According to a recent NM Incite report, there are over 181 million blogs around the world. The way many companies treat blogs in their content marketing mix is to incorporate blogs into their website as a section or subdomain, or host them on their own domain name as we do.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Content Marketing Tactics: Business Blogging Pros, Cons, Best Practices & Brands Doing It Right | http://www.toprankblog.com

Unfortunately, lower barriers to entry for publishing and distributing information have resulted in a plethora of non-news littering the web.

Is there any harm in “putting it all out there,” as in writing and distributing a press release for every event, newsworthy or not? I’d argue that yes, there is potential harm. As an industry journalist, I’ve personally become annoyed with companies or PR people sending me twice-weekly emails about everything under the sun. Whether someone has moved up internally or a company is seeking another round of funding, isn’t exactly compelling news.

Pitching of that type is not bad PR. What’s being pitched just isn’t news to me.

When bloggers and media become annoyed by irrelevant content, they’re not all that likely to write about your company or contact you for expert opinion on industry news.

At the same time, when it comes to brand content, customers don’t like to have to dig for the information they need to make buying decisions. They may even stop reading your missives altogether and miss out on the real news. This is not a good thing.

The problem, then, is two-fold: too much non-news content, and poor targeting of good content. Ideally, you will create relevant, targeted content, whether for customers, prospects, investors, distributors, or other groups who may have an interest in your company news. Then it needs to reach that specific group.

Avoid confusing your different audiences with fluff content and news announcements because you feel it’s time to publish something new just to attract their attention. “More” attention isn’t nearly as desirable as the right attention.

To implement online PR tactics with more purpose and truly integrate those tactics with the rest of your online marketing strategy, read on for tips and best practices.

Know Your Goals

There are two parts to this: what are your goals for your PR strategy overall as one facet of your digital marketing activities, and what are your goals for each PR piece you publish? For the purpose of this post, we have to assume you have some overarching strategy in mind and focus on individual pieces of content (or this could turn into a novel).

Think of the S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting model when planning your PR content; goals must be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

“We want to tell people about x, y, z,” is not a goal. Writing or otherwise creating content and throwing it into the ether is not enough. You need to know the goal of each piece of content so you can optimize and distribute it in the way that best helps you achieve your business goals. You may remember the 5 Ws from school (adapted for online PR):

• Who is my target audience?
• What are they going to want to do when they read this?
• Where do they live online?
• When is the best time to reach them with this news?
• Why are they going to care about this news?

This might seem like a tedious exercise, but going through these considerations intentionally will help you develop a mindset where putting your reader first and aligning content with business goals becomes a habit.

Target Smartly

Is it news? The piece of information you want to release may be news to one audience segment and not another. This may be defined by considering what action you expect people to take upon reading your news piece. Are you looking for mainstream media coverage? Don’t blast a press release to your entire email list; write to journalists. Then segment your email list down to journalists. Use social tools available to you, like InMail and targeted status updates on LinkedIn, or lists on Facebook, or Google+ Circles, to deliver your news to the audience for which you wrote the piece. You need to know exactly who this is going to be before you write a word.

Your news might also be news to a very niche selection of publications. Do your research and know the editorial calendars of publications you’re targeting in upcoming months. Find the angle that makes your company news relevant and newsworthy to each and give them plenty of lead time to work you in.

Don’t Make It About You

That’s a tall order when you’re trying to share your own news, isn’t it? If it’s worth telling people about, it’s because it offers some value to their life or business. What is that value offering? Don’t make customers or shareholders connect the dots, but give it to them straight by writing from the perspective of what they want to know, rather than what you want to say. For example, say the news you are planning to announce is a new campaign within your customer loyalty program:

You can easily sit down and write about how proud you are to offer this new program, tout its benefits and have your company executives share a few really intelligent (and probably boring) soundbites about how great this is for the company and its customers.

Or…

You could lead with the news that explains exactly what this means to customers and have actual program members explain it in their own words.

Which version is a more compelling read for customers: an announcement with executives telling them what’s good for them, or someone they can relate to telling them what they’ll get out of it?

Think Hard About Format and Get Creative

Not everything that happens within your company is newsworthy on its own. If you find that you have a collection of maybe-its-news accomplishments or achievements you could share over the course of a couple of weeks or a month, consider starting a series. Sometimes, two or three items together carry more firepower. Sequenced content, whether on your blog, in video, via email marketing, or in another format, is a great way to interconnect your company news pieces, resurface historical content and create audience anticipation for the next piece.

The answer to “Where does my audience live online?” will also help drive your decision to publish in one format or another. Video and imagery are fantastic engagement tools on social networks, while blog posts or press releases are great opportunities for written content media can quote, cite or link up.

If you’re having trouble finding anything newsworthy at all to announce but know your PR strategy requires more visibility, get creative. What can you do today, within your budget, that is both newsworthy and helpful to your audience? Here are a few ideas:

• Produce an industry survey with a corresponding report.
• Perform original research into a known issue in your space.
• Support local initiatives through charity or sponsorship.
• Release statistics or insights gleaned from your customer data (following an accepted statistical model).
• Develop relationships with industry media and serve as an expert source in ongoing coverage.
• Challenge the status quo; just be sure you can back up your position.
• Stay ahead of trends and be the first to offer insight to journalists on breaking or upcoming news.

Nurture Relationships

Do you find yourself often approaching media or influencers cold? Online PR is give and take. People in your community will support your business by engaging with your content and sharing your news; not every time, but more often for established connections than companies pitching them for the first time.

One of the top three reasons customers follow brands on social channels is because they find their content interesting. Further, 90% of consumers find custom content useful and 78% believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them. Once that connection is made, it’s up to you to continue to deliver on that promise and build a mutually beneficial relationship.

Good Online PR is a Mindset, Not a Process

As you can see, there is no magic formula or simple step-by-step process for making company news more interesting and relevant. Rather, it requires research, goal-setting, creativity and careful measurement to weed out underperforming tactics and hone in on the winners.

Have you struggled to make company news interesting and engaging? Please share your story in the comments.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Online PR for Brands: How to Make Company News, Real News | http://www.toprankblog.com

While some say social media and SEO have leveled the playing field, blogging is by far one of the most effective ways for small businesses to achieve numerous business objectives.

What can you achieve with a blog? As a content management system that can be optimized for search and social shares, blogs with great content can help a company attract new customers, engage existing customers, connect with journalists and connect with potential new hires. There are many business communication goals that can be realized through blogging.

How? The fundamentals that many companies seem to gloss over include:

• Create a hub and spoke framework for blog publishing and promotion.
• Source content that customers care about and that can influence sales or other goals.
• Integrate blogging with SEO, Social Media, PR and Content Marketing efforts to amplify content where customers are actively looking.

Those are general guidelines, so here are 4 steps for small business blogs to get big business results:

Optimize & Socialize Framework for Blog Content – Slide from #SMMW13 Presentation

1. Understand your  audience according  to their objectives – Don’t simply lead content planning with “we need to increase sales of product 123.” Think about your buyer and what goals your product solves for them. Ask how and why, too. The answers will reveal a more meaningful story that you can use when planning blog content.

2. Map customer needs to topics &  search keywords – If your target audience are potential buyers of your products, then describe how those needs are met. Further distill those descriptions to keyword lists, which can be researched and filtered using Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

3.  Use a content calendar to organize & optimize – Failure to plan is a plan to fail, so be sure to create a content planning calendar to identify when you will create what kind of content on what kind of topics. Here’s a free blog content template for this.

4. Grow social networks, promote content & optimize performance – A hub and spoke publishing model only works if there are people watching, monitoring and subscribed to your content. Make an effort to share useful content from others and engage wherever possible. Being useful is a great way to build your social networks. When you do promote your own content to social networks, make sure it delivers on the promise.

If you empathize with the audience you’re after and plan relevant blog content in a way that makes it easy for people to find in search and share on social, then you’ve optimized your way from a small business blog to big business results.

If you’re a small business blogger, what are some of the obstacles you’re facing? Maybe you’ve overcome those challenges – what lessons have you learned for getting better performance from your blogging effort?

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Small Business Blog, Big Business Results | http://www.toprankblog.com

Companies are now fully aware that simply distributing information on a regular basis is not enough. As Lee pointed out in a recent article on the reasons companies are challenged by content creation, “Anyone with half a brain can create information, but ‘content’ implies usefulness or utility.”

