Why the Web has turned branding into a questionable way to spend your marketing dollars.

Most marketers believe that the Internet is a fabulous tool for building strong brands. However, according to a fascinating article in The New Yorker recently, the Internet may be making brands irrelevant.

To understand why this is true, one must first understand why branding was originally valuable to both buyers and sellers.

To buyers, a brand served as a guarantor of quality and consistency. If you had a good experience with a branded product in the past, you would naturally assume that you would have a good experience with another product by the same brand.

The customer's predisposition to buy a particular brand reduced sales cost while allowing the seller to charge more for the product, even if it was virtually identical to a non-branded competitive product.

In other words, companies invested in branding to increase their profit margins. That no longer works. Here's why:

The Web Makes Loyalty Moot

The Web weakens and destroys brand loyalty in two ways:

The first is the ready availability of user reviews and competitive data. Because it's now so easy to find out if an individual product is excellent or a piece of crap, buyers no longer need the brand as a guarantor of quality.

In other words, I'm more likely to check online for the best SUV in my price range rather than simply buy another Honda because I like my old CRV.

The second way the Web destroys brand loyalty is that it provides the infrastructure for outsourcing to supply chains in the developing world. As a result, most products are pretty much the same, regardless of whose brand has been stuck on them.

PCs are a case in point. With few exceptions, all PCs (regardless of brand) are slapped together from the same components manufactured in the same factories and assembled in the same place. The only differences are the trim and the logo.

As a result, PC brand loyalty is pretty much kaput. When was the last time you heard somebody brag about how much they loved their PC brand? The same is true of other product categories.

While people might praise and continue to use a particular product, they're not likely to buy a different or follow-on product simply because it shares the same brand.

Only Children Believe Brand Promises

There are exceptions, of course. Kids, for example, can be very brand conscious. My 9-year-old son, for instance, just had to have Converse hi-tops.

However, that kind of brand loyalty is an artifact of immaturity. Children and child-like minds are easily impressed by celebrity endorsements. In any case, there's no loyalty there; next year I have no doubt my son will want some other brand just as avidly.

As he matures, my son will probably (hopefully) reach the conclusion shared by the majority of educated adults: that brand is meaningless as a predictor of quality because, aside from the logo, it's all the same junk made in the same factories.

As I write this, I can already sense that some readers will cite Coke and Apple as counter-examples. They aren't.

Why Coke and Apple Aren't Exceptions

Coke doesn't have brand loyalty; it has product and distributor loyalty. People drink Coke because they like the way it tastes, not because it's Coke. And they drink more Coke than Pepsi (insofar as it tastes the same...opinions differ) because Coke has a better distribution network.

Similarly, despite appearances, Apple doesn't command brand loyalty, per se. Apple has had a series of hit products that all work together well, thereby creating product loyalty.

However, if Apple released something weird that didn't work well with its other offerings, everyone on the Web would immediately know that and the product would flop. As indeed has happened to Apple in the past.

To summarize, in the Internet era, brands no longer command much (if any) loyalty, which makes branding less able to increase profit margins, thereby making it less effective as a marketing investment.

The implications are clear: Companies that want to be successful should spend more money on building and publicizing great products rather than building and publicizing their brands.

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With the constant demand for more quality content and the growing need for effective copywriting – one to attract visitors, the other to convert them to leads and customers – consistently producing powerful, high-quality copy is tough.

To help you avoid burnout, beat writer’s block, and ultimately get more results, here are 35 sure-fire copywriting tips from some of the greatest copywriters and advertisers.

1. Do more research.

All the copywriting and advertising greats know the value of research. David Ogilvy, the Father of Advertising, said to “stuff your conscious mind with information” so you have plenty to work with. One of Ogilvy’s students, legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga (who also studied with several other great copywriters), said:

“The best copywriters are the most tenacious researchers. Like miners, they dig, drill, dynamite, and chip until they have carloads of valuable ore. John Caples advised me once to gather seven times more interesting information than I could possibly use… Research is the infallible cure for writer’s block.”

The more information you have, the more possibilities you can play with.

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2. Add more interest.

When you don’t know what to write next or how to make your draft better, one copywriting hint is to add interest. As David Ogilvy once said, “Tell the truth but make truth fascinating. You know, you can’t bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.”

So how do you make your copy more interesting and fascinating?

• Make it scannable and visually appealing

• Use your distinct personality or unique selling proposition

• Make it entertaining (as long as the humor furthers your goal)

• Incorporate controversy

• Newsjack

• Tell stories

3. Inject personality.

Every writer and every brand has their own unique voice, style, and unique selling proposition (USP). Ogilvy knew that building a “sharply defined personality” is the best way (and sometimes the only way) to differentiate yourself from the competition and gain a larger market share. Before publishing anything, make sure it clearly demonstrates your brand personality – including voice, style, word choice, values, and USP – as well as matches your target audience’s needs and desires.

4. Refine your headline.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. ~ David Ogilvy ~

In their books on copywriting and advertising, legends like Ogilvy and John Caples wrote whole chapters on crafting powerful headlines. Here are a few of the best tips on copywriting effective headlines and subject lines to get you started:

• Copyblogger’s Magnetic Headlines training

• Write the copy first, then pull out the strongest phrases to use as headlines and subheadings. This ensures your headlines match your copy.

• Opt for straightforward, simple headlines over tricky or clever ones.

• Remember the 4 U’s: Urgent, Unique, Useful, Ultra-specific.

• Give readers a benefit – then make sure you deliver in the body copy.

• Paint a vivid picture or stimulate an intense emotion. These grab attention and add interest, and they can instantly convey the most important benefit.

• Use David Garfinkel’s Shortcut Test: If you posted the headline and a phone number as a classified ad, would it generate inquiries?

Copywriting Hall-of-Famer John Caples divided successful headlines into three classes. In his experience, the third best headlines used curiosity, the second-best used news, and the best of all used the reader’s self-interest. He suggested that writers “try to get self-interest into every headline” and “avoid headlines that merely provoke curiosity… curiosity by itself is seldom enough.”

5. Simplify your content.

Simplifying your copy doesn’t necessarily mean ditching the technical jargon or writing to a ninth-grader’s comprehension level.

It means making your message clear and concise so your target audience understands your offer and benefits as quickly as possible.

Famous copywriter Eugene Scwartz put it this way: “Write to the chimpanzee brain – simply and directly.”

6. Give your audience what they want.

Copywriter Gary Halbert tells a story about the best advantages a restaurant could have. It wasn’t great food, low prices, or a good location. The key to any restaurant’s success is the starving crowd. You start with a group of people who have demonstrated their hunger, and then you satisfy that need.

You can’t create desire; you can only stoke and channel it. Great content and copy gives your audience exactly what they already want.

7. Tell a story.

A 26-year-old raw copywriter sat down in 1926 to write an ad for the U.S. School of Music selling home-study courses for would-be musicians. He could have used a simple benefit headline, like Master the Piano at Home in 30 Days – Without a Teacher!

But he didn’t.

He dug deeper. He knew that mastering an instrument is hard work, and that the real reasons people do it is to be popular, to win their friends’ admiration and envy, and to find happiness. That copywriter realized the real product of the ad wasn’t a course or the ability to play, but popularity and happiness. With that in mind, he still could have used the classic how-to benefit headline, such as How to Be the Most Popular Guy of Any Party!

But he didn’t.

He knew that simply describing musicians’ popularity wouldn’t be enough. He needed the headline to resonate emotionally with prospects. He needed to create a vivid image of a buffoon–the kind of person no one ever dreamed could play – who left his friends stunned speechless by his performance.

His headline was “They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano But When I Started to Play!”

Then he used half of his entire ad space to tell the story of personal triumph, seducing prospects into reading the whole ad and giving them a vision of the possibilities.

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That copywriter was John Caples, who was inducted into both the Copywriters Hall of Fame and the Advertising Hall of Fame in the 1970s. That ad he wrote in the ‘20s launched his career and is still considered one of the pillars of the copywriting field.

It worked because it captured prospects’ attention, drew them into a world they desperately wanted to be part of, and left them hungry for more. The story presented the product as doing most of the hard work of learning to play and overcame the objection that you need a special talent to play (since even the buffoon could do it).

Consider these storyselling examples from CrazyEgg and these tips on mastering storyselling from Forbes.

8. Make the copy visually appealing.

Successful advertiser Leo Burnett developed simple icons to symbolize easy-to-understand product benefits and values (such as the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy). One of his rules of copywriting was to “make it inviting to look at” – since if the ad didn’t invite and entice the eye, no one would read it.

The same is even more true today, with the flood of content online, shrinking attention spans, and skimming readers. If your content doesn’t have what David Garfinkel calls “eye appeal,” it won’t get read or shared.

So how do you give your copy eye appeal?

• a good typefont that’s easy on the eyes and big enough to read

• short paragraphs

• variety in the text, e.g. bolding, italicizing, underlining

• bulleted or numbered lists

• indented paragraphs or quotes

• headings and subheadings

• visual cues, i.e. arrows pointing at the form button

9. Don’t be clever.

As writers and content marketers, we like to play with our words. Sometimes that’s okay, depending on your brand personality and the type of content. But most of the time, being clear and concise will return greater rewards than being clever.

As million-dollar copywriter Gary Bencivenga said:

“Effective copywriting is salesmanship in print, not clever wordsmithing. The more self-effacing and invisible your selling skill, the more effective you are. Copywriters who show off their skills are as ineffective as fishermen who reveal the hook.”

10. Break the rules.

This copywriting tip might seem counter-intuitive, but the best writers know when and how to break the rules of proper grammar, syntax, and mechanics. As David Garfinkel said, “I’ve advised many clients who feel compelled to use ‘proper English’ in their sales letters… to ‘fire your English teacher!’”

Speaking directly to your prospect in language they’ll easily understand is always more important than writing things by the book.

11. Keep a swipe file.

One of the most well-known copywriting hints is to keep a swipe file–a collection of emails, ads, and other copy or content you love or that performed well. That way, whenever you’re stuck on a tough headline or don’t know what to try next, you can glance through your collection and jumpstart your creativity.

12. Have a purpose behind everything you write.

With the content marketing boom, lots of marketers create content for content’s sake. Having a large library of content can be incredibly useful, but only if each piece has a purpose and fits in the overall plan.

As David Ogilvy said, “In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.” Witty, clever content by itself doesn’t do you any good. Make sure your content engages your audience, builds trust, and encourages sales first.

13. Avoid distraction.

Sometimes when you’re stuck writing, the real culprit isn’t a lack of ideas or words, but not enough time to devote to the project. If you’re having trouble, try this copywriting hint and productivity hack from Eugene Schwartz.

First, close the door and turn off your phone. Close or sign out of email and social media. Eliminate as many distractions as possible.

Then sit your chair and set a timer for 33 minutes. The only things you can do during that half hour are think about the writing project and get to work on it.

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When the timer goes off, take a 10-minute break and repeat.

With this system, Schwartz wrote about 3 hours a day, 5 days a week–and become one of the highest-paid copywriters of the 1950s and ‘60s.

14. Think outside the box.

David Ogilvy said, “Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.” Don’t be afraid to try something different and new, because it just might work. Find and form relationships with the nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels in your field and see what great ideas might spark. Unhook your rational thought process and allow your subconscious to make connections between ideas. That’s when you’ll come up with the best content and copywriting ideas.

15. Speak your ideal customer’s language.

Ogilvy also said, “If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”

Speaking in their language helps prospects get to know, like, and trust you because they recognize themselves in your words. That helps you connect and build relationships with them, and more easily persuade them.

If you’re stuck writing, go back and make sure everything sounds the way your customers think. Put yourself in their shoes. Make yourself invisible. Not only will your copy get better for the exercise, but getting out of your own way like this can jumpstart new ideas and illuminate what should come next.

16. Focus on benefits.

Every great copywriter advises other writers to emphasize benefits, not features:

• John Caples said, “The best headlines are those that appeal to the reader benefits.”

• Eugene Schwartz said, “Talk about what your product ‘does’, not ‘is’ – and demonstrate this.”

• Bob Bly said, “Virtually all successful copy discusses benefits.”

Everybody talks about this copywriting tip because it works, and it’s a relatively easy fix if your current copy isn’t doing so well. Make every feature you mention leads to a benefit.

17. Make prospects feel like they’re already getting something.

Another great tip about copywriting from Schwartz is to make gratification instantaneous. When prospects get something valuable from you just by reading, they learn to trust you and believe that you deliver what you promise. This copywriting trick gives prospects a taste so that real desire fuels their actions, not just curiosity, and it’s also one of the reasons content marketing works so well.

18. Ask questions that get readers to say “yes.”

A classic persuasion technique used by Socrates and used car salesmen, this theory states that the more often you can get prospects to say “yes,” the more likely they are to say “yes” again. A-list direct-response copywriter Parris Lampropoulos uses this technique a different way: “In sales copy, I’ll throw in a question here and there, but more often, I’ll phrase it as a statement. You know – one of those statements that get prospects nodding their heads.”

If they’re saying “yes” and nodding their heads, you’ve hooked them.

19. Appeal to emotion.

Early in his career, Lampropoulos saw a particular copywriting gig as his chance to make it to the big leagues, so he pulled out all the stops. In addition to packing it with proof elements, testimonials, and price justifications, he also “worked every possible emotion the reader might have.” It was one of his most successful direct-mail packages, and it mailed for four years.

The trick to incorporating emotions in your copy is to ask yourself: what is my prospect’s deepest desire right now? There are lots of emotions you can appeal to, but the key driving emotions – the strongest, deepest emotions not governed by rational thought – are:

• fear

• greed

• guilt

• exclusivity

• anger

• salvation

• flattery

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20. Try a unique angle or hook.

When asked about his process for writing stock stories and promotions for financial newsletters, Parris Lampropoulos said:

“First, I go to Fortune, Forbes and Business Week and read every article I can find on the company being recommended. Then I do something unusual: I sit down and start writing “fascination” bullets for those articles. By doing that, I find all kinds of unexploited sales angles. Those angles lead me to the “hook” for the stock story. And once I’ve got the hook, the story almost writes itself.”

The blogs and magazines you look at may be very different, but the principle is the same: start by researching good sources, then delve deeper to find the different, interesting, unusual, or unheard-of. Those golden nuggets become the angle or hook you need to catch attention and generate interest.

21. Hunt down the right words.

One of the oldest copywriting tips is to not use adjectives and adverbs to make an okay word good enough. Track down the very best word to convey the message, emotion, or imagery. It makes your copy stronger, makes you as the writer more invisible so the reader can feel or see or understand what you want to convey that much better.

As Mark Twain famously said, “The right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.”

22. Use active voice.

Stronger and usually shorter than passive construction, active voice is easier to understand and conveys your message better and faster. Passive voice makes you sound weak, reactive, or acted upon, while active voice takes charge.

For example, the passive sentence “Over 5000 customers have been helped by our services” is much stronger in the active voice: “We have helped over 5000 customers.”

23. Replace “weasel words” with imperatives and promises.

Avoiding commands and strong words like “will” and “can” are a way of protecting yourself, but it makes you sound wishy-washy and unable to deliver. Go through your copy and replace every weasel word (e.g. may, hope, could, perhaps, etc.) with the appropriate imperative or promise word (e.g. will, can, do, etc.). This strengthens your copy and makes you sound confident, which builds prospects’ trust.

