WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice since graduating from the online diary world of Xanga and Livejournal. It’s a fairly user-friendly system that requires no coding knowledge, but can easily be customized if you have the know-how and inclination. It comes in a hosted version with fewer customization options (Read More »]]> I first heard the word “blog” almost 15 years ago at a church retreat workshop for youth group webmasters, and I’ve been filling the Internet with my comings and goings ever since, with a mercifully small audience. But it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve started blogging for business more seriously and trying to gain a significant following that is interested in my work and knowledge. To make your content delicious, you need a great base and the right toppings.

WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice since graduating from the online diary world of Xanga and Livejournal. It’s a fairly user-friendly system that requires no coding knowledge, but can easily be customized if you have the know-how and inclination. It comes in a hosted version with fewer customization options (WordPress.com), or you can download and install the platform on your own web site through WordPress.org and  tailoring the platform for your own business blogging needs.

A plethora of WordPress plug-ins exist to take care of everything from filtering spam to enabling social sharing. If WordPress is the ice cream, then plug-ins are the toppings. Here are my favorite plug-ins:

• Akismet is a spam filter that comes prepackaged with WordPress, but you need to activate it before using.
• Sociable - adds all those cute tiny icons for easy social bookmarking
• Pinterest Pin It Button For Images displays a Pin It button directly over your images.
• Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message.
• SEO Facebook Comments will insert a Facebook Comment Form, Open Graph Tags and ALSO insert all Facebook Comments into your WordPress Database for better SEO.

There are also stand-alone blogging platforms that use WordPress as a base…think sundaes or smoothies made with ice cream. Our own Innoblogs can work for businesses large and small, while other platforms like Photocrati (which I use here) are industry-specific with specialized features.

While it’s easy to set up a blog, creating abundant and engaging content can be much harder. (Have you ever tried making a sundae without ice cream?!) To answer the perennial question, “What do I blog about?!” I use a few simple tools that you probably already know about:

• Mailing lists or newsfeeds from industry experts and your favorite vendors will keep your knowledge and skills up-to-date, which you can then share with your prospects and clients.
• Facebook, Twitter, and other social media keeps your finger to the pulse of your clients, prospects, and colleagues. Use it to collect questions, comments, and interesting content posted by other, and address these on your blogs.
• Blogging 360 is a feature of Innoblogs that sends aggregates of relevant blog posts straight to your inbox. Pick something that catches your eye and write a response, rebuttal, or riff.

If you haven’t written anything since your last college English paper, subscribe to Copyblogger, which combines marketing tips with good old-fashioned principles of effective writing.

Finally, it’s easy to add a little cherry on top of blogs with photos and graphics. The Internet has made us even more visually oriented than before, so nearly every business can benefit from adding Pinterest-worthy photos, graphics, and collages to their blogs. A common practice among photographer and artist blogs is to construct storyboards or collages of multiple smaller images. Doing so gives your images cohesiveness, tells a broader story about your business, and can speed loading time, which is critical for engaging mobile users. Picasa is a great alternative to Photoshop or InDesign for making collages. If you need images, sxc.hu (free) and istockphoto (paid) are wonderful resources. Make sure you keep images at a web-friendly 72dpi; Picasa is again a free, effective tool for basic image management.

There are many more tools available for your blogging toolkit, and the best part is that you can pick and choose what works best for your business. Check out Mashable’s Blogging Toolbox and let us know about your favorite blogging tools in the comments.

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Approaching content marketing from an educational standpoint, I often modify a favorite teaching strategy called K-W-L: Know, Want to Know, and Learned. I’d draw three columns on the board or have the students do so in their journals and together fill in what they already knew (or thought they knew) and what they wanted to know about a particular topic. After the lesson or unit, we’d return to the chart and fill in what we learned, sometimes making changes to the original Know column.

When it comes to ... Read More »]]> Amy Harrison recently gave us 5 Things Every Copywriter Needs to Know About Their Prospects based on Lagos Egri’s 1946 book, The Art of Dramatic Writing. She casts prospects as protagonists in their own stories, and challenges content marketers to mine their prospects’ past experiences, present conflict or need, and possible actions.