At TopRank, part of my job is the creation of content for our own channels – this blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I also assist clients in planning and developing engaging, interesting content for their unique audiences and business needs. As a result, my day typically goes something like this:

Wake up, shake off the cobwebs. Read industry news over coffee and breakfast. Get kids out the door to school. Hit the social accounts for reading, posting, and responding to activity. Review task list for the day. Review editorial calendars. Research. Plan. Write or edit. Research. Plan. Write or edit. Rinse. Repeat. Feed and entertain said children. Get ready to do it all again the next day.

It does get easier to create better content (faster) as you gain experience and find your rhythm, so I completely understand why companies – especially SMBs – struggle to come up with interesting, engaging content on a regular basis. It’s not your job to write all day long; you have a business to run. Even in larger organizations, participating in content creation can seem like an additional chore, or something you have to fit in, on top of your regular duties.

I wanted to share a few of the tools I absolutely couldn’t live without as I go about the content creation tasks that, over the years, have resulted in 60 e-books, thousands of blog posts, dozens of technical or educational manuals and over 300 assorted client writing projects. The right tools make content creation easier and faster, but also more purposeful. Give these 11 tools a try and see if they can help you get organized, more easily access information, and produce higher quality content.

1. An Editorial Calendar

Our editorial calendar at TopRank informs what I am to write about on a daily basis, but that’s just one small function. It also allows us to plan to cover the topics we want to touch on over the course of the coming weeks and months. It allows us to plan for sequenced content and to build on one another’s previously covered or upcoming ideas. It gives me an overview of coming topics so that as I peruse the web each day, I mentally take note of or bookmark resources that will be useful in upcoming blog posts.

Lee has generously shared a basic editorial calendar template over the years and you can get a copy from OptimizeBook.com. If you aren’t using one yet, it’s an absolutely necessary first step in getting organized and writing with purpose. Get one.

2. Google Reader

No, I’m not completely clueless, recommending a tool you won’t be able to use much longer. The ability to pick and choose the information you want to see more of in a format you enjoy is huge when you’re trying to stay on top of news in your industry. I’ve used Google Reader personally and in every single job I’ve had for years… and they killed it.

I’ll keep my sour grapes to myself, but all is not lost. I found a promising alternative this week called Curata; it’s launching in beta in May with access for the first 10,000 people to accept the invite. It promises to be even better than the original, with intelligent filtering and enriched content. Why am I so excited about something that hasn’t even launched yet? Curata is the baby of Pawan Deshpande, who held software engineering positions at Microsoft and Google and has patents in social networking and natural language processing areas. I’ll use Google Reader until they choke the life from it and rip it from my outstretched hands, but at least there’s a decent looking alternative on the horizon.

3. Twitter Lists

Twitter itself is a fantastic tool for anyone looking for content inspiration or the latest breaking news. Lists are an incredibly helpful tool for bloggers and networkers.

NASA Social Twitter List

Each time I attend a real-world event, I find a list of participants to follow, so I can see what’s going on, what news is coming out of the conference, or who I might like to interview. If I can’t find one, I make one. This also makes it simple to follow up and build relationships with the people you’ve met after the event ends.  You can use lists to track industry influencers, customers, journalists… any group of people whose real-time conversations might inform your content creation decisions.

4. Ubersuggest

This is a helpful tool when I’m brainstorming for clients. I don’t know everything about everything. However, success in content creation doesn’t require that you’re an expert in everything; you need to know how to find information and recognize the experts when you see them.

Ubersuggest takes your word or phrase and scrapes Google Suggestions to offer the hottest related topics people are searching for. As a bonus for different types of companies, Ubersuggest lets you search the entire web, or drill down into Google Shopping, Images, Video or other types of searches. Best of all, it lets you compile lists of terms you can then export and download. For me, it offers insight into the searches I should be doing when I’m looking for the most accurate information on a topic. When I’m planning, writing or editing, I need to know what people find interesting, but I also need credible resources to cite, interview or otherwise engage to build out my content. This is a great first step in making sure you’re headed in the right direction with your research.

5. Audacity

Try Audacity for recording interviews and editing audio. You have great insights to share with your audience, but you can also get really great content out of other people in your industry.

I like that it has editing functions, so I can clip out irrelevant sections of interviews before sending them off to be transcribed (transcription is relatively inexpensive and a great way to get notes and quotes from your audio interviews). Audacity is free and you’ll need a plug-in called Lame to convert their audio files to mp3 if you want to share your interviews in social channels.

6.  Screen Capture by Google

There are a ton of screen capture tools out there, but I like the simplicity of Google’s Screen Capture plug-in for Chrome… possibly because I’m a Chrome junkie, so it’s always right there when I need it. You can capture selections, visible content, or the entire page and choose JPEG or PNG output.

Another tool I’ve used in the past that worked well is Jing, which allows you to markup your screenshots and also records to video. Snagit is a premium option from the same developers, with far greater capabilities and a pricetag of $49.95 (if you’re looking for a more versatile screen capture tool).

7. Evernote

Capture everything and lose track of nothing. Evernote lets you save voice recordings, text, pictures, and entire web pages to a cloud account you can access from any computer or mobile device.

This is a must for people who – like me – can’t always sit down and force their brain to come up with just the right idea when they’re ready to plan or write. When inspiration strikes, you run into someone who would make a great interview, or you otherwise don’t want to forget a fantastic content idea, use Evernote to keep track. Their search function is great for recalling content if you collect a large volume.

8. Kapost

If you have multiple authors or different employees/agents working on social content and blog posts, Kapost is a great way to manage it all. Everything starts as an idea, with customized fields for background information such as external URLs, keywords, or title options. Users can assign tasks to different writers, editors or project managers, with notifications sent out as each action is completed. On top of managing workflow, it integrates with all major CMSs and allows for distribution/performance tracking across your content operation.

This is an option for companies getting serious about their content marketing systems, with a $1200/month starting point. However, that allows for 5 content types and 8 users, so it’s definitely worth checking out. Their client support is also quite good.

9. Social Search Engine Topsy

Topsy takes whatever keyword or phrase you give it and analyzes the social web in real-time. Basically, they’ve indexed every corner of the public social web, giving you access to critical time-sensitive insights as they occur.

Try their advanced search and see results according to social influence. This is a great tool for finding opportunities to create content around questions people are asking, or to address specific issues people want to know about. If it’s happening on the social web, Topsy can find it.

10. SocialMention

This is another critical tool for social content creation. Are you on top of what people are saying about your brand? They won’t always tag you to let you know you’re being discussed. How about your industry in general? SocialMention seeks out content according to your search parameters across the social web and analyzes sentiment.

Additional insights will show you the top keywords and hashtags associated with your query, the most popular platforms where conversations around the topic happen, and even the users who discuss it most.

11. Zemanta

Not big on research? Zemanta will bring images, articles and other web content to you as you write your content into WordPress or Blogger. This content discovery tool allows you to retain editorial control, so although you’re exposing similar content, you won’t be publishing about competitors.

As you write, Zemanta will suggest relevant content from your own blog, around the web and their advertisers to inform and complement your piece. More than simply suggesting links, this tool is more like a semantic content discovery personal assistant, listening to your needs and bringing back the information you need in real time. It’s a great tool for inspiration and research as well as engaging your audience with more relevant content, especially if you aren’t a high-volume publisher.

Tools Are a Marketer’s Best Friend

What did I miss, bloggers and marketers? These are just the tools I use most often but I can’t imagine how much longer and less productive my day would be without them. Which content creation tools are your personal favorites?

Top of post image from Shutterstock.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 11 Blog & Social Content Marketing Tools I Use (Almost) Every Day | http://www.toprankblog.com

As new businesses are started every day across the U.S., many of those entrepreneurs are grappling with the realities of how to market their ideas, products and services.

Limited resources and an overabundance of options requires filtering and prioritization when it comes to where marketing investments are made, whether it’s content, blogging, social media, or SEO.

Common questions include: What to measure? What if it fails? What should we outsource?

Here are a few answers to those questions that I was asked as prep for an interview:

What advice do you have for business owners or entrepreneurs who are staying out of blogging and/or social because they don’t feel they can produce enough content on a regular basis to keep things interesting?

I often reply to that by saying, “If a company doesn’t have anything interesting to say, they have bigger problems to solve than where their next blog post is coming from.” That’s a bit of a jibe, but it does reflect the need for a change in perspective. Many companies see themselves as a vessel, with a finite number of ideas and pieces of information. In other words, their view of content is fairly static and self-centered. Once they’ve said all there is to say about their own products and services, the well goes dry.

This is in contrast to what many successful business owners and entrepreneurs are doing with blogging and content creation. They create a blogging plan with topics and ideas to write about that customers would actually be interested in. They look at blogging as a byproduct of the ongoing listening and engagement that occurs between brand and customers, between brand and prospects and the community at large.