24. Back up your claims.

You’ll sound even more confident and build more trust and credibility when you prove your case with reliable data. Back up your benefits and other claims with proof. This wins over skeptic readers and shows that you really do know what you’re talking about. A few copywriting ideas to back up your claims might include:

• facts and statistics

• methodologies

• testimonials

• case studies

• success stories

25. Use specific examples.

Resume writers and school counselors tell you to include specific numbers in your resume because they quickly convey your experience and skills. This copywriting trick works in just about everything you write, and it makes your copy stronger by attracting attention and making you seem more credible – and memorable. As Bob Bly, one of America’s top copywriters, says: “Since so much advertising is vague and general, being specific in your copy sets it apart from other ads and creates interest.”

26. Evaluate your copy’s ratio of “you” vs. “we.”

Effective content marketing and copywriting always starts with the customer. That’s why no one wants to read brochures or websites that only talk about the company – and why copy that speaks directly to the prospect gets more results. When you make sure your copy uses “you” at least twice as often as “we” or your brand name, you’ll naturally focus on your customer’s needs and desires. Your copy will be stronger, and you’ll get more traffic, leads, and sales.

Derek Halpern of Social Triggers is a great example. In his post about creating amazing About Us pages, he explains why it’s important to include a benefit-driven headline… benefit-driven introduction… and social proof. To see his advice in action, check out his Social Triggers About page. There’s a lot of “I” and “Social Triggers” in there–but there’s also tons of “you.” He talks directly to his audience so they know exactly what they can expect from him.

27. Incorporate the fundamentals of persuasive copywriting.

According to “America’s Top Copywriter” Bob Bly, the fundamentals of persuasive copwriting are:

1. Gains attention

2. Focuses on the customer

3. Stresses benefits

4. Differentiates you from the competition

5. Proves its case

6. Establishes credibility

7. Builds value

8. Closes with a call to action

Depending on your product, prospect, and type of content, you may not need to use all eight. For example, established brand names might not need to worry about proof and credibility. But keeping them in mind while you write and revise can help you create stronger, more compelling copy.

28. Use imagery.

Imagery helps readers instantly understand a situation or benefit (plus, it makes your copy more interesting to read). Copywriter David Garfinkel says one of his favorite headlines/slogans is this one for a plumbing service:

Call Roto-Rooter – that’s the name -

And away go troubles, down the drain!

Describing it, he says: “Wow – is that perfection in a couple of lines, or what? You get a call to action, company identification, and a visual description of the benefit.”

The imagery of the drain instantly conveys the benefit. It’s also memorable, always a plus in great content.

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29. Lead with your strongest point.

So many writers save their most potent points for last, when it should be the other way around. More prospects will read the beginning than the end, so putting your best idea first is more persuasive. The strongest point can often grab attention better than weaker points, making it ideal for the beginning.

30. Build credibility.

Another very successful copywriter, Steve Slaunwhite, said:

“In my experience, the number one key to persuasion is this: communicate trust. If you do this well, you at least have a chance at engaging and persuading the reader. If you don’t do this well, however, no amount of fancy copywriting techniques will save you.”

You can build credibility and trust by mentioning credentials like:

• strong guarantee, return, and privacy policies

• testimonials and data about your track record

• years in business

• innovations and awards

• publications

• membership and participation in professional societies

• seals of approval

• agency ratings

• independent survey results

• media coverage

31. Mention the most important point at least three times.

This is Winston Churchill’s “tremendous whack” theory, which says to not be subtle or clever about your important point. Richard Perry says, “Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.”

Successful writers and marketers use the power of three all the time.

• Derek Halpern advises putting an opt-in form in three places on your About Page.

• Lots of email marketers include three links in an email to drive clicks (just look at a few of the email newsletters you get).

• Long-form landing pages often have three CTA areas.

If something’s important, say it at the beginning, again in the middle, and again at the end.

32. Stress value.

America’s top copywriter Bob Bly says, “It’s not enough to convince prospects you have a great product or a superior service. You must also show them that the value of your offer far exceeds the price you are asking for it.”

Showing the overall value is also known as the “drop-in-the-bucket” technique, where the cost of purchase is a tiny thing compared to the benefits your offer delivers. This works for email subscriptions and blog comments as well as product sales, since readers give up something they value–their time, email address, privacy–to get something of value in return.

This fundamental copywriting tip works really well in conjunction with tip #17, providing instantaneous gratification. If they already get value from your content, the value of your offer is almost certainly worth the cost.

33. Include a strong call to action.

If you don’t specifically ask people to do something, chances are they won’t do it. Everything you write, from blog posts to emails to social updates to landing pages, should close with a call to action (CTA). To get the most out of your CTAs, make sure they:

• match the buyer persona and stage of the buying cycle

• offer something of value

• offer prospects something they actually want

• reiterate your most important benefit or emotional driver

34. Make it personal.

Copywriter David Garfinkel says that successful content is personal, and it doesn’t use stilted formal English or “stickler” language of a school assignment. He recommends writing in a more personal, relaxed style, as if you’re having a one-on-one conversation with your prospect.

Research indicates that personalized emails convert better than mass messages, and most internet marketers know that the most successful blogs employ the relaxed, personal style.

35. Organize your writing with a formula.

AIDA is a popular sales letter format for a reason – it works. Using a framework like attention-interest-desire-action (or John Caples’ version, attention-interest-action) makes it easy to know exactly what to write next.

Here are a few other frameworks and formulas to help you get started:

• Dan Kennedy’s favorite copywriting formula is PAS, or Problem-Agitate-Solution. It works because people are more likely to act to avoid pain than get gain.

• Copyblogger promotes a simple 1-2-3-4 framework that helps you focus on the customer and incorporate the most important persuasion fundamentals.

• Essential copywriting formulas and checklists to make your copy as strong and powerful as possible.

What copywriting tips and tricks do you use?We’d love to hear what works for you!

Global marketers are on the hook to increase demand for their products around the world.

If you’re a global content marketer, you stoke those fires with a content portfolio—blogs, reports, infographics, collateral, and more—that speaks to your audience’s interests, differentiates your company from competitors, and nurtures a carefully constructed customer experience.

It’s already a huge challenge to produce and deliver all the content your company requires in one language. But translating these assets into all the languages of your target markets can be paralyzing. If that’s your experience, you’re not alone.

60% of global marketers have no strategy for multilingual content marketing.

We surveyed 500+ global marketers in 2013, and 60% of them had no strategy for multilingual content marketing. Like many other marketers I’ve talked to, they delay thinking about translation until after their content is produced, which, at best, makes the process even more painful, tedious, and expensive. At worst, it costs their companies significant dollars in lost opportunities.

The Numbers Say It All: Don’t Skimp on Translation

It takes 12 languages to communicate with 80% of the global online audience (Source: CSA). With so much content being generated and shared (27,000,000 pieces of content a day!) and given the massive market opportunities across the globe, it’s more important than ever to have a fool-proof game plan for delivering content to global audiences at scale.

Simply put, localization can no longer be treated as an afterthought. There’s just too much at stake. How much? Consider these statistics:

• By 2025, the number of global consumers in emerging economies will reach 4.2 billion, and annual consumption in emerging global markets will increase to $30 trillion.

• The global revenue opportunity available to companies using online communications rose to $44.6 trillion in 2012, and only a third of that amount is available to companies that communicate only in their native English language.
• Fortune 500 companies that deliver content in native languages to keep up with or gain an edge over their competitors are twice as likely to see increased profits and 1.25 times more likely to generate increased earnings per share.

“Localization can no longer be treated as an afterthought.”

Of course, if it were easy to deliver multilingual content, everyone would be doing it. Without well-thought-out processes, and the infrastructure to support it, it is complex and there are a lot of moving parts. But the above figures demonstrate that it behooves marketers to crack the code on global content marketing, and benefit from the many compelling reasons to take the border-hopping plunge:

Multilingual Content Helps Close Deals and Protect Your Brand

Almost 60% of global consumers say getting info in their own language is more important than price when making a purchase decision (source: CSA). Without localized content, your marketing and sales organizations will sacrifice potential revenue and lose share to competitors who create multilingual content effectively. With localized content, you’ll drive more web visitors, nurture more leads, and close more deals.

Planning Ahead Will Help Speed Delivery and Avoid Missed Opportunities

A typical approach to localization of content marketing that I see is a staggered “roll-out” of translations over time. The longer it takes to deliver your content to your target markets, the more competing messages your sales force will have to position against, and the longer it will take to capture market share and revenue in those markets. That’s what happens, though, when you translate your content after the fact. Wouldn’t you rather be the hero who gets your company’s content to all key markets at the same time?

The Bottom Line: Translated Content Is King…of the World!

Thinking about translation as you map out your global content marketing strategy, not after, will ensure you produce assets that will have greatest world-wide impact, reduce the time and money spent on translation projects by creating global economies of scale, deliver consistent branding and messaging while addressing local needs, and, most importantly, capture global market share and revenue faster.

For more information on how to get global content marketing right, watch this space for future posts. In the meantime, download the ebook “Content Operations on a Global Scale: A 2014 Guide for the Marketing Globerati.“

Ryan Siegl from Demand Results fills us in on how content plays an integral role and the benefits of outsourcing.

For Demand Results, an evidence-based marketing agency that specializes in demand generation, outsourcing content opened new doors for their content strategy. After finding that producing high-quality, original content increased brand awareness not only for them, but their new clients, content creation became a number one priority. Scripted.com spoke to Ryan Spiegl, Director of SEO, to find out more about their content strategy.

Scripted: How does content play a role in Demand Results’ success?

Ryan: Content always plays a big role in improving inbound marketing – which is our particular specialty. All of my clients needed good, relevant content to boost authority, increase targeted leads, improve PPC quality score, lower bounce rates, and last but not least to help educate a website visitor. Therefore we always pushed for quality content, and this proved useful to draw more converting traffic. To answer your question more succinctly, content was the tool we found to be most effective, so it was our top priority.

Scripted: What are your company’s challenges to creating content?

Ryan: Bandwidth and resources. Even if we had some writing muscle in-agency, sometimes the client’s niche would make it difficult for us to continually writing on some of the more specific (read relevant) topics on a regular basis. We were very interested in finding a solution that could satisfy our criteria of quality, at the pace we thought would be most beneficial to a particular client – and, of course, create content they would enthusiastically get behind as well.

Scripted: What metrics and measures of success are most important to you?

Ryan: Obviously, drawing in leads is the top of the success food chain metric-wise, but getting engagement from organic and social channels was also satisfying. We knew that brand recognition would improve every time someone found us organically or clicked a like or + on a piece of content. Seeing increased traffic to content areas was definitely an indicator of positive traction — especially due to the fact we knew the content was relevant.

Scripted: What advice would you have for businesses that beginning to launch their own content initiatives to grow revenue/clients?

Ryan: It’s important to me to be able to honestly tell a potential client that we have the resources needed to make their campaign a success. In our situation, letting go a little and outsourcing a portion of the content generation effort gave us the breathing room to improve strategy and other lead generation efforts.

What did you think about this interview? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Facebook is buying WhatsApp for ~$19 billion. There's no denying that's a big number. But, a big number doesn't necessarily mean it's an expensive number. In fact, it might be a relative bargain, even at $19 billion.

This chart from Statista shows that the per-user price Facebook paid for WhatsApp. Compared to all the other major social networks, WhatsApp is fairly cheap. Part of the reason is that WhatsApp hasn't effectively monetized these users. In the long run, though, it's not hard to see WhatsApp getting anywhere from $1-$12 per user annually, which would make it a lucrative business. 

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Do you always wish you could get more reading done? Here's a simple guide to help you make a dent in that big pile of books you've been meaning to read.

I want to teach you a system for rapidy reading business books. It's something that has helped me a lot over the course of my career. I learned the basics from my great mentor and friend, Dr. Tom Hill, and have made my own modifications. By following this system, I am able to read 100 business books per year and keep current on many of the best thinkers' ideas and approaches.

Like most people, time is a constant challenge for me. I have young children, an active social life, I workout, as well as spending time on the road building a business that is growing every year. Toss in broader family obligations and a commitment to my church and it is very difficult for me to find time to read. You probably feel the same way. Here is the key secret: Almost every business book can be read completely--and with strong comprehension--in less than one hour as long as you have a system.

A couple of guidelines:

• Business books are often written in an easy-to-digest format. They have internal outlining, call-out boxes, diagrams, and end-of-chapter summaries to aid readers in consuming the book material quickly. This is a huge help.
• Many business books are broken into thirds. The first third focuses on the context and core ideas, the second third provides an application, and the final third give examples and case studies.
• Your mind will not remember more than 3-5 highly influential ideas from any business book within about a week. Whether you read it slowly, page by page, or quickly using a system, the net result is very similar. Therefore, you can increase your efficiency without a big reduction in value by using a system.

Here's the system:

I use a simple one page sheet for capturing a book's general premise and key points. You can customize it and make it more valuable to you. My book review template can be downloaded here. So, without further delay, here is how you actually read a business book in an hour or less:

1. Read the front and back of the book jacket as well as the introduction

2. Skip the acknowledgements and foreword

3. Read Table of Contents looking for your "hooks" that you want to make certain to catch. These are the key points that build on the ideas that intrigued you when you read the book jacket.

4. Read first and last paragraph of every chapter

5. Skim the chapters for call-out boxes, story/case study boxes, and diagrams. Read those.

6. Read the sections of the book inside of the chapters whose headers are relevant to the hooks you identified earlier when you were looking at the Table of Contents.

7. Read the chapter summaries if there are any.

8. Write your notes as listed on the form.

This is the speed course for getting a business book done in an hour and actually taking away from it something of value. There are some books that I re-read every year. There are many books I put on the shelf, and when I need something from that book, I just pull out the form I filled out and take what I need from it.

As I am starting to read more digital books, I have also started using Evernote for capturing notes which I tag as "Book Reviews."

Periodicals, blogs, white papers, and other formats are great materials for keeping you current on trends and data-points in the market. However, a book provides a deeper dive into an overall set of ideas and their implications. Don't cut out books from your mental diet because they take too long. Instead, get a faster system.

With 22 U.S. tech execs earning more than $20 million in total compensation last year, securing top talent is tougher than ever.

UPDATED at 2:20 p.m. to include comments from Lover.ly CEO Kellee Khalil.

Escalating pay levels for tech executives have made the market fiercely competitive and a huge draw for international talent, according to data compiled by Equilar, a research firm.

Equilar found 22 tech execs in the U.S. made more than $20 million in total compensation in 2013, which includes salary, bonus, stock, and other benefits. As a result, more high-profile execs are decamping to Silicon Valley in lieu of going abroad.

The escalating compensation packages at large tech companies make it difficult for small businesses to attract top talent. If you do manage to snare a coveted executive, expect to pay a hefty price. "It's a competitive market," Tim Sparks, the president of San Jose consultancy Compensia, told Bloomberg. "It's amazing what companies will do to go after people."

According to Equilar, tech titans such as Apple and Google offer flexible schedules and unlimited vacation to entice workers, while other companies promise a healthy work-life balance, along with considerable equity to complement salaries and bonuses.

"More tech companies will pay above $20 million a year than any other industry," Aaron Boyd, director of governance research at Equilar told Bloomberg.

