Tag Archives: blog

Content Marketing: 12 Tips to Improve Your Business Blog

Posted on by under businesstips, content marketing, language, marketing

If you are in marketing, you certainly heard of or practice content marketing. This is the strategy of populating your blog, website and social media channels with written posts, video clips, audio clips, photos, games, infographics, etc. to attract your prospective customers, keep them coming back and start building a relationship with them. Of course, the idea is that this content is somehow related to your business.

You may think your business does not lend itself to this kind of promotion. Believe me: no matter how dry you may think your business is, there is always room to develop a content strategy for it. The efficacy of your marketing team should be measured by their ability to create such content and distribute it. In this day and age, it would be a huge mistake not to go this way. How do you expect to drive traffic to your website if you can’t offer useful information, entertainment, help or clarification about the products and services you sell?

In this blog post, we are focusing on one of the most effective kinds of content you could use on your website: blog posts. Having been an active blogger for the past 7 years, and seeing concrete results emerge from the strategy, I’ve selected 12 tips to help you improve your blog as a marketing tool:

1. Keep the blog on your website: for some kind of bloggers, there’s nothing wrong in using a public platform (such as WordPress or Tumblr) to host your blog. They have all the tools you need, and if you are prepared to pay for an upgrade, the possibilities of enhancement are unlimited. However, if you are a business, and already have a website – and especially if you sell directly through the Internet – why keep two separate sites, diverting your traffic or creating an intermediary step before your prospects reach you? Embed the blog in your main website. It will make it easier to turn prospects into leads, and convert them into buyers, if they are already there.

2. Write quality posts: blogs increase your page rank, allowing your company to appear higher in results lists of search engines. So it’s essential to avoid sloppiness. If you can’t write, hire competent writers. Everyone recognizes a good article when they read it. Have a strong and direct headline, able to capture the attention of the reader, and put a lot of effort into creating a compelling opening to your text. Grammar and spelling should be faultless. The language should be direct and simple. Paragraphs must be well ordered and clearly connected by linguistic cohesive devices. Break up long texts into smaller sections and use subheadings, lists, bullet points and italics as much as possible to guide the reader. Well written blogs, with quality articles, subject to careful Search Engine Optimization (SEO), increase your chances to do better in organic searches. Google specifically seeks to offer their clients the best possible experience in their search. The better your content, the more relevant your headlines and subheadings, the easier it will be for your business to be found on the Internet.

3. Choose an angle: many people write about the same topics. There’s nothing wrong about that. However, make sure your article is written with an original perspective. Make it personal. Base it on your own experience or the image your company wishes to project. Think brand alignment and positioning.

4. Write more frequently: quantity matters. Quality is essential, of course, but numbers also count. Therefore, the more blog posts or pages you have on your site, the bigger your visibility. Google loves freshness. Blogs which are systematically and frequently fed with new quality content gain points in their ever-changing page ranking algorithm.

5. Use images: make sure they are legal and attractive, maybe slightly controversial or funny (they must suit your positioning and brand voice. Do not steal images. Try free or paid photo libraries on the Internet, subscribe to Hubspot (they will reward you with dozens of images on certain topics as a gift now and then; or take your own pictures. Ask members of your staff to contribute their photos to an image bank everyone could draw upon at the company.

6. Write content that is fun, entertaining or inspiring: yet somehow related to your business: not all your posts need to be about your product or service. Use your blog as tool to attract prospects. Use soft sales tactics: get them to see or read something lighthearted or inspiring on your blog post occasionally. Of course, if you can subtly bridge the post to your service and product, even better.

7. Write content that helps educate your prospect: sometimes people will not even know they need a product like yours as they navigate the Web. You need to clearly show them the benefits of what you sell before they get interested. What is your product? What does it do? What problem does it solve? Why is it different? How can they use it? Where?

8. Write content to guide leads through the sales funnel: after you get the prospect’s attention, offer something else to get them even more interested: a free ebook for download, an infographics poster, a sample of your product, a visit from your rep to demonstrate the product. Do not ask them to fill in long forms to get the gift (their email address and opt-in allowing you to contact them should be enough to continue the conversation). Close the deal every step of the way. Closing doesn’t mean necessarily selling, but getting progressive commitments to the next steps along the sales funnel until you get the purchase.

9. Write content to solve your customers problems: use your blog as a troubleshooter. Transfer part of the work done by your customer service to the blog. Tutorials are a great help. You can use blog space to embed short how-to videos, slide presentations, or offer ebooks/white papers for download to help answer questions and have the clients take full advantage of the product after they purchase it.

10. Use social media sharing buttons to allow readers to share your content: people love to curate content. When they see something they like on the Internet, they immediately think of saving that for future reference or sharing it with their own audience. Make sure you make that sharing process direct and easy for them. They will be promoting your stuff to people you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise.