A change in perspective that allows the brand to see things from their customer’s perspective with empathy can reveal many opportunities for making observations, answering questions and interacting with the community through blog content. Just checking for commonly asked questions that customer service and sales people hear can be a rich source of blogging ideas.

In addition to a customer perspective and leveraging ideas that come from prospect and customer interactions, social media and web analytics data can provide ongoing information to inspire blog content. Social media monitoring tools can suggest topics related to areas of interest around products and services being tracked. Web analytics can reveal questions people most often use on Google that send them to the company website. Blog posts can be planned to answer those questions.

Ongoing engagement will mean a never ending source of things to blog about.

The key to persistent blogging in a productive way, and I’ve been at it myself as a business owner, is to have a plan, be adaptable and use blogging as a platform to share useful information that provides value to readers but also reinforces sales, referrals and social shares.

When it comes to optimizing websites that have been neglected in terms of adding content and ongoing optimization, where should SMBs even begin? 

A site evaluation through audits can help determine how much of an asset the website is currently and can be in the future. A SEO audit will cover keywords, technical/code, SEO copywriting, the linking footprint and social presence. Through the audit a sort of GAP analysis can be conducted to identify where the site needs attention for most impact.

This is an area where we’ve developed a lot of expertise at TopRank Online Marketing and it speeds up the time to see results when there are good processes in place for auditing and benchmarking.

As an example, a site that has thousands of pages with a simple SEO error of duplicate title tags might be updated using basic programming to extract content off the page (like product names) to dynamically populate title tags. If the site has many, many articles that are frequently found through search and have a good number of social referrals, then embedding social share functionality can increase social distribution of those articles just by making it easy/

In most cases, the low hanging fruit identification comes from having an evaluation of the website and expertise to determine where to apply resources in order to reach business goals.

What do you recommend for an SMB that has tried a particular social network out and discovered that it just wasn’t working for them? Is it better to delete the account, continue without much of a presence, or is there another alternative?

I’d approach that answer a little differently according to what the goal was and what social platform was being used. For example, if it’s Twitter then I might just discontinue manually posting to the account and determine it to be a source of news information. I’d do a relevant query on Google news, take the RSS feed of the search results for that query and run it through Twitter feed and populate the account with news stories once or twice a day. I’d still check the account once a day for engagement opportunities, but I’d probably not kill it if it can continue to provide some value. If it cannot provide value and there is no chance of it being used again, only then would I consider deleting it.

Now if you’re talking about a blog, then I might absorb the past posts into a resource center format with out comments but still organized by category. It would not look like a blog but more like a collection of articles on topics that would be useful to prospects and customers. Daily or weekly blogging would be discontinued but new articles could be added from time to time and incorporated into a company newsletter or bylined articles in industry media.

What advice do you have for SMBs who may be unsure of what they should be measuring with social media or which outcome is the most realistico or beneficial for them?

The first step in understanding social KPIs and business objectives is to establish what the goals are. In many cases, goals might emphasize customer acquisition or revenue.

There are other revenue oriented goals that can be affected by integrated SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing like the length of sales cycle, order volume, order frequency, per transaction profitability and referrals. Other goals covered in the book deal with increasing the effectiveness of PR objectives like awareness and building thought leadership. Yet others my augment content reach and effectiveness for customer service or talent acquisition.

The social KPIs worth measuring should help you track progress towards your goal. For example, if you think better search ranking of optimized content will result in more qualified visitors and sales, then the things that affect ranking are KPIs worth tracking such as inbound links, social shares and other SEO metrics.

If your premise is that the number of unsolicited media pickups will increase if the brand can become present in the social streams and news feeds of key journalists and bloggers that cover the industry, then you’d work social engagement and content into your social media tactics.

The objective of being visible as an authority on topics of interest to the media that are also of importance to your customers would guide tactics and measurement of progress. Social KPIs might be the number of retweets and shares of your targeted stories, the direct interactions with bloggers and media through comments, shared content and direct messages.

Ultimately, the success measurement would be the number of times bloggers and industry media mention your company, products or staff on topics being promoted.

What should SMBs be looking for in SEO, SMM, SEM or other online marketing professionals if they need to outsource tasks they don’t have the capacity to handle in-house?

The industry is mature enough that outside consultants should be able to show that they have experience implementing solutions and solving difficult problems using an intentional approach vs. social or SEO guesswork.

In many cases, it makes sense for a SMB to engage a consultant at a strategic level who can provide assistance with overall approach and oversight of implementation. For others, the need for niche expertise is what’s needed. Either way, marketing professionals should be able to listen and understand the nature of the SMBs business problem and offer a thoughtful approach and tactics to solve it. Some things can be done by the SMB and some by the consultant.

The online marketing world is competitive and consultants need to be more than mechanics of marketing. They need to be architects as well.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 5 Online Marketing Essentials for Small Business Marketers | http://www.toprankblog.com

Despite blogs being named as more influential than social networks in shaping consumers’ opinions and purchase decisions, many marketers and communicators  are falling short.

Why? A focus on self-promotion has many brands running out of content  ideas and time to show a return on their blog content investment. Tolerance for quantity of content and superficial social engagement metrics as a basis for results is diminishing.

Despite these challenges, blogs provide an incredible content marketing platform for connecting directly with prospects, the media, customers, new employees, investors and the industry at large.

To offer companies a roadmap to realizing these business blogging and content marketing benefits, I will be giving a presentation at the inaugural Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego on Tuesday, April 9th.

My talk will guide attendees through a powerful, yet simple 3 part model for developing blog content plans that attract the right readers, engage them with the right content and inspire them to take action – whether it’s to subscribe, interact, request more information or become a customer.

Some of the key components of the presentation include:

• Top reasons business blogs fail
• Understand your audience – empathy, not ego, is the answer.
• How blogs can be integrated with content marketing
• Attract, Engage, Convert model for better content marketing results
• Building a business blogging content plan with goals and measurement that matter

For context, here are some essential questions to answer when building a content marketing campaign that’s integrated with a company blog:

First, what’s your goal? Decide what outcomes you’re after and work backwards to determine the key performance metrics that will indicate progress. You can optimize these to get back on track when necessary or to accelerate outcomes.

What content and social media/network assets do you currently have?

What content will you need to create on what channels and where does the blog fit within this mix?

How will you attract traffic to the campaign?

What does your target audience care about? What interests, pain points and goals can your content help solve for them?

Who are the influencers that you can connect with to help co-create and amplify content objects and the overall campaign?

What stories and hooks can you use to create a narrative across the various content objects that will connect your target audience and influencers with the key brand messages?

What calls to action will you use to inspire action across the stages of the campaign?  The customer journey is not linear, so it is important to offer CTAs across the entire campaign, early – middle – late stage, not just when you want them to buy.

Make a content plan that identifies the primary messages, subordinate topics and the types of content objects you’ll use on your blog, social platforms and other media to execute the campaign. The content plan should factor search keywords, social promotion, online PR, email and any other promotion efforts to amplify content reach and engagement.

What specific KPIs will you monitor as the content objects are published and promoted? Assign responsibilities / tasks  on your team for curating the impact of your own content as it reaches influencers and the target audience. “Publicize your publicity” – Aaron Wall.

Blogging Integrated with Content Marketing in Action: #WhatTheFOC

I’ll be presenting at a local interactive marketing conference soon on the topic of “Future of Content”.  For the event, my goals are to create awareness and drive attendance. But my overall goal is to use the event as a component of an overall campaign to drive awareness of TopRank Online Marketing content marketing thought leadership.

The journey of creating content to promote the event will also create content and engagement nationally and internationally amongst communities we wish to engage.

I decided to break the topic of “Future of Content” down into component parts and post them as questions to my social networks in a content crowdsourcing effort. The goal being to get conversations going amongst influencers about these topics and leverage their insights along with my own in a series of blog posts. The first of these posts, “What is Content” combined 40 of the answers to the question I received on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

To tie these posts and their social promotion together, I created the #whatthefoc hash tag, which is fun and relevant to the topic.

Each blog post will serve as a hub for discussion about the crowdsourced question and promoted through social channels that reach far beyond the local audience.  Quotes provided by participants in these posts will be used within the “Future of Content” presentation.

Along with crowdsourcing social content, I’m also reaching out to digital marketing leaders at major national/international and local brands to survey their insights into some of the key questions answered in the presentation. Those quotes will be used in the presentation and in a guide that attendees at the “Future of Content” presentation will be able to download, un-gated. After the event, that guide will be promoted on the blog and through our broader social channels.

