

We all know that prospects today do their research online, even if they fully intend to buy a product or service offline. In this session I’ll share some great ways to use the new breed of online tools to drive your prospects into your offline stores, meetings and presentations including:

• Online calls to action
• O2O Advertising
• Networked networking
• Local social groups
• Online and on the go

Join me for what will prove to be a fun and informative celebration of small business – heck, I might even get my guitar out and sing a bit. (No promises on that one.)

To sign up and reserve your seat for the show – Register Here (While you can’t win any of the prizes unless you attend, we will record the event and provide an archive for all that register.)

I addition, some of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultants are holding local networking and watch events and providing additional education – find a local event near you.

Do you know other small business owners that might need this important information? Why not share this post with all your small business friends?

And a special thanks to our sponsors for support of this event!

Who Doesn’t Need Great Free Stuff? is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Facebook Study Shows Brand-Related Posts Drive Highest Engagement

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by Pamela Vaughan in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

What’s the secret to an engaging Facebook business page? According to the results of an internal study revealed by Facebook yesterday, posting content about subjects related to your brand is your best bet. The study sought to identify how post topics relate to engagement, which can help marketers understand which of their content is the most effective at getting fans to engage with their Facebook business page — both organically, and through Facebook ad and Sponsored Stories promotion.

About the Facebook Study

Facebook’s study looked at four weeks’ worth of page posts from 23 brands spanning six industries, and Facebook categorized each post into one of three buckets:

1. Posts About Products or Services: e.g. “Our new resort just opened! Book your trip today.” (Facebook’s travel brand example)
2. Brand-Related Posts: “I decided to go on my first cruise because______.” (Facebook’s travel brand example)
3. Posts Unrelated to the Brand: “Hang in there everybody. Monday will be over before we know it!” (Facebook’s travel brand example)

Study Results

Overall, Facebook found that posts that fell into that second bucket (brand-related posts), were the most significant predictor of page engagement.

And remember, according to Facebook, an ‘engaged user‘ is a person who has clicked anywhere on your post. In other words, engagement means that a person has performed an action on your post, such as liking it, sharing it, commenting on it, clicking on a link you share, viewing a picture, watching a video, answering a question you pose, RSVP-ing to an event you post, etc.

Facebook also reported on several content posting best practices to consider, depending on your Facebook marketing goals:

• Goal = Generating Shares: Facebook recommends posting about topics related to your brand and leveraging photos, photo albums, and video content.
• Goal = Generating Likes: Facebook suggests posting about topics related to your brand and using a clear call-to-action, such as “Like this if …”
• Goal = Generating Comments: Again, make the post about your brand, and spark discussion by posing a question in your post.

Pair Best Practices With Your Own Facebook Page Insights

Overall, the results from Facebook’s study are probably what you’d expect. It’s easy to understand, for example, why a reliance on product-specific posts would generate less engagement. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if a user is following your brand on Facebook, they’ve already had some initial interest in your brand that made them want to follow you. As such, posting content unrelated to your brand — like the latest internet meme that has nothing to do with your business — is unnecessary. So it’s understandable that going the middle ground, and focusing on brand-related content, is the best driver of engagement.

That being said, marketers should pair this knowledge with the data they gather from their own page’s Facebook Insights to make the best decisions about their Facebook content strategies. To learn how to analyze your Facebook Insights to inform your content strategy, check out our informative blog post and video on the subject.

And hey, if your brand can be incorporated into that popular new internet meme, go for it! HubSpot’s own Facebook page has had success with this very tactic, which is evident by the screenshot below.

What do you think of the Facebook study? How does your Facebook content strategy stack up according to Facebook’s content recommendations?

Image Credit: Sean MacEntee

All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, Gini Dietrich, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston – Flickr

[Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I'm happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.]

One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize. We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience.

We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline.

Consider the customer experience. They weave between traditional broadcast and print media into online seamlessly. For example, someone could ride their local train or subway, see ads, surf the Internet on their mobile phone, read a magazine (on their tablet or not), or a host of other activities.

