4 simple truths about content marketing re-imagined ~ by Helen Nesterenko

Content marketing is still a new field, and it remains dynamic and evolving. Every day, we have access to new statistics, which are based on the increasingly fine and detailed data that can be collected. These all reveal the importance of content marketing to businesses, and the very management of day to day operations.
However, despite all the buzz about this topic, it’s still important to keep basic principles and good sense in mind when crafting your content marketing strategy.
This article will highlight some basics to keep you current with the state of the industry.

Content is king

We have all heard this, and interpreted it in our own ways. However, as always when immersed in the daily pressure of running a business or maintaining a website, it is easy to become distracted by all the new developments and forget what is essential – the content itself. Have you lavished days of work on landing page graphics and shortchanged the text? Have you obsessively counted characters for the title of your post, and then rushed to try to produce a graceful composition fulfilling your title’s promise? Have you invested seemingly endless hours poring over website analytics, while forgetting to check in on what your audience is actually saying about your webpage?
Your readers always have time for what helps them get through their day, makes their life better, improves their business, or saves them effort or money. No landing animations, graphics of pretty models, website optimizing keywords, or urgent and appealing calls to action will compensate for rushed and poorly-thought-out content.


Stay positive. Work your @ss off. Educate yourself and remember these basic principles for successful content marketing. Good luck!
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About Helen Nesterenko

Helen Nesterenko is the founder of Writtent.com, the go-to place for engaging content that drives marketing results for businesses. She loves everything about blogging, writing and content marketing. That is why she truly enjoys sharing her insights with the audience.

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7 Things Good Communicators Always Do ~ By Jayson DeMers

Communicating is easy, but communicating well takes skill. Thinking beyond basic language rules and facilitating effective, positive exchanges of information is something not everyone can do. Fortunately, good communication habits come with regular practice, so if you know what it takes to sharpen your skills, you can proudly communicate like all the great orators and writers before you. Remember these seven things that good communicators always do, and make sure you’re doing them!

1. Get personal
Most of the time, people don’t care about what you’re saying unless you’re saying something they find valuable on a personal level. That personal level doesn’t have to be deep, it just has to exist.
Good communicators establish a personal connection by focusing on how their message may impact the other person. For example, good communicators in the marketing industry always explain how the company’s products or services will benefit the customer. This gives the audience a reason to listen and remember what the marketer has said.

2. Represent facts
Inaccurate information is worthless, so if you’re not sure about something you’re saying, either don’t say it or at least admit that you’re not sure about it. Sometimes, we can get carried away with a conversation and begin spewing out random things we’ve heard but don’t know to be true. Although this may seem harmless, regularly offering inaccurate information not only leads people to believe things that aren’t true, it discredits you as a valuable source of information, and sharing information is what communicating is all about.

3. Be specific
Good communicators cut to the chase and understand the value of brevity. You may love to talk, but that doesn’t mean others want to hear it. If you have something to say, say it. Ambiguity and superfluous words are likely to bore people and discredit you, causing your message to get lost in a cloud of noise. Good communicators always respect people’s time and choose simple, straightforward words.

4. Ask questions
Whether the conversation is with one person or many, good communicators always ask questions. Most importantly, they question their audience to confirm that their point has been understood.
Of course, it can get irritating if someone continually asks us “Do you know what I mean?” or “Get what I’m saying?” Such questions may come off as condescending, but there are friendlier, more subtle ways to ask for confirmation. Instead of putting the focus on your audience’s ability to understand, put the focus on yourself by asking “Am I explaining this well?” This invites the other person to ask for clarification without feeling incompetent.

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Jayson DeMers Contributor

I de-mystify SEO and online marketing for business owners. 

Magic Article Rewrite Program

 

There's nothing better than seeing first-hand the profitable results of your article writing. And it’s a “dream strategy” for many other reasons, too. Increase web traffic – With article marketing, visitors can constantly come to your website. Achieve massive publicity. Build your list of targeted prospects that want to hear from you right now Boost your reputation, credibility, and name recognition. Gain link popularity & Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings. Create affiliate relationships and JV partnerships with highly influential web publishers. 

However, one of the easiest, proven, most time-tested ways to attract new business and more traffic to your site is to become a sought after authority and gain expert status in your field.

Do You Want to Know How ???

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How to Generate Leads Creating Articles Like Magic

Laugh at Google's Duplicate Content Ban when You Discover...