With U.S. tech profits at an all-time high, Silicon Valley is looking like the new Wall Street. However the huge packages have widened the income gap in Silicon Valley, where some members of the tech elite are making a fortune even when their companies fare poorly.

Henrique de Casto, whom Marissa Mayer dismissed as chief operating officer at Yahoo in January, will reportedly take home $109 million, including severance benefits and equity awards, for a mere 14 months of service.

Startups shouldn't seek to hire executives who are fixated on commanding giant salaries anyway, says Kellee Khalil, founder and CEO of New York-based Lover.ly, a search engine for weddings. "It's difficult when you compete against companies like Google and Facebook that have a tremendous amount of resources and perks," she says. "But if people are coming to a startup just to get money, they're not the right person. At the end of the day, anyone can offer them more money."

Marketing is hard. But the problem is that too many people think it isn’t. Especially with all the new, “magic bullet” technologies out there that pretty much do everything for you. So where are the results? Why, asks your CEO, did we miss our numbers again?

The fundamental challenge of marketing is that there are a zillion moving parts, give or take, courtesy of a shape-shifting buyer who makes Jello look like bedrock. The buyer’s journey, which is most often defined as an orderly march down a funnel-shaped thing, is more often beset by a range of shiny objects, conflicting egos, power grabs, FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), budget shifts, priority shifts, urgent and important fires to extinguish, as well as various other threats to goals and timelines that show up daily in our businesses. In short, stuff happens.

So if that’s all true, if buyers cannot be relied upon to respect the very deliberate path we set out before them, what can we do to improve our conversion rates from prospects to leads and leads to customers? We can start by better understanding the Math of the Besieged Buyer that looks something like this:

The chart above comes from something I call the Rule of 30-20-10. This rule is a simplified version of several “rules” from the world of direct response that have proven very robust over the decades (including current times) when it comes to predicting how buyers behave. (If you want to dig deeper, see Rule of 45, and the Advertising Research Foundation studies via Bob Stone.)

There’s a certain instinctive truth to the above chart. Of course, it’s not perfectly predictive, but it does provide good directional information to create some context around this discussion.

So we run a series of campaigns, and what happens? Taking our Math of the Besieged Buyer one step further, we might get:

If you consider the number of “wins” on the bottom line, you get an eye-opening look at the slippage that can occur in any marketing system. Importantly, it’s not the software you may or may not be using that causes the majority of this slippage. As discussed in an earlier post, it’s the work that you put in prior to going to market.

I was speaking with a colleague this week who has carved out a very successful marketing automation consultancy. He deals with all sizes of company, up to the very large and, presumably, sophisticated. The common feature that continues to amaze him is how impatient marketing organizations are. “Get it out” consistently trumps “do it right.” Everyone is looking for shortcuts, and few are putting in the critical thinking that addresses the kinds of slippage observed above.

Precision targeting often falls victim to “buy a large list and blast it” [note 1 above]. The breakthrough that comes from a well-conceived and tested value proposition is more often lacking than not [note 2 above]. The buyer consideration that results from offers that are constructed from truly compelling content is almost always in severe deficit [note 3 above].

On Super Bowl Sunday, I received an email from Marketo, one of the supposed masters of context marketing, that made me laugh out loud (see image at right). To me, this is context marketing run by automatons. This isn’t clever and it certainly doesn’t address any business pains I’m experiencing. It’s someone in marketing who tried to use the Super Bowl as a quick and easy shortcut to relevance. This is the kind of stuff that is increasingly giving marketing a bad name.

The usual suspects of marketing slippage – targeting, value proposition, and offer strategy – continue to be shortchanged by marketers who are consumed by the delicious intricacies of execution at the expense of the hard work of thoughtful strategy.

The post Why Marketing is so Hard appeared first on Feed The Beast.

We recently delved into the benefits of having a quality control process in place for reviewing new content, campaigns, websites and other marketing collateral before hitting the big red “Go Live” button for the whole world to see.

Making sure an entire campaign is at its prime can be so crucial to its success. Here in the Quality Control department, we have compiled a running checklist of the top items we review, critique and analyze based on the mistakes we most commonly see before email marketing campaigns are sent out to client lists. Some of these items may seem obvious, but reviewing each detail carefully is what gives your campaign the boost of quality it needs to outshine your competition and reinforce your company’s standard of excellence.

The Email Message

This is it. Your campaign has been developed, and you are ready to announce it to the world. Email marketing is often times the frontline when launching a new marketing campaign, and your message is the first communication current and potential customers will receive. The very first item seen by all is the subject line in the inbox, so this needs to be catchy, enticing and not overly gimmicky. The last thing you want is for users to delete the email before even opening it.

Once the message is opened, review it top to bottom, every tiny detail. Do the graphics and content present your offer in the best possible way? Do the links in your template redirect correctly? Is it easy for the user to tell where to click and what to do next? Have your images been assigned alt text? Did you create a plain text version? Is the value of your offer clear and concise? Are you being overly promotional or giving a sales pitch? And of course, no spelling or grammar errors!

Key Email Items to Review:

1. Overall Design and Development
2. Subject Line
3. Email Graphics
4. Image Alt Text
5. Links to Offer
6. Plain Text Email
7. Footer/Logo/Social Links
8. Spelling/Grammar

The Landing Page

As the place where the conversion magic happens, this page needs to be spot on. Take the extra time designing and developing a killer landing page that clearly presents the value and advantages of your offer. Make it clear to the user how to get what they want. Plan out the meta data, page title, keywords and alt text on images to support your campaign goals. Decide if you want to run any A/B testing with different copy, form fields, graphics or other variables and be sure to test all testing pages. Fill out the conversion form multiple ways to ensure there are no hiccups in the overall process. And, again, no spelling or grammar errors!

Key Landing Page Items to Review:

1. Overall Design and Development
2. Meta Data, Page Titles, Alt Text
3. A/B Testing
4. Conversion Form
5. Spelling/Grammar

The Confirmation Page

Now that you have captured the conversion, it’s time to deliver. This page can be simple in both design and content, but it needs to be clear how the user can receive what they signed up for. If it’s an immediate download, use a large button they surely won’t miss, and double check the document is downloading properly. If it’s something to be received in the future, provide clear steps on how to sign in for that webinar or participate in that social media give-away.

Be sure the flow and process make sense, make it extremely simple for the user to do what you want him or her to do and remember to add no-follow code to this page so Google and other search engines aren’t able to index this page. This prevents web users from receiving your offering without fronting their information first. Finally, no spelling or grammar errors!

Key Confirmation Page Items to Review:

1. Overall Design and Development
2. Download Link/Next Action Steps
3. No-Follow Code
4. Spelling/Grammar

The Follow Up

Buyers have entered into your sales funnel—now what? Most landing pages have an immediate email sent when a user converts on a form. Review this email and make sure all the links are functioning, especially if this is how the user cashes in on the promotion.

Then, a huge chunk of time can be spent reviewing the workflows are properly set-up and ensuring all of the offers align with your sales cycle, leading buyers down the funnel with the proper content. This is a huge monster in and of itself.

Even while testing these workflows, we follow the same basic principles of quality control in the review process. And, of course, no spelling or grammar errors (notice the trend?)!

Key Follow-Up Items to Review:

1. Overall Design and Development
2. Immediate thank-you/response email
3. Workflows
4. Spelling/Grammar

These quality control checklists are enough to cover the basics when launching a new email campaign. If you find something isn’t quite working somewhere in your process beyond perfecting the details, don’t be afraid to adjust the strategy, revamp the graphics, change up the email subject line or be flexible with the way you are presenting your offer.

What items should we add to our checklist? Let us know your additional steps in the comment section below!

photo credit: Blue Square Thing

Does the media always deliver? Maybe not always, but they do tend to show up as scheduled. That’s one of the keys to building your community with content marketing.

A business chooses when it is available for serving customers. Since content marketing is designed to provide value for prospective buyers with the intent of encouraging profitable customer actions, it makes sense to apply those same standards to content marketing.

To effectively communicate what your business stands for, your content marketing must keep regular hours – just as your business does.

There are three reasons why consistent content marketing builds your audience.

#1 – It Builds Familiarity and Trust with Subscribers

What does it say to subscribers when the content shows up on a random basis? Doesn’t it also suggest that the products and services the business offers will be delivered in similarly unreliable manner?

Producing valuable content takes time, regardless of your level of skill. Yet, so does every other discipline that is necessary to serve your customers and earn their trust.

Therefore, when you approach content marketing (and the social media that it drives) as a necessary discipline for business success, it’s quality will rise and your subscriber base will grow.

Everything your business does is one business channel as far as your customers are concerned. It all speaks to your level of professionalism. It shows your subscribers that you care enough about them to show up on a regular basis.

Soon, they feel like they are getting to know you and your business; and that familiarity is exactly what you want your content marketing to accomplish.

#2 – Consistent Media Production Creates Opportunities

The most obvious benefit of consistent content marketing is it allows you to plan your content, thereby making it better for your community. If you subscribe to our weekly Web Marketing News you learned how this works on Monday.

Another benefit of regularly showing up is that you begin to notice trends, thereby heightening your awareness for particularly important breaking news.

For example, when the news of Facebook hashtags were announced quickly realized this was one of the keys to how Facebook’s Graph Search would transform Facebook marketing. Therefore, I was not surprised when my article that published that evening had generated significant traffic by morning.

When you know your schedule, you can also plan the type of content for that day. Monday is a high traffic day when many of us publish our high quality long-form content, with lighter programming such as this article arriving later in the week when most of us are busy.

When you control more of the content marketing variables, you open the door for leveraging other opportunities.

#3 – Your Content Marketing Gets Progressively Better

Every successful content marketer will tell you that following a disciplined schedule provides for gradual and progressive improvement. These improvements include:

• Becoming more skilled with technology
• Recognizing the intersection of related content
• Developing systems that increase quality and save time
• Building a backlog of content that minimizes stress
• Better understanding how to help your community

Everything on this list gives your business the freedom to take more risks with your content marketing, and that will in turn increase its effectiveness for serving your community.

Photo Credit

Product pages get a lot of love. Testing budgets go there, analysts’ reviews focus there and even AdWords campaigns deep link there (sometimes). And why not? You’d be hard-pressed to find a page that ties to return on investment as tightly as the page that directly sells the product. Tiny conversion improvements there add up.

If you compare a website to a movie, the product page is the third act. It’s where the tension reaches heights and the audience gets the conclusion. Because a lot hangs on it, movie studios spend a disproportionate amount of time punching up the script for the third act.

Billy Wilder is known for tearing into this kind of mentality. “If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act,” he notes.

The same can be true of online marketing.

The Problem is in the First Act

Just because visitors leave a product page doesn’t mean the problem is WITH the product page. Maybe the product page is persuasive about the sale, but the visitor wants to compare specifications. The product may have a clear call to action, but the page isn’t helping return visitors find support information. The product page can be very persuasive, but if it’s persuasive about the wrong things, it’s not going to stop visitors from looking elsewhere.

The real problem is this: most of the time, the sale isn’t your first conversion.

Conversions are tied to where the visitor is in their decision-making process. A good way to think about it is the AIDA model: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. If visitors are looking for quality educational material about your industry, success isn’t the sale … yet. Success is a low bounce rate and high return rate on early-stage pages, ones designed to cater to the “attention” phase.

Conversions aren’t exclusive to the late stage of the sales process. Microconversions matter too. Think about these as the setup leading to the third act:

Getting the First Act Right

To punch up the “first act” or get the early stage conversions right, you need to think about the 98 percent or so of your audience who didn’t buy something. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What are their tasks?
2. Did they find what they need?
3. How likely are they to come back?
4. Can you continue the communication and relationship with them?

From your clickstream or traffic monitoring tool, you’re not likely to be able to answer these questions. Don’t try to answer these questions using traffic — you will not get far. Instead, review things like internal site search (the words used in the search box on YOUR website, not Google and Bing) and voice-of-customer tools that show surveys to visitors. These tools will give you solid data about user intent and task accomplishment rate for tasks prior to the sale.

Once you know what the main tasks are and how well your visitors can accomplish them, you can reallocate your time and resources to fixing the biggest problems on your website, not just the ones on your product page.

Making Sure They Get to the Third Act

The other thing you can do is make sure your visitors can actually FIND your product page. After all, it doesn’t matter how explosive your third act is if most of the audience gets bored and leaves during the first two acts.

You can do a lot of things to make your site more effective, and three of the four things I usually recommend aren’t exclusive to the product page:

1. fix on-site search;
2. reduce your navigation categories (unless you’re Amazon.com); and
3. position your trust symbols where they can decrease anxiety.

All the Acts Matter

Remember, some of the conversions that matter are nowhere near your product page. It’s OK to obsess about your product page, just like it’s OK to obsess about the third act. Still, it’s so much better if you’re obsessing about the whole movie instead.

Photo credit

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This article originally appeared in Tim’s Retail Online Integration column January 22, 2014

Over the last three years, I’ve helped more than a dozen clients develop 75+ personas. Considering I work mainly for tech companies, and no two of those personas are interchangeable (believe me, I’ve tried) this is an example of the depth that needs to be achieved to create active personas that contribute to the development of specific messaging that will resonate with each one.

But every once in a while, I run into a situation where marketing executives think they know better. They want to manipulate the personas to a place where they feel back in control of the situation. And this just screws up all the research and effort that’s been expended to create them in the first place.

Before I go further, it’s important to understand that a B2B buyer persona is a composite based on the commonalities of a defined segment of your target market. I cannot emphaize emphatically enough that a buyer persona is not a real person.

Buyer personas are a guide. They are an active tool used to help you understand what’s important to people with similar responsibilities and objectives in similar situations. Personas are serving their purpose when they are used to inform content strategy, messaging, value propositions and ideas that mesh with the perspectives of that specific audience. Well constructed personas contribute to producing engagement that motivates activity toward the intent of buying that can be quantified.

Here’s where buyer personas start to go off the rails:

• You try to impose a specific order on priorities based on what you want to say or promote or to emphasize what your product does
• You inflict individual experiences you’ve had with individual buyers or customers onto the personas, changing what the research identified, because it makes you more comfortable (remember the commonality part – this is no time to let one-offs come into play)
• You decide that the personas aren’t quite accurate because they don’t agree wtih what you “know” – so you change them to align with YOUR perspective

No matter how long we’ve been marketers or how much we think we know about our buyers, what we think doesn’t matter in the face of buyer interviews and intensive research to understand them as a group. No matter how much we’d like to think that what appeals to us will appeal to them, it may not.

When’s the last time you actually participated in buying what your company sells? I’ve worked with many people who’ve come over after being a customer to work for a vendor whose product or solution they fell in love with. But the kicker is that they’re still only representative of one buyer in one situation with one company. Some of what they know will definitely come into play for personas, but some will not. Knowing which characteristics to use is key.

Here’s the rub. Marketers are usually working to engage and motivate a group, a target market segment. If we let the experience we have with one buyer or our own perspective influence the development of personas in conflict with the interviews and research, we may push our messaging off enough to limit our success.

And one more thing. We must never forget that we have the curse of knowledge. We know much more than it’s likely our prospects do about what we’re selling. It’s very hard to go back and unlearn that knowledge to the point where we’re truly on level ground with our buyers.