You get the point. Customer media use supersedes tactical practices. That’s true for both B2B and B2C, though as Lee points out in his book, these sales cycles are very different.

Multichannel marketing applies to traditional print, broadcast, mail and PR approaches, too. They should all be optimized for search, too, with messaging and keywords that will invoke familiarity with stakeholders regardless of which media form they are seen.

Think about it. Customers search when they are looking to find something. If you optimize online ads, content, social and SEO so that search indexes your company’s name first, then you absolutely need your print ads, direct mail, press documents, white papers and broadcast ads to use the same keywords.

A customer may not even realize it, but they are mentally associating these words — message components — with your brand. When they search, they will use the keywords, and your optimized content will naturally come up in the top results. More importantly, it will already be familiar to your customer.

Take it a step further and add your creative, ads and content to the web site in a the modern press room. Transcribe the broadcast media so the keywords are searchable. Make them shareable. and start real discussions on them. Even ask for feedback on the ads. All of your traditional content can be repurposed, optimized and indexed for social and search.

That’s why all marketing disciplines should be integrated and operate together as a collective whole. Marketing in the Round discusses selecting traditional tactics and newer disciplines like social, online and mobile. It’s about how to weave them together to achieve the common objective.

Geoff Livingston is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication ?rm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

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All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich | http://www.toprankblog.com

3 Simple Ways to Turn Your Website Archive into Profitable Books and eBooks

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by Joel Friedlander in Blog, Featured, Paid Content, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Attention Bloggers: I’ve seen the future, and you’re missing it.

Oh sure, we bloggers think we’re the most up-to-date, leading-edge, tech-savvy people on the planet.

But one of the biggest changes in the long history of content creation is taking place right under your feet, and I’m afraid it may be passing you by.

Yep, the ground is shifting, fortunes are being made, and some of the people who could best profit from this tectonic shift — content producers — are mostly sitting on the sidelines.

Okay, what am I talking about? The revolution in book publishing …

Maybe you’ve heard some of the success stories of the authors who’ve been selling a ton of paranormal romances, thrillers or other genre novels on Amazon’s Kindle platform, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

You may have also heard about big-time authors like Barry Eisler, Steven King, Seth Godin and others leading the way in self-publishing. That’s not it either.

What I’m talking about is something bloggers are already expert in: niche publishing.

Bloggers vs. authors

Let’s back up for a minute. Have you ever thought about the similarities between self-publishing and blogging? Probably not, why would you?

But as a blogger who writes about indie book publishing, I think about this stuff all the time. And here’s what I see at this amazing moment in publishing:

Self-publishers and bloggers each have only half the equation for success in the new world of book publishing.

Take authors for example. Most are really good at things like producing long content (long as in 80,000 words), staying with a project for months or years without losing focus, and planning a complex project using freelance contractors.

The problem is, many authors are notorious loners, are often non-technical, they can go years without any contact with their readers, and their mindset may be completely rooted in the 19th century. Not only that, the typical author has no idea of what marketing actually means in the real world.

That might make a blogger feel pretty good about herself.

It’s true that bloggers stay in constant touch with their readers, know how to publish on a schedule, get constant feedback from readers, love to experiment via agile content, and are highly networked with other bloggers in their niche.

But niche market bloggers have obstacles to overcome, too.

They can fall into the trap of thinking 500 words at a time, with disjointed subjects littering their archives. After blogging for a while, they may lose sight of any overarching theme they started with.

Not only that, many bloggers treat their blogs as a “hobby”, or they’re focused on Adsense, affiliate sales and special promotions. Bloggers like to chase the “shiny new object,” fall into the social media time-sink very easily, and all too often rely exclusively on metrics as the measure of their success.

Why book publishing makes sense for bloggers

Here’s what you’ve been missing: you don’t have to be Amanda Hocking or Joe Konrath or John Locke (all of whom have sold a ton of ebook fiction) to get major, potentially life-changing results from book publishing.

This is the dirty little secret behind self-publishing that we’ve been hiding from the big publishers for years:

If you’re a writer with ready access to a niche audience, you’re probably much better off financially publishing your own book.

