Content Mastery Guide

Editor and Ghostwriter

Don’t Be Last Week’s News, Be a Weekly Blogger

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Something wonderful happened when I was on the phone with a client last week. We were only two weeks into our new weekly blogging schedule, and we were on the phone planning content for the following month.

As we were sending some resources back and forth to each other by email, both of us noticed that his newest blog post had just been published and emailed to his list – great! Then, a few minutes later, my client noticed something else.

Someone had just sent him this reply to his email: “This caught my attention. Give me a call.”

If my client hadn’t sent his email, it wouldn’t have landed in that reader’s Inbox at precisely the right time, to deliver the message he was obviously primed to hear. And my client would never have had the opportunity to make that connection.

How many of your prospective clients are primed and ready to hear from you right now? So what’s stopping you from posting to your blog every week and sending that content to your mailing list? Maybe you’re thinking:

  • I don’t have enough to write about
  • I don’t have time for that!
  • I can’t write well enough
  • My audience is too busy to hear from me every week – they’ll get angry and unsubscribe (actually, Hubspot reported that businesses who send one email per month have a much higher unsubscribe rate than people who email more frequently)

We addressed all of these concerns in a Content Mastery Action Day presentation call, “How to Be a Weekly Blogger,” where I covered:

  • How one feature article can feed your blog and newsletter for an entire month
  • How planning and batching can save you time
  • How to make the most out of your editing time
  • How to provide more value in every single post

How to Make Photo Ads for the Facebook Photo Viewer with Free Online Tools (thanks Mari Smith!)

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I’m relatively new to using Facebook for my business, but I love how the new version of Facebook Pages allows me to participate in two distinct ways:

  • Logging in as my personal profile, I can interact with friends and family, or follow companies that I have a more personal interest in as a consumer/greyhound lover/foodie, whatever. 
  • Logging in as my business’s fan page, I can interact with my colleagues, follow companies or people I admire, and – most importantly – meet and engage with people who might need my help with their content marketing.

In her blog post, How to Use the Facebook Photo Viewer as a Marketing Tool, Mari Smith suggests a very clever enhancement to this new layout. If you add “calls to action” (as text) to your photos, and upload them to your Fan Page, theyll be added automatically to the new photo viewer at the top of your profile.

Then, when someone clicks on any of your photos, a scrollable “lightbox” pops up, and viewers can read your photo’s caption (where – ah-hah – you can place a clickable link to a webpage).

The size and shape of the photo are important (Mari gives details on dimensions) and I found that the spacing of the text made a difference as well.

After some trial and error, my third effort was, I believe, my most successful:Write-more-blog-posts960w719h
So are you ready to hear how a self-described “graphically-challenged” writer made this happen in such a relatively short amount of time, and with completely free online tools? Here are the steps I took:

First, I searched for photos at stock.xchang – it can be hit and miss, but I usually find something (and if I don’t, I’ll go with iStockphoto). Hint: Start your search with the emotions you want to capture – i.e., the pain of having the problem you’re trying to solve, or the joy of solving it. Then add another search term about your topic.

As an example, check out one of my other Facebook photo ads. I found this photo with the two search terms “frustrated” and “computer.”

Next, I uploaded the photo into Picnik, where I added the text and resized it per Mari’s suggestions. Here is a brief video demo of how I did that:

Honestly, if I did this, you can do it! Why not give your Facebook visitors the opportunity to learn more about what you have to offer?

Blog Like a Writer, Write Like a Blogger

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The other day, I met with a woman who happened to be an ex-journalism student. While we were chatting about how she might make the transition to online writing and blogging, I commented that she had a great starting point by already being a writer. To which she exclaimed, "Oh, I can write, but I'm not a writer!"

We have so many preconceived notions of what makes someone a writer. Is it only someone who's published (and if so, does self-published count)? Is it only someone who writes every day (or week or month)? 

And then what's a blogger? Is it only someone who blogs about a personal topic? Or is it the opposite – someone who just blogs for business? Is it only someone who sells/makes money from their blog?

I actually got chills when Charlie Gilkey stood up at the Wealthy Thought Leader event (Vancouver, March 2010) and said, "I'm not a blogger with a business. I'm a thought leader with a blog as a vehicle."