Depending on the complexity of what you sell and how often your persona changes employers, it’s possible that buying your solution may only be something they do 3 to 5 times during their entire career. Think about how much the technology and market environments may have changed from one purchase to another. One purchase will be significantly different than another. There are many factors in play.

If you want to test a modification, by all means do so. Personas evolve over time and should not remain static. Use the metrics, do follow-up interviews, talk to your salespeople about the conversations their having to find opportunities for tuning. Testing is okay – manipulation based on your opinion as the determining factor usually doesn’t turn out well.

So be fair to your buyer personas. Try to remain as unbiased as possible and let the research and the commonalities of the actual people they’re modeled to represent hold sway. The success of your programs will reinforce your hands-off position.

Building a blisteringly clear content strategy is repeatedly put in the ‘too hard’ basket. Taking its place is a substandard shell of a strategy that delivers underwhelming, yet passable results. What many Sales and Marketing professionals don’t realise is that they simply need to focus on their buyers and building a content strategy that facilitates the journey of those buyers through the Sales funnel. In this blog, Hugh demonstrates how to build a content strategy that can move a buyer through each stage in their journey. He shares a solid framework for choosing tactics and stresses how essential it is for these tactics to be centred around the most important thing in your business – buyers.

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If you told someone in IT in 2004 that in a decade, Apple would be a dominate force in enterprise, you'd be laughed out of the room.

Now, that fact is taken as a given.

On Apple's most recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook rattled off a list of statistics showing just how badly the company is crushing the competition among business users.

Among Fortune 500 companies, 97% use the iPhone in some capacity and 98% use the iPad.

If you factor in education and government buyers, market research firm IDC says that the iPhone holds 59% of of the enterprise market, while the iPad holds 78%.

How did Apple, the company that was crushed by Microsoft and the IBM PC in decades past, come to bring so many business users over to its corner?

A big part of the company's success in recent years stems from the culture shock brought on by the launch of the original iPhone. Aimed at high-end consumers with a sense of taste from the beginning, the business user was a natural customer for the iPhone.

That led to the "bring your own device" movement. People got sick of being assigned clunky BlackBerrys when what they really wanted was an iPhone. Some went so far as to "dual wield," having a BlackBerry for work use and the iPhone for personal stuff. But just as the iPhone made the iPod pointless, business users found it ridiculous that they would need two devices when one should have been enough to handle all their business and nonbusiness needs.

While people were clamoring to use the iPhone at work, Apple was making it easier to do so. As far back as 2007 — the year the iPhone first came out — Apple secretly licensed Exchange ActiveSync technology from Microsoft so that users could sync their email, contacts and calendars between their phone and work. 

This alone was huge for Apple in enterprise. When Microsoft came out with the news that Apple was building Exchange support into the iPhone, Terry Myerson (who was then a corporate VP in charge of Exchange, but now serves as executive VP of operating systems) noted that 81 Fortune 100 companies used Exchange for email and calendaring in 2008. 

Apple clearly realized how important making the iPhone a viable option for business users would be, as Myerson also wrote:

We started talking with Apple about licensing Exchange ActiveSync before the launch of the iPhone last year. In fact, I met with Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller almost daily for a period of two weeks ironing out the details of the agreement. The result is a true collaboration between Microsoft and Apple.

Of course, this partnership didn't make Apple a huge player overnight. A year and a half after the Exchange ActiveSync announcement, BlackBerry still held an estimated 63% of the smartphone market, with Windows and Symbian (Nokia's old mobile operating system) a distant second and third. But by then it was already obvious that employees were starting to get their way, as IT departments were forced to service iPhones used by execs.

Then Apple shook up the enterprise market again with the release of the first iPad in 2010. The iPhone had already been on the market (with apps!) for years, so people already had some idea of how the iPad might be used in the workplace. 

On the same day as the original iPad's announcement, Cisco mobile solutions Marketing Manager Dimitris Haramoglis wrote a post on the company's blog envisioning some of the possibilities of a supersimple computer that could be easily controlled with just the tips of your fingers: sales associates using the iPad to provide customers with valuable data; doctors and nurses instantly accessing patient medical records; and service employees taking orders from customers as they stand in line rather than waiting for them to get to the front.

Looking back, we know that businesses adopted the iPad for all of those uses and countless others. Within months of the iPad's release, venture capitalists were saying that the iPad had already taken over the boardroom. By February 2011, two months before the release of the second-generation iPad, The Wall Street Journal reported that 65% of the Fortune 100 had began testing the iPad for enterprise use.

As is often the case in enterprise tech, Apple's success only compounded once it got momentum behind it. That's not to say that they've been ignoring their business users — in fact, the opposite is true.

Last year, Apple rolled out iOS 7 with some major features specifically made for IT — the gatekeepers into enterprise. With iOS 7, the guys running tech behind the scenes can wield a ton of power without ruining the user experience on their co-workers' iPhones and iPads.

They can decide what kinds of documents open in which apps. They can have business apps use protected virtual networks while ignoring casual Web browsing in Safari. Businesses can decide on an individual basis which employees will be given access to specific apps without workers ever needing to be involved. Rather than wasting precious bandwidth by making employees download software updates individually, they can all be downloaded once to a Mac and distributed from there. The list goes on.

Apple isn't shy about its efforts to woo business users. As pictured above, Apple dedicated time in its WWDC 2013 keynote to some of the features it introduced for enterprise. It also has a section of its site dedicated to showing off these features and the numerous ways businesses have taken advantage of iOS in the workplace.

What Apple isn't too keen on sharing — which won't surprise anyone who follows the company — is its future plans for enterprise. While that's normally a huge deal for enterprise buyers, the "bring your own device" model that has evolved around the iPhone has done well for Apple so far. But it has led to rampant speculation about how Apple could better target business users, culminating in the recent rumors of a MacBook/iPad hybrid that Business Insider calls the "iPad Pro."

SEE ALSO: Apple TV is starting to sound more like Hulu than a cable replacement

Join the conversation about this story »

Anyone starting a career in the advertising industry is presented with a digital advertising ecosystem with numerous intricacies and a befuddling number of buzzwords and acronyms.

What is the difference between native advertising and sponsored content? Or programmatic buying and real-time bidding?

We want to put you on the path of advertising jargon mindfulness. Below, you'll find easy-to-read descriptions of some of the industry's hottest buzzwords, the phrases you've heard a bunch of times but maybe don't quite totally understand.

Native Advertising: "Native" advertising is all the rage these days, but lots of times people don't define it properly. Technically, a native ad is any paid media placement that is customized and can only be used by the company that is selling it. This frequently looks like a blogpost a company paid for, like this Buzzfeed list from Dunkin' Donuts. Facebook and Twitter sell more sophisticated versions — ads with those companies can only be seen on Facebook and Twitter, in the formats unique to Facebook and Twitter. Oftentimes when people say "native advertising," what they really mean is "sponsored content," a piece of editorial content (like that Buzzfeed post  mentioned a moment ago) paid for by an advertiser. Don't let these people fool you! Native advertising comes in all shapes and sizes, from when Twitter promotes a sponsored hashtag into your trending topics to when the video game you're playing includes a billboard for Mountain Dew.

Creative: "Creative" is the Swiss Army Knife of a marketer's vocabulary. It can be used either as an adjective the way a layman would use it (i.e. "that was a really creative way of communicating your idea"), or as a noun to describe either a piece of advertising content or the people who produce advertising content. In a sentence, the word could be used thusly: "The creatives came up with a really creative piece of creative that was so good, it was featured on the industry showcase website Creativity."

Media Agnostic: With the advent of the internet has come an explosion of new media platforms and places brands can reach their consumers. "Media agnostic" is the philosophy that marketers should not hire advertising agencies with the intent of creating a "television campaign" but instead with the idea of crafting a message that appeals to the consumers the brand is trying to reach and deploying that message on whichever channels the consumer is most likely to find it — regardless of whether that channel is an old one like a magazine or a new one like Snapchat. See also: "Omni-channel."

Deep Linking: Deep linking occurs any time someone posts a hyperlink to a specific indexed web page rather than a general home page (i.e. making a link to this specific article rather than BusinessInsider.com). But when people use the phrase in advertising, they're talking about the ability to link users from the web to a specific place inside a mobile app. Though marketers are still learning how to use deep linking into mobile apps, the tactic is thought to hold major potential for brands and developers. That's because it allows, for example, users with a department store's app to click a Google search ad for a pair of boots and then be sent directly to the page within the app where they could purchase the boots. For more information, Google has a nice, short video explainer of deep linking here.

Programmatic Buying: This term refers to any digital advertising spots that are purchased using computer automation, as opposed to having a publisher's salesperson meet with an ad buyer to discuss which inventory the buyer wanted to purchase and at what price. The most talked-about form of programmatic buying is real-time bidding, through which a number of ad buyers use automated programs running pre-set algorithms to bid on an advertising slot as the consumer is loading the desired webpage. However, programmatic also includes things like programmatic direct buying, in which buyers tap into a publisher's software to purchase a clearly defined, pre-set selection of advertising inventory at a price set by the publisher.

Engagement: A catch-all term for when consumers interact with a brand or its advertising on social media. Though marketers often spend a great deal of time pursuing and quantifying the "engagements" they receive, oftentimes these interactions can be completely meaningless (a Facebook "like" from someone who will never buy your product) or actively negative (someone sarcastically retweeting a dopey branded tweet for the sole purpose of making fun of it).

Viewability: Viewability refers to the concept of whether or not an advertisement that someone paid for was actually seen by a real, live human being. As of now, nearly half of all online ads are not in a place where users will see them, oftentimes because they are placed way down the web page where users will have to scroll to see them. While there remain discrepancies in how different ad delivery services determine whether a space is viewable, Google announced in December that it would start allowing buyers to limit their automated purchases  to inventory it certified as viewable.

Big data: A vague allusion to the fact that the internet allows marketers to collect a lot more information about consumers than they used to be able to. The phrase is mostly used by people writing about online advertising as a general preface to the idea that the industry should be implementing more technology and/or spending more of its advertising budgets on the internet.

Click Fraud: This occurs either when a group of computers are programmed to click on a certain webpage or an actual human being is paid to do the same, in order to give the appearance that more people are seeing the advertisements on that page than there actually are. This enriches publishers and the companies they pay to help refer traffic to them at the expense of brands who are unwittingly paying to have their ads seen by robots or distressed sweatshop workers in third-world countries.

Rich Media: A digital advertisement that includes more media than a mere banner ad or social media message, usually by expanding when a user rolls over it with his or her mouse (desktop) or finger (mobile). Rich media ads generally take up more space and ask the consumer to interact with them by either clicking to see a video or playing some sort of game. The idea is to build advertising experiences that consumers will want to "immerse" themselves in.

Responsive Design: Websites that have responsive design figure out which device a user is viewing them on and automatically present the user with a fluid experience fitted to the proportions and capabilities of the device he or she is using. With more and more web traffic coming from smartphones and tablets, brands and publishers are increasingly turning to responsive design to provide a seamless experience regardless of how the site is being viewed.

The Internet of Things: The idea that in the future, regular household items like your front door, fridges, coffee mugs and couches will all be connected to the internet, giving marketers an opportunity to collect data and serve more relevant advertising to consumers. Your fridge could prompt you to get groceries if it detects that it's empty. Your front door could alert you that your dog walker has arrived in your absence. With all those items being outfitted with internet access, some in the advertising industry believe the couches and coffee mugs will one day carry screens of their own, on which marketers could show more ads.

Join the conversation about this story »

So you’ve written plenty of blogs and conducted your fair share of content research…but have you really looked into the elements that take a blog from zero to content hero?

HubSpot’s most recently released Benchmark report shows that companies that blogged 6-8 times per month doubled their lead volume.

As blogs continue to grow in viewership, they will continue to build an increasingly valuable platform for brand establishment and lead generation.

That being said, blogging as a means of marketing your company is not solely about the blog’s content, but also how it’s being presented to your audience.

The personality and voice of a post matter as a way of making it entertaining and informative, but many other aspects of writing a blog fall into the category of bringing in and nurturing leads for your business, which is equally (if not more) important. Good bloggers take those extra factors into account.

Here are the five elements writers should be thinking about before hitting the publish button:

1)   Links

A typical blog should strive to include around three hyperlinks per post (if not more) as a way of directing readers to other site content that may interest them. You can direct them to other blogs, landing pages, pages describing the services your company offers, or to other company’s sites with the hope that the favor will be returned.

The days of promoting content with a simple “click here” are gone. Now you need interesting, intriguing words to encourage clicks. For example: Doesn’t “The trick to Owning YouTube” sound better than “Click here for more information on SoLoMo?”

2)   CTAs

Congratulations, you brought someone into your site through your blog! Now what?

Turn them into a lead for your business by offering them a Call-to-Action (CTA). In our case it is a free eBook you can download that is included at the bottom of each blog post. Other ways to use CTAs include providing links that will bring readers to a product trial or demo, an expertly designed landing page to sign up for newsletters, etc. Give them a way to stay connected to your brand and you a way to get that potential customer’s information for future use.

3)   Keywords

Incorporating keywords into your blog copy helps to push your blog into more searches, which in turn could lead into more views, more leads, and, ultimately, more sales.

Everybody wants that, right?

And yet, many writers don’t take the time to worry about keywords until it is too late, or maybe not at all. So make sure that you choose 1-2 keywords or phrases to include in your blog’s title, your photo’s alt tags, and throughout your copy. Put them in so they flow naturally with the blog copy.

4)   Content Value and Voice

To get anyone to take an interest in your blog, you need to demonstrate its value. If it is a company blog, as opposed to a personal blog, more than one employee should be writing it. As a team you should determine a strategy for one overall message and voice for the brand you are promoting, but more than one writer within that voice should bring different personalities and unique content ideas to the blog. Variety is a great tool that works to keeps blogs fresh.

5)   Reliability

This one isn’t really included in within the blog content itself, but it is a major flaw that many blogs fall victim to.

Both companies and individuals start blogs to gain leads, build site traffic, establish brand awareness, and allow a place for thoughts and experiences to be shared their with like-minded individuals. But many of them fall short by not posting consistently. Setting an editorial calendar for your blogs and sticking to it will instantly give you a leg-up on the competition and set your blog ahead from the crowd. If you say that you will post a blog every Tuesday and Thursday, you damn well better or you will lose those leads and followers the instant they feel they can’t trust you to deliver.

Takeaway

Blogging provides leads with unparalleled insight into your brand and company, but there is much more that goes into creating an optimized post than simply the writing itself. When a content creator is thinking through and mapping out their next blog they should be considering it from the perspective of a marketer, not a writer.

Adding marketing tools to written content will lead you on the path to blogging success!

At first glance, social media is only a way for people to post photos, communicate with friends and family, complain about the weather and discuss current events. On the surface it may not seem to have much value beyond that.

But the key words when it comes to social media are people and communication.

People communicate with each other on social media about all kinds of things, including potential purchases. At its very core, this makes it very valuable for marketers and business owners as a way to generate concrete leads.

Even so, and quite unbelievably, 73% of CEOs don’t find marketers to be credible business assets and think they don’t generate enough growth.

One of the reasons behind this understanding is that they find that marketers put a lot of value on social media but can’t always quantify exactly how it generates revenue for the company.

Here are a few ways social media marketers can generate concrete sales and put their CEO’s doubts to rest.