If you blog on a niche topic and know how to reach the people in that field, why give 85% of your profits to a big publisher in New York?

(If you’re Chris Brogan or Tim Ferriss writing for a mass consumer or mass business market, you might be better off with that big publisher. But if that’s not you, read on.)

The blogger’s unfair advantage

Okay, so you know how to meet deadlines, you publish on a schedule and you’re in touch with your readers. You’re already miles ahead of most self-published authors.

Is it really worth going through the trouble of learning how to publish books? Here are some outcomes that might stimulate you.

• Authority — There’s a reason all those guests you see on TV are introduced as “author of …” There’s nothing that will supercharge the authority you have in your niche the way a book will, especially one with lots of testimonials from people your readers know and respect.
• Passive income — It’s better than ads in your sidebars, better than pay-per-click, and once your book is for sale in either print or ebook versions, the whole process is completely automatic.
• Status — Having a book to your name will spread your profile far beyond the circles you can reach with your blog.
• More opportunities — You are likely to get more offers for speaking gigs, joint ventures and co-authoring opportunities once you’re a published author.
• Stand out from the crowd — Is there another blogger in your niche who is also a published author? No? What’s stopping you?
• Back of the room sales — Another underutilized way to make money from your blog is by selling your book at live appearances, workshops or other events.

But how do you make the leap from blogger to author? It can seem overwhelming when you compare the pile of posts in your archive to a neat and cohesive manuscript ready to publish.

Don’t despair; I’ve got three methods you can use, so read on to see which one appeals to you …

1. The site archive method

Lots of bloggers ignore their archives, which is a shame.

We’re so concerned with the next post that we forget all the value we’ve built up over the months or years we’ve been blogging.

In this method you explore your archives for themes that keep reappearing, or for posts you wrote to answer the most common and compelling questions people keep coming up with in your niche. Your “pillar” or “evergreen” or “foundation” posts are going to come into play here.

Gather the posts you find that meet your criteria into sections, each one for a separate subject. These will eventually become the chapters in your book.

This is the method I used last year when I published A Self-Publisher’s Companion. Then I wrote an introduction for the book, added an up-to-date resource section and the book was done. How cool is that?

2. The series method

This is the opposite of the Archive method, because it means you’ll be writing the book as a series of blog posts or, more likely, as several series.

You’ll outline the book first. This doesn’t have to be difficult, just pick the subjects you want to cover and then divide them into chapters.

For example, your book might have 12 chapters, and each chapter could be about 5,000 words.

Create a blog post that looks at each aspect of your chapter. You’re now looking at a series of five 1,000-word articles. And don’t forget, blog post series are a great way to keep readers involved and coming back for more, so you’ll win both ways, as a blogger and an author.

Just keep writing those series of blog posts, and pretty soon your manuscript will be finished and ready to go.

3. The big edit method

In this method you’ll treat all posts as potential first draft material.

Although this takes the greatest amount of work, it has the potential to produce the best book from the copy you’ve already written.

Look through the content you already have, selecting the parts that work within the scheme of your book. You’ll be doing a ton of cutting-and-pasting as you assemble the bits you want to use.

Undoubtedly, you’ll need to write new material to create an effective manuscript that flows well from one subject to another. To use this method, you’ll probably also need to hire an editor to help shape and smooth out the manuscript.

The truth is, in the book world, hiring an editor is always a good idea.

Your book editor can be a powerful ally when it comes to creating a book people really want to buy.

What’s next?

Now, you’ve got a real book manuscript.

When I did this last year it took about 40 blog posts and a new introduction to create a 222-page trade paperback that sells for $14.95 (print) or $4.99 (ebook).

What’s the profit look like from those books? On sales at Amazon.com — after all discounts and manufacturing costs — my profit is $8.00 per paperback and $3.75 per ebook.