Approaching content marketing from an educational standpoint, I often modify a favorite teaching strategy called K-W-L: Know, Want to Know, and Learned. I’d draw three columns on the board or have the students do so in their journals and together fill in what they already knew (or thought they knew) and what they wanted to know about a particular topic. After the lesson or unit, we’d return to the chart and fill in what we learned, sometimes making changes to the original Know column.

When it comes to content creation, I ask myself 3 questions:

• What do my prospects know?
• What do my prospects want to know?
• What will my prospects learn?

What prospects already know (or think they know) is vital for relevant digital content marketing. In teaching we refer to this as prior knowledge. You don’t want to sound condescending (or worse, irrelevant) by writing constantly about basic information they already know, but you also need to address misconceptions that may prevent prospects from purchasing your product, using your service, or even staying on your website. This can and should be done through writing and visuals. Is your service perceived as expensive and only for the privileged? Explain the true value of a job well done and be clear about everything that’s included in your best package. Is your product considered obscure or niche? Show a diversity of happy customers and how your business can tailor to different needs. Make sure your website looks fresh and well-trafficked. Can’t blog as often as you’d like? Consider removing dates on posts or including a Twitter feed of more frequent updates and stop telling people your blog sucks.

What prospects want to know should be the focus your digital content marketing efforts. This is your chance to teach them something new, which is what inbound marketing is all about. Knowing what prospects want to know will help you create content that captures their attention, nurtures their interest, and converts prospects to clients who come back for more. How do you know what they want to know? Ask for questions and comments on your blog posts. Review the inquiries from your contact form. (You do have one, right?) Follow others in your field and riff off popular discussion topics, with a link back to the original post or hashtag, of course. Keep up with the latest developments in your field, or even preview what’s on the horizon if you’re in a position to do so.

What your prospects will learn depends on the composition and sharing of your content. It could be knowledge about your field, interest in your product, or access to your service. This question is an internal check for yourself as the content marketer: does this blog post, eBook, white paper, newsletter, infographic, or Tweet address what my prospects want to know? Unlike the L in a traditional K-W-L chart, this question does not have to come last. In fact, you could start with the end in mind and decide what it is you want your prospects to do as a result of interacting with your content. Then you would double-check that your content lines up with what prospects already know and want to know. Either way, you’ve addressed the three important things to know about your prospects.

What about you? How are you getting inside the heads of your prospects? What works and what do you wish worked better? Leave a comment or question below!

Many people believe that writing for the web, aka writing for Search Engines (SEO), will destroy your ability to write for your audience and build a loyal following. This is not true at all. It simply means you have to spend more time writing strategically. You can incorporate keywords and phrases into your blogs that do not detract from the nature, style or tone of your writing. You can blog for people and you can blog for SEO at the same time.

Here are a few easy steps you can employ to help you blog strategically, for SEO and for ... Read More »]]> It’s an eternal struggle… do you write for the web or do you write for your audience? The answer you write for your audience, who are on the web and need to find your content. So yes – you write for both.

Many people believe that writing for the web, aka writing for Search Engines (SEO), will destroy your ability to write for your audience and build a loyal following. This is not true at all. It simply means you have to spend more time writing strategically. You can incorporate keywords and phrases into your blogs that do not detract from the nature, style or tone of your writing. You can blog for people and you can blog for SEO at the same time.

Here are a few easy steps you can employ to help you blog strategically, for SEO and for your audience as well.

Step 1: Know your keywords

Research the keywords and phrases you want your website and blog to be found for when people input them to search engines. The more of a certain keyword / phrase is used throughout your blog, the more Google recognizes that you are serious about that keyword. If you don’t have a blogging tool that coaches you on keywords – like our Innoblogs product (which I am using to write this blog), you will need to put your keywords into a spreadsheet or post-it note. Be sure you have carefully researched these keywords and that they are relevant for the topic you are writing about.