From the Desk of Alexander Krulik
Wednesday, 11:11am
Dear Friend,
There are tons of ways to generate traffic and build your business or practice online. There are new slick marketing ideas popping up all the time, one after another, claiming to be the next best thing.
However, one of the easiest, proven, most time-tested ways to attract new business and more traffic to your site is to become a sought after authority and gain expert status in your field. 
One of the biggest secrets that the top marketers don't talk a lot about is the fact that they ALL have built their credibility, visibility, and their lists of gold by writing articles.
In fact, multi-million dollar online entrepreneur Ali Brown says that:

"This is a tried-and-true method that will NEVER stop working, unlike the latest and greatest gimmicks to spoof the search engines.

(Try one of those and see how quickly your traffic halts once the bottom drops out.)

Search engines love real content and will always love real content."
Ali Brown,
http://AliBrown.com

And this is only scratching the surface...

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How To Connect Your Business Objectives To An Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy~By John Brhel

What do The Walt Disney Company and the WWE have in common (other than lucrative merchandising revenue and a cast of memorable characters?
If you followed the Dachis Group’s Social Business Index, which “analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels,” you’d know that Disney and the WWE are two of the most socially savvy brands out there. Apparently, people are still gaga for staged fighting and Donald Duck.
Did these corporate giants reach such great social heights by pursuing the exact same social media goals? Of course not. Disney and the WWE are vastly different companies with vastly different business objectives. You don’t market sweaty, hulking wrestlers the same way you do talking mice.
These two very different companies achieved social media success by applying specific social media tactics to achieve specific business objectives.
You may not be a multibillion dollar business with a killer mascot (at least not yet), but you can still do social like the best of them, so long as you connect your business objectives to an effective social media marketing strategy.
No Strategy, No Way!
According to the 2012 Small and Medium Social Business Study conducted by the SMB Group, just 24% of small businesses use social media “strategically, in a planned way.” Let’s hope for your sake you’re not part of that other 76%.
You could tweet a hundred times a day and have the fanciest looking Facebook page known to man, and none of it would matter if you didn’t have a social media strategy in line with your business objectives.
Don’t believe me? Just ask digital analyst and social media guru Brian Solis. “At the root of the problem, today’s social media programs start with the technology in mind and not the solution in mind,” said Solis in a September 2012 blog post. “Many businesses jump into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, et al, without thinking through opportunities or customer expectations and experiences.”
Are you one of those companies using social media “just because”? It’s not enough to post randomly on Facebook and throw whatever videos you have laying around on YouTube. You’ve got to be strategic.
It’s Time to Align
Before you dive headfirst into social media oblivion, take a cue from Mr. Solis and start with a solution in mind.
Follow these steps and you’ll be more likely to pursue a social media strategy that makes sense for your brand.

1. Define Your Business Objectives

Before you can pursue applicable social media goals, you need to make your business objectives perfectly clear. This is essential to running a business in general, let alone integrating a social media campaign that isn’t totally aimless.
Ask yourself this: What do you hope to achieve in the short- and long-term? Be specific. Do you want to improve overall customer satisfaction? Do you hope to increase profits by 10% over the next year? Do you want to be known as the coolest little ice cream shop in Austin, Texas?
Whatever they may be, your objectives are unique and require an in-depth, meaningful analysis of your business.
If you’re not sure how to set good business objectives, this article from Inc.com might come in handy.

2. Choose Relevant Social Media Goals

According to an Awareness Inc. survey of 469 marketers titled “The State of Social Marketing Report,” the top goals for social media are:

• better customer engagement (78%)
• revenue generation (51%)
• better customer experience (47%)
• increased thought leadership (41%)

These are all fantastic social media goals, but they may or may not be goals that pertain to your specific business objectives. You’ve got to pursue social media goals that relate to your unique objectives.
Are you launching a new product and hoping to get people interested enough to make a purchase? Do you want to direct people to your landing page, educate consumers, enable e-commerce, or deliver better customer service?
If you’re at a loss for good social media goals to pursue, this list by Web Ad.vantage founder Hollis Thomases sums up some of the most common ones.

3. Pursue an Appropriate Social Media Marketing Strategy

Just as your social media goals need to correspond to your business objectives, your social media strategy needs to directly relate to your designated goals.
Imagine you sell designer clothing and one of your business objectives is to increase sales of little black dresses. If your social media goals were to 1) increase revenue generation and 2) increase customer engagement, how would you get there? You’d have to figure out tactics that suited your social media goals. In this case one of your tactics might be posting articles about fashion shows, style tips, and other content that appeals to the dress-buying demographic.
Whatever strategy you decide to pursue, bear in mind that the best social media tactics are those that correlate directly to the social media goals you have in place.