As complements to these blog posts, there will be visual marketing components through images (tips) posted on Facebook and Google+, quotes on top of compelling images posted to Slideshare and promotions through email, social ads and guest posts / articles on industry blogs and sites.

Measurement will include quantity and quality of crowdsourcing participants, participation by global brands and thought leaders (some of which are local to Minnesota), message reach via social networks, blog post visits, comments, shares, off-site citations and inbound links.  We’ll also look at event attendance, buzz during the event and downloads of the free guide.

There will be incentives to livetweet and liveblog the presentation, so we’ll look at that too.  On top of all this, we’ll look at inquiries made for more information about the topic, working with TopRank on consulting projects, working for TopRank (yes we’re hiring!), media inquiries and request to speak at other events.

Hopefully this gives you a ballpark perspective on what I consider to be a pretty straightforward approach to integrating a blog with a content marketing campaign. Processes, templates and past experience make this a pretty efficient effort without the resources you would imagine.

What’s really important is to create a win for everyone involved across the campaign. Not just for the brand. Not just for influencers. Not just for the target audience. Everyone wins.

Image source: Shutterstock

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | How to Integrate Blogging With Content Marketing that Inspires Action | http://www.toprankblog.com

But it doesn’t have to be a mystery for customers to find your corporate blog. If you have interesting and useful things to say, there is an audience seeking that very information.

The connection between social media and blog promotion for companies is logical: Publish a blog post and then tweet it out or post a link to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

But there’s more to making your business blog findable than just sharing links through social channels. That’s why focusing solely on the promotion of blog content after it’s published is like a hamster running on an exercise wheel. The ideal is to be intentional and planned yet also opportunistic. And to scale those promotion efforts, it’s essential that two or three times as much time is spent growing social networks than actually promoting content to them.

Business blogs in particular, benefit from a content calendar to guide messaging and to stay true to meeting the needs of the business and researched interests of the target audience. With that editorial planning should also come an effort to build social networks.

For a business, the core 5 social networks to consider would probably be Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. If there’s substantial video content, then YouTube is a logical addition. Creating and growing communities in at least one or two of these networks with a new blog will help grow a community that looks forward to whatever you’ll post next.

Think of a hub and spoke model for blog publishing where the blog is the hub and social networks are the spokes. Each spoke represents a community of interest, relevant to your blog’s key purpose. Be useful to the community through curation, sharing, interacting, and stimulating conversation and the community will reward you with attention, engagement and sharing.

The time to start an army is not on the first day of the war. With so many sources of information coming at digital citizens every minute they’re connected to the web, it can be a battle to stand out. Many business bloggers make the mistake of simply creating posts and then tweeting them out and expecting attention in return.

To see a return on your blog promotion effort, you must invest! Publishing interesting and useful content isn’t enough. Promotion is key. But promotion itself is useless unless there is an interested audience to receive. That’s why growing networks is so important for a blog that expects to be findable.

Network growth can be achieved at the start, by simply curating interesting news, interacting with others and sharing only the posts that are particularly promotable. Here are a few tips on making social network growth both efficient and effective:

Use a tool – Using a tool like HootSuite can enable a blogger so they can do some basic monitoring their social communities on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+. Saved search queries on Twitter within HootSuite will help monitor topics of relevance and even “buying signals” that can prompt interaction. You can also create lists on Twitter of the influentials in your industry and follow that list within HootSuite for interaction and promotion opportunities.

Track news to curate – Besides monitoring influentials on your social networks for choice for news to share, searching Google News and bookmarking the search results page can also be useful for finding recent and relevant content to curate.

Comment on other blogs and news sites – Find other topically relevant blogs and industry news sites that allow commenting and track them for opportunities to share your opinion. Just one of these comments a day can take about 5 minutes and if you add that up over time, it creates a very credible footprint. It can even turn into bloggers or journalists reaching out to you for comment.

Besides growing networks it’s also important to make the most out of the blog content itself for more effective blog promotion. Here are a few key questions to answer for each post, whether its planned in advance or a spontaneous reaction:

Why is it special? – Think about the one thing that makes the post special or most useful. This can be made into the meta description that appears in search results. The thing that makes a post special, can also be distilled into the post title, Tweets and other social messages.

Who would find it interesting? – Business blogs have a certain audience in mind and should be considered for the voice of the post and where it’s promoted. If you think your social connections that represent the topic of the post would be interested, reach out to them and share the post. Better yet, ask them for a tip and include it in the post.

What is the core message and promise? – Similar to the “special”, this is the syntax for the title. For example, rather than just “10 Blog Promotion Tips”, it will be more effective to say, “10 Blog Promotion Tips to Boost Traffic for Real Estate Blogs”. The revised title includes a classic formula for successful social sharing: Topic, Benefit and for Who. This is also where you should consider keywords people might use on search engines.

There could be more than one message and more than one target audience for a post, so use it to your advantage and craft Topic, Benefit, Who messages for each. Those can be used for social sharing on different networks or multiple messages shared throughout the week.

What’s the takeaway for the reader? – This is your conclusion of the post. Hint at this in the opening, provide substance for it in the post and provide the takeaway in the conclusion.

Any special media (graphics, audio, video) elements? – If your post has a special image, or embeddable media like a presentation hosted on Slideshare or video from YouTube, then there are promotions opportunities based on those media on other social networks. When dealing with things like video and presentations, there are also many content repurposing opportunities. Images from an embedded presentation could be used on Pinterest or Flickr to attract traffic back to the blog post, for example.

Based on your answers to these questions, some better choices for promotion can be made and you’ll be able to scale the reach of your business blog without scaling the amount of time to achieve it. Every blogger has something valuable to say and there’s no reason that it should be a mystery to find such useful information and advice. Don’t make the mistake of expecting a return on blogging with no investment in promotion or network growth. The social web works on a give to get basis, so think about what you can do to optimize your blogging effort and create value for the people you’re really trying to connect with.

For a lot of bloggers, just doing 2 or 3 of these things on a regular basis will improve the reach and findability of their blog content. Once a connection is made between promotion and an increase in visits, engagement and interactions, then confidence in an even more active effort will come. Mystery solved!

What blog promotion tips would you add?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Is Finding Your Business Blog a Mystery? 3 Tips for Blog Promotion & Findability | http://www.toprankblog.com

Both Lee Odden and Mike Yanke have touted the benefits of evergreen content here at Online Marketing Blog. Mike cites the SEO benefits of content that builds links and engages readers over a lengthy period of time. Compelling, engaging, original content satisfies visitors and search engines alike.

It’s also critical for creating marketable assets that convey your company’s key messages designed specifically to attract, engage and convert new business, says Lee. Businesses need to use evergreen content in concert with more timely pieces, creating a layer of information you can refer back to, repurpose, and otherwise use to build your digital footprint over time.

What is Evergreen Content?

I think we can all agree that evergreen content is good and that it should definitely be a part of our business content arsenal, particularly on a company blog. But what does it look like? What it is, exactly, that makes a piece of content evergreen?

Evergreen content has a number of universal characteristics, regardless of your niche or industry:

• It will remain relevant to your audience over a period of time.
• It answers a question, describes a process, offers a definition, or otherwise provides information your readers find valuable.
• It is original and of high quality.
• It is your definitive resource on a topic that might be revisited or referred to countless times in the future.

While creating an editorial plan for your blog (I know you have one!), use the tips below to ensure a portion of your content is purposeful, helpful, and likely to live on for years to come.

Tips to Make Your Content Evergreen:

Stop! See what I did there? I can’t assume that each person who reads this post will have read Lee’s previous post, Core Content SEO Tools: Keyword Glossary and Editorial Plan. I can’t properly explain what an editorial plan is, or how to create one, in this post if I’m to deliver on what I promised you to this point. Yet each month, about 4,400 people search Google for “editorial plan.” I linked to his evergreen editorial planning resource to offer assistance to those looking for more information on the topic.

Now, for those tips:

• Remove any timely elements from your post. There is a time to refer to a recent study, share news, or tie your post to a trending topic, but this isn’t it; this can quickly make it appear outdated.
• Invest time in making it awesome. If you really want a piece of content to be a source you’ll refer your readers back to for the foreseeable future, don’t do it halfway.
• Incorporate multimedia elements like photos from Flickr, SlideShare presentations or videos embedded from YouTube. Images and video can be helpful in explaining concepts and add visual interest. Plus, each is searchable in its own right and when linked, can lead visitors from those properties to the helpful resources on your blog.
• Optimize each piece for search engine discovery and social sharing. This is best practice for any type of content, but especially important to keep it living after the initial buzz of a newly published piece dies down.

