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May 16 2013
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Mobile Copywriting Tips and Four Apps to Assist

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Teddy Hunt – Enjoy!

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photo credit Via Flickr by FaceMePLS

With 79 percent of Americans working remotely at least part of the time, it seems the days of copywriters chained to cubicles are far behind us. However, leaving the desk behind can take some getting used to. Read on to discover tips for copywriting in a mobile work environment, and 4 helpful apps to assist you in doing so.

Stay Connected with Technology

Many of us step out of the office to recharge our batteries, but you shouldn’t cut yourself off from your workplace altogether. A smart phone allows you to receive phone calls from your clients and respond to their emails while you’re away from your desk. You can also set up a landline-style number through Skype. The low subscription fee lets you make and receive local and international calls just as you would in the office. Calling landlines is cheap, but beware of dialing international mobiles. Global roaming charges can add up quickly!

Invest in a Convertible Tablet

Laptops are the traditional choice for mobile copywriters, but convertible tablets offer greater flexibility. They have the screen size you need and the keyboard you love, with the additional of benefit of being able to run mobile apps. These handy programs aren’t just for wasting time. Read on to learn about the apps that can help you write great copy on the go. Here are 4 of the best ones:

Wi-Fi Locator and Free Wi-Fi Help You Connect

Mobile copywriters need to research, send email, and log stories on the go. The Android-compatible Wi-Fi Locator and its iOS counterpart, Free Wi-Fi, track your location and tell you where to find the nearest t-mobile broadband hotspots. Handy maps make it easy to head to the places you can log on.

Evernote Turns Note-Taking High TechEvernote

Once upon a time, copywriters wouldn’t be seen without a well-worn notebook. These days, that notebook has gone digital with the launch of Evernote. To call it “the ultimate note-taking app” might sound like an overstatement, but its ability to capture text, images, and video is impressive. In fact, it’s created such a buzz that 89 percent of Evernote users downloaded it on a friend’s recommendation.

Use it to record your interviews or simply to jot down your own thoughts when inspiration hits. The ability to tag items helps you stay organized, no matter how many assignments you’re working on.

Omnifocus Keeps You on Track

OmniGroupWith a multitude of external distractions, staying focused can be one of the greatest challenges for copywriters on the go. The Omnifocus app makes the job easier by prioritizing your workload and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable tasks. The reminders function ensures no job slips through the cracks. Omnifocus is currently available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and details can be synched across these devices. An Android version is also in development.

(Image via OmniGroup)

Mozy backup

Mozy Backs Up Your Important Data

Almost three-quarters of businesses have lost data in the last two years. If you think it won’t happen to you, then consider these sobering statistics. A staggering 140, 000 American hard drives crash every week, and more than 2 million laptops are stolen annually.

Backing up your data using a cloud system like the Mozy app will help you keep business as usual should the worst happen. The app can automatically back-up the files on your laptop or tablet while you work.

Keeping Pace With An Accelerating World

Perhaps the most important takeaway that you could get from this article, though, is that copywriters need to do everything they can to keep pace with today’s rapidly changing marketplace. The more quickly you can generate great ideas and deliver stellar copy, the more competitive you will be in your endeavors as a professional copywriter.

And if you aren’t currently very mobile in your own copywriting practices, it can be to your advantage to do so. In fact, many remotely working employees have reported a 25 percent increase in productivity, so it makes sense to take your copywriting out of the office. What other tips do you have for copywriting on the go?

teddy_hunt_avatarTeddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.
Filed Under: Content marketing, Marketing Materials, Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With: ,
May 9 2013
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How Great Business Writing Gets Done Quickly

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Steve Aedy – Enjoy!

5780578430_fb473e636bGreat writers know a thing or two about how great writing is done. After all, that’s their job. For you, the business owner or marketer who needs to do some writing, it’s helpful to know what counts for your particular needs.

I Think, Therefore I Have a Headache

Blogging for business is not like writing a great novel. It’s about getting to the point in as few words as possible. That means thinking, which is painful and annoying, but you have to do it.