4. Monitor Your Audience/Track Results

All that time you spend brainstorming objectives and tying it all together to your social media strategy won’t mean jack unless you’re monitoring your audience and tracking the results of your actions.
Be sure to keep tabs on what your customers are saying and measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy via analytics. There are tons of tools out there that let you do social monitoring and analytics, so you should have no problem measuring the efficacy of your social media tactics.
Make the Connection!
You don’t need to be a gigantic corporation like Disney or the WWE to establish a winning social media strategy.
All you’ve got to do to align your business objectives with an effective social media strategy is:

1. Define your business objectives
2. Choose relevant social media goals
3. Pursue an appropriate social media marketing strategy
4. Monitor your audience/track results

Be smart and strategic about your social media marketing strategy and you’ll have a much better shot at achieving your business objectives. It might not hurt, however, to have somebody like The Rock or Mickey Mouse on your side.
Is your social media marketing strategy in line with your business objectives? Let us know whether you’re ready to outdo Disney and the WWE by posting in the comment section below. 


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Author: John Brhel John Brhel on the Web John Brhel on Facebook John Brhel on Twitter John Brhel on Pinterest John Brhel RSS Feed

John Brhel is Content Manager at Social Eddy, a social media management and content curation platform. Social Eddy helps brands create, curate, and share engaging web content on multiple social accounts from one easy-to-use dashboard. Read more of John's nifty posts at Social Eddy's official blog, The Bow... View full profile

Shedding Light on Black PR

February 20th, 2013 | Shonali Burke |

 

 

 

Terri Johnson tipped me off to a fascinating story yesterday. It’s an exposé of China’s “black PR industry.”
I had no idea such a thing existed, but here is how Charlie Custer, who summarized it for Tech in Asia, explains it:

“Black PR firms provide client companies with both post deletion services to help them escape negative news stories, and some also provide placement for soft ads and hit pieces attacking competitors. The top black PR firms can offer these services even for stories posted to China’s most popular news portals.”

Image: Arjen Toet via Flickr, CC 2.0
The bit about placing soft ads and hit pieces won’t shock or surprise you, since we’ve seen that happen here in the U.S. as well, disgusting as the practice is. And reputation management is often a large part of what we, as PR professionals, do; for some, it’s what they specialize in and focus on.

In fact, even those who don’t think they do it, probably do. For example, content marketing is as much about reputation as anything else; after all, we (organizations, or clients, or simply human beings) want people to think well of us, and to come to us for the right reasons… right?
Scrubbing the Internet
There are also numerous companies that offer to “scrub” your reputation for you (for varying amounts of money), or teach you how to do it yourself; though at least in the U.S., most people know enough to not overtly promote “black hat SEO” tactics to do so. In fact, companies like BrandYourself tell you point blank what they won’t do.
The approach I’ve seen (so far) from such firms primarily involves getting higher rankings for “relevant” and desired links, by tweaking keywords, generating useful content, etc… mostly in an above-board manner. This, again, is not a surprise. (I’ve never used BY, btw, I just found them when I was researching companies that offer this kind of service… case in point.)
But here is where I started to narrow my eyes as I read the article:

among other things, these “black PR” firms offer to delete negative articles and post “hit” pieces to China’s most popular news portals.

Not (just) search engines. Not pitch stories. Actually delete from, and post to, news portals.
The dirty saga in a nutshell


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Free Backlink: How to Get to a PR 3 Ranking in 90 Days

By Marc Marseille

Climbing to the top of the search engines is the goal of every home base business owner that own a website. A well optimize website alone may help you achieve those goals if you are a niche market with little competition. On the other hand if your niche market is one shared by many marketers, you will have to prove to the search engines that you site has more relevance. The way to differentiate your business from the many on the internet is by creating high quality backlinks.

Many website owners are deterred from generating high quality backlinks to their website either from lack of time or lack of money. The truth is that creating thousands of backlinks does not have to be time consuming or costly. In fact there many ways to generate high Pr backlinks to you website for free. Using the methods I am about to share with you will be able to generate a PR 3 ranking in 90 days or less.

The first thing you must do to create free backlinks is to join five forums related to your niche. Once you have joined five forums, make sure you make a least 10 post per day to each forum. Forums usually have a high pr ranking and they are indexed by the search engines. Furthermore, every one of your post will equal to a high quality backlinks as long as you make sure you include you website's url in you forum signature.