How Does Evergreen Content Fit Into Your Content Plan?

Now that you know what it is and how to create it, when should you use evergreen content?

Make a concerted effort to work it into your content plan; there’s no optimal percentage or density I can recommend. In a lot of cases, your audience will tell you – perhaps not in so many words – where they would like more information or advice. This is where your web analytics, social listening and competitive research all come into play, to inform opportunities to create resources that answer a specific need.

Get creative and try a few of the following:

• Create topic pages that introduce a narrow, specific idea and curate your best content, with a description and link to each. For example, a fashion blog could create one post on “Fit” and link to their ten best resources on properly fitting and tailoring clothing.
• Make a How-To post that compiles posts you’ve written on each step of a process and guides new readers through from start to finish.
• Define terms and concepts in one post that links to your lengthier posts on each one.
• Make a timeline of industry events.
• Share a compilation of statistics or factoids for a period of time, ie.: a specific month or year. These can be evergreen if you offer information from a variety of sources, making your post a valuable resource to refer back to in its own right.

Even Evergreen Content Needs Upkeep

Revisit your evergreen posts monthly or bi-monthly to refresh your content and add updated information. Remember to link back to these posts wherever relevant so they aren’t sitting dormant in the underbelly of your blog for all eternity.

The process of maintaining evergreen content is far simpler if you plan for it. Set calendar alerts for future dates to check in on specific post topics, or add each post as you write it to a list you’ll access again in a year’s time.

Build out your arsenal of evergreen content to keep the pageviews, social shares and leads coming. How important is evergreen content in your company blog strategy? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Image courtesy of Stock.Xchng

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Where Does Evergreen Content Fit in Your Company Blog Content Plan? | http://www.toprankblog.com

One of the debates is around writing content as a stream of consciousness with the assumption that it will attract the audience that it deserves, causing it to be shared and exposed to even more readers.

Then there are the opportunists that seek to scale the reach of their content though blogging by creating processes for generating topics, keyword optimization and social sharing schemes to blast the content everywhere the internet’s sun doesn’t shine.

As extremes these are opposing views where one is focused on earned attention due to quality and another is focused on maximum attention due to quantity. The tricky part is that they both have merit but not until a very important distinction is made:

Blogging for personal expression is not the same thing as blogging for a business. 

Blogging as a form of personal expression vs. blogging to meet the needs of a particular audience you want to do business with are different things.

Personal expression and creativity are awesome. If your form of creative expression results in something that also happens to resonate with your readers and internet audiences at large, it’s very gratifying. It’s also a crapshoot in terms of achieving results.

On the other hand, when a business, small or large, invests time in creating content, there’s an expectation that it will result in a return of some kind. Few companies have unlimited budget and time to figure out what that return is, so they reconcile the difference between business goals and the information needs of the audience they’re trying to connect with.

In tandem with who you’re writing for is the notion of frequency, a topic of last night’s #blogchat hosted by Mack Collier. “Should we should strive to blog consistently, or only when we have something epic”.  Epic or meaningful, it makes sense to write when you feel inspired. But for business blogs there has to be some accountability. Epic can mean an overwhelmingly practical and useful post or the “War and Peace” of your industry.

Based on 9 years of business blogging, I answer such questions through layers in the editorial plan. Some topics deserve to be epic and others more routine. There’s an audience for both. There’s satisfaction in creating both.

Tools and processes like a content marketing strategy, editorial plan, researched topics and keywords that are in demand by a target audience can all help move the business blog’s chances of getting a return on effort from crapshoot to a solid investment. And it can do so without compromising content quality.

The flip side is when opportunists take those processes and pervert them mechanically, then the spew of auto generated, keyword curated nonsense in the name of content marketing and SEO puts a nasty mark on two very legitimate marketing disciplines.  All because of how the tools are used.

Tools are only as good as the expertise of the person using them. 

Recently, I read a post on Social Media Explorer about the need for creativity with business content. With that premise, I can’t agree more. Companies that master the blocking and tackling of content creation will never rise above to their potential without tapping into the creative inspiration that exists within their subject matter experts and content producers.

At the same time, there is a very important role with the aforementioned tools in order to scale those creative efforts. I’ve been using and recommending these types of tools for many years. That’s why the following part of the post caught my attention and inspired me to comment on both the post and to write this one:

“Put the editorial calendar on hold and focus instead on developing pure ideas. Set the list of key words aside and face an empty page (and) without it the crutch.”

That is just one part of the post, but my experience with using such tools has been very different. Here’s my reply:

“Really? I’ve been using an editorial calendar with keywords and topics as a guide for 5+ years. We have one of the most popular marketing blogs on the web. Traffic, inquiries and awareness of our business have never been higher. Our posts get hundreds and sometimes thousands of social shares and anywhere from 4,000-8,000 visits per day. We’ve had a 6 year engagement with a $100bn company because of that content. We helped launch a new social community with one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers because of that content.

If someone is ineffective at using tools like an editorial calendar, search phrases and social topics, does that mean those tactics stand in the way of creative inspiration?

Content planning that considers the information needs of the audience you’re after that will ultimately buy you, your products and services deserves guidelines. There’s plenty of room for creative execution, just as there’s room for content planning to be accountable for business outcomes. It’s not enough to dance like no one’s looking to be competitive.

Could businesses stand to be more creative and free with the content they produce? Of course. But I’ll take creative + performance over creative + personal expression every time.

So, my question to you is, are you blogging for personal expression or do you consider the audience you’re writing for? Do you use any tools to manage and optimize your writing and blog post promotion efforts to reach those readers?

Photo via Shutterstock

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Blogging For Business or Pleasure? Personal Expression vs. Creating Value for Your Community | http://www.toprankblog.com

Since bloggers do more than just write posts, I’ve shifted the focus of this list from blogs to individuals. With the increasing importance of authorship and personal brands, I think it’s important to consider individual bloggers and the content they share whether its tweets, status updates, or other useful information created online.

As a result, the people on this list are recognized for their overall social sharing about “online marketing” related topics, not just blogging.

Thanks to nominations made from some really helpful UK bloggers and the folks at Traackr we’ve created the Top 50 UK Online Marketing Influencers & Bloggers.

Here’s more info about this year’s Top UK Online Marketing Influencers & Bloggers List and a few inevitable questions:

How did you create the list?
To start, we drew upon our top UK internet blogs lists from past years then asked an array of UK based internet marketers to nominate their favorite blogs and bloggers that cover search engine optimization, content marketing, search engine marketing, social media and other online marketing practices.

TopRank Online Marketing also partnered with Traackr to discover new influential bloggers, track their online content and measure their reach, resonance and relevance.

To make the list, a blogger needed to write consistently about online marketing and have an engaged audience. This ranking is updated every month to take into consideration new content published by UK focused bloggers on the social web, so be sure to return to see if your ranking has changed.

How do you define “online marketing”?
To develop this list, we defined online marketing as the practice of using digital channels to attract and acquire customers. The bloggers selected for the list write consistently about topics such as search engine marketing and optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, online public relations and similar topics.

How can I be included on this list?
The only way to be included on this list is to be based in the UK, write and share original content about online marketing. Your relevancy to the topic is most important. We also look at metrics to determine the size of your audience and their level of engagement with your content.

Why did my rank change?
The influential bloggers listed here are identified by Traackr and their online content is monitored over time. As new content is published, we reassess everyone’s relevance and engagement metrics. New people can emerge and current list members can move in rank depending on these factors.

What is Traackr?
Traackr provides influencer identification and analytics software for businesses and agencies. The tool discovers, ranks and monitors online influencers and the content they produce on the web. Midsize and large companies use Traackr to build better influencer programs and earn more attention by engaging with the right people. You can learn more at www.traackr.com.

Thank you

To the following UK based marketers and all around helpful people who nominated many of the bloggers in this list:

• Andy Betts – @andybetts1
• Anna Francis - @MissAnna_F
• Allister Frost - @AllisterF
• Andy Kinsey - @andykinsey
• Andrew Girdwood - @AndrewGirdwood
• Carla Marshall - @Carla_Marshall
• Chris Lee - @CMRLee
• Ciaran Rogers - @ciaraniow
• Claire Carlile - @clairecarlile
• Dave Chaffey - @DaveChaffey
• Dixon Jones - @Dixon_Jones
• Doug Kessler - @dougkessler
• Gianfranco Cuzziol - @iamgfc
• Jason Meininger - @shadowdaddy
• Jim Banks - @jimbanks
• Joanna Butler - @JoannaButler
• Malika Sharma - @Malika89
• Matt Sawyer - @mattuk
• Sam Scholfield - @StuffedWeb
• Tim Grice - @Tim_Grice
• Volker Ballueder - @ballueder

Also a HUGE THANKS goes to Evy Wilkins from Traackr for all her hard work to make this new list template happen.