1. Establish Your Company as an Authority

Throughout the course of the last eight years, social media has proven itself to be an incredibly lucrative tool for establishing and boosting revenue for thriving businesses.

Any successful marketer knows that to build a lasting customer base, a business needs to establish its brand image.

One way to do this is to sink your teeth into the market share by establishing your business as an online authority.

A good example of a brand utilizing this strategy is energysavings.com’s plugging In blog that features articles about saving money by conserving energy. When consumers see the authoritative quality of advice and information on the blog, their perception of the company starts to lean toward respecting it as a trustworthy source for energy savings (just like the Brandwatch blog, eh? – Ed.).

Track and evaluate all traffic that the blog brings in and apply the demographic and geographic information of visitors to the rest of your marketing efforts. If it’s an ecommerce site, even better. This way you’ll be able to quantify the impact the blog has on revenue.

2. Utilize Specialized Agencies

They say that:

in order to be a good communicator, you must listen more than you speak. And the fewer words you use to get your point across, the better.

This premise translates to social media very well because the most important aspect of social media marketing is listening to what your followers say.

Companies like Brandwatch sort through all kinds of social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, to locate and classify people who post and tweet about purchasing certain types of products. It then delivers the information to their clients as potential sales leads.

Some systems even score leads based on what point in the purchase cycle the person is most likely in. For example, if a person tweets “I want to buy a new SUV,” they’ll be classified differently than one who tweets, “I’m shopping for a new SUV today!”

It’s estimated that about 70 percent of marketers said they had generated leads through social media, which is remarkable in the land of social media marketing.

This strategy is invaluable for marketers, as it narrows the audience considerably, making the best use of their time and energy.

3. Perfect Your Call to Action

Calls to action are cornerstone of most good advertising campaigns. Advertisers found that ads that feature one of these statements are extremely more effective than ones that don’t.

Why not transfer this theory over to your social marketing campaign?

To do this naturally, focus on what’s in it for your viewers and skip the promotional jargon. Typically folks on social media are in the mindset of browsing and socializing, not buying.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use a call to action, though. This site has some great tips for improving your calls to action on social media.

There’s no reason that any company should overlook social media as a practical aspect of their marketing strategy. It takes a bit more finesse, and quantifying its effectiveness can be difficult, but there’s no doubt that when it’s executed properly social media can generate concrete leads for your business.

Do you have any points to add?

Please feel free to share your social media marketing tips with us in the comments below.

Maybe they don't qualify their sales prospects. Maybe they lie. A veteran salesperson explains.

I have over 35 years in sales in a variety of situations, and I have seen many salespeople come and go.

When it comes to the ones who went, I have seen them lose their jobs in many ways, ranging from lack of urgency to outright dishonesty.

Here are the most common reasons sales pros fail, and how their shortcomings impact on their relationships going forward:

1. Lack of qualified activity

One of the early salespeople that I hired had so much activity. He would literally generate 40 to 50 new contacts every day. The only problem was he was lacking the questions that helped him get to a better understanding of where his prospect was in the sales cycle. Many of them didn't even belong in the sales cycle. When he figured out the right questions and qualified the prospect for solutions to their business, he started closing accounts and became one of my top reps.

Mark van Hartesvelt, managing partner at digital marketing company GCommerce, tells me that that there are three habits that are kryptonite for otherwise super salespeople: making the same pitch to everyone (i.e., throwing the same stuff at the wall and hoping it will stick), not following up sales calls and failing to identify specific sales opportunities.

2. No sense of urgency

Waiting for leads, customers to call and business to land on your desk is the type of sales complacency that will kill a person's enthusiasm, energy and career. No matter how successful your day, month or year you must act as if you're always climbing. Proactive movement must come by doing things that push you out of your comfort zone. One of the most common requests from my customers involves creating a program for their sales teams to gain access to net new business, and not constantly rely on current accounts Many salespeople that fail have a hard time making calls on new prospects.

We need a sense of urgency infused in everything we do when it comes to sales success. Life is really too short.

Having a sense of urgency doesn't mean you're engaged in your work 24/7, but it does allow you to relax with your family/friends knowing you have a plan and completed key activities for the day. We are much happier when we have action during the day that gets us closer to our goals.

3. Being unorganized

I was supposed to be picked up at my hotel at 7:30 a.m. by a sales rep I was scheduled to travel with to coach and evaluate. He was told about this travel day a week in advance. He arrived at 8:15am. When I got in the car, I had to move a few things around to find my actual seat. I'm sure you know where this is going. When I asked him what he had planned for the day, he looked at me like I had two heads. He was told to have several meetings set up, and we could cold call around those meetings.

He lasted until the end of the month.

All the other reps I traveled with had a printed out itinerary and description of the meetings. Some of them sent them to me in advance. When you're unorganized you not only have a problem generating new business, but end up losing business because of poor follow up.

If I look back at my business deals and how they were closed there was a tremendous amount of follow up and follow through on requests, research, new contacts and all the critical actions that begin to establish trust with a prospective customer. You earn their trust when they see how you follow up and deliver on the next steps you've promised. I don't know how any top sales producer accomplishes all they can by being disorganized. And I'm not talking about being a neat freak ... Plenty of great salespeople have had offices that look like they went through a war. They just had their own way of knowing what their priorities were for the day, and had a system for follow-up that worked.

4. Negative attitude

What you think about, you bring about. It is extremely difficult to become a top producer when your thoughts are negative. All new salespeople will go through scenarios that make it hard to stay positive. Deals fall through to more experienced competitors, prospects tell them "no" hundreds of times, and the ones who can't move past this will have a tough time with longevity in this business. Whether you like it or not, your attitude determines your altitude in life and in selling. This is such a fundamental asset for successful selling and dealing with all types of objections and obstacles. It's impossible to have a great day with a bad attitude. It's also impossible to have a bad day with a great attitude.

5. Poor work ethic

If you think salespeople are born not made, guess again. I have come across and worked with hundreds of successful salespeople who you would think from your first glance and handshake were never made for this profession. But they have a work ethic and internal drive that's second to none. As my sensei would always say, hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Hard work creates so many powerful attributes. It creates solid confidence because of your own knowledge of the ground work that's been built prior to your presentations and sales meetings. And after all my interviews with my customers' customers, they will always bring up the quality of their sales reps work ethic and how they go beyond what's expected to create a strong relationship and deliver more value than is expected. When I ask sales managers for the No. 1 reason their reps fail, they almost always relate it to lack of activity and an unwillingness to do the work. Successful people do the things that unsuccessful people don't like to do.

6. Doesn't believe in themselves or their product

This can stem from both the attitude problem and lack of work ethic mentioned above. If you don't believe in yourself, it's very difficult for the customer to believe also. And product knowledge and knowledge of your customers' business takes work and dedication.

I've seen many turnarounds for salespeople who had a rough time of getting into their business--until the business got into them. For some reason or another, something clicked. They worked weekends on a specific presentation and put the time into creating something unique about how they stood out from the competition. When the deal was closed they got a huge boost of confidence that re-energized their efforts and strengthened their belief in their product and themselves.

7. Honesty is not their policy.

It takes years to build strong relationships and just one little lie to ruin everything you've built.

I still to this day cringe when someone says to me, "Let me be honest with you..." Why? Why wouldn't everything you're telling me be the truth?

When salespeople think they will succeed by tricking, manipulating or deceiving the customer, they might just pull it off for that one time sale. But it will never last. I want to buy from people I like, trust and respect. Those are the three top reasons most customers buy for you.

Money for nothing

If you are any where in the sales channel chain, you’ve kicked a trashcan or two through the years.  Frustration, misunderstandings and lack of empathy are common in sales channel relationships.

Manufacturers often lament that sales channel partners are under performing.  typical shortcomings include:

• Don’t create projects – only respond if someone asks them
• Don’t communicate consistently
• Expect quotes and engineered solutions and never follow up
• Don’t close leads which they are sent (generated at great expense)
• Never learn product very well
• Don’t seem committed

Nearly always all those things are true!  But here’s the rub.  It’s always your fault as the manufacturer.  Seriously!

Channel Management on Autopilot

In some cases poor channel selections are made (often adopting someone who brings a project as a channel partner) and then aren’t proactively trained, managed and culled if appropriate.

But in most cases channel performs exactly as the factory has taught them that they should.

You know exactly how that message is conveyed.  There may be a cursory initial discussion around mutual commitments, and thereafter the monthly pipeline spreadsheet is the extent of the channel management program.

Everyone’s busy; conflict is undesirable; and training, nurturing and managing accountability are resource demanding activities. And yet mutually beneficial collaboration is somehow supposed to coalesce from the ooze of emails…Pretty silly, isn’t it?

Select carefully

It’s amazing how few companies take the time to consider different channel models for specific product/market/vertical circumstances.  They reflexively use distribution in each case and each market.  That may be the best choice, but if so it’s arrived at only by accident.

And channel partners themselves are rarely measured against a carefully established baseline profile.  Not only are simple metrics (# of offices, sales/admin/support people, geographical coverage, competitive products, etc) often disregarded, but the more substantive mutual business planning is never undertaken.

Plan extensively

Strong channel partners will value relationships which challenge them to grow and perform. Any channel engagement should begin with carefully vetted candidates and build on a channel business plan.  Dedicated resources, other products which will be dropped to enable adequate focus, training and demo commitments and investments, joint travel and meetings and other related topics must be preemptively discussed and agreed upon.

Execute obsessively

Early nurturing and collaboration will not only reinforce the mutual commitments but set a tone for the life of the channel collaboration. Communication must be proactive and management of objectives and KPIs (not just revenue) should be consistent.

And even if you do it all right….it won’t always be smooth.  Selling through sales channel is really tuff.  Doing so domestically is hard enough – doing so internationally is even more challenging.  But the business imperative is clear – so it stands to reason that companies that can become incrementally more effective will substantially improve their business growth.

You will have stumbles.  You’ll select some sub-optimal partners.  Some may age out of effectiveness.  Others will be sold or change management – either of which can disrupt the chemistry of collaboration.

But if you “manage” your channel like most companies, the fault for frustration and poor channel performance very likely lies with your inadequate channel management.

It’s really, really tough to reframe existing channel relationships.  But your business growth may require doing just that.  In any event, starting any new channel relationships  out right is entirely within your immediate control.

So stop whining about your lazy and ineffective channel and take a critical introspective look at how you may have fostered and enabled mediocrity.

Then get to work improving it!

So you’re ready to take on the philosophy of the new digital world. You understand that becoming a valuable resource for your prospects and customers is now a necessity of growing a business with all the power that the Internet has to offer. First thing’s first though, building the hub of your online presence. Your lifecycle marketing website will need to have several key elements to insure you can attract and convert more business opportunities.

9 Keys To Your Lifecycle Marketing Website

1. Optimized for search engines in the coding foundation of the site

2. Responsive design

3. CMS/Blogging capabilities

4. Continually add to the amount of pages on your site

5. Integrate social media sharing and profile links

6. CTA’s around the site

7. Focused landing pages

8. Simple forms

9. Automated follow up

Optimized Website Code For Search Engines

The way a website is coded when it’s being built will distinguish how readable it is to search engines. This is “baked in” to the code of the site when it’s being developed, so it’s important to have this talk with your website developer from the get-go to make sure they know what they are doing. While search rankings are determined by hundreds of factors in Google’s algorithm, many of those things being off-site and how your content is written and formatted, if it isn’t structurally correct in the foundational code, then you are going to struggle building your authority with Google and other search engines.

For your lifecycle marketing website to attract people through search engines, this is extremely important to get right from the start.

Responsive Website Design

Responsive website design is how you describe a site that actually changes based on the visitors device. If someone is visiting your website from their computer, they will experience the full offering of what you have available. From a tablet, the visitor may see a slightly modified version of the site that is tailored to a touch screen experience on a slightly smaller screen. If your visitor is arriving from their smart phone, then seeing a desktop version of your website could be overwhelming and too cumbersome to navigate and find what they are looking for. Having a mobile optimized website is key to ensuring your visitors are having an equally satisfying experience, although different, from whichever device they are coming to you on.

CMS & Blogging Capabilities

CMS stands for Content Management System. A website that is built with a CMS allows non-tech users to log in via their web browser and make basic changes to content on the site from one centralized interface. There are many different CMS options when having your website built, WordPress being the most popular (at the time of writing, I believe that 20% of the Internet is running on the WordPress CMS – Don’t confuse WordPress.com and WordPress.org when having your website built.).

With a CMS, you will also be able to add extended functionality and more easily integrate technical needs that you’ll need to have in place to reach your business goals. Things like CRM integration, marketing automation implementation can be much (RELATIVELY) simpler projects when they don’t need to be built from scratch.

One of the most important integrations that you’ll need for your lifecycle marketing website is the ability to blog. Creating content is the most important factor in building your digital visibility and giving you the fuel to run search, social, and email marketing strategies that will attract and convert more customers for your business.

Size Matters

There is no finite number of web pages that you need to have in order to deem your site “complete.” You should continuously be publishing more information and growing the amount of pages on your website for multiple reasons.

Having more pages on your website makes you a stronger authority to search engines, and people, who are looking for information on topics relevant to your products and services.

Adding more pages (*blog posts*) gives you the ability to rank for more keywords and phrases that your prospects are searching for on Google. Every page on your website is the chance to rank for a different keyword or phrase.

With more posts published frequently, you have more content to share on your social media channels that will be broadcasted to all of your Fans, Followers, Subscribers, and Amplifiers to help increase your digital visibility and raise your thought leadership as well as drive traffic back to your central online hub (your lifecycle marketing website).

The more content you have on your website, the more opportunities you are giving to your Audience to share within their online (and offline) circles, again raising your digital visibility and thought leadership within your target audience.

Social Media Integration

In order to fully engage your Audience, you will need to have social media integrated into your website in various different ways. Two must-haves though:

1. Links to your social media profiles

2. Social sharing buttons on your content

Social Media Profile Links

When people visit your website, you’ll want them to easily be able to connect with you on your social media channels (the one of their choice) and become a part of your audience.

A Quick Note On The Importance Of Your Audience

This is literally an entire book’s (series of books IMHO) worth of information on this topic, but to sum it up briefly for you: You rent an audience when you buy TV/Radio/Print/Direct Mail ads from someone else. When you have your own list of contacts, you don’t need to pay to rent someone else’s AND your audience will be more interested because they have volunteered to get information from you (unlike the rented audiences of ad buying).

Now back to our regularly scheduled topic of Lifecycle Marketing Websites…

Social Media Sharing Buttons

Social media sharing buttons are what you commonly see above/below/beside an article that you are reading online that has an icon to various popular social media networks. These give your readers the opportunity to share your content with one click to their social circles. This is another key way to spread your brand’s digital visibility and attract more interested prospects to come back to your website.

Some other ways to integrate social media into your website may include:

• your social content streams

• third-party social curation pages

• fan generated content streams

Calls To Action

A call-to-action (usually abbreviated as CTA) is an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a “call” to take an “action.”

- Ginny Soskey, Hubspot

In order to capture more leads on your website, you’ll need to ask your visitors to take action. This can be signing up for your newsletter, downloading a Lead Magnet, or possibly buying a product. It’s your message that moves them to taking their next step. So if you have a free guide that visitors can download that offers insight on making a purchasing decision, and you are publishing blog posts around that same topic, then you should have a CTA on those blog posts that will drive people to a landing page to enter their contact information in exchange for that free guide. Without telling visitors that free guide exists or why they should download it, they’ll never know it’s there as a resource for them.