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (Letter 16, 1657) – Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

KISS: Keep It Short & Simple

Blog posts are “quick reads” and are often skimmed for key points by people who are very busy. Respect that fact. Format your work with headings and bullet points. Keep your word count at or below 500 words. This is truly a case of “less is more”.

“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time is wasted.” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Ham and Eggs Beats Eggs Benedict

Great authors know that simple is better, fewer words beat lengthy prose and it’s more important to not be misunderstood than to try and make yourself understood with a lengthy explanation.

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” – Aristotle

“Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” –  George Orwell

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” – Thomas Jefferson

Ready, Fire, Aim

A business blog post has a specific target to hit. That target doesn’t always have to be a sales pitch or an attempt at customer retention. Sometimes, that post is just a statement of how your business does business or some other non-sales theme. The point is, write your blog post freely, then edit it to conform to your main point, which you discovered while writing it.

“I write to find out what I’m talking about.” – Edward Albee

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” – E.M. Forster

Procrastinate Later…

This brings you to the most important point: write. Procrastination never helps, when it comes to writing. Despite the fact that what you start out with is less than perfect, write. Put down everything you can, then go back and cut out the fluff.

“Don’t get it right – get it WRITTEN!” – Lee Child

The Benefits of “Quick and Dirty”

Avoid the trap of “perfection”. Yes, you do want what you write to be good, but the beguiling temptation to craft exceptional prose is a time waster. This is NOT a novel, nor an excerpt thereof. Make it good and stop.

“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.” – Arthur Freed

Summing Up

The Marine Corps of the United States has a proven method of getting a point across to recruits:

  1. I’m gonna tell ya what I’m gonna tell ya.
  2. I’m gonna tell ya.
  3. I’m gonna tell ya what I told ya.

Use this formula when crafting a blog post. After all, I told ya I was gonna tell ya what counts, right?

aedyAbout the Author:

The article was written by Steve Aedy, who is a staff writer for Fresh Essays – a company that provides online paper writing service and editing help. He likes to write on social media, small business and education related topics. Follow him on Google+.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Referral Marketing Tagged With: ,
Apr 11 2013
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Why Every Small Business Needs Great Content

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s gust is Natalie Chan – Enjoy!

What-is-content2It’s no longer enough for a small business to build a website, Facebook page or twitter profile and hope that people will flock to it, bringing new business.

To ensure a strong online presence, you need good content. Great content means interesting, high quality and highly shareable content that allows you to capture your audience with engaging information, advice, stories and more to provide value – not a hard sell.

However, while nine out of ten organizations market with content, (Source: Content Marketing Institute), continuously creating great content can be a challenge. Especially for small businesses who are already time-poor and resource-stretched.

Repurposing your content allows you to streamline your efforts and make your content work harder for you at no extra cost.

Here are a few tips to boost your content marketing:

1. Subtract the sales pitch

Content marketing may require different tools and a different mindset than direct marketing, but that doesn’t mean the two can’t play together. Use some direct marketing materials you’ve already created and subtract the sales pitch to isolate the relevant, engaging messages for the casual consumer.

You can turn a press release announcing a new product into a blog post addressing the problem your product attempts to solve and educating consumers on other solutions or points of consideration they should be aware of. Take a pitch deck, remove the hard-sell, and turn it into a webinar with useful information for consumers independent of your product. That’s the difference between providing value and extracting it from consumers.

2. Multimedia is Multipurpose

Multimedia assets can greatly increase the flexibility of your content execution. An Instagram photo can live in a blog post, which in turn can become an appealing thumbnail in your Facebook update. Video is one of the most flexible assets you can develop. You can embed videos on your YouTube channel into articles and blog posts, turn them into thumbnails on Facebook, link to them on Twitter, adapt them into podcasts on SoundCloud. Each of these channels present sharing opportunities as well, and by extension further repurposing.

3. Use Hyperlinks

One of the easiest – not to mention cheapest – methods of repurposing your content and extending its shelf life is creating hyperlinks back to it later. These links can be placed organically throughout the new content you produce as a way to get readers to engage with related or otherwise contextually relevant content. As a best practice, be sparing with the number of links you use so as to not to distract the reader or encourage too much bouncing.

