Posts tagged content marketing


Six ways to create great content in just 15 minutes a day

Jun 10th

108 comments

Let’s face it. Content development can be a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive proposition! So I started thinking about this in the context of my friends and small business customers who simply can’t afford that kind of effort.  It led to this idea: micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content when you don’t have time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.

Let’s examine ideas about using micro-content for your social media strategy, assuming you are testing the water and only have 15 minutes a day to devote to this activity. Hey, I’m up for a challenge!

Preparation

Like any marketing initiative, you must have a firm idea of your strategy, selling points, and target audience.  Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You’ll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative.  Once you have a firm idea of “your story,” here are some content marketing options that work in just 15 minutes a day:

1) Slideshare

Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides! Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website. The time to upload an existing presentation? Less than 10 minutes.

2) LinkedIn forums

LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content!

There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the “search” function at the top of the page, highlight “groups” and look for a few that have like-minded people who might be interested in you.   If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.

Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website.  I’ve made some fantastic connections this way and acquired two great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they “click” on you! Depending on your industry, spending 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.

3) Networking on Twitter

This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content. In this separate post, I’ve provided some helpful ideas on building a targeted audience through Twitter.  It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening!  Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you’re just starting to tweet.

1) Create a habit of sharing — Today, every article, post and video has a “tweet” button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.

2) Leverage your network — If you’ve surrounded yourself with interesting people, they’re providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don’t have to generate everything yourself.  ”Re-purposing” other people’s content takes almost no time all.

3) Try following the “3 x 3 x 3 rule” — If you’re new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects:  a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.

Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content — drive people to action on your website.  Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio.

Don’t be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so your 15 minutes of daily networking are well-spent.

4) Connecting Through Comments

Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:

  • A small business owner I advised commented on a magazine’s Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
  • Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
  • My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That’s not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long “shelf life.”
  • Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.

I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re “micro.”  People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy?  Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments?

5) Micro-video

Videos are just so hot right now but you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.

I carry my $150 Kodak HD video camera with me everywhere I go. Recently, I gave a speech at an innovative new center for entrepreneurship in Chicago. I whipped out my camera and did a four-minute interview with the director. After I uploaded it to YouTube (for free), I embedded it on my blog (the embed code is under the “share” button on every YouTube video).

Voila! With 15 literally minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog — which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream, and LinkedIn status.

6) Micro-content and blogging

There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing  micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:

  • Cut and paste answers you’ve already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
  • Start a blog post with, “I found this interesting article through a link on Twitter …” and share the great content from one of your tweets.
  • Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
  • Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.

A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts in 15 minutes.

In summary …

These are just a few of the ways you can effectively network on the social web with a “sprinkle” of content instead of a flood.  Obviously there are hundreds of other ideas, but this is at least a start — even if you only have 15 minutes a day.

How you are using small nuggets of content to support your time-starved marketing strategy?

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The profound power of five blog readers

May 6th

47 comments

At the recent Social Slam conference, there was a ton of inspiring content from some of the greatest marketing minds around. And yet to me, the sentence from the day-long conference that has lingered in my mind came from the least-known speaker of the day.  She is not a marketer. She is not a social media expert. In fact, Social Slam was the first social media conference she had ever attended.

I invited Dr. Alice Ackerman, a pediatrician and college educator from Virginia Tech University, to relate her inspiring story of how she was connecting to her community through social media. She told the audience of her introduction to the social web through The Tao of Twitter and of her struggles to get approval to blog from the university medical community. She persevered and eventually got the go-ahead, but finding an audience for her blog posts was another matter.

Much of her first blogging efforts were aimed at educating the community on the importance of childhood vaccinations. But she had some doubt as to whether she was making an impact.  She displayed a chart displaying the lowly results of her blogging efforts.  For more than a year, her posts limped along.  In fact, she averaged 4.5 readers a day.

And then something magical happened when she received this tweet:

Dr. Ackerman is the person who changed my mind once I read her blog and her links. I had no idea that info existed.

And it was at this point that Dr. Ackerman delivered the line at the conference that received a thunderous applause from all the hard-working bloggers in attendance:

“Yes, I only had 4.5 readers a day on my blog … but I had an impact on one of them.”

I thought this was a profound lesson on many levels.

  • “Citizen Influencers” are using the power of online publishing tools to make a difference in unexpected ways
  • You never know when your words are making an impact
  • Tenacity, commitment, and patience make the difference in social media success

I think this is an inspiring message for any blogger out there. What do you think? Are you making a difference in big and small ways?

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For social media success, write, then IGNITE. Here’s how.

Mar 18th

19 comments

I recently did some volunteer work for a national charity and provided counsel on their social media strategy. The PR Agency started the meeting by listing all of the “messaging” being developed to support a major fund-raising push in 2012. The list looked something like this:

  • Press releases
  • Podcast
  • Promotional video
  • Slideshow
  • Photos and videos from local events
  • Clips from local TV stations

They’re off to a good start because there is the potential for a lot of interesting content here. But ultimately the effort will fail as merely a blip on the radar because nobody in the organization is working on the network strategy. Developing content for the social web is a waste of time if it just sits there like a bump on a Heinz dill pickle. It has to go some place if it is to attract attention and eventually compel people to do something.

To ignite a social strategy, you must ignite your content.

So to be successful, you must aggressively develop the “human pathways” that will carry your content to the world … not just write press releases that you HOPE will be buried on a community events calendar somewhere. And the larger — and more engaged — the network, the better the chances for success, so get started NOW!

Here is an action plan I provided to this charity that would result in long-term success … and it can ONLY be long-term success because it takes TIME and CONSISTENT EFFORT to build a relevant and engaged network that will share your stuff!