Landing Pages

Your Lifecycle Marketing Website needs to have focused web pages that don’t distract visitors in any way or lead them off of your site. This means no links to references on other websites, no icons going off to your social media channels, no CTAs for them to click off to another page, no sidebar with lists of other articles to go read, often times it even means stripping the navigation away from the page. A landing page serves one purpose and should solely focus on that purpose.

Using blog posts to attract traffic from search and social, and designing intriguing CTAs for readers to click and bring them to a relevant landing page with a quality offer, you will be able to convert more of your website visitors into leads and customers.

Simple Forms

Too many forms on the web ask for every piece of information that you could ever possibly want from someone. The problem is, people don’t like filling out forms OR giving away their information. How can you solve this problem? Easy, make your forms shorter and simpler. The less fields that someone needs to fill out, the more likely they will actually complete the form in front of them. If someone is just entering contact information in exchange for some kind of digital information or lead magnet, then all you absolutely need from this person is their email address. Often times it’s worth asking for a first name and email address, that way you can personalize content for that specific visitor, but that’s something that you can test out with your specific site.

Sending an email that says “Hi Dan” instead of “Hi,” is much nicer to a reader. Subject lines including a first name are also opened at a much higher percentage. There is also technology that is available now that allows you to actually personalize your website content to have someone’s name in it as well.

Automate Follow Up

When someone is signing up for something they expect to receive via email, it should be as close to instantaneous as possible. This means automating your email follow up with the information requested in each form you have on your website.

If someone is filling out a contact form to talk with a sales rep or consultant from your company for a quote, the faster you can follow up with a contact request from your website the better. We even send an automated voice message on some of our forms to alert the prospect that they’ll be receiving an email from someone within a few minutes.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later – and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”

With the level of marketing automation offered today by different software companies, there is no reason that you shouldn’t be integrated your website with your CRM and marketing automation software in order to more efficiently turn prospects into leads and nurture those leads into sales.

Is Your Business Armed With A True Lifecycle Marketing Website?

Does your company take advantage of these different elements of lifecycle marketing within your website? What aspects have you found to be most successful?

Do you implement any other strategies or tactics that you would recommend? Leave your experiences and questions in the comments below!

Ready For Your Own Lifecycle Marketing Website?

If your company isn’t attracting enough quality sales leads through the web, it’s time to learn more about lifecycle marketing and how you can start making your business more efficient by combining solid marketing strategies with technology.

Click here to contact one of our Lifecycle Marketing Website Consultants now >>

(You might even get to see how our automated phone calls work)

People ask me why I decided to focus on buyer personas.

Easy. I like to impress people.

And it’s easier to impress people when you know what they want.

Very early in my life, I learned that I could exceed expectations by figuring out what mattered most to the people around me. I learned how to ask good questions, and to listen intently to the way the person interacted with me about the topic.

People would often give me short answers that weren’t very helpful. But through persistence and interesting follow-up questions, I was able to learn the most amazing things.

This is the approach that landed me in the technology field more than 30 years ago. I had zero background in computers, but because I was genuinely interested, not only in how it worked but also why it was important to people, there was always someone willing to talk to me.

When I got into marketing, this simple approach began to pay big dividends. By then I had learned that information that was easy to get wouldn’t set me apart from anyone else. So I quickly observed that the best way to impress my boss, the salespeople, and a whole lot of other people was to make a positive impression on the buyers who were looking for solutions like ours.

No one told me that directly, mind you. In fact, the people I worked around didn’t even talk about our buyers. Every conversation was centered around our company’s products, strategies, or goals. We had endless meetings to evaluate options to talk about what we were doing and deliver that message to the market.

But no one ever talked about what the buyers wanted.

My colleagues would sometimes talk about “the market.” But this never seemed like a very useful conversation. “The market” seemed to consist of relatively meaningless statistics about the size of the companies or industries where our buyers worked.

Sometimes we’d hear what the analysts were saying about “the market,” which was mainly their perception about how we were doing compared to the competition. This led to discussions about how we could be better or different than the other companies.

None of this addressed my deeply-held conviction that success comes easiest to those who know what matters to real people. During our meetings, I’d ask questions like “what do the buyers want?” and “if we make these changes, will the buyers care?”

I generally got blank stares.

But I persisted, because I knew that if I had these answers, I could use them to build strategies that worked for everyone. I knew that I had to find the place where our products, strategies and goals intersected with what the buyers actually wanted.

I started finding ways to talk directly to buyers. Since one of my key goals was leads and demand generation, I was extremely curious about why some buyers had suddenly decided to make it a priority to investigate a solution like ours. So I found opportunities to talk to people who had recently bought our solutions.

I’d start the conversation by asking them about what happened on the day when they started looking for a solution like ours. After probing on that theme for a while, I’d get the buyers to tell me their whole story about what happened as they evaluated all of their options. I never accepted an easy, obvious answer. The process was one of digging around, looking for real insight.

I saw again and again that people want to engage in an open conversation about what matters most to them. I listened intently as people got caught up in the dialog and provided information I could have never thought to ask about.

It didn’t take long to see patterns in our buyers’ stories. It didn’t take long to notice that some of the distinctions we’d had about market segments were largely irrelevant. And it didn’t take long before I could build and defend strategies and tactics that I knew would resonate with our buyers.

I know that this simple idea is the reason that three different companies asked me to serve as the executive responsible for their product management, marketing and sales teams. Through that experience, I saw the power of buyer personas to impact every one of these functions

So in 2001, when I built the product marketing workshop for Pragmatic Marketing, buyer personas were the organizing principle for the entire course. Over the next ten years, I traveled the world, attempting to cram everything I knew into two action-packed days. The feedback forms always told me that buyer personas were the most important part of the workshop.

In the emails that followed, I saw that people needed more guidance. I saw that conducting this type of interview didn’t come naturally to many people.

I realized that I had to build structure and training around the interviews or marketers would create buyer personas that were only skin deep. I noticed that larger companies needed help with the cultural and process issues that emerge when the buyer’s voice is a part of the workflow. And I saw that many companies preferred to have buyer personas built by people who were already experts.

Once again, I listened intently to what really matters to people and founded Buyer Persona Institute to answer that need. This gave us the opportunity to impress hundreds of clients, thousands of marketers, and countless buyers all over the world.

This cycle of listening and impressing buyers is the reason that we say that our sole aim at Buyer Persona Institute is enabling marketers to say: “This is what matters to our buyers. So here’s the plan.”

You are about to kick off a campaign and have a target list. Have you ever wondered if the content being promoted is relevant to the target list? The following questions and concerns have probably come up:

• What percentage of the target audience is really interested in this topic?

• What are other topics that this target list is interested in?

• Should I segment this list further? If so, how?

• If the content is not relevant, I may get an unsubscribe. I then lose the contact for ever.

Social channels provide a wealth of information, which can be leveraged to answer these questions. To start with marketers need to start augmenting their contact data with social attributes. This may not be available for all the contacts in the marketing database but it should be part of a long term plan. You can start then listening to what your leads are talking about on social channels and get a deeper insight. Marketers can then leverage this information to better segment their campaigns and nurture the appropriate sub segments with the right content.

After all, content is king and leveraging social insights to better segment and nurture is critical better conversions. The proof after all is in the metrics. What metrics can we measure for leads identified on social channels?

The metrics should be a mix of top of the funnel and middle/ bottom of the funnel and should reflect both quantity and quality. Do leads identified on social channels have a faster time to revenue? Are they more qualified to begin with? Are inside sales able to have a better conversation with prospects because of social insights? Measuring these metrics and comparing them to traditional methods would give you insights on what works for your business.

What are your experiences with leads generated on social channels? What metrics have you measured?

The growth of Big Data has not gone unnoticed by B2B marketers. In an annual study from Infogroup Targeting Solutions, 54% of marketers said they have already invested in Big Data. Up to 30% of marketers said they plan to invest in Big Data for the first time in the next two years.

Although Big Data has been a part of the lead generation and nurturing process for quite some time, many B2B marketers are still developing strategies for managing and leveraging the influx of information they are collecting on prospects.

“There is such an abundance of data now, and yet there’s no standard practice, methodologies or systems presenting and quantifying and measuring,” said David Lewis, President and CEO of DemandGen International, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “If you’re a CFO, there are actually published financial standards on how publically held companies should be reporting their finances. But the field of marketing — primarily because there has never been any framework for measuring — lacks any form of standards for reporting.”

The lack of a standard data management practice comes from the sudden growth in the amount of data that marketers are gathering. Marketers’ first reaction was to collect as much information as possible before developing a clear strategy for managing and leveraging it, according to Jim Lenskold, President of The Lenskold Group.

“I think marketing analytics is evolving,” Lenskold said. “I would say the evolution went from marketers having very little data to marketers having all of this data, and I think the first response is to find a way to report it. That leads to marketers comparing and counting all of their data. The thought of a strategy for data analytics is where all of these new questions are coming from. Since everyone has been sitting on this Big Data for a while, now marketers are starting to ask: ‘What else can I do with it?’”

While certain data points collected from areas such as content engagement, the sales pipeline and purchase activity help marketers identify the impact of their marketing strategies on sales and revenue, collecting behavioral data on a large scale is what leads marketers to make more predictive marketing decisions.

“With very specific data points, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack for many marketers,” said Robert Bois, Director of Product Marketing at Lattice Engines. “It’s really hard for marketers to apply value to their data. A lot of times they’re making assumptions about either the data they have or the data they should be collecting, or they’re just taking the standard data formats in their internal systems.”

Bois stated that automated platforms that sift through behavioral data can help marketers gain an advantage with their predictive analytics capabilities.

“The human brain can only hold a certain level of information in order to make a decision,” Bois explained. “But with predictive analytics, you never make any assumptions. You just feed in as much data as possible and it will spit out the things that are important for you and your company.”

Keeping Data Clean

With all of the data that is passing through each marketer’s management system, one of the biggest struggles they face is keeping their database clean and organized. Having clean data helps marketers feel secure about their data’s credibility, increasing the accuracy of business decisions.

“In the B2B marketing space, a clean CRM and database is critical,” said Nate Young, Director of Demand Generation at Kenshoo. “So it’s ‘junk in, junk out;’ you have to make sure that as your managing your data, that you’re staying on top of your CRM hygiene to collect the data that can be used later in terms of identifying different segments you can go after.”

Having a clean database can help marketers determine which pieces of data are valuable to company executives. Using this information, marketers can effectively present their data to show the ROI of their marketing initiatives.

“The marketing organization doesn’t naturally lean towards the analytics side — it’s mostly based around the idea of being more revenue-focused,” Lenskold said.“A lot of marketers in B2B only had tracking and goals that went halfway through the funnel, so the idea of focusing on revenue is where that mind-shift has to come into play. I think it’s coming, but I don’t think it comes naturally.”

Although it may be difficult, it’s possible for organizations to tell a story with their data and give viewers a clear understanding of every aspect of marketing operations — whether it be the effectiveness of a campaign, or the specific attributes of a target audience, according to Kathy Macchi, Managing Partner at Allegro Associates.

“Even if you collect all that data, at the end of the day you need to tell a story with it,” Macchi said. “You need to know how to design and present the data so people can just look at your dashboard and obtain context about what the data represents. You can do it — it takes time — but you just have to obtain the experience that will help you connect the dots. I didn’t say it was going to be easy, but it can be done.”

Is Outsourcing The Answer?

Oftentimes it is not possible for companies to manage all the data that is required to run effective campaigns and make intelligent decisions. This is a common problem that tends to be resolved with outside help from partner companies. Outsourcing data management can be handled in various different ways, according to Bois.

“The first way would be when marketers just go to a data appending company and outsource the collection component of the process,” Bois said. “The second would be to outsource the lead collection process as a whole, which is now being recognized as a somewhat bad practice. The third is to not outsource the data you need to run your sales and marketing operations.”

Marketers “might have assumptions” about what can be considered predictive about their customers, but outsourcing the analyzing buying signals data can give marketers better predictions about their customers, Bois reported.

“There is no sense for marketers to duplicate their efforts,” Bois added. “The data that marketers need to run their operations has to stay in their source systems. But the data and buying signals that enhance predictive capabilities for the in-house data can be outsourced to save a company time and resources.”

It is a delicate balance to decide how much of your data manage to outsource. But to outsource all of your data “is a really big mistake,” according to Erich Ziegler, VP of Marketing at RingCentral.

Ziegler explained: “My biggest question for up-and-coming companies offering to manage my data is: ‘How much time am I going to have to put into transferring and cleaning the data so you can use it?’ They will probably come back to me with the same results I could have gotten from keeping the work in-house with people who hold themselves personally accountable and use methods that they believe work the best for them.”

I’m guessing this isn’t the first article you’ve read about how to get your blog started, running, and making you money. But if you’ve been looking for a pile of tips, tricks and tools to cut your blogging time down (and we mean WAY down), this is the article you’re looking for.

Whether you are trying to start a business, develop a new pastime, or something else, building a blog is a proven way to build your web presence. However, many people, especially small business owners, simply don’t have the time to blog as regularly as they’d like. When it comes to small businesses, it’s hard to justify spending any time or money on something that doesn’t bring a good return on investment.

What makes blogging unique is that it can be one of two things:

1. A massive time sink that doesn’t make any money
2. A profitable, satisfying and efficient way to promote your business

With the tools and information we’ll share in this article below, you’ll learn everything you need to know about getting started with profitable blogging. Once you’ve read and learned everything we’re sharing below, you’ll learn:

• How to create an attractive blog on your website
• Ways to format your posts so users actually want to read them
• Which blogging platform to choose (and why)
• Tools that make sharing your blog posts fun and easy
• How to grow your audience and connect with your readers
• When social media is a waste of your time – and when it’s not
• Why email can actually help you become a better blogger (and make more money)
• How to blog when you’re on the go
• How you can monetize on your blog

…and plenty more. So settle in, bookmark this page so you can use it as a reference later, and get ready to learn everything you ever wanted to know about getting into blogging.

Why Blogging?

If you’re not naturally inclined towards writing, you may wonder why you want to spend any time blogging in the first place. Why write when you don’t have to? Writing was hard enough in school, and now you’re expected to do it for fun?

Not quite. The writing you did in your English class is much different than the writing you’ll do while blogging. The purposes of blogging are many, but here are just a few:

• To educate: Your primary focus in your blogging efforts shouldn’t be to sell or convince anyone why your business is the “best.” Instead, by focusing on educating your audience and sharing relevant information, which they want to read, you’ll naturally form a relation of trust with your readers. When they trust you, they’ll also trust your brand. It’s the same principle of putting the customer (or in this case, reader) first.
• To promote: Even though you should primarily try to educate your readers, as we read above, don’t think that means you can’t promote or sell through blogging. Blogging is a great way to let your audience know about products, sales, offers and more. Blogging lets you draw traffic: There’s a reason blogging is at the heart of most SEO and content strategies – it works. If you want a way to create content that brings in web traffic, a well-crafted blogging strategy is the way to go.
• To make friends: Not in it for the money? That’s completely fine. By writing a blog regularly, you can find an audience of real people with whom you can network, share ideas, and build relations.

