How to Start a Successful Blog

There are many benefits to blogging: being a thought leader, increasing website traffic, engage your audience and more. Recently, one of my clients decided it was time to start benefitting from a blog and needed advice on how to get started on creating a successful blog. I set up some foundations with him and thought it might be beneficial to anyone freshly starting out in the blogosphere:

1. Know your audience. If you’re writing for your company’s blog, write for who you are trying to target. If you are trying reach a certain buyer persona, write to them. If you are looking to ramp up on hiring this year, create posts about company culture. Your blog should compliment your company's strategic goals. For example, if you have a product that you are looking to market towards Enterprise size companies, it would not be advantageous to create posts targeting a B2C audience.

2. Be Helpful. Why do most people read blogs? Some people read blogs for entertainment, but most are looking for an answer that solves their problems. When thinking of topics, think in the form of questions: How to, Why you Should, Top Tips. If you have pain points within your own company via customers inquiries; view this as an opportunity to address via a blog post.

3. Writers block? Find inspiration all around you! If you’re at a loss of what to write try to find inspiration via trending industry topics, news and seasonal events. Last May, I wrote a blog about Vidal Sassoon who had passed away that week. Am I in the salon industry? No, but I always thought Sassoon was as talented with branding and marketing as he was with hair. A good example of utilizing the season to create a blog post is MyEnergy’s post on energy conservation during the holidays.

4. Make a schedule. The one thing my client asked me, is how often, how will I remember to blog and what will I blog about? My advice to him was to make a schedule. I suggested this as a way to stay consistent as he is very busy and always on the go. We ended up setting up a spreadsheet via google drive and planning a month in advance.

5. Readability is key. As well as being relevant to your audience, your blog should be easy on the eyes. Long enough to be engaging and yet not too long that it takes too much of your readers time. I try to keep my blog within 350 to 500 words and break up the paragraphs enough that my posts are easy on the eyes.

If you can keep yourself organized and create engaging content that resonates to your buyer personas than you’re on the road to success!

Do you have any further tips on how to create an accomplished blog? Leave them in the comments!

How to create conversations with your customers.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who is having a conversation at you and not with you? You know, the conversation were all you hear is about their job, their family, their pets, them, them, them, them, them. Here you are sitting there looking attentive while wondering ‘when they will shut the hell up?’  Well consider your advertising, are you only talking about you, you, you? If so, please realize that your customers and leads can and will tune this out. Here are some pointers on breaking out of the monologue and developing a dialogue with your audience.

Realize it’s all about them not about you. You’ve got to face it – no one cares about your products or services. Sounds odd I know, but what I’m saying is people will care about what your product or service is going to do for them. With that being said, try to make sure your all copy has the word “you” more than it has the words “I” or “we”.

Refrain from spamming other people’s social media. This goes along with tip #1 but needs to be pointed out separately. Once in a while, when you have a great achievement sure it’s fine to point it out. Placing your business all over your friends and your business pages you follow however is just plain tacky and annoying. Taking a picture
of your product and then tagging everyone you can think of will easily get you defriended!

Use your social media to ask questions. Questions are great conversation starters. Boston television show Phantom Gourmet does an excellent job using their Facebook page to ask their ‘Phans’ fun, yet relevant questions to create conversation. Bonus: When you ask relevant questions to your fans you get valuable marketing information.

Use your Internet marketing to show your customers love. If you’re a B2B company, using your customers as case studies is a great way to showcase how your product/service made their company more efficient and also it allows you to cross promote your customer and who doesn’t love a little free promotion! If you’re a B2C company, social media is a great place to run contests and thank your loyal customers.

Negative feedback is a great way to show your customer service skills. As hard as it is to see a bad review, view it as an opportunity. In fact, use it to your advantage! How you respond to a bad review can really speak volumes about your company. For example, if you’re a restaurant that received a bad review on Yelp or Google, post a reply apologizing for the reason behind a bad review and offer a solution. First off your acknowledging and taking responsibility for what happened publicly and secondly you didn’t just say “So sorry, too bad.” - you offered a solution. It shows you care about your customers and your public image. Yelp’s Support Center offers further reading.

When it comes to lead nurturing, building relationships with your customers will be the key to a successful long lasting relationship is to show you care by creating an open dialogue. 