Getting interested? Want to know how to get started turning your archives into books? Here are some tips:

• The fastest way to get a book up for sale without the complications of formatting for print production is with an ebook.
• These are ePub and Mobi ebooks, not PDF ebooks like the ones you give away on your blog.
• You can convert your own files to ebooks with free software like Calibre or with a tool like Scrivener, used by many ebook authors. Apple’s Pages outputs to ePub, and more tools like this are coming online constantly.
• Smashwords will convert your book for free if you follow their formatting guidelines.
• BookBaby offers great deals on ebook conversion and distribution to all major retailers at very low fees.
• Become part of the book scene by getting familiar with some of the big reader communities that are growing like crazy online. Goodreads, Shelfari, Wattpad, and Scribd are all new communities with millions of members that most bloggers have never even heard of.
• Use your blogging schedule to plan out the article series that will become your book manuscript. For instance, you might want to have a special focus on your blog for the month, encouraging lots of discussion and interaction while you’re creating that specific part of your book.
• Leverage your blogging network when it comes time to launch and promote your book. After all, you establish these connections to help market your blog. When your book comes out, it’s a great opportunity to “tour” the other blogs in your niche, exposing you to tons of new readers.

The time is now

Well, there you have it.

No group of people is better situated than bloggers RIGHT NOW to take advantage of the historic movement to digital books and the exploding popularity of self-publishing.

Will you join the revolution?

About the Author: Joel Friedlander (@JFBookman) is an award-winning book designer, a blogger, and the author of A Self-Publisher’s Companion: Expert Advice for Authors Who Want to Publish. He’s been launching the careers of self-publishers since 1994 and writes TheBookDesigner.com, a popular blog on book design, book marketing and the future of the book. Joel’s also just about to launch a new online training course, The Self-Publishing Roadmap.

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In-depth Guide To Content Creation [With Infographic]

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by Designbysoap Ltd in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Posted by Designbysoap Ltd

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an on-site SEO consultant, a link-building specialist or an all-round ‘internet marketer’, content creation should be particularly high on your list of priorities. We’ve been hearing the phrase ‘content is king’ for years now, but given Google’s recent de-indexation of low-quality blog networks, the Panda updates and the new algorithm burning across the horizon, it seems it’s never been more true than in 2012.

It’s not difficult to understand the importance of high quality, unique and relevant content in the modern SEO industry; content of this type published on your own site can do wonders when it comes to link magnetism and social media metrics and similarly, can help you obtain extremely powerful links from high authority domains that might otherwise be out of your reach. But creating this content is easier said than done, particularly if you’re trying to compete in a crowded industry. Sure, if you’re working on behalf of a client in a fairly dull field it can be relatively easy to produce content that will attract attention, but competing in content-heavy industries like SEO, gaming and entertainment (for example) can be very, very difficult.

So how can you make creating high quality, shareable content easier? What processes can you follow to minimise the time you spend researching and thinking and maximise the time you spend creating and sharing your content?

To try and answer these questions I’ve put together the following article and infographic (a large chunk of my time working for Designbysoap is spent designing infographics) that aims to give you a structure for content creation, as well as some useful tips and tools. I hope you enjoy it and, more importantly, I hope it helps when it comes to creating high quality content for your own campaigns.

Click for a full size version if you'd like to print it.

Research

Typically, this is often the most time-intensive element of content creation, whilst annoyingly yielding the fewest results. I’ve spent numerous hours reading posts and analysing data that ultimately comes to nothing. Sure, it can be enjoyable and often rewarding in terms of learning about an industry, but it’s not always permissible to spend huge chunks of your time (or a clients’ for that matter) reading and searching only to end up with nothing to show for it.

Having said that, the research portion of your content creation process can often be one of the most important – delivering content based on flawed, incorrect, irrelevant or (perhaps worst of all) boring information will get you nowhere and will essentially nullify all your efforts in the latter stages.

Ultimately, you need to find out what’s popular in the area you’re working in. Your research needs to be around a topic that’s current, relevant to your industry, popular and, most importantly, likely to gain traction (whether that be via social media platforms, inbound links or attention from high profile sites).