Step 2: Know your audience

Determine who you are writing for, before you start writing. In marketing lingo, we refer to these as “Personas”. A persona is a made up person (aka Jane Doe) who embodies certain characteristics for whom you are trying to target. For example, if you are blogging about products for new moms you may have a persona named Katie Single. Katie is a unmarried pregnant woman in her early 20′s from an upper middle class home partially through college. Katie Single has needs that are different from Married Martha who is a woman in her mid to late 30′s how has been married for 3-5 years and has a career. Determine who you are writing for and write to that person (or persona). Your message will not resonate with every reader but it will resonate very strongly with your target audience.

Step 3: Be yourself

Everyone has a voice and a writing style. Yours may not be perfectly polished but it’s yours and that is probably better than you think. People enjoy authenticity so when you write, be yourself. You audience will thank you.

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Photo Credit: Victor1558 via Compfight cc This is a question that all of our clients face when they start using Innoblogs. We make collaborative blogging easy with great tools built into Innoblogs, such as, editorial calendars, topic reminders, staleness notifications, ect. However, no tool, not even Innoblogs will build passion into your employees to blog. Here is how we approach it

Let employees participate in selecting and owning their topic focus - You will have a very disengaged employee if you approach the situation by instructing them to just write on this topic. Now I am assuming this isn’t an employee whom has the sole purpose of writing for the company. I’m under the assumption that ... Read More »]]> How do you get others within the company to become committed, engaged, and passionate about blogging?

Photo Credit: Victor1558 via Compfight cc
This is a question that all of our clients face when they start using Innoblogs. We make collaborative blogging easy with great tools built into Innoblogs, such as, editorial calendars, topic reminders, staleness notifications, ect. However, no tool, not even Innoblogs will build passion into your employees to blog. Here is how we approach it

Let employees participate in selecting and owning their topic focus - You will have a very disengaged employee if you approach the situation by instructing them to just write on this topic. Now I am assuming this isn’t an employee whom has the sole purpose of writing for the company. I’m under the assumption that the employee has other responsibilities and you’re wanting them to help the blogging machine.

Align the employee’s daily responsibilities with the blog topics  - You’ll get some of the best writing if you ask your employees to speak on topics that they deal with on a daily basis. Our client ST Ericsson has their engineers do writing on their blog about the products they build daily. This is some of the geekiest and detailed writing I have seen. Their audience loves it!

Show the big picture - Help the employee see why they’re writing. Show how this all adds up to a bigger goal, and who the team consists of doing the writing to move to this goal. Keep everyone informed of progress, and highlight, praise, and showcase the efforts throughout the company. Build buzz around this project and you’ll be amazed when other employees approach to be guest bloggers.

The term “writers block” didn’t start being used until very recently. Break through the fear that is associated with writing for others to read with engaged employees! Build an audience with engaged employees! Don’t make this just another “task”. Get your employees on board and build something that will provide profit to the company!

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1. Implementation planning 2. Implementation/content building 3. Continue content creation and blog maintenance

During the implementation planning stage we discuss the the goals of their content and blog. Also, we discuss the voice they will use to accomplish these goals. These two building blocks lay the framework that we’ll use to be successful with this tool, and not to get lost from where we originally wanted to go!

Implementation and content building is the time where we build up some content for the launch of our blog. The developers are quickly putting the nuts and bolts together so we have time to prep. Since we know our overall goals and ... Read More »]]> I work with clients on content creation continuously when they sign up to use the Innoblogs Business Blogging Platform. There are 3 main stages that we go through.

1. Implementation planning
2. Implementation/content building
3. Continue content creation and blog maintenance

During the implementation planning stage we discuss the the goals of their content and blog. Also, we discuss the voice they will use to accomplish these goals. These two building blocks lay the framework that we’ll use to be successful with this tool, and not to get lost from where we originally wanted to go!

Implementation and content building is the time where we build up some content for the launch of our blog. The developers are quickly putting the nuts and bolts together so we have time to prep. Since we know our overall goals and the voice or voices to use to get there, we start writing. See my blog on business blogging to build an audience and get SEO. It’s a good strategy. If you’re just blogging for SEO… then to Google we go to find our topics and keywords to use: Google keyword tool.