The next step you will need to take is to submit your website to as many directories you can that are relevant to your websites content. You can either submit

your websites manually or you can use a submission service to speed up the process. In addition to the backlinks, you will also generate a great deal of traffic.

The third step will be to write three articles per week and submit your articles to fifty article directories every week. This method is one of the most effective, because once you submit your articles, chances are they will get picked up by other article directories creating even more backlinks to your website.

The fourth method is to post to one hundred social sites at least three times a week. There are hundreds of social networking websites like Digg, Sphinn, Stumble Upon and Mixx. These social web 2.0 sites have a high Google ranking and also can create a heap of traffic. I suggest posting to one hundred social networking and social bookmarking sites daily. To make the submission faster you should use a social bookmarking software to post to multiple sites at one time.

The final step is to submit your RSS feed to one hundred RSS directories. If you do not have an RSS feed for your website, you should look into creating one. RSS feeds are important in generating backlinks and traffic to your website. In the meantime you can substitute for not having an RSS feed by posting comments to ten do follow blogs daily.

The steps provided will take you approximate 3 hours per day to complete, while establishing a PR 3 website will bring you tons of traffic from the search engines. You may also receive offers from advertisers to display their ads on your PR 3 website thus increasing your income dramatically.

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 Website Traffic Is Not The Key To Success
By: Mike Burke
Website traffic is deemed the single most important factor when it comes to the success of a website but that statement needs to be qualified. Although it's true that a constant stream of traffic is the lifeblood of a website, the quality of the traffic is far more important than the quantity.Of course, any amount of website traffic is better than no traffic at all but even if you have the most perfect website, your site is doomed to fail if you are not getting visitors that are looking for the products or information you have available on your site.
It's easy to get caught up in a numbers game. It's exciting to see the number of visitors to your site climb from a few a day to a few hundred a day. On the surface, this looks like exactly what you want but if your visitors are looking for something other than what you are offering, for the most part, your website traffic is wasted.
You could have a great website design, compelling copy, the lowest prices and fantastic specials but all your efforts will be useless unless your website is drawing traffic that is interested in what you are providing or promoting.
What you need are visitors specifically interested in your product or service -- you need 'targeted traffic'.
Don't think of targeted traffic as a sub-category of website traffic because they really are two separate entities. If you're marketing plan is designed to drive as much website traffic as possible to your site, no matter what kind of traffic it is, then you're not making effective use of your time and you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
The web is a very different venue than a shopping mall. A shopping mall relies on unfocused traffic, wondering from store to store, not looking for anything in particular but willing to spend it's money on an impulse.
Believe it or not, people surfing the web will leave a website after viewing it for only about 2 seconds. They're looking for specific items or information and if they don't quickly find what they are looking for on your site, they'll click out of your site and go to one of the other millions of sites on the web.
That's why most of the successful websites are tightly focused on their 'niche' and their marketing plan is focused on driving people to their site that are looking for what they offer - they understand the importance of 'targeted traffic'.
Of course, targeted traffic and a website focused on a particular 'niche' go hand and hand. Think about your website. Does it really lend itself to a specific product or service, or is it so broad that it tends to confuse potential customers?
Here are a few tips to help you prepare your website for targeted traffic:
Design your website to promote one particular product or service as your main item.
Determine the type of people that will be interested in your product or service and adjust your website to be attractive to them.
Establish the items or services that are 'closely' related to what you're promoting on your website. If you think that they would be interesting to your visitors, offer those items on your website as well.
Keep a constant flow of free content, that your visitors will find useful, on your website and add new content and information often. Invite your visitors back to your site to see the new material you're constantly adding.
Keep in mind, a website that's focused on a particular 'niche' item or service lends itself to targeted traffic simply because there is something specific to target and the more targeted traffic your site receives, the more productive your site will be.
There are many conventional and many not so conventional ways to drive targeted traffic to your website but we'll explore them in other articles.
The purpose of this article is to point out the difference between website traffic and targeted traffic. More isn't always better and if you focus your marketing on 'targeted traffic' you'll quickly find that the hits your getting on your website aren't just empty numbers - they'll be potential customers and, more importantly, sales.
For more website traffic tips visit www.starttheprofits.com
Author Bio
Mike Burke is the author of numerous articles and has an affection for website marketing. Learn how to drive tons of targeted traffic to your site without spending a dime on advertising. Visit us at http://www.starttheprofits.com
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