Inevitably, there are people that our readers feel should be included in the lists we publish.  You can share your suggestions of course, but publishing content on social networks and on blogs on a regular basis is really the best way to make it into the consideration set.

Creative Content Marketing—Winning Hearts, Minds, & Wallets
Investments in content marketing are on the rise, but few companies have fully realised what the best practices are for creating high-quality content over a long period of time. Developing ideas for effective marketing can be a challenge. This session will help you to:

• Develop a framework for creative and efficient content creation.
• Find resources and ideas where others cannot.
• Leverage a mix of evergreen, repurposed, curated, and co-created content for better marketing results.
• Apply SEO and social media optimization principles to amplify content reach and engagement.

The top 2 live tweeters during my #SESLON session will win a copy of Optimize (sorry, no “Optimise” version is available)  :)

I hope to see you there!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Top UK Online Marketing Influencers & Bloggers in 2013 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Starting a company blog provides a good opportunity to attract new customers and engage current customers with content about your products and other topics that are of importance to them.  It doesn’t matter if the items being sold are car parts, clothing, electronics or furniture, there is an opportunity to help solve pain points and arm your customers with information that encourages engagement and purchasing decisions.

Showcase Merchandise & Industry Trends

Clothing: Showing apparel while still providing value to customers is easier than one might think.  Use a blog to keep customers up to date on the latest trends, or mix and match clothing options using featured products.  This may spark an idea in the customers mind and encourage them to purchase.

Technology:  The tech industry is constantly evolving and most Americans want to stay up to date, or ahead of the curve.  Your technology blog can prove to be a great resource for the latest electronics industry news and trends.  Also, if there are tips and tricks that can be provided to customers on how to best use your products or troubleshoot common issues, you will prove to be a valuable resource to them.

Involve The Online Community

The community of online customers and fans are priceless to building trust in your brand.  In fact, recent reports have found that 31% of surveyed consumers read an online review before making a purchase and 50 or more product reviews can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.

Social Networks Can Augment A Blogging Strategy

Finding the right social networks for your brand can be tricky.  The company’s listed below are considered to be the top retailers on the big 5 social networks.  A review of what social media strategies are working for top brands can provide guidance and inspiration for your social media and blogging plan as well.

• Facebook: Walmart
• Twitter: MLB
• YouTube: Nike
• Google+: GameStop
• Pinterest: LL Bean

Provide An In-Store Experience Online

For online retailers that also have stores, the majority of revenue will be generated offline.  Why?  Customers like to see and touch the merchandise before making a purchasing decision or obtaining help from a sales associate if needed.  Online retailers can go so far as to create an in-store experience online.  Find a way to provide content for customers that makes them feel motivated to purchase.

Whether you’re just beginning blogging or are on the hunt for new tips to improve an existing content marketing strategy I hope that these tips put you on the way to providing new and innovative content to your customers.  In an online world filled with competition and quickly evolving best practices, it is essential that you arm yourself with the tools necessary to stand out from the online and real world competitors.  What type of blog content have you found to be most well received by customers?

Image via Shutterstock.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 4 Blogging Basics For Online Retailers | http://www.toprankblog.com

Whether you’re sprinkling your content marketing with imagery or looking to make it a larger part of your strategy, C.C. suggests some best practices for letting your images shine.

#1 – Always Create An Emotional Response
When someone looks at the images that you use to help tell the story of your content, it should illicit a response or reaction.  If a follower takes a look at your photo and then stifles a yawn it’s time to go back to the camera lens and find another image that is more suited.

#2 – Start Thinking Visually
It’s time that every business start thinking visually.  If you’re a retail website, be more mindful of how your products are displayed.  If you have a storefront, take some pictures of it.  If you create a lot of text rich content online, amp it up with some killer images.

In his presentation, C.C. shared examples of companies that you wouldn’t think would have a strong visual focus with their online content.  Companies like General Electric have taken a very innovative approach to the types of images they share on their Instagram page.

#3 – All Content Needs Photos
There is an opportunity to add visual content to almost all media types.  Using a photo on a Facebook post or tweet to your fans is a great way to draw them in with something new and unexpected.

#4 – Size Doesn’t Matter
Don’t let budget stop you from including great photos in your online content.  Even if you aren’t able to hire a photographer you can still capture great photos.  Take a crack at it yourself and see what happens!

#5 – Look For Moments
Try and keep an eye out for those moments that will create a great photo if captured in time.  It could be something as simple as a leaf falling from a tree or a unique perspective on a piece of architecture.  If any of you have ever seen Lee Odden’s Instagram feed you know that he loves taking photos on his travels and has a good eye for making the piece of architecture you’ve seen a million times, somehow look different.  Find what it is that inspires you and snap it.

#6 – Share When No One Else Can
C.C. provided an example of a trip that he took with two other individuals to a remote part of the world.  As there were only two other people with him on this trip, they had access to “content” that no one else ever would.  If you find yourself in a unique situation that you’d like to share with others that could not be present, take a few photos that can be used in your content.

#7 – Shoot Like A Kid 
Ever heard the expression: “Dance like no one’s looking”?  Well, the same notion applies to taking great images.  Shoot little things you find interesting, try different angles, and don’t overthink your shots.

4 Quick Tips For Getting Started

1. Know Your Gear
2. Develop A Workflow
3. Observe What Others Are Doing
4. Shoot What You Love

Whether you or a business or an individual you have an opportunity to choose how the world sees you.  Including images in your online content that appeal to your audience can help influence what they think about you and what actions they take based upon your content.

Keep an eye out for more posts from NMX Las Vegas over the next couple days.  Follow the conference hashtag #NMX and check us out on Twitter (@toprank) for even more helpful tips

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 7 Ways To Spice Up Your Online Marketing Using Photography with C.C. Chapman | http://www.toprankblog.com

Happy New Year and Welcome 2013!

Also, Happy Birthday to TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog!

A little over 9 years ago I started this blog as a way to save and share links to industry news. Over the years it has evolved in many ways thanks to our community and our team at TopRank.

Since 2003 Online Marketing Blog has generously shared thousands of posts, reaching millions of online marketers all over the world. Every time I speak at a conference, whether it’s in New York or Sydney or London, multiple people approach me with thanks for our blog’s contribution of insight, tips and useful information. That feedback is priceless and very much appreciated.

Now for some thanks back:

• Thank you to our 50,000 subscribers and the hundreds of thousands of people who visit via the web and from social networks.
• BIG THANKS to the companies who hired our agency TopRank Online Marketing after reading, following, listening and engaging with us.
• Thanks also to journalists and bloggers who reach out, cite us and reference our content in their stories.
• Thanks to our first time ever sponsors Trackur, Unbounce, Raven Tools, PRWeb, Acquisio and Digital People.
• Thanks to the authors and industry thought leaders who have written guest posts for us.
• Thanks to the team at TopRank Online Marketing (Alexis, Brian, Evan, Jolina, Mike Y. and Miranda) that contributed posts, liveblogged conferences and engaged with our community.
• Of course a BIG thanks goes to Ashley Zeckman for consistent contributions each and every week, including the most popular blog post on Online Marketing Blog for all of 2012!
• THANK YOU for reading, sharing and providing us with an even richer experience on the web. I hope you find our contributions useful and look forward to connecting with you on and offline.

With BlogWorld’s New Media Expo (NMX) conference coming up next weekend, (I’m presenting Jan 8th at noon) I think it’s incredibly timely for a blog birthday post that shares tips from years of first hand experience. I appreciate that there’s a lot of advice on blogging out there and for those that want to hear from someone that has been at it for a very long time and with great results, this post might be of interest.

1. You Can’t Score Without A Goal

There’s really no way to predict 100% what a blog will do for your business, but at a minimum, a blog can serve as a direct communications platform for your company to reach all audiences that you might want to engage with. Setting goals and having a purpose is essential for any business investment in time and money. Otherwise, how will you know how to create your plan or when you’re successful?

My initial goals were simply to be functional and useful. Then they extended to things like traffic, search visibility and referred traffic to our company website. Now we can count a variety of goals that include customer acquisition, recruiting, industry media coverage, conference speaking and private workshops for companies, industry networking and other engagement, growth, retention and advocacy goals.

