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Posts Tagged ‘marketing strategy’

Posted on August 5, 2010 - by Kwame

11 Easy Tips For Better Content Marketing

Do you use content to drive traffic and generate leads? Content marketing has become the preferred means of marketing for many businesses. It’s a great strategy for attracting leads to your business. Blogs, whitepapers, online videos, podcasts and other content forms are there to show us the truth behind content marketing.

If your content is not getting you the results you want or even if you are new to content marketing, there is good news. It’s possible to change.

With that setting the stage, here are 11 tips to help you in your content marketing.

1. Have a goal: When you’re planning your content, set a goal for it. What do you want to achieve with your content? Perhaps, you want it to get you more newsletter signups or more sales for your products. The best way to set goals for your content is to categorize them. For example, you can categorize your content like this: drive traffic, generate leads, generate sales, etc. Delving further:

List posts: Drive traffic. Traffic may convert to leads
Downloadable Documents: Increase traffic conversions to leads
Customer reviews/ testimonials/ case studies: Convert traffic and leads to sales

Categorizing and setting goals like this helps you choose the right words to use to achieve your content marketing goals.

2. Produce enlightening content frequently: The two keywords here are “enlightening” and “frequently”. When you produce great content, people will want to share it and subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter. Teach people in your industry new ways to do things. If you disagree with an accepted norm in your industry, produce content to debunk it and share it with top players in your industry.

When you produce great content, people talk about you on their blogs. When you produce great content, your business grows. When you produce great content… the goodies goes on and on and on.

3. Analyze and Proofread: After planning and producing your content, take your time and double check for errors. If you’re unsure of any mistakes, work with someone who is better at spelling and grammar to help you out. Also make sure your content is easy to understand and is convincing enough especially when you are using it as a sales tool or to debunk a theory.

4. Stack up content ideas: Plan your content ahead of time. This reduces the probability of not having any content to share when you want to produce content. I keep a word document with many content ideas so I’m not often faced with writers block. Stacking up content ideas also helps you write great content because you have a mental picture of what you’ll be writing about.

5. Use different content formats: Don’t only rely on text to promote your business. Use graphics, PDFs, audio, and video. People want to be spoiled with choice when it comes to giving them content. They want to watch screen casts of what you are talking about. They want to listen to your content on their mp3 players. They also want your content on their desktops in document format.

6. Stay informed: Be attentive online. Subscribe to blogs in your niche. Set up alerts on Social Mention and Google to track news and articles with keywords you’ll be interested in. Learn about new marketing opportunities. Learn about new trends. Use the information you collect to keep your content and strategies up to date.

7. Manage your time: Having a time-table or to-do list is a great way to manage your time as a content marketer. Producing great content can take some time so you need to give yourself enough time when you are producing content. Learn how to manage your time so that you’re ready when you feel the urge to create content.

8. Network Effectively: Do you want influential bloggers to link to you or talk about your product? Then don’t just follow and friend them on social networking sites. Most of them won’t follow or friend you back anyway. You’ll have to prove yourself worthy to be talked about by networking properly with them.

Start by commenting on their blogs and joining in their conversations on social media and networking sites. Leave insightful comments on their status updates. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything. You can also contribute an article to their blog.

Another great way to network is to use interviews. Interview opinion leaders about the latest industry trends or get yourself interviewed by bloggers.

Networking gets you noticed. When you get noticed, you’ll be talked about on these blogs and their readers will also notice you and talk about you on their blogs.

9. Do your research: When you’re not sure of something, do some research online. Never add statements and quotes to your content without finding out whether they’re right or not. If you make a mistake with this, people will question the credibility of the rest of the information you’re giving them.

10. Identify and use content aggregators: Some websites are programmed to aggregate and show content from various sources. I call these sites content outlets. These sites will help you reach a larger audience with your content. Some examples are Social Media Today, The Daily Brainstorm, The Customer Collective, Alltop, etc.