We build up about 10 articles in this stage. Then we start rolling them out after the blog has been launched. Now to maintain – feel, write, publish!

Feel, write, publish? – If you’re building an audience then you must be in contact with them. You have to be connected! This will let you hear their worries, issues, goals, etc. You’ll use your blog to speak to these topics! FEEL your audience… find the next topic. If you’re not building an audience then use Google to continue to find your topics.

Write – You know the topic…now it is time to write. Don’t have domain knowledge on the topic? No worries, do the work of researching and finding a solution for your audience. This is why they’ll come back to you. You’re working for them! This is the same process for SEO.

Publish – Don’t get caught up in wanting the blog to be “perfect” or a “viral hit”. The more you publish the better your writing will become, I promise. The more you publish the more opportunities you have to connect. Publish Publish Publish!

Can you build an audience while writing for SEO?

Yes! You just need to understand how to inject quality SEO into a post that is helpful and relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach!

1. Identify a problem/issue your audience is facing.

2. If you have domain knowledge and can speak to this, then move to step 3. If not, do your research to find a solution or come to a conclusion you believe.

3. Write an article as if speaking to an individual in which you’re invested enough to share your true thoughts and feelings. How would ... Read More »]]> Blogging for business is not a new subject. In fact, you can find thousands of articles discussing the benefits, downfalls, and process to blogging for business. In this post we’re simply going to discuss one issue…

Can you build an audience while writing for SEO?

Yes! You just need to understand how to inject quality SEO into a post that is helpful and relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach!

1. Identify a problem/issue your audience is facing.

2. If you have domain knowledge and can speak to this, then move to step 3. If not, do your research to find a solution or come to a conclusion you believe.

3. Write an article as if speaking to an individual in which you’re invested enough to share your true thoughts and feelings. How would you speak to a friend over coffee about an issue you have knowledge? How would you speak with a long time client on an issue you know how to solve? Write this way.

4. Use tools like Google Keyword, or if you have an audience that you’re connected with through social media identify the keywords they’re using to describe the problem.

5. Add these keywords into your post copy, headline, image meta, etc. Don’t over do it! The goal is to still have your voice, but speak your clients’ language.

Boom! SEO optimized blog post that both supports building an audience and getting SEO. Click here more information about SEO or SEN (search engine marketing)?

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The Ford Focus was not a good brand. In fact, the brand was in such bad shape that there were online groups dedicated to hating on the Focus. So put yourself in Ford’s shoes for a minute… would you kill the brand or try to save it?

Ford decided that the brand, although not well liked or respected, still had a ton of recognition… and that is real value. They decided to try to save the brand using some creative digital marketing.

The Ford marketing team, led by Scott Monty, knew they needed something radical to turn the tide, which is very difficult at any large company. They needed to go rogue.

Ford hired an agency and created a series of webisodes using a hilarious puppet named Doug. Apparently HR was not too pleased with ... Read More »]]>

Image sources TheTorqueReport.com and SXC.hu

The Ford Focus was not a good brand. In fact, the brand was in such bad shape that there were online groups dedicated to hating on the Focus. So put yourself in Ford’s shoes for a minute… would you kill the brand or try to save it?

Ford decided that the brand, although not well liked or respected, still had a ton of recognition… and that is real value. They decided to try to save the brand using some creative digital marketing.

The Ford marketing team, led by Scott Monty, knew they needed something radical to turn the tide, which is very difficult at any large company. They needed to go rogue.

Ford hired an agency and created a series of webisodes using a hilarious puppet named Doug. Apparently HR was not too pleased with the artistic direction, but they don’t control the ad budget, so Ford went forward with the webisodes. They went after the voice of the customer using humor.

The results were staggering:

• The webisodes got 4 million views
• Ford increased their Facebook fans by 44,000
• The favorable opinion of the Ford Focus went up by 74%
• The metric “possibility of purchasing” a Ford Focus went up over 60%

The big take away is that people engage with personalities and with stories rather than with products and features.

Of course, not everyone has the resources Ford has to pull off a digital campaign of this magnitude. I would like to commend the Ford team for pushing the envelope and creating edgy content that really resonated with customers.

