How to Write Content Your Customers Want to Read

Generating fresh content in blog posts and articles is a key component of successful online marketing. Most business owners and marketers understand this reality. Yet, the hurdle for many is consistently writing content that actually gets read. Yes, it isn't always easy to figure out what customers want to read. But, there are some proven ways that can encourage their readership.
For starters, online content must be both interesting and engaging – much more than simply reiterating the selling points of your product or service. Let's face it, blogs and articles that are loaded with traditional marketing copy are boring!
Instead, successful content that actually gets read, builds an online community, and leads to measurable ROI requires a blend of information, promotion, and style delivered in a strategic fashion. Here are the basics of what you should be incorporating into your writing.

Expertise

When you consider that people go to blogs or read online articles because they are looking for useful information, offering unique or new content about your industry, products, or services can offer great value to your readers. Examples can include explanations of a new law or industry change that affects your customers or a rundown of trade shows within your industry. The Internet is very much a reference tool.
So, by using your knowledge to write content that provides relevant information, you'll gain readership from those who look to you as an expert.

Insight

Readers also want to gain inside information about your business that spans beyond what they can find on your website. This is where a blog can come in particularly handy.
Share milestones and achievements, post images of your team, offer your opinions, and even consider opening the forum up occasionally to customers who can serve as guest bloggers.
The key is to provide an insiders' glimpse of your company that keeps readers coming back for more.

Reassurance

By posting honest, consistent, heart-felt articles, you can instil both trust and respect that ultimately converts readers into customers.
Encourage comments and generate interaction to promote engagement. Through these efforts, you'll build a positive image that delivers reassurance to those thinking about buying from you.

Promotion

Of course, you should be promoting your product, service, or business in your content, but this is not the place for self-promoting statements. Instead of using traditional selling language, a more effective approach is to infuse promotional information within copy to demonstrate your leadership.
For example, if you sell running shoes, writing about new techniques being used in training for marathons with an explanation of why your shoes are particularly popular with marathoners can be far more effective than simply telling readers to buy your shoes.
Most blog experts recommend that at least 80% of your content should be informational to 20% promotional.

Humour

There is a tremendous amount of dry, boring content on the Internet. In fact, the vast majority of it has little or no humour at all.
Readers crave content that makes them chuckle or at least smile.
No, you don't have to write one liners on your blog. But, weaving an interesting or funny personal story into the information that you're trying to deliver can sometimes work wonders in encouraging readers to share your content.

Consistency

There is a certain amount of responsibility that goes hand-in-hand with generating content and building a community. A blog that is out of date doesn't send a good message to your readers and can negatively impact the positive image of your business. Ideally, it's a smart idea to post content at least once a week to keep content fresh and encourage readers to check back often.
But, the main goal is keep the flow of content somewhat consistent. To do this, keep an editorial calendar or list of planned topics, and build time into your schedule to get the content written.

Quality

Because content is a touch point with customers, there simply is no excuse for poorly written text with typos, errors, or inaccuracies.
Blog content and articles are company literature and deserve a watchful eye to check for spelling and grammar errors before they get published for the world to see. When well-written, this content can be a significant driver of business while providing insightful, entertaining information to readers.
By setting high quality standards for your content, you can maximize your ability to make the most of these marketing tools.

So…

Stay away from sales speak. Inform, share your knowledge, and weave a genuinely interesting story line throughout your content.
In one word? Engage.

5 Ways To Market Your Personal Brand With Your Facebook Business Page

Your Facebook business page is an opportunity for your audience to learn more about your brand. Here are the top five areas of your page that you must focus on to engage your Facebook fan and strategically market your brand.

1. Utilize your profile picture

Your Facebook profile picture is initial opportunity to demonstrate your brand to your followers.
Choose a high-quality image of yourself and work with your graphic designer to design a custom designed banner that is consistent with your brand. You have 180 X 540 pixels  of space to work with; so, take this opportunity to express your core message: who you are, what you do, and for whom you do it for.

2. Create a Facebook landing page

Facebook landing pages are your prime opportunity to welcome your fans and tell your brand story. Gary Vaynerchuk’s landing page literally tells his story and is a great example of using this medium to promote yourself to your audience in a fun way.
There are a number of services and applications available that will customize your Facebook landing page that fits with your brand and your budget. Many of the do-it-yourself applications offer a free trial, so be sure to play around and investigate before you decide on one to use. For more information, check out Orli Yakuel's comparisons in her blog post "The 12 Best Ways to Customize Your Facebook Pages" for Tech Crunch.
A key element to creating a fan page that converts visitors to fans is the “like-gate” feature. This basically requires page visitors to “like” your page in order to view the content. By nature, most people are curious and want to feel that they are a part of something exclusive. A few strategies you can use to play this up are to offer your fans:

• Exclusive discounts and coupons
• First look at product announcements
• Video reveals
• Giveaways and contests
• Free resources including tips, white papers, articles, etc.

3. Get creative with photos

Pictures are a visually appealing and fun way to engage your audience. Pam Lawhorne, The Social Maven, does an excellent job of staying on brand by incorporating her pictures with her colors and tying them into themes  with her “entrepreneur of the day”, “question of the day”, and “30 days of gratitude” campaigns.
Another creative tactic is to make use of your Facebook photo strip. The photo strip consists of the five default photos at the top of your page. Companies are using this to highlight their products, introduce team members, and to further tell their brand story. Check out this Social Fresh’s blog post for ideas to incorporate this into your business page.

4. Effectively use your “info” tab.

The “info” portion of your business page is another opportunity to connect your followers across all of your social media platforms.  Do not assume that your fans know that you are available on other social media outlets and include links to your blog, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

5. Keep your content fresh and relevant.

A golden rule of personal branding is to keep yourself in front of your audience at all times.  Having pretty pictures and landing pages are great, but without a constant, clear message that relates to your followers, it is a waste of time.
To develop fresh content, ask yourself:

• What keeps your audience up at night?
• How do you solve their problem?
• What are related topics of interest that you can link to?