2. After the Honeymoon It’s Going to Take Work

When companies launch new blogs there’s excitement about the promise of creating a new way of communicating with prospects, customers, new employes and the media.  The people responsible for creating content often have other responsibilities besides the company blog. Seeing your hard work published for the world to see, the first comments and mentions of your posts on industry websites is exciting.

That excitement, or “honeymoon period” is going to wear off.  Developing and maintaining a productive business blog takes work. It also means working smart. Many of the solutions to that work/hard smart observation are in the rest of this post. Just be aware that after you start a business blog or hire a dedicated blogger, there will be a period of over optimism and then reality will set in regarding being able to maintain several quality posts per week, keeping up with comments and being able to show a return on the time spent.

3. Failing to Plan is a Plan to Fail

When I first started a blog, Minneapolis digerati Garrick Van Buren asked me what my blogging strategy was. I replied that I had none, it was purely an experiment. The look of disbelief he gave was a bit of a lightbulb moment. It took me a while to develop a sold strategy after that, but things really ramped up after I did.

A plan can be as simple as outlining a hypothesis about what a blog will do for you or your company and the steps you think are necessary to reach those goals.  If you want to be known as the king of “red widgets” then planning blog posts around that topic will help advance that goal. That means topics from the reader’s perspective, not just editorialized advertisements for the brand. It also means planning networking, outreach, off-blog commenting and integration with other digital and offline messaging.  A good blog can be a force multiplier for a social media or digital marketing effort.

4. Blog For Your Audience, Not Just Self Expression

I know one of the motivations for many individual bloggers is self expression. The motivation of expression is very powerful. But it can lead you away from reaching business goals.

When it comes to blogging for a business, it’s essential to identify business objectives and audience interests right along with self expression. The flavor of “personality” added to blogged content that serves the needs of your readership is a lot more valuable than a rant. Accurate and timely information is more shareable and travels farther when a business blog has a particular voice. Self expression and business goals do not need to be mutually exclusive with business blogging.

Growing your blog audience means building community. People will often only show as much interest in your business blog as the interest you show in the community. So engage, ask and answer questions relevant to the topics your target audience is interested in. Tapping into those ongoing experiences means content that your audience will care about and a never ending source of new ideas.

5.  Stand For Something

While it’s important to use empathy with your community to identify topics that will attract and engage them, it’s also important to communicate your key values and unique selling proposition.  With thousands of blog posts and even more social media updates published every day, there’s a lot of competition for your community’s time.  By aligning your key business values and unique selling proposition with the content plan for your blog, you’ll provide a stronger signal that will help your brand stand out. A focused purpose of message will magnetize your content and attract a community interested in what you have to say.

6. Grow Promotion Networks Months Before You Need Them

Great content isn’t great until people can find it, read it and share it with others. With a business blog, that means incorporating promotion into the editorial process. The free blog content planning spreadsheet we published a while back provides for the usual, dates, topics, keywords and media. It also includes planning how certain blog posts will be promoted. Make promotion part of the process.

Writing a fantastic post and then deciding to reach out to people you haven’t connected with in a year or more to help you promote it, probably isn’t going to get the response you expected.  As you plan your blog’s overall topics and themes, start reaching out via comments and social networks to the movers and shakers on those topics. Show value first, ie “give to get”.  When the time comes to promote, those networks where you’ve invested time and created value are more likely to return the favor. Better yet, they’ve subscribed to your blog and are already helping to share because the content is relevant and useful.

7. Maintain a Queue

One of the biggest concerns companies have over corporate blogging is being able to maintain high quality content over time.  I can assure you, I’ve learned this lesson many times.  One of the keys to maintaining quality is to stay connected with your community and the industry. Take notes of trending topics and connections that you see. I like to use Evernote to nurture these ideas until they become budding blog posts.

Beyond planning topics and writing in advance, keep a queue of blog posts that you can draw from. Sitting down and writing a 2,000 word blog post like this one can take a long time, time that you don’t have. Rather, add to it from time to time.  It’s easier spending a few minutes here and there on a post over a period of days or weeks than trying to find 1-2 hours of uninterrupted time.

8. Integrate With Other Digital Communications

A blog is not and should not be an island.  A blog can serve many communication and engagement purposes from marketing to PR to customer service. Integrating the blog content plan with a company’s overall content marketing strategy should be a given, but oftentimes it’s overlooked. Blogs can be excellent places for repurposing other digital content.  They can also provide support to other digital marketing content and advertising initiatives.  Integrating key messages from other business communications and promotions into the blog editorial plan will help amplify those key messages in a natural way.

9. Ask for Help

I’ve written over 2,000 blog posts myself which amounts to over 1.2 million words.  It took me a long time to learn the lesson of asking for help. I didn’t hire an internal marketer until I had been blogging for about 8 years.  A diversity of bloggers helps spread the workload, it introduces new voices that may better resonate than your own,  and for business blogging it can tap into subject matter experts that would otherwise go unpublished.

Asking for help goes beyond content contribution to social participation. Giving relevant team members a heads up about a particularly special blog post may result in more social sharing.

Tapping into your community for participation and promotion can be very effective. The key to asking for help is to make it crystal clear what you want the person to do. Make it easy for them to do it and be sure to give feedback upon completion. As they say, “people will work for a living but die for recognition”, so make sure you recognize contributors that are actually helping advance the blogging effort: whether it’s co-creating content, social sharing or both.

10. Adaptability and Agility

Whether it’s listening to other blogs and emerging stories in the news or mining topics most often mention in your comments and the site search queries, adaptability is key. Leverage data from web analytics, social media monitoring services and even Google Alerts to identify mentions of your blog, trending topics and what your community is actually responding to. Adapt editorial as you need to and even “newsjack” to tap into emerging news stories that you can be a part of. This requires speed and active monitoring but can be well worth it.

Speaking of speed, responding quickly to comments on the blog shows you value contribution and participation. Since so much content on a blog can get shared through services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, it’s important to monitor those services too, in order to acknowledge commentary or to participate in resulting discussions from your posts.

11.  Everybody Makes Mistakes

A blog for the blog owner is like a baby and you want everything perfect. Or like in my case, I’ve been at it for over 9 years. There are things I know that have taken a very long time that someone new to the business blogging world isn’t going to pickup overnight. No matter how many processes, checks and balances that you put in place, errors can occur. Whether it’s a type (the bane of my blogging existence) or a bad link or just bad writing. Did you catch that one? The irony is incredible, so I’ll leave it in.

Few companies have the luxury of a blog editor who can read through every post, check every link and also edit for style. But even when you don’t, it’s important to hold a standard for quality.  Even with that standard, mistakes will be made.  Identify them, correct them and move on.

BONUS.  Measure What Matters

In my world, blogging serves multiple objectives including marketing, PR, Recruiting and Customer Service.  In order for the effort of 5 posts a week (except yesterday) to pay off, it’s important to monitor the KPIs that lead to business value and to make changes

For effective business blog measurement, think about the customer or audience journey to decide what’s important for you track. From creating awareness of your category and interest in your brand, to being included during consideration of different services or products to the ultimately being chosen, creating, promoting, monitoring and optimizing blog content performance is essential. Also think about the differences in user experience according to purpose. For example, the path of discovery, consumption and engagement will be different for attracting a new customer than it would be for recruiting or customer service.

Just make sure you can tap into analytics resources to measure progress and outcomes that the blog is contributing to. You’ll be able to show value of course but also tap into the information you’ll need to optimize performance of your investment.

I could write (another) book about blogging for business, so these insights are just the tip of the iceberg. If you stick around a while, you’ll hear many more. In fact, if you’re attending the NMX conference next week, be sure to find me on Jan 8th at noon in the Miranda 5 room for my presentation on the Mythbusting and Integration of Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, what are some of your best lessons learned?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Happy New Year! 11 Lessons Learned After 9 Years of Business Blogging | http://www.toprankblog.com

If someone would have suggested to me 9 years ago that I should write 1.2 million words as a key component of my agency’s online marketing strategy, I would have dismissed them as crazy. And yet here we are.

I know a lot of companies have dabbled in blogging with mixed results and many are considering either starting a blog or scaling their blogging efforts. There are reasonable questions about how a business blog will add value to the bottom line. How will a corporate blog contribute to leads and sales? What is the ROI of blogging for each quater, month, week, day, hour and dollar invested? Those are great questions.

Maybe I should have asked myself those questions 9 years ago. But I didn’t.

What I did do was make a commitment to using a blog as a publishing platform to communicate directly with all the people I wanted to reach: prospects, customers, journalists, other bloggers, talented marketers to join the TopRank team, marketing partners, conferences and events to speak at and of course our own staff.