Did you ever wonder what goes into creating one of these great custom designed Infographics? It’s more than you may think!

I sat in a session by Graphic Design Company Lemon.ly at the New Media Expo (NMX) in Las Vegas recently where they took us step by step to create a high quality infographic. This blog post is about that process with some enhancement by our Innogage marketing team.

1. Inform

Start with the goal (the Thesis of your infographics). What are your 3 main points – what do you want to reader ... Read More »]]> By now, you have probably seen a ton of Infographics. These are the pretty visual images that tell a story with data. For examples, visit our Pinterest board where we have aggregated a lot of Infographics for Marketing

Did you ever wonder what goes into creating one of these great custom designed Infographics? It’s more than you may think!

I sat in a session by Graphic Design Company Lemon.ly at the New Media Expo (NMX) in Las Vegas recently where they took us step by step to create a high quality infographic. This blog post is about that process with some enhancement by our Innogage marketing team.

1. Inform

Start with the goal (the Thesis of your infographics). What are your 3 main points – what do you want to reader to walk away with? What is the conclusion or call to action (CTA)? (Read a post about how different CTAs can multiply and shape your content.)

2. Gather Data

You need to gather information and data and ensure it’s in a consistent format You don’t want to get caught comparing apples to oranges or your readers will likely call you out. Try to gather data from multiple sources – some internal and some external. Think about your high school term paper – you don’t want a citation page with a single source.

3. Discover

Look for trends, comparisons, relationships with the data. You will need to get creative in this step and put on what I like to call “data glasses”. Wearing data glasses means you look at the world in a different way. You don’t see a staircase, you see number of steps and you immediately begin to think about climbing the stairs thousands of times and how many vertical steps it takes to equal the tallest building in the world. A ruler to measure a single step and a quick search go find the height of the tallest building is all the data you need. Apply 4th grade math to do conversions and you’ve got an impressive stat.

4. Wireframe

A wireframe is a rough black & white sketch of what the infographic may eventually look like. It is meant to be a working document that can be moved and tweaked. My favorite wireframing tool is a big whiteboard and the camera in my iPhone. I sketch the design, take a photo and email it to my designer. Done. There are also some good software tools as well.

5. Relate

Be sure your Infographic tells some kind of story. The pretty graphics and fun fonts and data are all great but if there is no story to tie it all together, people won’t want to share it. If you tell a good story with your Infographic you may be surprised how many people you don’t even know will share your content with their networks.

6. Moodboard

This is mostly for the designers but it requires input from the marketer too. The Moodboard is where you select your colors, fonts, styles to use. If you need a push, Dribbble.com has images and ideas you can use.

7. Design

This is the step where I get the heck out of the way and let those with skill work some magic. Be sure the design encompasses the look and feel of your brand and carries branding through. Do not forget to add a URL (preferably one where a digital copy of the infographic can be obtained along with a Call to Action. Also add your company logo, any tagline you have, and phone number. Remember that if your infographic is good, people will share it. You want them to share your brand and your contact information as well.

8. Launch

With all the work you put into your Infographic, you need to think through the launch carefully. Are there some bloggers who you want to notify about this Infographic? What about news outlets? Do you want it to live on your website or your blog? What social channels are appropriate for your launch?

9. Promote

Along the same lines of the launch is the promotion. Promotion can continue for days or even weeks post-launch. Note that if you want a news outlet to publish your infographic, it’s best to let them break it first. Work out with them how many hours or days after they publish your graphic will elapse before you post it on your own digital properties.

10. Measure

If you’re not going to measure it, don’t do it. Remember the URL I mentioned earlier? Make it a custom unique page and tie Google Analytics to it. Use a form on that page as a CTA and tie conversion analytics to the form completion. Use a unique trackable phone number on the infographic so you know if someone calls you as a result of receiving the infographic. Also remember to baseline your website traffic before and the week after you launch and promote the infographic. If you put it on Pinterest, track the repins and measure audience reach. There are many more metrics you could track – contact us if you want to talk it through.