4. Leverage Recommendations

There’s no better time to engage audiences than when they’re thinking about what to experience next. Whether on yours or other publisher sites, using discovery platforms to recommend more content you’ve produced for consumers to check out next is a great way to keep them engaged and extend the shelf life of your content.

N ChanNatalie Chan is a Marketing Manager at Outbrain. Outbrain helps people discover the most interesting, relevant and trusted content wherever they are. Outbrain provides personalized recommendations across a network of premium publishers, including CNN, Fox News, Hearst, Rolling Stone, US Weekly and Fast Company. Through Outbrain’s all-in-one content discovery solution, publishers, brands and marketers are able to amplify their audience engagement by driving traffic to their content – on their site and around the web. Outbrain is currently installed on more than 100,000 sites and generates more than 85 billion page views per month.

 

Filed Under: Content marketing, Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With:
Mar 8 2013
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Maximizing Your Earned Media for Sales and Lead Generation

This guest post is brought to you by Outbrain – Enjoy!

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photo credit: aussiegall via photopin cc

Third-party endorsement or exposure of your brand can be a powerful tool in spreading awareness and reaching audiences to  drive new leads.  But one earned media placement only goes as far as the immediate audience, and for all you know it may not be the right audience.

If leveraged correctly, earned media can be an effective source of qualified leads and other benefits,  rather than vanishing into the ether or otherwise going to waste on the wrong audience.

Here are a few tips to making the most of your earned media to benefit  sales and lead generation:

1. Keep Track of It

You may find a number earned media placements are not the result of your direct PR efforts, in which case are you certain you’re aware each time your brand is mentioned in the press?  Set up a mechanism for routinely gathering this information (daily, if possible).  Google Alerts is a simple solution.

2. Amplify It

Think of content marketing like oral storytelling; once the story’s been told, it can be passed on to other audiences in ways organic and paid.  Let your goals dictate which channels you pursue for each piece of earned media.  If your goal is to drive conversions, that means attracting the most qualified audience and you can use traffic acquisition platforms like Outbrain to get your earned media in front of that qualified audience.  The more people engage with it, the longer the shelf-life for your content and your long-term potential to bring in leads

3. Repurpose It

One of the undervalued aspects of earned media is that the parties producing it have different ideas than you do — not just about the nature of your brand or product but the landscape of the market, who your competitors are, etc.

Earned media can be a springboard for owned media.  If a piece of earned media highlights a problem, misconception, or even a positive asset related to your business that  you had never considered before, use it as an opportunity to generate your own content addressing those issues or demonstrating those assets.

4.  Arm Your Team with It

Prospects love to hear about other customers who have faced similar challenges and used your company to solve them. For this reason, case studies, testimonials and positive earned media are all great tools for your team when making their case. Look at how a local restaurant keeps their restaurant review in the window or a clothing boutique showcases their fashion magazine editorial coverage on their shelves. When you have great earned media, think about how your business can use it to generate leads or help drive new prospects over the sales line.

head shotBrandon Carter is a Marketing Manager at Outbrain.  Outbrain helps people discover the most interesting, relevant and trusted content wherever they are. Outbrain provides personalized recommendations across a network of premium publishers, including CNN, Fox News, Hearst, Rolling Stone, US Weekly and Fast Company. Through Outbrain’s all-in-one content discovery solution, publishers, brands and marketers are able to amplify their audience engagement by driving traffic to their content – on their site and around the web.

Filed Under: Content marketing, Lead Generation, Referral Marketing, Sales Tagged With:
Feb 27 2013
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Content Repurposing Is the New Way of the World

Today’s guest post is from Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Dan Kraus. – Enjoy!

C O N T E N T

One little 7-letter word that makes marketers and business owners alike cringe a bit.  We know we need new, fresh, content to attract prospects.  The old world of outbound, hunt-down-a-prospect marketing isn’t working any more. But creating new content takes time, skill, patience and for many of us, brings us right back to the memories we have of writing essays in high school. Content Marketing is the new way of the marketing world.

