Content Mastery Guide

Editor and Ghostwriter

Downtown jamming

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It's hard to believe it's been almost a year since I joined Downtown Jam,  a unique music club in downtown Toronto. I've had a blast getting together with other musicians and singers to play through a songbook of all my favourite rock 'n' roll tunes.

Thursday night was the annual BBQ and open mic night. Unlike the regular sessions, this time we were playing for an audience. Luckily it was a very warm and receptive audience, made up of mostly other jammers.

I played keyboards on two tunes, but didn't get a chance to sing – I actually really like taking a supportive, accompanying role in the band. I still get to sing quite a bit at the regular jams.

I was surprised how nervous I was, though! I don't think I've performed on the piano since my early days of piano recitals! And the first song the singer chose was a Carole King tune ("It's too late") that featured a four-bar piano introduction. Eeek – just when I thought I was out of the spotlight.

Well, the four bars passed quickly and I managed to get us started. The next song was a rockin' Beatles number,  "Come together," which was a groovin' good time.

The evening reminded me just how much fun I've been having at these jam sessions and I've pledged to make sure to include them as a regular part of my life.

Why article marketing takes the prize

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There are so many ways to get attention and attract new clients for your service-based business.  So how do you know which is the right one for you? As you’ve guessed from the title of this article, I’m already quite biased about the answer.

Ads, cold calling and speaking, oh my!

Radio and television ads are usually too expensive for small service-based businesses to even consider.

Google pay-per-click ads or other forms of Internet advertising can be highly targeted, but can also get expensive and complicated to manage. As well, they do nothing to develop a personalized relationship with a prospective client.

Cold calling offers a chance to connect, but can be quite intimidating and puts the service-based business owner in the position of having to sell their service. Most of us need a lot of help with our telephone sales skills.

Networking is also wonderful for building relationships, but works best if you give before you receive. Service-based business owners who don’t want to give away their services (nor should they), often get stuck in the follow-up phase, because they don’t have anything valuable to pass along to their new contacts.

Speaking, if you like it and learn to do it well, is an excellent strategy for gaining visibility and credibility, but until you build up the platform to earn large speaker fees, also requires follow-up to stay in touch with people and inform them about your other products and services.

The fortune is in the follow-up

And that’s where article marketing comes in. Whether you’re cold-calling, networking or speaking, if you have valuable content that solves a problem for your target market, you can now follow up with confidence. Instead of selling, you’re giving. Instead of creating pressure or urgency, you’re building a trusting relationship. 

And if you’re not out there making the calls, meeting people, or speaking, article marketing can pick up the slack and find the prospects for you! That’s because unlike advertisements or cold calls, people are on the Internet every day actively seeking exactly what you’re giving – information.

Other benefits and applications of article marketing

Service-based business owners with a storefront business can apply exactly the same strategies, and augment by publishing a column in a community newspaper right in their neighborhood. Or enhance your article a bit for submission to a trade journal, newsletter or magazine that’s targeted to your specific audience.

Writing original content based on the very same solutions you have created to solve the problems of your target market can also help you to systemize how you deliver your services. More importantly, it gives people access to your solutions who cannot or will not ever hire you personally.

There are plenty of helpful ways to market your business, and you will be naturally more skilled at some than others. As you find the mix that works for you, please include some article marketing!

If you feel like you’re lacking the discipline, skill or structure that you need to apply the power of article marketing to grow your business, contact me to today about how I can help!

Starting from scratch? A beginning strategy for article marketing magic

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If you’re just getting started with marketing your business online, I believe that the most effective strategy is a combination of blogging, email, and article marketing. In a nutshell:

  • Blogging will get your content published quickly so that it is immediately available to people (prospective clients) who are online and searching for information about your areas of expertise and the topics you care about. 
  • Weekly (at best) or monthly (at least) emails to your contact list will help you follow up with people who have visited your site and are already interested in you.
  • Article marketing will draw more traffic to your website and/or blog, where people can join your mailing list, learn more about you and continue to stay in touch.

Here is how to put it all together:

1. Get a Typepad account – I have a Pro account for $14.95 per month, but you can choose the one that best suits your needs. Consider whether you’ll want to use your own domain name (you’ll need at least the Plus account, $8.95) or customize the design (you’ll need at least the Pro account).

2. Get an AWeber account (starts at $19 per month) and set up the blog broadcast feature to send out new posts from your blog as soon as you publish them.

3. Create an editorial schedule of one topic per month. Piggyback onto the holiday times that people are sure to be discussing or looking for help with. You can also be strategic here and plot out possible chapters for a book.

4. Set up four separate idea catchers (e.g., draft posts in your blogging program, or four pages in a notebook) to collect your thoughts about these four types of blog posts:

  • A full-length article exploring the whats and whys of the topic (e.g., what is the problem/solution/strategy/issue, what is the impact, why is it important)
  • A tips list exploring the hows of the topic (e.g., how to apply the solution, how to practice the new strategy, how to explore the problem further with coaching questions)
  • A list of related resources (online and offline)
  • Case studies, stories or examples from your own life

5. Every week, flesh out one of those blog posts and publish it on your blog. As soon as you do, AWeber will send them out by email to your mailing list.

6. At the end of the month, compile content from some or all of the blog posts into an article and submit it to EzineArticles, searched by 1,000s of visitors every month, including newsletter publishers, consumers and the media – at the end of each article will be your bio and a link back to your website or blog.

Using this combination of strategy, planning and automation, you’ll be on your way to generating an information empire in no time!

Of course, if any of this is going to result in new clients and customers for you, your website had better be working! Stay tuned for an announcement about a free class that Linda Claire Puig are offering called, “Help! My website’s not working!” In the meantime, check out my website manifesto.

Patience, revisited, this month in IAC VOICE: The road to masterful coaching

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To continue this month's theme of patience, check out Nina East and Karen Van Cleve's latest "Lessons from the Certifiers" column in this month's VOICE, the newsletter of the International Association of Coaching. When you see how they answer the question, "How do coaches really become masterful?", you'll see what I mean!

IAC members, enjoy the whole article. Other readers, you can read the first section of this article, along with the rest of this great issue.

Tired of wonky formatting when you copy and paste from email?

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Copying and pasting from web-based applications is a regular source of frustration for me.

My only solution so far has been to keep a Notepad document open all the time so that I can copy text from the web, paste it into Notepad to strip the formatting, and then copy and paste it from there into MS Word.

Of course the problem is that now I've lost all formatting, and sometimes the spacing is STILL wonky!

Well, the other day I clicked on the "Create a Document" link in my Gmail account – I enabled it awhile back but had completely forgotten what it was or what it did.

Wow, what a surprise! A Google Doc popped up with the contents of the email, perfectly formatted. You can check out an example of how it works in my previous blog post about patience. In the post, I reference an email I received from the folks at EzineArticles, and I was able to link to a Google Doc of the actual email.

It's a beautiful thing.

Keep 'em coming, Gmail!