To help you identify this kind of content, there are several excellent tools at your disposal;

Google News – helps you highlight areas of interest and current news

Google Trends – helps you hone into specific topics in any given area of interest

Google Insights – helps you discover what people are searching for around an area of interest. Great if you’re writing blog posts

Digg, Twitter, Reddit – helps you find out what’s popular with the readers, what kinds of topics are receiving the highest level of sharing

These are the platforms I turn to first, but there are plenty of others (Cracked, AllThingsNow, Bing News, Fark, etc.), all of which will add to your level of insight around any given topic. Now, these can certainly help you find up to date, reliable and current information and can be invaluable when it comes to highlighting the most popular topics, but they don’t solve the problem of minimising the time you’re spending on research.

This is where a phenomenal tool from SEOGadget comes in, that makes ingenious use of Excel and Google Docs. I hugely recommend you follow the link and save a copy of the document to your own Google Docs (when you’ve finished reading this post of course), as it will save you a massive amount of time and effort during the research stage. The tool allows you to add a search query within the excel document, after which it will pull in invaluable data from Google News, Google Insights, Twitter, Bing News, Digg and numerous other platforms. You can not only quickly and easily find out what’s hot, but you can see the most popular topics on a range of social media platforms and highlight the top and rising searches around any given topic. There’s a fair bit more to it, but I’ll leave you to discover all it has to offer – suffice it to say it’s a perfect tool for the content creation research stage.

Ideas

Once you’ve got a solid set of data and a firm grip on the type of information likely to be shared, you need to start brainstorming some ideas on how you’re going to present the information.

The first thing you need to decide is the angle from which you’re going to approach the information. It’s no good just re-formatting a post or piece of content that already exists (you see this a huge amount when it comes to content creation, particularly in the SEO industry), you need to add something new or interesting to what you’ve already got. Can you come at the information in a new way? Or add something new to the story? Can you produce something unique to the industry?

Essentially, you’re looking at how you’re going to present the information you’ve gathered (an in-depth blog post, a video, a static infographic, an interactive infographic, etc), how you’re going to approach the subject (informative, analytical, satirical, etc) and how you’re going to add something beneficial or attractive to the target audience (drawing new conclusions, bringing together lots of pieces of information, attempting to shock, informing, entertaining, etc).

An excellent example is SEOmoz's own Google Algorithm Change History; all of this information is available elsewhere on the internet, but by pulling it all together and keeping it up to date, they've provided a piece of content that makes life easier for readers (bringing all the information together in one place), keeps them up to date (by displaying the latest information) and provides new insight (by viewing the complete history of algorithm updates, you can see the progression Google has taken, which offers far more insight and value than a post discussing just the most recent change).

Sometimes, it’s enough to simply be first – as long as the content you’re producing is high quality. A great example from a different industry is the Angry Birds Space infographic (section included below). This was the first quality infographic to be published on the latest Angry Birds installment; a game that saw a huge amount of buzz across news platforms for reaching 10 million downloads in just three days. The infographic is not only very nicely designed, but gained a decent amount of traction. Only two days after being published, the infographic has seen over 1,000 Facebook likes:

Infographic section via PlayVille

You can also gain a decent amount of traction by focusing your content around an upcoming event – a great example is the F1 2012 Season infographic (a section of which is included below). The infographic doesn't necessarily offer anything new, but took advantage of the excitement surrounding the start of the new Formula 1 season, resulting in a very high placement for the infographic.

Infographic section via Autoblog

Another excellent idea is to try your best to involve other people in the idea (or even the research) stage; specifically, people you know have an influence in the industry you’re working in.

Let’s say you’re producing an infographic on console gaming – why not email some people from Destructoid, G4TV, Gamespot, IGN, etc. and ask them what they’d like to see in an infographic. Or give them a collection of your ideas and ask them which they think is the best – not only does this involve influencers in the early stages of your content creation, but it can help massively when it comes to placement and promotion.

If these people give you valuable insights or information, then include them in your content (in the sources section of an infographic, or via a credit link in a blog post) – you’d be amazed how much more willing people are to share things when they’re credited with a hand in the research or production.

Placement

Once you’ve gathered your information and you have an idea of the type of content you’re going to produce, you need to try and identify where the content is going to be placed.