The key for getting past this, is to really think about how you re-purpose, re-use, re-cycle your content everywhere.  Writing something and just using it one time in one place, is a painful and expensive way to burn out your content creation energy.

Figuring out how to re-purpose is especially critical for those businesses that sell products or services with long purchase cycles (6 months or longer).  Moving those prospects through the process of Know, Like, Trust, Try and Buy has to have a continual application of useful and engaging content.  If left to their own process, most salespeople will just call once a month to see if someone is ready to buy.  But that doesn’t add value to the process – it just bothers the prospect. Marketing can and should take a nurturing approach that allows a prospect to consume your value-added content in a way most meaningful to them.

We all learn in one (or more) of three ways – visual (seeing), auditory (listening) or kinesthetic (touching, experiencing).  By thinking about how you present your content to people in each of these ways, you enhance your chance of driving engagement as well.

So now, with our content, we want to repurpose it in a way that allows us to stretch out the use of it over time, and in a way that gives people different ways to interact with the content.

Here’s a real-life example of how we do this.  For this example, I am going to pretend that I am a company that sells and installs accounting systems for businesses.  And I know that many of my ideal clients and potential clients are very focused on making sure their cash-flow is in good shape.  So I am going to spend some of my marketing cycles talking about how my business helps our clients improve cash flow.

To start off the year, in January I am going to send out a newsletter to my prospective customers.  The main article in the newsletter is titled “10 ways to improve your cash flow this year”.  After I send out the newsletter, I am also going to:

  • Post the article on my website
  • Tweet that is on my website
  • Post it as a note on my company Facebook page
  • Submit for publication to eZines.
  • Use each one of the 10 reasons as one individual blog post – giving me my next 10 blog posts without working too hard – and I will tweet about it each time I post the blog post.

In that newsletter, I am also going to mention that I am doing a web-seminar in February on this topic.  The seminar will be on 10 ways to improve your cash flow. And to promote the web-seminar, we will send out email invitations to our list; we’ll post the info on Facebook and in LinkedIN groups; we’ll tweet about it and of course, we’ll list on our web site.

When we do the web-seminar on improving cash flow, we’ll record it and put the recording on our website for replay (with registration of course) and we’ll post a shortened version of it on YouTube.  We’ll also post the slide deck on Slideshare.  And with each of those actions, we’ll tweet and update statuses on LinkedIN and Facebook.

At the end of the webinar, we’ll invite those who may be interested in taking part, to have us come in and do a cash flow review and analysis for them.  This is a service we do for free to give the prospect a chance to try us out and see how we work/work with us.  We’ll also also promote this through the month of March with emails to our prospects, tweets and updates to LinkedIN, Facebook and other social sites we participate in.

Phew!  We just took one concept – cash flow – and one core piece of content – our newsletter article on 10 ways to improve it – and re-used it many, many times…

  • The newsletter
  • Newsletter article on our website
  • Newsletter article submitted to others
  • The webinar (and a few invites to it)
  • The cash flow review offer
  • 10 blog posts on cash flow
  • Slide deck posted on Slideshare
  • Video posted on YouTube
  • Video on our website
  • And lots and lots of status updates/tweets on our social sites

And we gave prospects a way to digest it visually (reading in the newsletter), though listening (the webinar) and kinesthetically (with the cash flow review).

So, looking back at all that, you can now safely say that If it took you 4 hours to write and research your article on 10 ways to improve cash flow, you definitely got a good return on your time investment.

One final thought.  Almost any business can approach content creation and distribution this way.  You’ve just got to really understand what the problems are, that you solve for your customers.  And then put on your thinking cap (or call for help) and get creative about getting your message out there.

24.thumbnailAbout Dan Kraus: I am passionate about helping small business grow through effective marketing. As a marketing professional specializing in small and mid-sized business I bring a deep domain experience in technology and software marketing. I am a master coach for the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system and also currently provide fractional VP of Marketing services for a number of small business clients. I am the founder and leader of Leading Results where we help small business stop wasting money on marketing.