11. Elicit the readers participation: unlike the days of Mad Men, the popular TV show, marketing nowadays is a two-way road. Customers wish to comment and talk to you about your product on the internet. Allow them to do so on your blog, so you can keep a closer eye on what is being said and take fast corrective measures if necessary. Invite them to a dialogue, build a community around your blog, by allowing them to post their comments and rate your post. Learn how to be cool: don’t let the compliments go to your head, but also don’t feel thrown off when you get criticisms.

12. Pomote your blog: use as many social media channels as you can to place links to your main content. These are the social media channels I find more useful to drive traffic to my blogs, ordered from the most effective to the least: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Adwords (paid ads),Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook (Meta). You need to try many others and start measuring to find how they work for you.

The payoff of creating and keeping a popular blog is huge. People will start thinking of you as an authority on the topics you usually write about. You will become a thought leader, to use the current buzzword for this kind of reputation. Your audience will grow through word of mouth and higher positions in search engine page results. As a consequence, you’ll slowly become a reference for the kind of service or product you offer. This is likely to have a direct impact on your bottom line.

Jorge Sette

Five Most Common Misconceptions About Writing

Posted on by under art, blogging, businesstips, Career advice, content marketing, culture, E-books, education, language, marketing, sales

Writing is today more fashionable than it has been in a long time. Perhaps it’s at the peak of its importance ever, with all the blogs, messages, emails and tweets swamping our computer, tablet and smart phone screens every second of the day. Of course, most of the time it’s bad or unclear writing. But everyone is doing it one way or another, and job opportunities are opening up for those who do it well.

Content is the key word in the workplace today. Especially if you are in sales & marketing. The buyer has all the power today and they control when, how and where they will make their next purchase. In this context, writing can be a great asset in educating and persuading prospects, making them see you as the expert, or thought leader in your field. Writing great content and making it available will help you develop a relationship with your potential customers, who will definitely lean towards your offer when the time is right.

Saint Jerome Writing (detail) by Caravaggio

Saint Jerome Writing (detail) by Caravaggio

As a consequence of its importance, the Internet is full of advice about effective writing, how to put blogs together, the dos and don’ts and best practices of publishing anything. By all means, read all you can, as there is a lot of useful information online. Beware, however, of some of the most common misconceptions about writing: in general most of them were acquired or developed at school and academic settings rather than on the Internet. Here are five of the most common:

1. Writing is about inspiration and waiting for the muse to come down and sit on your keyboard. Well, I’m afraid there’s not enough room for the muse to relax and spread out on such a small space. Also, deadlines have a weird way of not accommodating the muse’s busy schedule, so do not wait to get started. Writing is not necessarily what Hemingway warned us against in his famous quote: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Make it more active: brainstorm ideas, do some research, check out what is trending online, use automatic topic generators on the Internet, and do not delay. Start the process as soon as you can,

 2. Writing comes out as the masterpiece you usually read in the printed copy of good magazines, newspapers and books. Well, the final draft is not easy to get to. That’s what you see published. But anyone can get the process started and refine it until you achieve a satisfactory result. The saying writing is rewriting, or writing is more about transpiration than inspiration are indeed true. Once you spill out your first ideas and get them more or less outlined on the page, you will start the process of polishing them. And that is the hard part. This will take time, effort and immense patience.

3. You cannot self-edit. If we are not talking about your PhD thesis or your fiction masterpiece, do not believe you need a team of copyeditors, researchers and proofreaders ready to work for you. They are expensive and hardly available in enough numbers even for big publishing companies nowadays. So, unless you can count on close friends to help you out with it (remember you can always return the favor), you must learn tactics for self-editing. Do not hesitate to count on every piece of technology available to help you with the task: spell checkers, grammar checkers, dropdown thesaurus, online dictionaries, you name it. There are a lot of very useful tools out there. Read your drafts as many times as you can and carry on refining them. There will be a moment when you’ll get so fed up with reading your piece you will want to throw up. That’s when you take a serious break. I’m not talking about the proverbial coffee time (you have probably been drinking coffee nonstop throughout the whole process anyway). Just abandon your text for a couple of days (I hope you can afford to do that. Factor in those necessary breaks when you plan your timetable to meet the deadline). Next time you get back to the text, you will see it with fresh eyes, and give it the final touches as a Steven Pinker would.

4. Sophisticated writing is good writing. Write as you speak. Content that will help you sell is content that’s simple enough for the majority of readers to understand. So drop the long words and complex sentences. The golden rule of elegance is less is more. Apply this to your writing: precision and simplicity of vocabulary, clarity of ideas, avoidance of overuse of the passive voice, and keeping to what is essential are the tactics that will make you win the reader over. As you read and reread your text, try to leave out everything that is superfluous or redundant. Cut, cut, cut.

