Linda Dessau – Page 32

Feed Your Blog Like a Pet, Not a Beast

October 13, 2013 By Linda Dessau

Patch the greyhound — Photo credit: Jacob Brickman

Keeping your company blog up to date with fresh content can be a source of stress and pressure or a source of warm leads – prospective customers who are already interested in and knowledgeable about your business.

It’s time to stop thinking about your blog like it’s a hungry beast demanding to be fed, and treat it like a faithful companion whose only wish is to earn your praise.

Step into the role of alpha dog – Just as a pet needs to know its place, so does your blog. Be sure everyone on your team understands where blogging fits into your overall business goals and marketing strategy. Then show your blog who’s boss and remember that it works for you, not the other way around.
Get on a schedule – It’s easier for the whole family when a pet’s sleep and bathroom routines are predictable. Though an editorial calendar can make you feel boxed in at first, over time you’ll appreciate how this external structure helps you avoid sleepless nights or thrown-together posts that look like a dog’s breakfast.
Practice positive reinforcement – Most dogs thrive on positive attention and learn quickly to repeat whatever they did to get it. Track which of your posts and promotional methods get the best responses, and keep doing more of the same. While you’re at it, acknowledge yourself and others for your hard work.
Give enough exercise, discipline and love – Cesar Millan of TV’s The Dog Whisperer says dogs need a balance of all three. Exercise your writing and editorial skills and they will get stronger. Discipline your team to adhere to your schedule and blogging strategy and you’ll get higher quality posts. Focus on content that is relevant and helpful to your customers, and they will feel the love.
Encourage socialization – Socialization doesn’t always come naturally (Patch the greyhound learned how to play with other breeds at Thee Place for Paws). Posting links to your blog posts gives you a head start on your social media conversations, but don’t stop there. By commenting, liking and sharing posts from other business blogs, your company becomes part of a network of valuable thought leadership in your industry.

Successful business blogging is as much about mindset as it is about tactics. The next time you feel like the beast is raging at the door, shift your perspective and see your blog for what it really is – a tool that fetches your company’s unique message and drops it at the feet of the people who need the solutions you provide.

How Blogging and Email Work Together to Grow Your Business

October 7, 2013 By Linda Dessau

“Is a blog the same thing as a newsletter?”

Great question! It came up recently from a business owner who is brand new to online marketing, and I heard a similar question this weekend at WordCamp Toronto 2013:

“Where will I find the time to do a blog AND a newsletter, while still running my business? I don’t want to just send the same content.”

Rushing in with an enthusiastic response, panelist Austin Gunter from WPEngine explained that you absolutely can and should repeat your blog post in your newsletter. (You can even automate this process using RSS-to-email subscriptions!)

The truth is that people will not remember to visit your blog regularly. That’s why it’s such a good practice to share links to your blog posts on social media. Yet while social media builds visibility, trust and relationships, Austin said it’s not nearly as effective as your email newsletter for inspiring people to buy something from you.

“Once someone has invited you into their Inbox, that’s power!”

Just as blogging is a perfect companion to social networking, newsletters and blogs can work hand in hand to attract your ideal customers, show them how you can help, and make it easy for them to do business with you.

In order to put these strategies into place, you’ll need:

A business blog, ideally one that’s part of your company website
A subscription to an email broadcasting service such as MailChimp (affiliate link), AWeber (affiliate link), iContact or Constant Contact
An email subscription form in the sidebar of your blog, and ideally on every page of your company website
Bonus: A highly relevant report, white paper or e-book that people receive automatically after subscribing to your email list

Attract your ideal customers

If you understand who your ideal customers are, what challenges they have, and what solutions they’re looking for, you can create blog posts that attract them. These could be “how to” posts that solve an immediate problem, or deeper thought pieces that help them better understand their issues.