Filed Under: Content marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With:
Feb 21 2013
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SEO Consulting in 2013: What the Pros Know that You Don’t

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Chris Warden. – Enjoy!

SEO

photo credit: SEOPlanter via photopin cc

SEO is changing, and for the most part, the life of an SEO consultant is getting better. Gone are the days of open keyword data and mass link buying, but we’ve been lucky to gain a few things too. Most notably, we’ve gained the ability to justify the cost of good SEO and shown that a good SEO consultant is worth the additional expense in easy to understand terms and ideas such as ROI and lifetime value.

As in all walks of life, it seems that the pros are always one step ahead of the amateurs and the hobbyists. What separates the pros from the amateurs in 2013 isn’t going to be a self-proclaimed “expert” title in their bio on LinkedIn. In 2013 it’s all about strong content and quantitative analysis to determine what’s effective and what isn’t.

Here’s what’s really important in 2013, and beyond.

Content is king. Really, we mean it this time.

Google has been telling us for years that content was king. Somewhere deep down inside, I think they really meant it.

SEO experts knew that content was important, but the only benefit to good content over bad content was the potential to get it shared, thus building more links in the process. Other than that, content was content. If it were indeed king, it was the king of a place we’ve never heard of.

Now, Google has shown the world that it means business. The “new” search results are going to favor brands – whether personal or corporate – to low-quality, niche-specific, here today gone tomorrow websites or those that just build massive amounts of low-quality content (I’m looking at you eHow) in order to spam the search listings with as many of their indexed pages as possible.

Maybe content was king all along, and Google just found the right algorithm change to weed out most of the bad content by sending it to the depths of the search results. Or maybe Google held on to the idea for far too long that links were absolutely the most important tool in SEO; even though what they really wanted was good and relevant content, even though they didn’t have a quantitative way to measure what good content and bad content looked like (other than human review). We’ll never know.

What we do know is that bad content is a thing of the past, at least if you plan to build a site that generates a decent amount of organic search engine traffic.

Backlinks are losing ground to stronger rankings metrics.

Backlinks are still the most important metric when it comes to ranking a site, but they’re quickly losing ground to other – more modern – metrics such as social indicators, citations, and instances of co-occurrence. In short, SEO is becoming more and more similar to PR every day.

Pro tip: If you’re a PR guy (or girl) it might be time to add a bit of SEO knowledge to your repertoire before you’re completely obsolete.

Content doesn’t mean blogging (necessarily).

Every SEO consultant or person who happens to rely on content in order to drive traffic, leads or sales dies a little inside when we talk about content with clients only to hear about how they’re “already blogging.”

Content is writing. Content is also video, podcasting, design (infographics, presentations, etc.), and social media posting. There are quite literally dozens of ways to produce content and writing it in  a blog is certainly not the only way. Depending on your business, it might not even be the most effective way.

In essence, content is a way to express thoughts or ideas to other people. Writing is but one of may forms of content, and it is certainly something you should educate your clients to understand.

Integrated strategies are the new one trick pony.

In the last few years, the Internet marketing community has grown very segmented. With the rise of segmentation within our industry, we’ve come to rely on several one trick ponies – or people who specialize in just one thing – to get the job done.

The future is made for the strong generalist within all of us. SEO in general is switching from building backlinks, analyzing keywords and optimizing pages to an all-encompassing medium focused on everything from social media strategy to content production.

SEO consultants of the future don’t necessarily have to be good at everything, but they certainly need to be aware that SEO is more than linking and optimization, which is largely what the past generation of SEO revolved around. The good SEOs of the future understand that SEO is a mix of research, optimization, link & citation building, content production, social media and data mining. SEO can’t stand on its own anymore. To succeed in the future, you have to understand the importance of integrated marketing strategies and how to implement them for your clients.

There’s no better time to be (or hire) a great writer.

Anyone who calls himself an SEO consultant – or SEO expert – knows 2013 is the year of the writer, thus making it the year of content. We’ve been building to this point for quite some time, but the time has finally arrived where the best writers – or those that know how to find and retain the best writers – are going to leap frog over the outsourced link builders and the automated software. In short, this is the year the SEO consultant that plays by the rules is really going to shine.