There are plenty of other specific reasons why you’d want to create a blog not mentioned above, so don’t see the above brief list of blogging reasons as the be-all-end-all. One of the great things about blogging as a content platform is that it’s so versatile and CAN be used for nearly any purpose.

How to Avoid Wasting Time when Blogging

Because blogging is so potentially powerful, many individuals and businesses feel they NEED to blog, but aren’t exactly sure how to do it right. This leads to a lot of wasted time and effort.

Eventually, this wasted time and effort leads to people abandoning the pursuit of blogging.

DON’T DO THIS. Instead of wasting your time, learn how to blog the RIGHT way. How do you do this? By getting everything set up the correct way. In fact, when everything is in place, writing an awesome, productive and profitable blog post only takes about an hour per day.

Here’s how daily blogging activities can look when you’ve learned how to blog efficiently:

1. You pull up your list of blog ideas and choose one that looks good (>5 minutes)
2. You write your blog post (30-40 minutes)
3. You post your blog and then share it using the tools below (5-10 minutes)
4. You reach out and promote your content (5-10 minutes)

That’s it! Once you have your system all set, it’s very easy to blog effectively. Of course, it can take longer to write large posts or in a case where a lot of research is needed.

However, getting a system setup that works is the hard part. Fortunately, we’ve broken it down into simple steps that anyone can follow.

Here’s everything you need to know to start your blog and begin making friends, customers and money through blogging.

Setting Up a Blog

You can’t begin blogging if you don’t have a blog, right? There are several things you need to start your own blog, and not the least of these is a solid blogging platform. We recommend WordPress, so we built our guide around using that as a content management system (CMS). Here’s how to initially set up your blog so you can begin posting. (Also read, How to Setup Your Blog in 5 Minutes)

Domain Name Registry

While a YOURNAME.blogger.com account is free, it’s not ideal (exceptions being there) if you’re serious about creating a brand. Fortunately, getting a domain name is inexpensive.

You have several options about where you register your domain name. NameCheap is a popular choice because (you guessed it) the domain names are pretty cheap. You’ll find your hosting service will likely allow you to buy domain names through them – at a price. We recommend you go with NameCheap because of their fair pricing.

Web Hosting

Like choosing domain name registrars, you have plenty of choice when it comes to choosing web hosting solutions. Here are some of our favorites:

• Dreamhost: A simple but powerful hosting service, their prices are fair. However, the real value with Dreamhost is seen when they have new customer deals. With these savings, you can often get an entire year of hosting plus a domain name for around $20 – not bad. Plus, installing WordPress with Dreamhost is incredibly easy. The service also features Google Apps support, unlimited databases, 1-click installs and more.
• Bluehost: Another popular hosting choice, their prices are good and consistently competitive. With unmetered storage space, bandwidth, and email accounts, you don’t have to worry about paying more for certain features like you do with different web hosting providers. (RECOMMENDED)
• Hostgator: One of the lowest-priced web hosting options, Hostgator features unlimited bandwidth, uptime guarantees, free templates, 1-click installs, and even Google AdWords credit for new customers. Longer-term commitments to the service mean you’ll have more discounts.

Once you’ve registered your domain name and chosen your web-hosting provider, you need to make sure your domain name servers point to your hosting service. This is easy, as all major hosting providers will have either instruction guides or customer service that can help if you can’t figure it out yourself.

Installing WordPress

With your domain name and hosting set, you’re now ready to install your blog! Most major hosting providers (like the ones we mentioned above) make installing WordPress easy. Usually, you can find WordPress as part of the 1-click installation on your hosting control panel. You may need to consult your web-hosting provider for specific instructions on installing WordPress if it isn’t there, though.

If you do need to download and install WordPress yourself, you can visit www.wordpress.org to find instruction on how to install the files, set up a database, and more.

However, if you’re new to web hosting and would rather not deal with manual installation, stick with the 1-click installations. It’s just easier and more convenient.

Choosing a WordPress Theme

One of the reasons WordPress is such a powerful CMS is that it allows users to customize nearly every aspect of how their visitors interact with your website. This includes:

• What your website looks like
• How your URLs are structured
• What custom plugins and options you’d like to install

…. and plenty more.

But before you start finding WordPress add-ons and plugins, you need to find the right theme.

A theme is basically a skin for your WordPress installation. Usually, WordPress installations come with a few different free themes. Generally, the best themes are almost always paid. This is for several reasons:

• Free themes normally don’t come with support. That means it’s unlikely you’ll get help from their creators, if you run into any problems.
• Paid themes generally look and feel more professional. As good graphic designers know, the details matter.

There are a few different places you can get themes for your WordPress sites. Here are a few places to get started:

• Elegant Themes: One of the largest theme sites on the web, Elegant Themes has thousands of different WordPress themes for just about any purpose. Plus, the themes are reasonably priced.
• WooThemes: If you’re interested in having a variety of themes to choose from or experiment with, Woothemes is an affordable place to look. Its theme club is affordable and gives you a continuously growing selection of professionally designed themes. If you’re using the WooThemes framework, changing themes is really easy.
• StudioPress: The most popular WordPress theme packages, these constantly updated themes are beautiful and stunning. Whether you buy a single theme or pay for the entire package, you’ll get award-winning support, updates, and more from these fantastic WordPress themes.

Once you’ve let your blog grow and you have a sizable audience, you’ll probably want to find a professional designer to build a custom WordPress theme. If you don’t know a set of designers yourself, check sites like oDesk and 99Designs to find freelance designers who will bid on the opportunity to build your site for you.

Tips on Formatting Your Blog

When you have finally found your theme, there are still some things you can do to increase the readability of your blog. Try some of these tips to make it easier for your visitors to navigate your blog and find the content they want.

Pages

In WordPress, Pages are different from Posts. While Posts are automatically listed on your blog,

You’ll want to have at least the following pages created so your visitors can learn about your blog:

• Home
• Blog
• About
• Contact

Custom Blog Pages and Home Pages

By default, WordPress places your blog at YOURDOMAIN.com/blog. However, you can change where your blog is located through some simple steps. This will also allow you to change the home page your visitors see when they visit your domain. To set custom home and blog pages, follow this tutorial at wpbeginner.com.

Menus

You’ll almost always have to change the default menu settings in your WordPress theme settings. Follow this tutorial on the official WordPress codex to learn how to make custom menus.

How to Format Posts

Knowing how to format blog posts is a bit tricky to explain since every post is different. However, this post at Problogger has a great breakdown of the principles every blogger should know.

Under the Hood

Part of managing a successful blog is tracking what pages your users read, which keywords bring users to your site, and other statistical data.

We recommend the Google Analytics program for all new blogs. It’s powerful enough to give you great data, and it’s free.

As your blog grows, you may want to upgrade to paid analytics platforms. But until then, Google Analytics is easy to install. This includes CrazyEgg, Kissmetrics, MixPanel, and others.

If you want to add Google Analytics to your blog, check out the Google Analytics plugin by Yoast. It makes installing Analytics on your blog as easy as cut-and-paste.

Finally, if your blog loads slower than you’d like, try using WP SUper Cache. It caches your site and decreases load time.

Writing Blog Posts

Once your blog is all set up and ready to go, you’re ready to begin writing some blog posts. If you’re a writer, this is the fun part. If you’re not a writer, that’s okay – like we mentioned before, writing blog posts is a lot different than the kind of writing you were required to do in school.

The Basics of Writing Great Blog Posts

When you’re set up and ready to write, it’s a good idea to understand how effective blogs are structured. This is accomplished by reading good blogs, learning the principles of blogging, and understanding how to know what your readers want.

Choosing Your Topic

Normally you would select a niche, even before you book your domain. If not, here are some tips, which help:

• Pick something you’re interested in. A successful blog needs to have a focus on something you actually care about. Your interest and passion will naturally show in your content. Plus, since a successful blog is a long-term project, an interesting topic will help the daily blog grind, feel more fun.
• Determine what your audience wants. If you need help knowing what your audience wants, see the section about Analytics below.
• Research. Find what types of blogs are getting followers easily? What topics are covered by other popular blogs? Is there a space for you in the blogosphere?

Having a good topic will help you write blog posts, find guest posting opportunities, guide your promotional efforts and more.

How to Find and Read Good Blogs

First, you’ll want to use an RSS reader that allows you to easily or quickly see what popular blogs are publishing. Our recommendation goes to Feedly, a powerful mobile app and web app, which makes it easy to find and read blogs of all sizes. You can search for blogs by topic, browse blogs, and keep track of your favorite articles for later and much more.

Once you’ve found great blogs on Feedly, you’ll want to spend some time every day reading blogs whose topics are similar to yours. This will let you know what’s being said in your niche, allowing you to write blog posts that help you become part of the conversation.

Another app that’s great at checking multiple streams at once is HootSuite. Its free services should be enough to let you follow leaders in your industry and see what’s being said in your niche.

Learn How to Blog

There are plenty of sites out there that will teach you how to blog well (including this one). As far as a complete training course goes, it’s hard to beat the lessons offered by Copyblogger. Recently, Copyblogger updated how they handle training on their website. This made going through their lessons simpler, and now they have more features than before. You can even upgrade your account (for a fee) and connect with professional content marketers and bloggers.

You can check out My Copyblogger, their training program, by clicking here.

How to Write Great Posts in Less Than an Hour

Learning the basics of blogging is the first part. If you want to learn how to cut your blogging time down to one hour per day, you’ll need to learn how to produce great blog posts fast.

Don’t worry — expert bloggers from all over the web have put together several different guides on how to write articles in 1 hour, 30 minutes, or even 15 minutes!

• Write a (good) blog post in 1 hour – here’s how! The principles told in this article
• Who Else Wants to Write A Quality Blog Post in 15 Minutes? Article.
• My Mantra to Blogging that Made $20,000: Remix, Reuse and Republish. After blogging for a little while, you may be sitting on a gold mine of content ideas. This article shows how to remix, reuse, and republish your existing blog content to great success.
• 5 ways to write a blog post in under an hour. Another collection of great tips, tricks and ideas to write blog posts fast, the ways shared in this article could help a lot, especially on days when you’re strapped for time (and ideas).

How to Check Your Posts Before You Publish

Once you’ve drafted your blog post, it’s always a smart idea to look it over before you send it out into the wild.

• SEO by Yoast. If you want to target specific search engine optimization (SEO) keywords and increase the chances of your blog showing up when people search for specific phrases, you need to make sure each post is properly formatted and optimized. This handy free plugin by Yoast helps you double-check each post’s headline, URL, content and more.
• The blog Post Checklist: Use Before Hitting “Publish” This article gives bloggers a great checklist of the different checks, edits and final things they need to look over so their posts are ready to share.

Sharing Your Blog Posts

Once your post is published ready to share, letting everyone know about your new article will help you draw traffic and build your audience. Remember, you can’t make any money from your blog if you don’t have anyone reading it, so sharing your posts is important.

The best tool we’ve found to share your posts is Buffer, a simple-to-use app. It allows you to schedule your social media postings in advance. That means your fans and followers will see your posts gradually without you even needing to be near a computer. Thus, you can schedule all of your social media within the one hour per day you spend on blogging.

If you’re looking for more ideas on how to share and promote your blog posts, check out this infographic on Pinterest.

Email Lists

You’re probably thinking, “What does email have to do with blogging? Aren’t they two different systems?”

While email and blogging serve very different functions in the world of Internet marketing, they ultimately work together to help you make money from your blog. Since email is STILL the most effective sales platform (believe it or not), getting your readers to sign up for your email list means it’ll be easier to promote your products, inform them of your new posts, and generally monetize your blog efforts.

Getting a good email list requires some work, however. Generally, you need to give your readers some compelling reason why they should agree to receive your emails. Maybe you’ll offer a free ebook, or maybe you can give them a free consultation for signing up.

Whatever you ultimately decide to offer, once you’ve got someone on your email list, you need to make sure you have a way to actually contact him or her. In fact, usually your email capture forms (the forms on your website where your readers can enter their names and email addresses) can be built easily using the tools from your email service provider.

Email Providers

Here are 4 of the most popular email service providers used by bloggers.

• Mailchimp. For beginning bloggers, it’s hard to beat the services offered by Mailchimp. Free for the first 2,000 subscribers, Mailchimp also makes designing attractive emails a breeze. The service imports your site’s color scheme so your emails automatically support your branding. As your subscriber list grows, Mailchimp’s prices (at least at lower subscriber counts) are very affordable.
• Aweber. A very popular choice among Internet marketers, Aweber’s services aren’t free, but they are reasonably priced, especially considering how powerful the software is. Auto responders, scheduled emails, and even smart email lists are all possible with Aweber’s great email platform.
• GetResponse. As your business grows, solutions like GetResponse (which caters to subscriber lists sized between 30,000 and 100,000 names) become much more economically viable. It’s not quite as user-friendly as Mailchimp, so designing emails and crafting custom email campaigns takes a little more technical expertise.
• ConstantContact. Another option similar to GetResponse.

If you want to use a paid email provider (which often brings certain perks), sign up for a free trial at any of the above services and see which one seems to fit your business blog best.

Advertising

If you’re going to monetize your blogs through Google AdSense, selling a product, or any other method, one thing you need are visitors. A steady stream of blog readers allows you to find new customers and continue making sales (and earning a profit). If you use AdSense or any other ad network, it is worthwhile to use a tool like AdPushup (Disclaimer: I’m a co-founder) to A/B test between different ad locations, sizes and themes. In a large number of cases, I have seen ad revenues double, just by using a/b testing.

While Google AdWords and Facebook Ads are common for experienced bloggers to use, other tools aimed at newer bloggers will be easier and more effective at first. Check out these services, which promote your blog posts and allow you to connect with a brand new audience.

• AdPushup. To continuously optimize ad revenue on your website from current ad networks.
• Outbrain. With sites such as CNN, Time, and Rolling Stone in its network, if you’re trying to get your content in front of a lot of eyes, Outbrain can do the job. You only pay when someone clicks on your article, and you have complete control over how much you pay. Check out Outbrain’s site to learn more about how it can help your blog audience grow.
• NRelate. Some bloggers prefer to use NRelate, and for good reason: it often delivers more relevant articles than Outbrain when users are browsing. This means you’ll be more likely to connect with readers who are already interested in your topics. However, the chance of finding readers on sites completely unrelated to yours may be more difficult in some cases. Look at NRelate and compare it to Outbrain to see which one would serve your blog better.

Guest Posting

In addition to paid advertising, guest posting is a great way to connect with other bloggers. This has many benefits:

• You get your blog posts in front a different audience
• You’ll build networks of friends and relationships with other bloggers
• Your blog will gain more authority in the eyes of sites like Google

Knowing where to begin guest blogging can be tricky, so here’s a great article on Moz about how to get started.

Once you’ve read that, check out these articles to make guest blogging better:

• How to “Level Up” Your Guest Posting Efforts
• Finding Guest posting Opportunities from Twitter

Mobile Blogging

Sometimes you’ll get a great idea for a blog post but be away from your computer. Other times, you’ll simply be traveling and not have the time to sit down and blog. If you’ve got a smart device (like Android phones and iPhones), you’ve got several choices on which apps to use. While there are countless options for each platform, here is what most WordPress bloggers use when they’re away from home.

