Popular blogging platform Wordpress reveals that its users produce about 500,000 new posts every day. Given that number, don’t you sometimes wish the Internet had a loudspeaker system, one that only you could use? Given the fierce competition, how can a blogger set herself apart? Below are five strategies bloggers can use to engage an audience without being demanding, annoying, or spammy.
Most marketing and content writing nerds like me know the brilliant statement by Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” I always thought it was the best example of selling results instead of the product or its features. Then I bought a drill. Find out why “real results” – not just short-term payoffs – are really what matter to your clients.
Did you ever have one of those moments when you hear or read something a billion-trillion times and on the billion-trillionth-and-first time it suddenly makes you want to throw a pie at everyone who’s ever said it? One of the things that’s been moving the needle on my irritation-meter lately is the overcooked advice to “write quality content”. Yes, if you write quality content you’ll be doing yourself, your blog, your website and your business a favor. But what is quality content and how do you write it? Here are some actionable tips that you can use to write winning content that people and search engines will love.
Your headline must do exactly one thing – get people to keep reading. More people will read your headline than any other part of your content. If it doesn’t focus on their needs and draw them in, they won’t read anything else. Whatever time, effort or money you’ve invested in creating and/or sharing that content will have been wasted. If people keep reading, the headline worked. If not, it failed. Simple as that. Here are some tips for getting people do keep reading.
It can be challenging to start a blog and it can be just as challenging to keep it going. Last post, I walked you through a simple strategy for starting your business blog with a plan and a list. But sometimes it doesn’t matter how many ideas you have on your list, you just don’t feel inspired. Resist the temptation to quit. Successful blogs take time and dedication. So for days when sagging traffic, lagging comments or a plain old case of “the blahs” are sucking up your inspiration, here are some blog ideas to pull out of your hat.
Not everyone is a writer. Not everyone likes to write, wants to write, has time to write or has a clue how to start writing. But everyone wants a successful business, to reach more customers, build authority in a field, get credibility and attention and boost SEO. And a business blog is one of the most powerful ways to do all that. So what’s a non-writer to do? Whether you’re resisting the idea of writing or really want to tackle it but just don’t know where to start, here are ideas to get you going and tips to keep you rolling.
Today, I would like to discuss the senseless, often absurd and regularly contradictory use of quotation marks in advertising, product displays and marketing in general, so your marketing does not become as senseless as others who have transgressed against reason.
Bill Gates wrote the original “Content Is King” article in 1996. Love him or hate him, he was correct. He said people “must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will” and “those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences and products – a marketplace of content.”
When you read a blog, a business letter, an email or a web page, do you wish for more text? Only rarely. Yet we mistakenly think people reading our marketing communications will make time to trudge through our complicated thought process and figure out how it applies to them.
A few years ago it was all the forward-thinking rage to have a business blog. Some people wrote books about it. Other people bought those books. Talking heads explained what a “blog” was. Some people called it a fad. Other people called it a trend. Now that it’s a few years later and blogging is standard practice, there are still plenty of businesses out there that do not blog.
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