Obviously if the content is going on your own website, then this is less of an issue, but if it’s a link-building exercise then having an idea of the kind of site you’ll be aiming for can make a big difference to how you approach the creation stage.

It can be a good idea to start your outreach before you approach the actual creation of your content, as confirming a placement beforehand will make your life much easier in terms of considering the target audience. If you know where the content is going to be placed, then you can tweak the language, style and tone you adopt throughout the piece in order to maximise your chances of appealing to their readers.

Conversely, you don’t necessarily need to have confirmed the placement location before you start work on the production stage. Often you may find it easier to convince sites to place your work once they’ve actually got something to look at, rather than trying to tempt them with just the concept. If you’re planning on completing your outreach once you’ve finished the content creation stage, then you should at least have an idea of the sort of website you’re going to be targeting. Don’t specifically aim content at one website before you contact them, as if they turn it down you may struggle to place it somewhere else.

When it comes to contacting specific websites, your best bet is to write a concise and polite email to the most relevant person at the organisation, then follow this up with a call a day or two later. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from your preferred placement, it’s still worth giving them a call just to check they’ve received your email and even if they turn it down, you’ve got a contact you can use for future pieces.

Creation

So you’ve done your research, you’ve got your content and you’ve got an idea of where you’re going to place the piece – now it’s time to actually create your content.

Giving you advice on the creation stage is a little tricky, as it will depend on what type of content you’re putting together. To overcome this, I’ll quickly cover the two most popular content types; blog posts and infographics.

Infographics

Having produced around 100 infographics personally over the last 18 months (and overseen scores more), I consider them to be one of my main areas of expertise. One of my major pet hates when it comes to infographics is people telling me that there are ‘rules’ to infographic production – there aren’t. An infographic doesn’t have to tell a story, it doesn’t have to avoid using text at all costs, in fact it doesn’t have to do anything other than display information that is either complimented by, or portrayed via graphics. So don’t get too caught up in the non-existent infographic ‘rules’ and just focus on producing something that is engaging to your target audience.

Some topics will require more text than others, particularly if the data is qualitative rather than quantitative. A lot of people will use phrases like ‘don’t make me read’ when they’re looking at infographics, but you should give your audience more credit – people don’t mind reading, as long as the information you’re including is concise and adds something to the visuals. If you can visualise it (i.e. statistical information), then do, if you can’t then don’t worry too much about it, people will forgive you.

Try and create an immediate impact with the visuals and draw readers into your infographic as early as possible, the most obvious place to do this is with the title. It’s amazing how many people are happy to just type the title in a nice big font and then move on to the rest of the content. But if you look at some of the best infographic designers (and the most popular infographics online), you’ll see that the title is a fantastic opportunity to grab the reader with a strong, relevant visual. I’ve included a few examples below to show you what I’m talking about (please note these are just a part of the original graphic — there is a lot more to see when you click on the link underneath each image!):

Infographic section via the Designbysoap blog

Infographic section via Volvo

Infographic section via HotelshopUK

Infographic section via Geekosystem

When it comes to visualising the data you’ve got, try and keep a consistent theme throughout the infographic, whether that’s through your choice of visualisation methods, the colours used or the style of design. If you can help it, try and avoid using too many infographic ‘cliches’ – a good example of this is using a line of six person icons to visualise a statistic like ‘60% of people use people icons in their infographics’.

Just try and be as creative as you can (which I realise isn’t really all that helpful, as it’s like saying ‘be more musically gifted’), and don’t take the lazy approach just because you’d like to get it finished.

My last point is on orientation – generally speaking, if you’re going to be placing the infographic online then you’re probably better off opting for a portrait infographic, rather than a landscape one. This is because it’s far easier to use online and usually allows you to use a longer file (people will always prefer to scroll up and down as opposed to left and right, if the web page even allows it).

Blog Posts

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in-depth blog posts are far more likely to encourage sharing than a quick post that just skims over a topic. Long blog posts are great as long as they’re adding value to a topic – you should be informing, educating or entertaining your readers as much as you possibly can.