Because to write your way to more clients online, it really doesn't matter what you call yourself. Your writing is simply another platform from which to share your expertise, establish trust, deepen relationships and achieve visibility.

Just for fun, let's see what writers and bloggers might be able to learn from each other.

To blog like a writer, try to be more:

  • Clear – "When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing." – Enrique Jardiel Poncela 
  • Concise – Give yourself a word count limit (I recommend 500 words) and don't waste any precious space
  • Creative – Challenge yourself to expand your vocabulary and play with your words
  • Careful – Self-edit your work, or borrow another pair of eyes (hey, we do that!)

To write like a blogger, try to be more:

Even if you don't feel like a writer OR a blogger, take heart. Once you get started, keep going and build some momentum, your writing identity will find you – and so will your ideal clients!

Content Creation Manifesto #4b – It’s all been said before

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Last night I was privileged to share the stage with Josh Muirhead of Socialmark Media and Anne Dorsey, Business Librarian at the Barrie Public Library. The topic was "Social Media for Your Business," which attracted more than 40 people. Thanks to everyone who came out to listen and participate!

I was asked to speak about the importance of creating relevant, useful and high-quality online content – a topic I'm certainly passionate about! I decided to share my Content Creation Manifesto, with the addition of this NEW #4:

Content Creation Manifesto #4b – It's all been said before

There is no need to re-invent the wheel of online content. Yes, someone else has written about your area of expertise. Your ideal clients still need to hear it from you – in fact, you might be the only one they can hear it from because you speak exactly the same language.

START NOW by making a list of topics that are highly relevant to your ideal clients. What do you wish you had known when you were in their shoes? What do they ask you about when you meet? What is your unique way of answering?

Head back to the Content Creation Manifesto Summary for links to #1-7.

Trackbacks, Reactions and Link Love – How to connect with someone you wrote about in a blog post

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Link-lovew150-h113 On January’s Content Mastery Action Day, a member of the Action Club asked, “How do you tell another expert that you’ve mentioned them in your blog post?”

“Link love” (linking back to someone else’s blog or website) is truly a win-win-win proposition. It’s also the heart of connective content – the content you don’t have to create from scratch.

Your readers win because they read and learn about something they may not have discovered otherwise. Hopefully you’ve chosen resources and information that relate to your topic, and hopefully that topic is highly relevant to your readers.

The other bloggers win from having new readers. If they’ve done their own work in producing great content, the right people will be led to follow them. By the way, if that means your reader hires another person instead of you, he or she wasn’t the right client for you in the first place.

You win by having richer content for your blog, introducing different perspectives that you and your readers can learn from, and making connections with other experts in your field.

But how do you get the attention of those experts, especially if you’ve never met or connected online before?

Email, Twitter, trackbacks and tracking

Contact them directly

You can send them a brief email with a link to your post, and let them know you wrote about them. If you are connected via a social network, you can send a direct or private message there as well.

Show up on their screen

There are several ways to show up someone’s screen and get their attention, even if you don’t have direct access to their email.

  • Tweet – I’ll usually post an update to Twitter and include the person’s Twitter ID (example). If you’re posting several tweets about your blog post (as I recommended in a blog post and call about conversation starters), that means two or three more opportunities to connect with that colleague when they see your tweets in their list of “mentions.”
  • Trackback – If you and the other blogger are both set up to enable trackbacks, you can automatically notify the person and even have YOUR blog post displayed in a special section on their blog! First look on their post for a trackback link (example). Then paste that link into the box in your blog post editor (here are screen shots from Typepad and WordPress).
  • Sit back – If the other blogger is monitoring their online mentions, they’ll see you. Especially if you type out their full name in your post (versus just linking from some words that describe the topic). For example:
    • Google Alerts – When someone has an alert set up for their name, your post will show up in their report. This even works for tweets, though I’ve noticed it can take a couple of weeks for tweets to show up in my report.
    • Mention
    • Others? – I know there are many other ways to track who is writing about you and your blog. Please leave me a comment about which one you use and what you like about it.

Everyone wins when you link to high-quality content from your blog. Take the win even further by creating or deepening a relationship with the other expert.