Holiday inbound marketing ideas to boost your end of year revenue

Tis’ the season to drive in revenue!  That year end sprint is a driving force for every business. If you own a business that sells products or services to consumers, here’s how to drive holiday traffic to your store with discounts, free gifts and contests using:

Check In Deals

Offer customers that “check in” to your store/restaurant via foursquare, Facebook or other location based social networks to enhance your special promotion.  Not only will this drive traffic into your business; this will also increase your reach beyond your followers, as friends of your fans will see status updates at your location.
Bonus: Point out on your Facebook page and/or twitter account who took advantage of your offer, make sure to use the @ symbol, so your follower gets highlighted and the post will go on their page as well.

Facebook Landing Pages

That’s right, use Facebook as a Landing Page! Not only will you gain more “Likes”; you can offer a holiday gift and at the same time collect information from your customers, which will enable you to segment market better.  The page will be a tab found on the right side, make it your main page when someone comes to your page and let the holiday cheer come in!
Bonus: By gathering information on your customers, you can find out who your buyer persona is and keep them engaged via email deals and newsletters that are more suited to their needs.

QR Codes

A fun way to fun ways to keep your customers interested in your products or services is using a QR Code. The possibilities for what you can place a QR Code on and what you can do offer with them are endless - Place them on your holiday signage as a “secret discount”, send your customers an email blast holiday card that has a QR code with your holiday promotion, create a business card size holiday tag with a code and place the card in your customers shopping bags with discounts on their next purchase.
Bonus: For more great QR code ideas check out Create and Tracks, “Top 5 things to do with QR Codes this Holiday Season”.

Send a Holiday Greeting

Use your email list to send out a Holiday Greeting to everyone on your email list.  Make sure to send emails to you vendors as well as your customers.  Since not every customer or vendor is the same, experiment with different offers based on information you have collected in your CRM software.  Experiment with different subject lines as well based on to maximize the amount of customer who open your email.
Bonus: Give a discount for your customers Friends and Family.

Update your Google Place

Did you know you can update you Google place advertisement to offer special deals? Simply go to your Google places account and and click the offers tab an place your holiday deals!
Bonus: You can set an expiration date on your offer.

Hope these tips help you have a successful end of year!

Happy Holidays!

Why content is online marketing's best friend

When it comes to driving traffic and creating leads, a nice design might be eye catching, but it’s your content and how your content engages your visitors that’s going to make your site a success. Consider your content to be your marketing budget’s best friend.

What makes content so important?  I seriously cannot stress enough the importance of great content.  Content is how your visitors will find out about your brand and what solutions you can offer to their lives easier. Content is what gives your company credibility and will set you apart from your competition. In this economy you need to transparency in your brand and gain trust in order to make it, and your content is just the thing that will help you do so.

What makes great content you ask?  Great content is finding ways to reach out and engage your customers by offering ways to make their lives easier.  Content isn’t only limited to images and text on a website, content can be blogs, podcasts, webinairs, white papers, ebook, etc. The point is to be as useful as you can to your visitor.  Once you are useful to your visitor, you can start turning your visitor into a prospect.

How can you create content that engages your audience? 
Compelling content is created when you take the time to understand your buyer’s persona.  Who exactly are you trying to reach? Write for them first and then the search engines.  Start by specifically thinking about who would buy your product or service. For me I am talking to you, the business owner who needs help with their online marketing.  That’s why my blogs are filled with tips to help you become more marketing savvy.  My website, my blog and my twitter account have you in mind.  If you are having trouble thinking of what to write? Read this ebook by hubspot to give you some great content ideas.

But what about ranking in the search engines? Now that you’ve got your reader engaged, time to make sure you content is optimized for the search engines. The key to optimization is in long tail keywords. Creating a keyphrase will help you gather your leads attention in search engines and weed out the traffic you don’t want.  The more specific your keyphrases are, the better chance you will have of driving the type of traffic you would want to your website. For example, when I moved back to New Hampshire from Rhode Island I was looking for a salon.  Since my favorite hair color brand is Goldwell, I searched “Goldwell Color Salons in Southern New Hampshire”.  Do you see how specific I got?  I knew I needed a salon but I only wanted one that offered the Goldwell hair color line.  The more specific you get in your keyphrases the more quality traffic you will drive to your site. Remember to use analytic tools such as Concentrate to track and measure your success.

While an esthetically pleasing website is great to look at as a visitor, what will make or break your business is your content.  What will help you rank in the search engines is your content. What will create sales is your content.  Consider your content your businesses best friend.