For the first time in the history of search engines, we’re starting to see sites with established and authoritative writers ranked better than those that aren’t as high on the food chain. For example, Rand Fishkin is always going to have better ranking content on the subject of SEO than me, no matter how good I am at SEO. The reason for this is due to the perceived authority (deservedly so) that Rand has achieved within the SEO community.

The same goes for your business, or your clients. Better writers are beginning to show greater returns on investment than the $25 articles from no-name writers we’ve been purchasing from freelancers for the last decade.

It’s time to really dive in and learn all you can about producing great content, or to find someone who can. Good content runs in the range from $75 – $350+ for a blog post, but those that are producing the best content are those that are going to be rewarded with the links, shares, and recognition within the industry.

Cheap content is dead and gone.

There is no more room for shortcuts.

Automation software and overseas employees used to rule the SEO game.

Those days are gone. SEO is now an art form that needs micro managing and near constant supervision.

When your clients ask, can you tell them with 100-percent confidence that nothing is going on that is going to get them penalized by Google? Of course you can’t. And if you can’t be sure that you are providing value to your clients, you shouldn’t be in this business in the first place.

Conclusion

Good SEO consultants are constantly on top of the changes that happen (seemingly daily) within the industry. The main thing that separates a good SEO from a bad one is education. Educate yourself, and stay on top of trends in order to provide your client with the most bang for their buck and you’ll stay relevant no matter what changes the SEO world faces in the future.

Warden_HeadShotChris Warden is a seasoned entrepreneur and CEO. Starting his entrepreneurial career at age 19, he has performed in numerous capacities owning and managing both offline and online companies. Chris now serves as CEO of Spread Effect, a leading content marketing and publishing company. He is a member of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) and often writes on topics of content marketing, SEO, and business development. He’s passionate about building and mentoring world-class teams and loves to chat with like-minded individuals. You can connect with Chris via Linkedin, Twitter – @ChrisWarden_SE, or Google+.

Filed Under: Coaching and Consulting, Content marketing, Referral Marketing, Search Engines, SEO, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Dec 20 2012
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How to Get More Social Mileage Out of Video

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Dr. Melody King – Enjoy!

photo credit: MoneyBlogNewz

No doubt you’re knee-deep in social media marketing these days, spending a good chunk of time engaging with customers within social networks and creating compelling content that attracts followers. Pat yourself on the back for your hard work – and now, get ready for a social networking exercise you may not have come across before.

Videos, which you may be using in your business to help highlight your products and services, are a great tool for expanding your social connections. As you’re probably aware, videos help bring your brand and key marketing messages to life in a different way than text or still images do. And you may have already posted some of your videos to YouTube as a way to generate buzz.

However, to do true “social video marketing,” you need to go beyond simple YouTube posting. You need to encourage audiences to add their own ideas to the video mix, which means they are implicitly endorsing your marketing messages.

According to research from Bazaarvoice and Kelton Research, most consumers trust user-generated content – that is, content that’s not created by the brand – over any other kind. In addition, 84% of people under 35 say that user-generated content has some influence on what they buy. They are also three times as likely as their parents to use social channels to research their purchases.

Below are ideas for getting the most possible social mileage out of your videos.

Think beyond just posting. The “baby steps” of social video marketing involve doing more than simply posting videos to your own website. Posting videos to your own YouTube channel will help not only boost the social sharing of your videos, but can also increase your SEO rankings. In the retail space, we know that enhancing natural search through the back link from YouTube has helped raise the rankings of Sports Unlimited, Advantage Bridal, and Factory Direct Jewelry, to name a few.

Include a call to action. Once your videos are up on YouTube, you can encourage people to comment, ‘like,’ and share your content with their social connections. You can do this by offering compelling content and by simply asking outright with readily accessible sharing icons and links.

While these functions are built into YouTube, don’t assume people will take the plunge on their own. As with any other marketing channel, include a clear call to action and readily available sharing icons and links.