In your newsletter, poll your readers occasionally for more information about who they are and what they need. It’s a nice touch to send some of these questions automatically whenever someone new signs up for your newsletter. Ask your email service provider about automated follow up messages (autoresponders) – then be sure someone is monitoring the email address you’ve designated for replies to your broadcast messages.

This lets people know that you welcome them, you care about them, and you’re interested in providing content that meets their needs. The benefit for you is that you’re more likely to get positive responses to your content because you’ll be writing exactly what people want to read.

Show them how you can help

Aside from the testimonials or longer case studies you may have elsewhere on your site, blog posts that tell client stories give concrete examples of how you work and the results your company has achieved with others.

As well, “connective” blog content (e.g., reviews, links and commentary) positions you as a valuable resource and demonstrates your connectedness in the industry.

In your newsletter, you can mention some of the services, courses, products or special offers that relate to the blog content you’ve shared. You can also list upcoming events where your company is presenting or exhibiting, to highlight your expertise and industry leadership.

Make it easy for them to do business with you

By consistently posting high-quality and relevant content on your blog, you’re building trust as someone who understands and can help with the specific issues facing your ideal customers. That trust makes it easy to say yes when they see your next offer.

Use your blog’s sidebar to rotate featured products and services, with direct links to take action. At the bottom of each post, create opportunities for a deeper relationship with your company, for example:

Here’s a related post about this topic (tip: you can display related posts automatically – learn more in this post about how to encourage longer blog visits)
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe now to receive our newest articles by email
Download our free report to learn more about this topic

You can also try more direct calls to action (e.g., find out more about this product/service or schedule an appointment today), though I’d recommend you do this less often. Your blog readers will be in all stages of the relationship-building process, and you could turn off your newest blog visitors by asking for business too soon or too often.

Instead, take Austin’s advice and use your newsletter for selling, after you’ve given value with the informative content from your blog.

Make it easy by providing direct links to registration/purchase pages or to schedule an appointment with you. A huge benefit of email marketing is that it’s simple for anyone to take the next step by replying. Some of your customers may not be comfortable with online contact forms or e-commerce options, but almost everyone can reply to an email.

Customize the “From” field people will see in their Inbox, preferably with the personal name and/or department name of the person or people who will be responding to messages. As I mentioned above, be sure to monitor that email address regularly, especially in the minutes, hours and days following an email broadcast.

Your blog isn’t the same thing as your newsletter, but you can use the same content in both places to attract your ideal audience and convert them from readers into customers.

P.S. I’ll be discussing business blogging strategies on Your Business With Charmaine Huber this Wednesday, October 9, 2013 at 7:00 p.m. (Rogers TV). Her other guest will be an email marketing specialist, so I’m sure we’ll be discussing many of these concepts. If you’re in the Barrie area, please tune in!

How to Keep Your Blog Fresh When Your Topics Have Been Covered Before

October 1, 2013 By Linda Dessau

Photo of fresh vegetables to symbolize a fresh company blog Whether your company is new to blogging or you’ve been blogging for years, chances are someone else is blogging about the same topics you are. While this may seem intimidating, finding your own way to say similar things will be the key to your blogging success.

Here are five ways to keep your company blog fresh and relevant, even when your topics have been covered again and again:

Infuse your posts with personality – There are customers out there who are the perfect match for your company’s particular approach, values, people and solutions. When you write posts that express who you are as a company and as individuals, those ideal customers can find you. Just as importantly, the ones who are better suited for someone else will stay away.
Talk to lots of beginners – It’s easy to convince yourself you know what “the market” wants and needs, but until you talk to real people and actually test your theories, you won’t know for sure. So instead of creating blog content from the perspective of what you think people understand and want to know more about, ask them – directly! Listen to their questions, and note how they describe the topics so you can use that same language.
Simplify your ideas – Talking to beginners also helps you see how complex and confusing the subject may seem to them. When you’re immersed in your industry day in and day out, you can forget that your prospective customers haven’t been there with you. Just because information is out there doesn’t mean they’ve seen it. If you can bring it to them in a clear, concise way that’s easy to understand, you’ll get and keep their attention. So forget what you know and help beginners get started on the topic.
Seek out related blogs – Instead of ignoring other blogs that cover your company’s topic, hoping they’ll go away, I recommend you look at them – often. As soon as you begin defining your own blogging strategy, start reading, bookmarking and subscribing to similar blogs. Notice what you like, what you don’t like, and what seems to be working well for them. Then continue to monitor the best blogs for content you can learn from, build on, and – yes! – share with your network. This may lead to guest post opportunities, expert interviews, exposure to each other’s audiences on social media, or a rich dialogue that could inspire a multitude of future posts.
Use case studies – When you illustrate the facts with examples from your own leadership team, employees, customers and vendors, you bring a personal and unique perspective to any topic. One of my clients who writes about federal contracting often cites examples from bids he and his company have worked on – both successfully and unsuccessfully. This brings credibility to his information and shows how his company employs the practices he blogs about.

Blogging is a powerful tool for attracting new customers who are a good fit for your company. By incorporating your personality, interacting with beginners to your topic, simplifying your content, reading related blogs, and using your own relevant case studies, you’ll find your company’s unique blogging voice and the inspiration to keep singing.

For another look at this topic, check out What Once Was Old is New Again from the Content Mastery Guide archives.

Bloggers: We Are the Media – Interview With Jeff Korhan

September 17, 2013 By Linda Dessau

In this series about how social media and blogging work together, we’ve looked at the world’s most popular social networking sites: LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

For today’s final post in the series, I’ve invited my friend Jeff Korhan to pull it all together for us. Author of Built-in Social, Jeff has a wonderful way of humanizing technical tools and marketing concepts and bringing the discussion back to the basics of good business.

Can you discuss the influences of social media on business activities today compared to how we operated before these digital media were available?

It is my belief that social media is influencing every aspect of the business environment, making it all more personal and transparent. What social media is really doing is democratizing media by giving everyone a voice. This is especially relevant for consumers that now collectively have a powerful voice that can stand up to that of any organization or corporation.

So, the challenge is avoiding the temptation to make social media another layer to add to your current marketing practices. More than just integrating it with your marketing program, its qualities should be built into all of your business growth practices to earn the trust of your community. Therefore, it’s important to thoroughly understand what got you here, and then use the qualities of social media to make them more relevant.

You will often hear it said that because business has significantly changed, what got you here will not take your business to the next level. That’s crazy! Your strengths never change. If you were fast, or strong, or witty, you still are. What’s important today is learning how to adapt or translate traditional business practices to a digital world that is also becoming profoundly social.

So, regardless of whether a business has been sales, marketing, customer service, or production driven, it should stick to what got it here and learn to adapt to the influences of these digital and social media.

This can be an amazingly prosperous time for businesses if they learn to understand the influences of social media on the buying behaviors of their customers, and then redesign their traditional practices to make them relevant for this connected economy.

Many people are so overwhelmed by social media that they don’t even know where to start. What do you recommend as the best way to begin using a social networking site for your business?

Start by observing. Notice what others are doing, and reconcile that with your business and its resources. Social media can get very personal, so it’s important to use it in a way that is congruent with who you really are. In fact, that transparency tends to work well for earning trust on each and every one of the social networks.

After that, take the time to build a strategy. Write it down; implement it; and refine it over time. The only way to make improvements is to create results that can be evaluated. I imagine that is how nearly all of us developed our proficiency – learning from successes and failures alike.

In the early days of social media we made a big deal out of the number of connections. What is clear now is that it’s more important to be better connected than the most connected.

Thus, a smart social media strategy should consider whom to connect with and how; and it should describe specific practices for encouraging engagement, and otherwise nurturing those network relationships over time.

Some people lump blogging into the same category as social media, but I tend to see it as something unique. What do you believe are the key connections that will help everyone use blogging and social media more effectively?