11. Think SEO: If you publish text, audios and videos, you have to always think S.E.O. when producing your content. You’ll have to optimize your titles and use the right key words in your descriptions. It’s the only way you’ll reach more people.

Conclusion:

What strategies do you use in your content marketing? Share them with me.

Next week, I’ll start a series of articles that will show you how to reuse your blog and newsletter ideas to generate more leads. You’ll learn new things including video and audio SEO. Subscribe to the RSS feed in order not to miss this.

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Posted on May 21, 2010 - by Kwame

Five Reasons Why Paid Reviews are Great for Internet Business Start-ups

A paid review is a promotional method used by many online businesses to spread the word about their products or service. It is a promotional technique used by both big and small business to get new business for new products and services. We are going to delve into its importance more but let’s start by defining what a paid review is.

What is a paid review?

A paid review is a review whereby one is paid to write about his or her evaluation or appraisal of a product or service. The reviews are based on personal knowledge or experience with the item being reviewed. It is a cheap way of getting news of products and services out.

If you don’t have enough cash to spend or if you have the cash but don’t want to take a lot of risk, you can pay someone who has a big follower base to tell their followers about your product.

Five reasons why paid reviews are great for start-ups:

Your brand gets some recognition: Your brand will be put in front of an audience who may be having problems that your products can solve. If you find the right audience for your products, pay the leaders of your audience to tell their followers about your products or services.

You will get traffic to your website: The readers of the blog on which your review is published will flock your website to find out more or take a free trial (if you have one available). Some readers might tweet about it on Twitter and some will share it on Facebook, Linkedin, et cetera.

Other people will start reviewing your product or service for free: Whether you pay them or not, people will start reviewing your products on their blogs. I have seen this happen on a lot of blogs.

You save a lot of money: You will save money since paid reviews generate free word of mouth marketing (the best form of marketing in world if you ask me).

You get back links: This will help increase your website’s page rank and your search engine rankings. If your product or service is reviewed on an authority blog with high PR (page rank), your own page rank will get some credit and if other bloggers review your products for free, their page ranks add up to help increase your own.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on reviews. You can have a small budget and still get it to work.

Before you pay someone to review your product or service, you need to do your due diligence. You want to get lots of traffic to your site right?

Three tips you can use to help with you get great results:

Make sure the blog has a lot of RSS subscribers: This will help you get more eyeballs to read the review, thus, increase the effectiveness.

Make sure the blog’s readers are targeted or suitable for your product’s market: For example, if you are selling an eBook about internet marketing, make sure the blog is about internet marketing or internet business.

Make sure you are paying a reasonable price for the review: Some bloggers charge higher than others but provide little value in terms of all the points I have made above.

If you are lucky, some bloggers will share the review article with their email list. Most bloggers have thousands of newsletter subscribers and it will be your lucky day if they decide to share it with their email list too at no extra cost.

You can ‘manipulate’ readers and bloggers a little bit if you also offer an affiliate program. That will even spice things up more since people will get a commission just by telling other people about your product on their blogs, on Twitter, and all over the internet.

You can also spice things up a little more if your review includes a promo code or discount code with an expiry date. This will create some sort of urgency for people to buy your product before the price is regularized.

You can also try and add a competition to your review where you give out prizes to people who visit your website or who also write a review of your product on their website. Just play with ideas.

What do you think about marketing with paid reviews? Any experiences, thoughts or ideas questions? Let me know in the comments box.

Posted on May 18, 2010 - by Kwame

How Competitions Can Build Your Online Business

We all love competitions and winning prizes don’t we? We certainly do. The businesses who organize these competitions and sweepstakes also love giving out their prizes.

That is why they spend money easily to organize these events. Hmm, I guess I have to explain more.

There are tons of benefits of organizing your own competitions and sweepstakes. I will be sharing the benefits your business can derive from organizing such events and also share some ideas on contests and sweepstakes with you.

First, let’s look at the difference between contests and sweepstakes:

A contest is an event in which individuals with required skill sets submit their work for judgment. For example, an art contest will require good art skills.