Pull, don’t push. Give some thought to how to make your messaging generate interest from your audience. Obviously, you want to develop videos that help promote your company’s products and services. However, potential customers will also respond well to authentic, personal messages about you and your business.

For instance, you can use video to explain how you’re responding to customer feedback, tell a story about how your products are making a difference in the world, or provide insights from your fellow business owners. This is not about creating slick and polished videos – it’s about giving your customers a personal connection to your brand, which helps humanize your company. Zappos.com is one company that’s done a great job with video to highlight its customer service and return policies, and generally give customers a good impression of how the company operates.

Put customers at center stage. Allow customers to upload their own videos describing experiences with your products and services, or as responses to your videos. Then allow them to share these videos socially. If that’s not appropriate, brainstorm about other options. For example, the Will It Blend team knew it would be irresponsible to ask people to perform their own experiments (for example, tossing iPhones into blenders), so they asked Facebook users to suggest items the company could blend on camera.

A recent comScore study found that both professionally produced and user-generated video can work together to provide even greater impact on your marketing efforts. This makes sense: Customers want to hear from you about your business, but they also want to see believable messages from people like themselves. So how can you incorporate user-generated content into your video channel? You might let them compete to sing your jingle in a fresh way. Or issue a video essay challenge that fits your brand.

Choose quality over quantity. Are you monitoring for views and thumbs-ups? Or sharing, comments, and links? High video views are great, but high engagement is better. Even though some folks want to see their videos circle the Web in a flash, quality engagement is more important than putting up big numbers. After all, millions of us watched those roller-skating babies, but did you switch to a new bottled water brand?

Social video marketing focuses on measuring shares, comments, links to your website and the online buzz it generates for your brand. So while going viral is good, you should do more to encourage interaction, which can better impact sales. Right from the beginning, a social video marketing strategy should incorporate ways for people to share their thoughts and feel as if they are contributing to the content being shared. It’s also important to provide access to channels that make sharing and redistribution easy.

Consider humor – but carefully. For many marketers who hope to go viral, funny is the way to do it. Humor can also help build interaction and get your content shared. However, humor can also be tricky to pull off really well. It’s more important to be real and to connect with your targets than simply generate LOLs.

Marketing has claimed a “customer first” focus for a long time – but today, social media is forcing us to walk the talk. Putting users front and center, and giving them a sense of co-creation, adds value for your customers, their social circle, and other potential customers who are seeking information. It all adds up to very convincing information at purchase decision time.

Dr. Melody King, DM is vice president of marketing at Treepodia. As vice president of sales and marketing for Treepodia, Dr. King, provides clients with ecommerce solution expertise to harness the power of rich media in the form of engaging video content. She can be reached at [email protected].

Filed Under: Content marketing
Nov 29 2012
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5 Simple Steps for Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Aaron Houghton  – Enjoy!

Image Credit: Qole Pejorian Flickr CC

Throughout my career I’ve run my own small businesses, consulted with small business owners, and built software for small business users. I’m one of the biggest small business advocates you’ll ever meet. The passionate entrepreneurs who decide to launch and run their own businesses are the force that drives this world forward.

One of my favorite things about small business owners is that they’re natural do-it-yourselfers. As a small business owner yourself, you’ve probably learned that in order to get something done right, you oftentimes have to do it yourself.

In this article I’ll show you how to take your web marketing results into your own hands.

Although it’s common to assume that web marketing should be handled by the techies, don’t make this huge mistake. Your knowledge about your business make you the person most capable of generating big web marketing results – more sales leads and new customers for your business.

Small business owners who use this process acquire new customers at drastically lower costs than buying visitors through cost-per-click ads. Our research shows that following this process over one year produces high quality free website traffic equal to that from a $100,000 paid search engine advertising campaign.

Let’s get started.

Build a Website that You Control

You probably already have a website for your business, but if you don’t, it’s critical that you set one up immediately. A business website is the digital representation of your personal expertise. It’s where you build your authority as an expert on the topics you know best.

To establish your expertise you’ll write blog posts and articles using keywords that are important to your prospective customers. In order to do this, you need to have access to quickly and easily add new blog posts and pages on your website.