Here are a few strategies to keep a constant presence:

• Schedule your status updates in advance with a service such as MediaFeedia.com. A word of caution… while this will help keep your posts consistent and constant, you still must log on and interact with your audience – answer comments, reach out to your audience, and build relationships.
• Create a Google alert on the related topics that you identified so that you can easily link to relevant articles and blog posts that are of interest to your audience.
• Create a weekly or daily theme to help focus your message or questions. For instance, I am known for incorporating pop culture and lyrical references in the delivery of my messages on personal branding so I created a pop culture question of the day, you can find an example on my Kimberly Bordonaro Personal Branding page.

So, what did I miss? How are you using your Facebook business page to market your personal brand and engage your audience?

Neighbourhood Watch: 5 Ways to Stay on Top of Local Search

Local is the new global: any business, no matter how large, planning their search strategies needs to think very carefully about local search coverage too.

 

One of the reasons for this is the importance of Google Maps. Google Maps aren't just maps and images; Google Maps also contain a massive selection of local business information around which many other applications and services operate.

 

Consequently local and mobile search, influenced by the location of the person doing the searching, is of vital importance to Google: over 20% of Google's search queries has a localised purpose.

 

It is not just about Google of course, though it sometimes feels that way; Bing and Yahoo are worth thinking about too and they've been investing in maps and local search in a big way.

 

Bing is on the record as saying local search is now one of their main strategies going forward. So how do you make sure you're visible in your own neighbourhood? For starters, make sure you stick to these five rules:

1. Fill Out and Maintain Your Google Place Page

Google have their own free service (Google Places) that allows you to verify your business, your business location, the address and contract information of that business and your website details (as well as lots of other bits and bobs).

 

Keeping this updated is crucial to your local search success.

 

If your business is lucky enough to have more than one outlet you can also upload multiple locations in one go.

2. Fill Out and Maintain Your Business Profile on Other Important Local Search Sites

Google wont just check your details on its own Google Places Service it will also check every other site that has your business details too, to make sure there are no discrepancies. Thanks to all you sneaky SEO marketers out there, Google is suspicious of anyone trying to game their local search, so make sure you've got the same details logged into Bing, Yahoo, Qype, Foursquare, Yelp or any other Local Search sites you can think of.

3. Make Sure You Have Crawl-Ready Contact Information

Most webmasters and site owners are aware of the importance of having the business address and phone number in a prominent position on the site, but this information might be displayed within a flash file or image which the search engine spiders cant recognise.

 

Ensure all business contact details are set out clearly in good old fashioned HTML.

4. Create A KML File

A KML file is a Keyhole Markup Language file and it is what Google Earth runs on.

 

In the same way you would normally submit XML sitemaps to Google listing all of your websites pages, you can also submit a KML file that holds all of the physical locations of your business. For the technically un-savvy there is a site, GeoSiteMapGenerator.com, which will handle all of that for you.

5. Maintain Your Offline Business Records

Sneaky old Google is rumoured to also be looking offline (you know, in the real world) to check tax records, licensing applications and other forms for verification.

 

If you want to be certain of getting the most out of local search, the lesson is to make sure you use the same details in every single form, online and offline, that you fill out on behalf of your business.

Google Analytics – Is that really you?

Google Analytics has launched a security system that is set to make life just a little more difficult for analytics specialists and consultants to help companies out.
We at SEP frequently helps businesses and organizations understand their analytics, and develop business information and strategies based on their Google Analytics data. Frequently, there isn't an analytics specialist on staff, or their expertise is focused on one or more of the other analytics platforms. Not a problem – that's when we get called in to figure out what the data is saying, and what needs to be done to address whatever the issue is. When an organization gets to this point, the issues are usually backlogged and the work is a high priority.
My team took on a client this week, to help answer some key business questions that will help guide the online strategy of the organization going forward. There are some serious questions need answered, and they need answered fairly quickly. We got the Google Analytics information from the client, booked in the time to complete the work, and set a deliverable date.
But this message from Google Analytics put a speed bump in the analysis:

Hey {email}, is that really you?
It looks like you’re signing in to your account from a new location. Just so we know this is you — and not someone trying to hijack your account — please complete this quick verification. Learn more about this additional security measure.

Google explains this message on it's Unusual sign-in location detected help page as being designed to help secure your account & data:

The additional step at sign in is designed to prevent an unauthorized person who does not know you from accessing your account, even if they've obtained your username and password. While this won't necessarily stop people who know you from accessing your account (for that, try 2-step verification), it's an important measure to keep hijackers who have a long list of passwords from doing malicious things with your account, such as creating spam or accessing and deleting valuable data

Google Analytics can already be a difficult beast to tame for many organizations, especially when the person using GA leaves the company. It's not uncommon for a business to lose literally years of information simply because the Google Analytics login information is incorrect, and the email address is disabled after the person leaves. I've seen it happen, more than a few times.
This new system is going to make these situations even more difficult – if a company's IP address changes and they don't have access to the email address, for example, this security system could stand between a company and their data.

Action Item:

If you are going to be consulting for a company in their Google Analytics account, you should proactively take one of these two steps before beginning the work:
1. Instead of using the client's email address to log into the account, get the client to set up your GA login email with access to their GA data. This should bypass this security measure.
2. Get the answer to one or two (to be safe) of the security questions before beginning the work. This will save your project time!
Everyone appreciates the fact that security is a key concern, especially where business data is involved – you want to keep that private. I believe this system is a good one, and is useful. Just be aware of this potential speed bump when you take on a new client!