• Blogsy. A favorite for bloggers with iPads, this app offers a much more robust editor than the official WordPress app.
• Official WP App. Available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, the official WordPress app is a decent way to manage multiple blogs on the go.
• Google Analytics. If you’re on Android, Google has an official Analytics app, which makes it easy to track your site’s performance.

Selling on Your Blog

Most bloggers generate revenues by selling on their blog. While taking the time to develop products to sell is a bit of work at first, once you’ve got a steady stream of blog posts and know your audience, it’s fairly easy to know what to sell. Here is great article on the subject: Digital Products Your Can Tell From Your Blog. It offers an overview of different types of digital products.

Shopping Cart Options

You can’t sell a product without a way to collect payments. If you’re starting out, look at using one of the following payment processors:

• PayPal
• eJunkie
• Clickbank

Once you’ve built up your blog sales, check out these more advanced payment processors:

• PowerPay
• Stripe
• ultraCart

Blogging in 1 hour

Now that your blog is set up and ready to go, here’s how to blog in one hour per day:

1. Bring up your list of ideas.
2. Write a post.
3. Check your seo
4. Publish
5. Schedule sharing
6. Check your reader for new post ideas
7. Add new ideas to a list
8. Repeat tomorrow

It’s simple. Follow this formula, and stick with it. Over time, your blog audience will grow, and so will your profits.

Keep checking back to this guide. We’ll continue to update it so you have the latest, best ways to create and grow a successful, profitable blog!

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The post How to Blog in 2014: A Complete Guide to WordPress and Blogging appeared first on Blogging Tips.

An important part of developing skills and expertise is to understand where you fall on a continuum of what’s possible and then take action to evolve and advance accordingly.

With so much digital marketing advice and information on the web, it’s easy to follow along with the latest best practices. But what about 1 or 2 years from now? How valuable would it be to anticipate the challenges and opportunities beyond the current 6 or 12 months of marketing planning?

What is in your future for content marketing?

Along these lines, I’ve been developing a model of content marketing maturity to help companies better understand where they are and where they could be with their own content marketing and as a guide for using outside content marketing services. This is especially relevant as the need to develop more integrated strategies has become the minimum to compete.

Stasis – The focus is on the status quo. Content is created because it’s necessary or required. Press releases, new web site content when products and services are launched and the occasional blog post.

Few dedicated resources are allocated to the content marketing effort and while there may be some experimentation with online content through blogging and basic social networks, the content tends to be very brand centric. SEO works independently of social media and is focused on promotion, distribution of brand messaging.

Organizations at this stage aren’t looking to grow outside of what they’re already doing until they start to see competitors overcoming them on multiple earned, owned and shared media channels.

Production – With the realization that more content means more potential destinations for links, social shares and entry points through search visibility, companies in production mode find ways to create more content..

The “more content” approach tends to be very SEO centric, with an emphasis on creating specific, keyword focused content to justify search engine rankings.

With this predominantly SEO perspective, content is seen mostly as a link building tactics. In other worlds, create content so good (and promote thought social channels) that people will link to it and share on social networks.

There may be dedicated resources to content production as well as a SEO focused strategy for content and the use of social media for amplification. Processes and tools are used to make the content ideation, management, optimization, promotion and measurement efforts efficient and more effective.

A shift begins to occur where keywords are not the solve focus for determining the topics for a content plan and some emphasis is placed on mapping the customer journey through the sales cycle. Content is developed according to specific customer segments and their information needs through the buying journey.

Companies at this stage reap rewards pretty quickly as they grow their footprint on the web. However, traffic increases do not always indicate an increase in leads and sales. A common issue is a boost in search visibility and organic referrals without a corresponding increase in inquiries. Thus begins investigation into more specific opportunities from the customer point of view and more empathy with the buyer journey.

Utility – As marketers develop their content marketing programs, processes, use of tools and skills, a shift starts to happen. Rather than letting keywords and brand messages about features and benefits drive all content planning, investments in content that empathizes with the customer and that contributes to useful experiences are made.

As distint customer segments are developed, with their common characteristics and information needs, content planning emphasizes answering customer questions and they move through the sales cycle. That content is optimized for search and social media discovery and promoted through multiple channels.

Content usefulness is the standard, versus simply being informative. The content or media creates value in and of itself. Imagine a buyer’s guide, or advice about how to get more value from a product or service – beyond it’s intended use.

Jay Baer has an entire book about creating this kind of useful content called, Youtility, that I highly recommend.

Building connections though social networks is a key component for content promotion and growing influencer relationships starts to emerge as a critical skill.

Companies that master the creation of truly useful content also attract growing social communities. This creates a robust ecosystem of content and engagement. Competition amongst mature content marketers creating utility is already tough and will only increase. In order to create a more meaningful connection with buyers and the community, marketers start to tap into more emotional appeals in their content.  It’s not enough to inform, but to help buyers feel what the brand stands for.

Storytelling – As companies come to know the questions their target customers have during the sales cycle, there are also efforts to define and put forth a brand narrative – the story a company tries to tell to a specific target audience.

Evolving content marketing beyond features and benefits and incredible usefulness means connecting with customers on an emotional level. What better way to do that than through stories?

One way to think of this stage is that rather than just informing your customers, you’re creating experiences across channels through stories that contribute to both intellectual and emotional needs of the buyer.

Answering questions about what customers care about and how the brand wants to be known, are filtered through buying cycle analysis. Content planning identifies key brand narratives as part of the content marketing strategy and those stories drive content ideation across owned, earned, paid and shared media.

Social Networks mature at this stage and interactions with communities and influencers often contributes many of the content ideas. Along with growing influencer relationships is the growth of brand authority and subject matter experts as influencers themselves.

This is where “being the best answer” wherever customers are looking becomes a key driver for content. Also, integration of content with search, social, PR and influencer marketing is dynamic and optimized.

Evolving skills at integrating marketing messages across channels is a distinguishing feature of mature content marketers. Most companies are satisfied with the growth rates in community, engagement, customer acquisition and revenue at this stage. And yet, some will want more as they evolve their publishing capabilities and see even more opportunities to become the dominant authority in their industry.

Monetization 360 – Of course the goal for any stage is to monetize based on how effective content is at creating awareness, interest, driving consideration and ultimately purchase. This is the core function of marketing – create awareness, educate and inspire leads and sales.

However, for this stage, we’re talking about the ability to monetize through customer acquisition as well as through syndication, advertising and sponsorships. In other words, the marketing content is so good, so useful and such a great experience, that it can generate revenue on it’s own. Few content marketing programs can or need to achieve this stage, but of course it’s fantastic when you can.

Very few companies are able to monetize content marketing in this way, but I think we’ll see a lot more in 2014 and beyond. Some of our projects are just starting to enter into this stage and I’m looking forward to being able to share case studies and examples to complement movement through these 5 stages.

Not all companies will follow a model like this, 1 2 3 of course. That’s the point of the model: to anticipate where a company wants to be with their content marketing program and to create a strategy to evolve to the stage that makes the most sense.

It’s also unlikely that an entire organization’s content marketing program can be summed up as just one of these stages. But when you look at the characteristics of each stage, it’s easier to see how to align content marketing strategy to be more effective – for customers and for your business.

What do you think of this model? Do you see any similarities in your own experience as you’ve matured your content marketing capabilities?

Top image: Shutterstock

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2014. | Essential Stages of Content Marketing Evolution – If You’re Not Growing, You’re Dying | http://www.toprankblog.com

As an automotive buyer's consultant I have dealt with a lot of salespeople. Most of them are good, some of them not so good. One of the best salesmen I ever met didn't sell cars; he sold knock-off purses and wallets at a bazaar in Kusadasi, Turkey.

Read more...

Last year, content marketing spread like wildfire. Now, over 91% of B2B marketers are currently using content marketing, according to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute. And even more excitingly, content marketing has been proven to be one of the most effective tactics for lead generation.

Despite this, businesses are somewhat lost when it comes to the numbers. Even now, business owners are still doubtful about their content marketing spend. Some common questions are:

1. How much should I spend on content marketing?
2. What portion of my marketing budget should be allocated to content marketing?
3. How much does content marketing actually cost?

Image source

Unfortunately, there is no one answer as to how much your business needs to allocate for content marketing. Research gives us some general guidelines that on average businesses normally allocate 25% of their marketing budget to content marketing, but knowing whats right for your business is complex. The amount you should spend on content marketing is dependent on several different variables – your business’ growth plans and stage of maturity (younger = higher spend), your sales and revenue goals and specifically the number of leads you need to achieve those goals.

However, we are going to make it a little easier for you. In this blog, we’ll discuss the specific costs you must incur for content marketing.

Marketing Automation Software

A big cost you will have to incur initially is the purchase of your marketing automation tool for email marketing. This cost is usually accompanied by the costs of setting up a blog, since email marketing will not be the only tactic you use in your content marketing strategy. You will also want to invest in a tool that will automate your social media updates and manage your SEO and keywords too.

There are several email automation tools out there, such as Vision6 and MailChimp for email, SocialOomph and HootSuite for social media. Whilst these tools are quite easy to manage separately, the huge challenge is keeping these separate marketing channels aligned and the databases synched. Its hugely more economical and time efficient for you to use a complete marketing automation software package that combines email marketing, social networking, SEO, workflows and analytics capabilities, and so on, such as HubSpot.

Cost: Between $200 – $800 a month, plus several thousand dollars in setup and training costs (unless you use a Hubspot partner) – Based on HubSpot plans

People

Of course, even the best automation tools are worthless if you do not use it well. Therefore, you will also need to invest in the right resources. You need a skilled marketer who can develop a sound content marketing strategy that deploys the right mix of channels to help you achieve your goals, and a writer who understands the importance of writing engaging buyer focused content that encourages conversions.

Some organisations think a marketer can be a writer and vice versa. But the reality is – not all marketers can write engaging content and not many writers can write with marketing principles in mind. Ultimately, content generation must not be underestimated. It poses the greatest challenge for 69% of marketers, according to Hanley Wood Marketing. Therefore, it is crucial to invest your resources in a writer with a good marketing foundation to be able to write content that leads yours buyers forward in their buying journey.

Cost: $6,000 per month (based on average marketing and writer compensation) before overhead and taxes. (Fully loaded costs can easily reach $10k per month.)

Analysis and updates

You will have to invest time in analytics to regularly monitor the progress and results of your content marketing campaigns. Your reports will clearly show how your campaign is performing against objectives. This will help you determine the elements to change in your marketing campaign to improve your results.

Additionally, marketing automation tools such as HubSpot are always growing. They periodically release updates and new functionalities. It is important that your marketers keep up with these new features and leverage them to improve the results of your marketing campaigns.

Cost: $500 every month

All in all, content marketing costs organisations over $10,000 per month, when done internally, and that is over and above the time investment to understand the ins and outs of content marketing.

Of course some organisations prefer the option of outsourcing to an external B2B marketing agency to take care of it. In most cases, these will be more cost-effective since they have the experience with content marketing in general and are power users of the tools involved, and therefore don’t have to incur some costs that you would have to.

Equally, finding and keeping staff with the right skills is a constant challenge and oursourcing is a great way to manage this risk. When content generation s a fundamental part of your lead acquisition and sales strategy this is an important consideration.

Choosing the right agency to ensure a return on your investment is not alwyas easy. The key is to work with an agency who understands the importance of buyer centricity in all the content they generate and build this into the content campaigns they run for you.

To learn more, refer to the summary of our methodology. Or to dive further into content marketing, download our eBook: The Content Marketing Revolution.

Recently I was approached by a salesperson who was facing a tough challenge. When he gets his targeted buyers on the line he frequently has to deal with these sales objections: 

"We recognize your proven credentials but aren't taking on any new suppliers." 

"Great stuff, but we're already getting this from another vendor." 

He wanted to know how he could break through these sales barriers. Here are the two suggestions I gave him: 

1. Analyze what you're saying.

You're probably talking about your product/service way too early. The reason I say that is because the response you’re getting is a common reaction to that. 

To solve this problem, you need to rethink your entire conversation. What would it take to get them to say, “Mmmm. These guys really get the challenges we’re facing. They have some good ideas that could help us achieve our objectives. Maybe we should talk with them more.” 

It's likely you need to do more research/prep prior to calling so you can customize your message to their situation.

Also, think about sharing a case study at the start of your conversation to give your prospect an idea about how you help others achieve their goals.

Finally, be prepared with a question about their objectives and challenges. 

2. Be a bit more nicely brazen.

If you’ve done the above (which I sincerely believe needs some serious examination), then you are allowing yourself to be brushed off too easily. I’ve often found that it works well to say something like this:

“Listen, John. Based on what we’ve talked about, it’s highly likely that we could save your company XXX in 2014, at the same time we improve XXX. You’re not getting that from your current suppliers. So, what do we need to do to get on your approved vendor list.” 

That's not being rude. It's being confident in the results you deliver. And, you can do it with great sincerity when you know that what you sell truly does make a difference. 

By changing what you say and not backing down so quickly like a wuss, you will get different results.

Your Turn: That's my two cents! What other advice would you offer this struggling salesperson?

 

Regardless of form or viewing device, video is an ideal medium to engage, inform, and entertain prospective buyers and clients. Here's what you need to know to get in on the action. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Some companies want to stay true to their roots – they seem to have the difficulty to embrace an entirely new era of ways in which they market their business.

No one has the right to hold it against them.

As a matter of fact, surveys indicate that while employing the same, traditional methods they’ve had since the birth of their companies, they still reflect a positive growth in both their financial status and social presence. However, there are times when a company is no longer reaping the fruits of their beloved methods, and that’s the time they would want to open up their world into new opportunities.

These are the indications that your company might need a marketing strategy overhaul and summon social media to the rescue:

1.  Your business is not approachable.

Virtually every website nowadays (or at least the ones who were put up after 2008) includes a mandatory “Follow us on Twitter” or “Like us on Facebook” link on their pages. It has become so customary that people would actually look for these links on a website as a means of “bookmarking” them whenever they find something useful in it. Now imagine your potential clients not finding these links on your website and settling with an “Email Us” or worse, “Contact Us” link instead. You would even wonder why they even ended up on your website in the first place, since your website link is nowhere to be found on social networking sites. If your business is unknown in cyberworld, it might as well be unknown in the real world.

2. Your business needs to cut back on marketing allocations.

After a million years when you finally realize that your other marketing strategies (events, TV/radio ads, and magazines) don’t work like they used to, you would also realize that you’ve spent money that you didn’t earn back. This leads you to minimize expenses and resort to a medium that is essentially free and much more effective: social media.

3. Your employees are active social media users.

You’ll notice it when everyone seems to be talking about the latest office gossip except you. What better way to make use of their “addiction” than to put up social networking accounts for your business and have them maintain a strong presence online?

4. You want to know what’s going on out there.

The strongest sign for you to decide if your business needs to be social is when you yourself feel the urge to hop in the bandwagon. You can’t help but be curious with the possibilities of taking the plunge and getting the attention you’ve longed to get. You see your competitors marshalling a huge following on Twitter and you sit there wondering what things you could do with such power. That itself is already a calling for you to at least consider it.

The good thing about all this is that it’s risk-free. Once you’ve finally decided to engage in social media marketing and, after a few months, you’ve realized that it’s not working out as planned, you can always give it up and go back to your comfort zone. Maybe it’s not for everybody, but it sure is worth a try.

This content originally appeared at Callbox Blog.