Personally, I like to think of my blog as my farm. It’s a place where I nurture and grow ideas that I then take to the social media marketplace for sharing and consumption.

Especially after Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, and now Google Authorship, it’s clear that we’ve progressed from blogging as a form of journaling, to now building viable digital marketing assets with solid content that will stand the test of time.

It’s important for businesses to now think of themselves as publishers, and even media companies. That mindset alone will change your blogging and social media for the better. Media used to be something that we hired. Now we are the media, and we know better than anyone else what our customers want from us.

Any final thoughts you would like to share?

Sure. Well, you and I have been doing this for the better part of seven years or so, and we have collaborated on a number of projects such as this. I’m convinced that blogging is absolutely essential not only for success with social media, but it’s also where the business world is going in general. Everyone should consider how lucky they are to have this amazing resource, and of course, be consistently learning how to use it to run a better business.

Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business (Wiley 2013).

Jeff was a Fortune 50 Sales and Marketing Executive who later founded a landscape services company that was twice named Small Business of the Year during its two decades of operation. Today he helps mainstream small businesses adapt their traditional business growth practices to a digital world.

Jeff is a regular content contributor to leading business publications, with his own New Media and Small Business Marketing site ranking among the Top 100 Small Business Blogs in the world.

Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.

Using YouTube to Curate and Share Relevant Content For Your Niche

September 9, 2013 By Linda Dessau

In this post we’ll get back to my interview with expert video marketer Anthony Idle from Local Video Marketing. Anthony is a Google Certified Adwords professional with an MBA in strategy and marketing. He is a former general manager of a US national business, but these days he works online helping businesses globally to advertise locally.

For Anthony’s answers to my first three questions about YouTube as a social media site and relationship-building tool, check out YouTube Gives You Face Time With Prospective Customers.

4. What are the best methods and tools on YouTube for businesses to find interesting content (to generate blog post topic ideas and share with their networks)? I call this the “Expand your mind” step.

With YouTube, there are three dominant methods to curate content. The first is to use the search bar to find either individual videos to share immediately via social media or your blog, or to find channels/individuals to subscribe to so you can follow their content over time.

For the best results from the YouTube search bar, I like to recommend something called Google fishing. I put together a video to describe the technique (direct link to Anthony’s video about Google fishing).

The second way to find content and ideas on YouTube is with the related videos that turn up at the end of whatever video you’re watching. Some people turn that functionality off, but 9 times out of 10 you’ll see related videos that have similar tags, title and description as whatever one you’re watching (including your own).

The third tool is one that I particularly like, and it’s the Subscription Manager found inside your own YouTube channel. So if you’re trying to rank for five or six different keywords, you might create a group of subscriptions (these are called collections, and are similar to folders) in each of those categories. For example, I particularly like funny, creative ads, and so I’m always looking for 30-second classic ad clips. So I have a collection for these in my Subscription Manager.

5. What are the best methods and tools for sharing original blog post content on YouTube? What are the benefits of doing this? I call this the “Expand your influence” step.

If you’re the type of person who really doesn’t want to show your face on the camera, there are ways to turn written content into a YouTube video. For example, you can take the key points of your blog post and create a slideshow presentation using Keynote or PowerPoint. From there, you can play the slideshow while you capture your screen using tools like Screenr, Jing, or Camtasia.

Anthony lists all his favourite video marketing tools at http://localvideomarketing.biz/tool-kit/.

Is video worth the effort?

While it does usually take longer to produce a video than it does to write a text-based blog post, Anthony says it’s well worth the effort. He points out that a YouTube video can get you to the first page of Googe’s search results a lot quicker than a text-based blog post. He also stresses the importance of face time in building relationships with prospective customers. That’s why he takes the time to produce high-quality videos, and helps other businesses do the same.

As someone who hasn’t done very much video blogging, I appreciated Anthony’s insights into YouTube and video marketing. The wheels are turning with ideas for videos I might create. What about you?

Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.