1) Identify all the passionate advocates of the charity. They are a powerful and critical first step in building an engaged network.

2) Explain to them why you need their help and the benefits of helping — you’re connecting many small networks to create an enormous network.

3) Teach them how to proactively and aggressively build a targeted network and a social media presence so that you have hundreds of “beacons” for your brand.

4) Give this group tips on how to effectively share, connect, and network on their favorite social platforms.

5) Assign a central resource to “corral” real, passionate stories, videos, photos from the field to share across the ENTIRE network. Unleash the content! This will provide a constant drip-drip-drip of interesting content every week.

6) Make the content easy to share. Have easy-to-find social sharing options. Use Linked Within (like I do at the bottom of each post) to highlight similar stories of interest (this increases my page views by about 8 percent). Highlight other content of interest on the site.

7) Institute free, simple monitoring tools like Google Alerts and saved Twitter searches to measure the effort and identify the most successful networks and content. “Buzz” is a leading indicator of donations. If the buzz is going, up, up, up, the donations will eventually follow.

I care about this cause so I’m going to try to shepherd this as best I can. Hopefully it will work. Does this make sense to you? What other advice would you give this worthy cause?

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7 Reasons Your Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working

Mar 16th

22 comments

Guest post by {grow} Community Member Sarah Golinger

As marketers, we know that the best way to generate quality leads for our businesses is by creating great content.  A strong content marketing strategy offers informational and educational materials to interested readers, allowing them to learn more about your industry, your company, and your product or service, and hopefully become prospective customers.  Not to mention, it also provides a great opportunity to create more ways to engage your website visitors and social media followers.  But while it is extremely important, having a good content strategy isn’t always easy.  Here are 7 reasons your content strategy might not be generating leads as effectively as it should be.

1. You’re targeting the wrong audience.  Targeting is a key component of all aspects of marketing, but it’s especially important for content.  Let’s face it – in order for someone to even consider reading what you’ve written, it has to offer some sort of value to them.  It needs to fulfill a need or desire of theirs, in this case, probably to learn or understand something about your industry or alleviate a problem that your product aims to resolve.  Figure out what it is that your readers are looking for.  Use your analytics tools to determine which pieces of your content have performed particularly well.  See which pages of your website attract the most visitors.  Create a poll to send to your readers via social media or email and ask them what kind of content they’d be interested in consuming.  And don’t forget to segment your audience appropriately so you can target your content more closely.

2. Your content is too repetitive or boring.  Again, people are looking for valuable content.  You have to keep it interesting!  No one wants to read the same information every 3 blog posts.  Plus, you probably have more to teach your readers than you might realize.  Think about all the different features of your product or service and what relevant information you can offer to your readers in an educational manner.  Write about industry news, updates, and trends.  Maybe some of the tasks you perform in your role at your company would be helpful for others in similar positions.  Keep coming up with fresh content ideas, and you’ll find that your readers might stick around longer.

3. You don’t vary your content formats.  Speaking of keeping things fresh, one of the easiest ways to do that is to produce content in different formats.  If you usually just write blog posts, crank out an ebook once in a while.  If you tend to spend your time doing webinars, try making a few shorter videos.  If you’ve never made an infographic before, try one of those!  And even though they’re quick to write, don’t forget to include social media updates as another integral part of your content strategy.  There’s lots of room to be creative with your content, so change it up and offer more ways for your readers to consume your information.

4. Your content is too promotional.  Sure, the ultimate goal is to get your readers to become customers, but the whole idea behind content marketing is to provide educational information.  By establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry, you not only gain more readership, but you gain the trust of your readers.  Their interest in learning more from you will allow you to learn about and target their needs and interests.  Once you’ve figured out what your readers are looking for, you can teach them about how your product or service can fulfill that need, and eventually send them over to your sales team.  But this is a process; you can’t just include a sales pitch in all of your content, or you’ll never gain your readers’ trust or interest from the start.

5. You’re not promoting your content enough.  Okay, so you’re writing well-targeted, interesting, educational content, but no one’s reading it.  Well, are you telling people about it?  Use the different channels you have to spread the word about your content.  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn are all great places to post links to your blog posts, ebooks, and webinars.  You can post to your blog about your latest ebook, and even include an excerpt to give a sneak peak.   Create a page on your website where visitors can access all of your offers.  Send out an email to let people know about your upcoming webinar and how to sign up.  Just make sure you’re giving your content enough visibility so it doesn’t stay hidden from potential readers and viewers.

6. You’re not promoting your content through the right channels.  Once you’ve started distributing your content through multiple channels, look at your analytics to figure out which ones are the most effective.  If the majority of your target audience is on Facebook, your status updates will be more useful there.  Maybe your email sends generate more click-throughs than the links in your blog posts.  Use insights from your data to spend your time focusing on the channels that drive the most traffic and leads.

7. You’re not including calls-to-action.  You don’t want to be overly promotional in your content, but you do want to give your readers a clear indication of what to do next by including calls-to-action.  You might suggest a blog post that offers more tips on the subject, or direct your ebook readers to register for a webinar that covers the advanced level of that topic.  More importantly, you should provide your readers with opportunities to learn more about your specific product by including calls-to-action for free trials, demos, or assessments.  Guiding your prospects to the next steps that they should take will make for a much smoother transition from prospect to lead, and eventually from lead to customer.

So, are you ready to generate more leads with a killer content strategy?  Avoid these mistakes, and you’ll be well on your way to driving more traffic and better business in no time.

This is a guest post by Sarah Goliger, an inbound marketer at HubSpot. HubSpot is a marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA that makes inbound marketing and lead management software.

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