Include relevant, quality outbound links that are useful to your readers – if you find a good tool during your research phase, link to it. If you find a post that offers an alternative argument to what you’re saying, or adds additional information, link to it. Too many people are hesitant to link out from their blog posts, worried that it will give readers a reason to leave their page. Trust me, if you’re producing high quality content, they will come back (for example, when I’m reading blog posts and I come across a link I want to follow, I tend to open it in a new tab and then continue reading).

Again, it seems obvious, but pay attention to grammar and punctuation – it’s hard to come across as authoritative if your content is full of spelling mistakes, misplaced commas and missing capitalisations. It might sound strange, but grammatical errors can also put off people from sharing your content and you want to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of shares and links. If writing isn’t your strong point, then get someone else to proof read your articles before publishing, particularly if you’re sending them out as guest posts.

Another good tip is to try and engage your readers as early as possible in the post – the best places to do this are the title, the sub-title and the opening paragraph. There are many different ways to do this; provocation, humour, questioning, etc. just make sure you grab people as early as you can. Bear in mind it’s the title that will encourage click-through rates when it comes to blog front pages and aggregation networks such as Inbound.org. Having said this, don’t be deliberately misleading with your titles – sure it can increase click-through rates and traffic to have a title that draws attention, but if it’s erroneous then you’re far more likely to piss people off than you are to encourage sharing.

You should also try and help your readers as much as possible; something that often means not assuming knowledge on their part. Unless you’re writing for particularly high level, technical websites, it’s best not to over-use entropic language without clearly explaining yourself. If you’re writing a post full of tips, explain things to your readers – rather than just saying do this, tell them how to do it.

Another valuable tip is to try and break up the copy in particularly long articles – use sub-headings and paragraph breaks to make the article look less dense and more accessible to readers. You should also make sure you’re using images in your posts, not only do they break up long sections of text nicely, but they can often be extremely helpful, particularly in tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles (screenshots can be especially useful). When it comes to sourcing images, you should either be creating them yourself or using an online platform such as Shutterstock or Creative Commons, rather than just stealing them from other websites. Having said this, the latter is permissible in some situations, just be sure to include credit links to avoid upsetting other webmasters, and check the copyright laws in your country. Don’t forget to properly name and alt tag your images either – it’s amazing how often you see people missing this potentially valuable ranking signal.

Publish

So you’ve spent hours putting together a high quality piece of content, now it’s time to get it live. Hopefully you’ll have started your outreach before putting the content together, but if you didn’t, now’s the time to start sending some emails.

I would always advocate aiming as high as you possibly can (as long as the quality of the content is good enough), as it never hurts to try. When we’re advising our link-building engineers on gaining high profile placements, we get them to put a list of five or six potential placements together, in order of domain authority, traffic or level of engagement via social media (depending on the post content and what we’re trying to achieve). From there you can start at the top and work your way down, until someone agrees to place your content.

Once a placement has been confirmed, make sure you’ve got an idea of when it will be published, so you can start sharing as soon as possible. You should also keep up a level of etiquette when you’ve posted on someone else’s website – push the content as much as you can, link to it from other posts and send as much traffic and social media engagement as humanly possible. This not only makes the link more valuable, but will encourage the administrator to publish your posts in the future. You should also keep an eye on the comments and reply to as many as you can; keep up the level of engagement and discussion and be involved.

Promote

It’s amazing how many times we see people produce fantastic content, and then just leave it to either reach a large audience or, more often, fall flat on its face. If you’ve gone through all the effort of researching and producing a high quality piece of content, then you should continue that effort through to the post-publishing stage.

It’s true that if your content is good enough and it’s published on a high profile platform, then it will likely achieve a high level of social media traction and natural inbound links, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best to push it as best you can.

You should aim to utilise as many avenues as you can to promote your content, including social media, news aggregators, infographic publication sites and inbound links from other domains (particularly applicable if you or your team writes lots of related guest posts). I could include a massive list of sites you can use, but honestly it depends on the vertical in which you’re working. Instead, check out this awesome link building strategies post, this list of infographic distribution sites, this post on finding the perfect content promotion platform and this handy list of social bookmarking websites.