Websites built on simple editing platforms like WordPress or SquareSpace allow you to edit existing pages and add new ones at any time.

If you can’t easily edit your current business website, just create a new website right now. Imagine that you’re starting a little online magazine. Register a domain name that explains your primary topics of expertise, for instance home-garden-talk.com or makeup-for-weddings.com and set up a hosting account with GoDaddy that gives you the ability to edit and add pages to the site on your own.

Choose the Right Keywords For Your Business

In web marketing, keywords are the building blocks of success. Having the right web marketing strategy really just boils down to having the right list of keywords. It’s that simple.

Your best keywords are the words that your customers are already using.

Ask a few of your customers how they describe your business when talking with friends. Pay special attention to the words they use and write them down.

Think about the problems that your prospective customers are experiencing that your business can help them with. Add descriptions of those problems to your keyword list too. For instance, if you are a locksmith, you would write locked out of my car or need to change the locks on my house.

If your business serves a local region make sure to include all of its names too. For instance Chapel Hill, North Carolina is also referred to as part of the Triangle Area of North Carolina, and Central North Carolina. Create multiple versions of each of your existing keywords by adding the region names at the end, like locked out of my car chapel hill north carolina and locked out of my car triangle area north carolina.

You should have 25-50 words or short phrases in your list now (each on its own line). Copy your list and paste it into the Google Keyword Tool to see which keywords have the highest volume of searches and lowest level of competition.

Find the ten keywords that have the highest search volume and the lowest level of competition. You now have the perfect web marketing strategy for your business. Let’s get started implementing it.

Create a Content Schedule

You need to begin writing blog posts and articles about each of your top ten keywords. Don’t expect to do this today. It’s actually best to add these new pages to your website steadily over time.

Take a look at your schedule and add a recurring weekly event to remind you to write at least one new article each week. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Ask employees, friends, business partners, or customers to contribute. Give them a topic from your keyword list and tell them to take any angle they would like.

A good blog post or article page is three to four paragraphs in length, is focused tightly on a single keyword from your list, and is written in a friendly, conversational tone.

Write your article, or edit an article submitted to you, and then add it as a blog post or new page on your website. Include links in the article, where relevant, to product or service pages on your website.

Optimize Your Pages

Give your new blog posts and articles the best chance possible to pull in new visitors by making sure they’re optimized for the search engines.

The search engines pay special attention to certain page fields so you can gain a better search engine rankings just by putting the right words in the right places. Check for basic optimization by making sure that each page’s keyword (or keyphrase) can be found in the page title and meta description and is also used several times within the article’s text.

Use free tools like BoostSuite or SEOMoz to automatically scan your website and see where changes need to be made. Most optimization fixes are just simple text changes so you can optimize each new article in only a few minutes right when you post it online.

Commit to the Process and Get Started

Our research shows that adding one new optimized article to your website every week for one year generates an amount of free search engine traffic that would have cost around $100,000 if purchased through paid search engine advertising.

Now that’s a competitive advantage! But you actually have to follow this process to generate these results.

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Are you willing to do the work required to grow your business and have new customers knocking down your door?

Start back at the top of the article and work your way through the process. Find your best keywords, write your first article, optimize it then add it as a new page on your website now. Your website will start receiving new visitors in just a few days.

Keep it up week after week and you’ll build a powerful web marketing system that produces thousands of website visitors and a steady flow of new customers for your business throughout the year.

Aaron Houghton is a serial entrepreneur who builds web marketing products for small business owners. Aaron is currently co-founder and CEO of BoostSuite.com. BoostSuite is a product that helps small business owners get more marketing results on their own. Formerly Aaron was co-founder of email newsletter leader iContact.com that was sold to Vocus in 2012 for $180M. Aaron was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner in 2008, was listed to Inc Magazine’s 30 under 30 list 2010, and was named as a Top 10 Most Influential CEO in 2010 (behind Zuckerberg, Andrew Mason, and Matt Mullenweg). In his free time Aaron is an avid wakeboarder and outdoor adventurer.

 

Filed Under: Content marketing, Search Engines, Small Business Tagged With: ,