I hope this helps. If you would rather outsource the whole thing because you are now completely overwhelmed, why not give Lemon.ly a ring. You know they rock the Infographic world.

You can find Part I at this link, and Part II at this link.

To recap very quickly, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz talked about a new kind of marketing when you slowly and consistently nudge your prospects and customers to take small actionable steps that benefit them and you. In the digital marketing space, this can take on many different appearances depending on what kind of business you have and who ... Read More »]]> Welcome to Part III of the blog mini-series about Nudge Marketing with content from the Rand Fishkin presentation from NMX in Las Vegas. If you missed parts I and II, I encourage you to read those first and then come back to this blog post.

You can find Part I at this link, and Part II at this link.

To recap very quickly, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz talked about a new kind of marketing when you slowly and consistently nudge your prospects and customers to take small actionable steps that benefit them and you. In the digital marketing space, this can take on many different appearances depending on what kind of business you have and who your customers are.

So keep reading for Nudge Marketing Tactics 11 – 15.

11. Nudge over time. [Do not ask your prospects for lots of information or provide a lot of options in your website calls to action. Instead, give them small bits to complete, step by step. Use multiple shorter requests for action over time. The probability the user will take the desired action decreases with the number of simultaneous requests being made. The opposite is also true - the desired action increases, the fewer things you ask at one time]

12. Use Minimal Design. [This is especially important with you are trying to get your user to take a desired action. Too much bling can distract them from the Call to Action (CTA), which is what you want them to focus on. Use a simple design with a single target. Make the CTA clear and simple.]

13. Promote competition among buyers. [Think about an auction – the auctioneer wants to spur competition between bidders. This is a major reason in-person auctions are so successful. In the digital world, think about leader-boards. Also, a college boosted their college attendance rates by 50% by just making students fill out one college app.

14. Use Gamfication. [Gamification is the process of using game-like components in your marketing. Games and the resulting behavior can create powerful marketing nudge if done properly. Offer an “earned reward” to valuable prospects or those using a freemium or paid version. For example, if a user is on your freemium version but uses the software frequently, tell them they have “earned” 2 free months of the paid version that has increased functionality. It may be enough to make them take the leap. You can also offer non-cash incentive rewards such as badges which can be displayed, or points that can be won or earned for future rewards. Be sure, however, to tell the user they have EARNED the reward. Do not just give it to them as a present or gift. People like to earn things – it provides a sense of accomplishment.]

15. Repetition & Modeling. [Share your stuff, then share it again… then share it again. In the Digital Marketing world, your prospects, fans and followers are only on those social networks for certain periods of time and even when they are there, chances are, they are not watching closely. Take Twitter for example. At best, only 5-6% of your twitter followers are online at any give time. Most of those won’t notice your tweet anyway. Share posts 3-4 times and use multiple platforms. Be aware that it is highly likely you will have one or two followers who see all your repetitive posts and they may even angrily call you out for it. When that happens, don’t apologize and scale back to single shares. That person (or persons) likely represents less than 1% of your total network. Don’t let that one person disrupt your strategy to reach the other 99% of your network. Be sure you are smart about it, though. I remember seeing a colleague with a social media company shotgun blast her posts through multiple twitter accounts all at the same time using Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. For those of us who followed multiple accounts, it looked really spammy and unprofessional. Share your content at different time across multiple days and change up the language in your shares with each send. Don’t be lazy about it.

I hope this series on Nudge Marketing has been helpful. A special thanks to Rand Fishkin for coming to NMX and doing this presentation. If you would like to see Rand’s presentation, he provided embed code for it on Slideshare and you can flip through it below:

The Mighty Nudge: The Future of SEO, Social Media, & Content Marketing from Rand Fishkin

To recap quickly, Rand Fishkin spoke about Nudge Marketing at the New Media Expo (#NMX) in Las Vegas recently and I was lucky enough to hear his presentation. I blogged about Nudge Marketing Tactics 1-5 in an earlier post. If you have not seen that one yet, I encourage you to read it first and then come back to this post. For each tactic, I list the tactic from Rand and then provide my commentary in the [brackets] to expand on the subject matter.