You should also try to reach out to influencers in the industry you’re working in, whether that be via phone, email or social media platforms. The success of this practise will depend on a variety of factors (including the content itself, the domain it’s published on, the author, the way you choose to make contact and the area of discussion), but it never hurts to try. If you made the effort of reaching out to people during your research and ideas phase as suggested, then you may find you get some great traction via some very influential people.

So that’s about it for my guide to creating good content – did I miss anything? Disagree with anything I said? Let me know in the comments below.

Post by John Pring from Designbysoap Ltd.

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What’s holding you back?

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by Heather in Blog, Freelance SEO copywriting, In-house Content Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Tips and techniques

Who knew that my post, “Why do freelance writers hate SEO copywriting” would stir up so many comments?

After the post, I received a bunch of emails and blog comments like this one:

I like being able to work from home, but I really do despise the articles that I write. I would run away from these articles as quickly as possible if I had a client willing to pay a decent wage for excellent content.

Unfortunately, I cannot find these clients. To be honest, I don’t really know where to look because the only thing I find are the companies wanting quantity and care very little about quality.

Ugh. This writer is obviously in misery. Writing bad copy for low wages can’t be fun – at all.

But here’s the deal: If you’re in an uncomfortable situation, the only person holding you back is you.

That’s not an indictment. I have certainly been in scads of situations where I felt hopeless. Every day, I would wake up with a knot in my stomach. Instead of feeling excited about my day, I’d feel a huge sense of dread. Sometimes, I’d hear my father’s voice asking, “How long are you going to put up with this?”  There were times that I immediately snapped to and quickly changed my situation. But there were many more times that I didn’t.

Why? I may have hated where I was – but I was comfortable. The misery I knew was better than “putting myself out there” and doing something else. That seemed way too scary (and in my depressive way, I figured that it wouldn’t work out anyway.)

In short, I was stuck.

If this is you, I encourage you to change your outlook right now.  There is always something you can do to change your situation and exercise your “control what you can control” muscles. That power is always available to you.  You may not be able to do much…but you can take baby steps towards a goal

For instance, let’s consider the “I’m writing stuff I hate for hardly any money” situation. Here are some steps that person can take:

- Figure out his copywriting niche. What type of client does he want to work with?

- Figure out his value proposition. How can he demonstrate to his prospects that he produces extremely valuable work (hint: testimonials, case studies and testimonials can certainly help.)

- Determine his income goals. Steve Wilkinghoff does a great job during the Copywriting Business Bootcamp discussing how to figure out your yearly income goals – and how to break them down into attainable bite-size chunks.

- Develop a fantastic Website. If he wants Web clients, he’ll need to have a killer site with compelling copy. ‘Nuff said.

- Figure out how to reach his desired market. Is his target market on Twitter? LinkedIn? Or is direct mail better?

- Develop an airtight sales strategy. What will he say to prospects? What’s his process?

Is this easy? No. Will it take some time? Yes. Could it mean some hard decisions and sacrifies? You bet. But it’s taking action. It’s moving forward towards a goal. It’s using smart planning and baby step momentum to propel him in the right direction.

In short, it’s exercising the power he already has.

So, next time you’re feeling stuck, consider what you want the end goal to look like.

Do you want to lose weight?

Do you want to make more money?

Do you want to take a long vacation?

Do you want a better relationship with your partner?

Then, consider the things that you can do that are within your control. That could be signing up for an exercise class. Or working with a consultant to help you improve your income. Make a list of all the little tasks you can take towards your goal – big and small.

Then, start taking those baby steps towards your goal. Every day. No negotiation. No “Well, I don’t feel like it today.” Do it. That’s when you’ll start seeing results.

I guarantee that taking action – and reclaiming your power – will make you much happier.

Plus, you’ll make so much progress towards your goal that you’ll start feeling in control. You’ll know that you pulled yourself out of an uncomfortable situation and made it better. You’ll have exercised those “control what you can control” muscles and made them bigger and stronger. Next time you face a challenge, you’ll be that much better prepared to deal with it.

And that’s a wonderful thing.