5. Not everyone can write. You are write (sorry: right) to think so, if you are using Oscar Wilde or Hemingway as your standard. Artistic and creative writing are not for everyone. It does not need to be for you. But most people can learn to develop and communicate clear, authoritative and persuasive ideas in writing. It takes practice, though. All the content marketing gurus agree on this single point: you need to write everyday if you are in the business. The blog post you will write as soon as you finish reading this text will sound a hundred times better than the one you wrote around the same time last year. They will be both there on the Internet: just read and compare them. You will have improved. So keep working at it and surprise yourself month after month at how much better you are becoming. Good luck!

Would you like to share with us any advice on writing? Please do not hesitate to do so on the comments section of this blog. You might as well rate us so we can improve.

Au revoir

Jorge Sette

Should you have a blog as a marketer?

Posted on by under art, Career advice, content marketing, Escrita, language, marketing, sales, sales training, Writing

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Ernest Hemingway

As we all bloggers know, Hemingway did nail the writing process in his quote above. Yes, it’s hard; yes, it’s time-consuming; no, it’s never right the first time around. Writing is rewriting. For a 1000-word blog post, I would say the average blogger would write at least 10 drafts before he is reasonably satisfied with the result. He is lucky if he has an editor to help with the polishing, but that is not usually the case.

However, in this day and age of content marketing, you would be crazy as a marketer if you did not sit down at least once a week to create or repurpose some  written content to post on the Internet. Let me highlight in this post the features of good blog posts and how your business could benefit from them.

Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror by Bacon, Francis, 1976

Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror by Bacon, Francis, 1976

1. Search engine optimization: provided you offer useful and original content, employing the relevant key words, blogging will help your business show up on the SERPs (search engine results pages) of your prospective clients. I don’t know many people today who will not go to Google at some point during the buying cycle to do a search before actually purchasing a product or service. So, to be available, to show up, it will help to have a carefully SEOed (search engine optimized) blog to pop up on the first page.

2. Answer your customers questions: the buying process – the cycle your prospects go through before committing to a purchase –  consists of the the following phases: first, the prospect needs to identify a need or problem; second, they will try to learn about possible solutions; third, they will start shopping for the ideal solution; afterwards, when they are ready, they will look for directions to actually buy it (online or offline); finally, when they start using the product, they might have problems or questions about it, so you need to offer them prompt customer service. Your blog needs to account for each one of these phases and provide the appropriate answers to help them at the stage they are, moving them along the sales funnel. It takes close communication between Marketing, Sales and Customer Service to identify the customers most frequently asked questions and issues, and try to solve them through your blog content. So it’s time to cooperate (there’s no need to tell me how hard this can be, but it’s worth trying): salespeople and customer service professionals need to develop their marketing skills, while marketers should learn more about the customers from sales and customer service so they can provide qualified leads.

3. Thought leadership: by covering content that speaks to the different needs of your customers at the different stages of the buying process you will soon develop a reputation of an expert in the field. Even if you don’t get conversions in terms of sales at the first moment, your customers will grow to trust your opinions and respect your points of view. When the time comes for them to make a buying decision, who do you think they will turn to?

4. Style: your blog is not supposed to be a work of art if you are a marketer. So write as simply and elegantly as possible, as if you were actually “talking” to the prospect. A marketer’s blog is not a piece of literature, so tone down your message, and be objective and direct. Of course it would help to be aware of the reading level of your audience, but “according to many reports (including the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics’ 1992 Adult Literacy survey), the average reading level is the 7th or 8th grade. Combine that with reports of increasingly low-attention spans of Internet users who require even milder language and you’re looking at a reading level of the 6th or 7th grade”  (http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2013/10/ezinearticles-asks-what-reading-level-should-you-target.html) . If you really wish to fine tune your text’s level of difficulty, there are some tools on the Internet (try the Readability Test Tool, for example, http://read-able.com) that will allow you to measure it.

5. The title: the importance of a catchy title to crown your blog post cannot be underestimated. This is the first impression you will make on the reader, and you only have a couple of seconds to entice them. So think carefully about it. Putting yourself in the shoes of a journalist may help, after all, this is your headline. Research says that questions are a good way to go, as they tease the reader into looking for the answer in the text.

6. Promoting and Repurposing: to make the most of all the effort you put into writing your piece, promoting your blog is a must. Use your social media channels with this objective. Putting links to your blog post repeatedly, however,  may not be the solution (although you’ll have to do it occasionally). Be careful not to make your audience feel spammed. Another solution is to repurpose your content and distribute it in different formats to suit the different social media channels: write a summary of the content as an image (for Instagram); use the photos you put in your blog post with a link to it (Instagram, Facebook); write a headline for your blog with a link to it (Twitter); turn it into an infographics poster (Pinterest); use the main points for a slide presentation (slideshare), etc.

As with most things in life, practice makes perfect. Some people say they blog everyday so they can improve.  Research indicates that to be excellent at a skill you need to have spent at least 10,000 hours at it (read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”  for a deeper explanation on this). Maybe you don’t have that  amount of time available anymore, but I would say it’s never too late to get started. What you can’t afford to do as a marketer is NOT to have a blog. How about starting today?

Au revoir

Jorge Sette