A sweepstake is an event which requires no skill at all to enter to win a prize. With sweepstakes, winners are chosen through random picking in the style of a lottery.

With those two words defined, let’s look at the benefits of organizing them.

Sweepstakes and contests can:

Drive traffic to your website or social media profile

Build brand awareness

Increase your social media following or fan base

Make people (who may or may not be your customer) feel connected to your brand.

Help you build some sort of collaborative bond between your brand and people. For example, let’s say you have a site with an API that you want people to develop into apps, one of the best ways you can do that is by hosting a competition or sweepstake to get people to start building an App community around your website.

These and many other benefits can be derived from hosting a sweepstakes or contest.

I want us to also look at how you can organize your own and also what criteria you can (or should) follow.

First, you must set rules for your competition.

Rules of the Competition:

The rules of your contest or sweepstakes must cover:

1. How to Enter:

State how people can enter; basically, the requirements and non-requirements.

2. Number of Entries:

You will need to state how many times participants are allowed to enter.

3. Prizes:

You will need to tell the participants about what they will win if they are chosen.

4. Disclaimer:

If you are going to use the winner’s name or photos in an advertisement or infomercial after they have won, you may need to ask them to sign a waiver that will confirm their agreement.

5. Liability Clause:

You may also need to state in a clause that your company will not be responsible for any injuries or damages that participants may incur as a result of entering the competition.

6. Other Rules:

You may also need to state other rules and guidelines you will want participants to adhere to.

You may need to advertise your competition so that more people will see it and participate.

You can buy advertisement or you can use free forms of advertising that may be available to your business.

If you don’t have any online influence (on Facebook, Twitter, your business blog’s RSS or email list), then you should consider paying for advertisement to get exposure for your competition. On the other hand, if you have online influence, you can use that influence to promote your competition.

I got the chance to get Maya Grinberg, Community Manager and Product Evangelist at WildfireApps to answer two questions about online competitions and this is what she had to say:

KWAME: Where do most businesses go wrong when they organize competitions and sweepstakes?

MAYA: Organizing competitions and sweepstakes is an excellent way to drive user engagement, increase awareness of your brand or product, and build up your fan base. Creating great, engaging, and fun promotions like these to accomplish your social media strategy goals is one thing though– there is another key step to the equation that sometimes gets left out.

Creating a promotion and sitting back to “hope for the best” will not lead to success. Unless you’re one of the lucky multi-national companies who seem to have infinite brand awareness and tons of fans who send news on its merry viral way instantly, you’re going to have to kickstart the spread yourself a bit.

We wrote a blog post previously about some of our favorite advertising strategies that will help companies do that…and the good news is, many of these wont cost a single penny! Feel free to read that post at http://blog.wildfireapp.com/2010/03/25/7-strategies-for-marketing-your-facebook-fan-page-promotions/

KWAME: What makes a successful competition or sweepstakes event?

MAYA: A successful contest or sweepstakes depends very much on how relatable, engaging, entertaining, and interactive it is for your users. This is a relative thing– depending on what your brand or company does, your users may appreciate different things, like gardening tips for home improvement enthusiasts or pictures of babies for parenting communities.

The key is to listen to your audience, capture some of their interactions with your brand, and use that knowledge to create compelling promotions. For example, fan pages for products related to raising toddlers can almost always feel secure in creating user generated photo contests relating to cute babies. Parents just love to take photos of their kids, and the only thing they love more than that is sharing them.

If you know things like this about your audience, use them to your advantage. Have a dental office that needs a social media strategy? Consider a sweepstakes that rewards the winner with a free teeth whitening. Have a bakery? Put up a coupon for a dozen free cookies with any other purchase. The most important thing to increasing your odds at running a successful promotion is to try to understand your audience, and cater your promotion to their interests.

Thanks to Maya for providing this wealth of information. Anyways, you can follow Maya on Twitter @papayamaya

WildfireApps is an excellent service that can help you promote your competitions online if you don’t want to do it alone or if you need help.

You can share your thoughts or experience with contests and sweepstakes in the comment box below.