As our agency has grown, other TopRank team members have joined in the fun contributing their expertise and developing their blogging skills. Those additional voices help paint a better picture of our agency than I could ever do on my own. Team contributions are essential for a successful business blog.

The result? The ROI? We get new inquiries for consulting projects daily without any advertising or salespeople. Journalists and bloggers contact us to discuss stories weekly along with conference speaking opportunities. We get regular inquiries about working for our digital marketing agency and inquiries about partnering with other PR, Advertising and Interactive Marketing firms. Those objectives, without getting into the financials – trust me, they’re good, are more than the vast majority of agencies see with blogging efforts.

Monetize your marketing. On top of industry credibility, visibility, awareness, influence and measurable conversions, we also get daily requests for advertising. That means we’re not just realizing ROI in the form of attracting new business, but we’re able to monetize our marketing content through blog advertising.

Still feeling crazy. If someone had suggested to me 9 years ago that not only would I not need to advertise and not employ any salespeople, but that people would pay to run ads on our marketing content, I would have dismissed them as crazy too. And yet again, here we are.

Measuring the return on investment of a business blog is no different than any other online marketing effort. It starts with setting goals.  As you can see, the business value from blogging extends beyond lead generation and sales, although those are certainly the first order of the day for most companies.  Blogging is a communications channel that can work in concert with other communications to add value, reduce or deflect cost, increase efficiency and effectiveness. Blogging can play an essential role, in PR, lead generation, community building, customer support, collaboration and many other valuable business functions.

Imagine what blogging can do for you. Because blogging is so dynamic and works best as a component of an overall content marketing strategy, it’s important to develop a hypothesis about what you expect will happen from a successful blogging effort. What does success look like? How will you know you’ve met ROI expectations with blogging? Who are your audiences and how can publishing information on a blogging platform can pull them closer to where you want them to be? Answering those questions will be key in setting specific goals.

After goals, the mechanics will follow. With goals, timeframe and a blogging strategy in place, the monitoring of KPIs and measurement of blogging performance can be established. If goals are customer acquisition, then it makes sense to map the steps a prospect might take during the sales cycle from awareness to purchase and determine what’s measurable about that journey. If the goals are to attract media attention, then research industry editorial calendars and schedule content and media outreach accordingly. If the goals are related to customer support, then track topics of customer inquiries and create content to answer those most frequently asked questions.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) can range from rankings to traffic to social shares and referrals from the media and other blogs or websites. Tracking the quantity and rate over time of KPIs should serve as an indicator that your blogging efforts are moving in the right direction to achieve business outcomes like micro conversions (RSS subscribers, email newsletter signups, demo sign ups, white paper downloads, etc) as well as referrals from the blog to pages designed to sell on the company site. Any leads generated there can be attributed to the source of the referral. Of course any contacts or inquiries made directly on the blog count as well.

Measurement beyond the blog itself. Blogging promoted through social networks means tracking network size and rate of growth as well as engagement. A blog post can travel far through RSS, tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn shares, links from other blogs and of course the potential effect of Google+ shares. Visibility on social networks may not create leads directly, but the touchpoint through social when added to search visibility, email marketing, ads and media coverage all add up to building trust in prospects about your brand. That trust shortens sales cycles, increases order size, improves retention and many other trackable business outcomes.

Blogs are a critical part of a content marketing strategy. Blogs can serve as a hub with social networks and media as key channels of distribution in a hub and spoke content marketing approach. Following an editorial calendar that supports audience and business goals, content published on the corporate blog and promoted through social channels will create awareness, interest and invite readers to hunger for more. When companies deliver on the promise of useful, relevant and interesting content, readers can’t wait to see what will be published next. They’ll move beyond readers and often become advocates.

There are many lessons to be learned about blogging for business and luckily, we’ve figured out about as many as you can. But we continue to learn something new every day by tracking blog performance both short and long term.  There are so many new things I would like to do with this blog as we raise the bar and do an even better job of providing what our community is interested in and at the same time, accomplishing our business goals. In 2013 there will be some exciting changes as we bring on more writing, creative and social / SEO resources.

What does success look like to you with blogging? How do you measure success for your business blogging efforts?

Want to find out all there is to know about business blogging?

Then be sure to attend the BusinessNext conference (part of BlogWorld & New Media Expo) January 6-8, 2013 in Las Vegas.  BusinessNext speakers range from Amy Jo Martin to Ann Handley to Michael Brito to Dana White of the UFC. I’ll be doing my thing there too, presenting on the Attract, Engage, Convert Model for blogging and social media success.

The NMX conference includes speakers like Jay Baer, Leo Laporte, C.C. Chapman and many, many others. The BlogWorld NMX event is now consolidated back into one event for the entire year and it’s happening in January and in Vegas. See you there!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | What’s the ROI of Corporate Blogging? | http://www.toprankblog.com

Jason has been a vocal advocate of practical online marketing and PR for years and his experience with blogging and blog consulting may very well be the one thing you need to experience to justify your own secret mission to Columbus next week for Content Marketing World. For a sneak peek at Jason’s business blogging and content marketing secrets, check out the following interview.

BTW, we could tell you how we were able to get these secrets out of Jason, but then we’d have to “kill” you. With content of course.

You’re a busy man! As an author, speaker, blogger and the CEO of Social Media Explorer, how has your work with content as a marketing asset evolved? What do you think about all the recent buzz about “content marketing”? What’s BS and what’s the truth?

If anything, I’d say that my work with content marketing has grown more critical to each client we work with. Without exception, every client Social Media Explorer has worked with in the last three years, and even the clients I worked with in my previous role at Doe-Anderson, had content at the core of what made them successful online. In my mind, the digital and social marketing roles for a business are there to help create a holistic and consistent consumer experience with the brand. Content drives the online touch points. Without it, all you have are ads, which, by the way, also constitues content.

What do you consider to be reasonable goals for a content marketing program that’s focused on showing a business return, whether it’s sales, retention or something else?

It depends on a lot of factors — size of brand, scope of goals, size of audience/customer base, passion brand or more utility/commodity brand — but I think reasonable goals are to establish a connection between online content marketing efforts and either unit sales, revenue or cost savings, then grow that baseline as the effort matures. You’re going to start with very little needle moving at first for many brands, but as you build and attract more relevant audience members to your content, the numbers go up … they always do if your content is outstanding and you are consistent.

Your session “Cut the Bull – Blog with a Purpose and Drive Your Business” is focused on taking a no B.S. approach to blogging for business.  What are 3 of the primary takeaways from your Content Marketing World presentation that you think are most important?

That you shouldn’t blog as a business unless you’re going to blog for business. Is that three? Seriously, we’re going to talk about why blogs are business drivers, how you can make yours one, how you can build an audience for it and how you can track and measure your blog’s effectiveness as a business driver. Wait … that’s more than three. Damn.

What are some ways that successful companies are integrating content marketing with other online marketing channels such as social media, digital PR and SEO? Can you share a few examples?

Content Marketing World has one of the best examples in its speaking roster. Marcus Sheridan has created the penultimate small business marketing case study for River Pools and Spas. He used his company blog to simply write content based on answering key customer questions and solving key customer problems. Because he used SEO techniques to optimize for strategic keywords, the content ranked well. The natural traffic has turned their content marketing into a primary customer acquisition mechanism. It’s just awesome. I also like what Western River Expeditions is doing to combine social media, blogging and email marketing to create a beautiful cycle. But to know more about that, you’ll have to come to my session. Heh.

Content is both art and science with high demands on coordinating necessary planning, time and resources. This seems especially true for large, complex organizations with multiple players and diverse needs. What tools, software or services can recommend for large enterprise companies that want to be more efficient and effective at using content to drive new business and engage their customers?

The good news is that there are dozens of really good social media management systems out there to help organize large social content marketing teams and outposts. The bad news is that there are dozens of really good social media management systems out there to help organize large social content marketing teams and outposts. Unfortunately none of them do everything most companies need a content management system to do. For one, most don’t manage your own content (website, blog, etc.) While tools like Awareness get close, most are focused on social channels only. Some of my favorite picks for enterprise social media management systems — all worth looking at — include Expion, Spredfast, Sprinklr, Vitrue and Awareness.

Goals can vary of course, but what are some of the essential “must have” measurements for content marketing success?

Nichole Kelly (my partner in SME Digital) and I almost always insist that your content marketing needs to point customer to a path to conversion. Whether you’re primary measures are online sales or leads for offline sales, we want to formulate strategies that help you drive unit sales, revenues or save costs. Bottom line metrics are the ones that make boards and CEOs happy and get you budget, etc. So we focus much of our efforts there. While you certainly can have awareness, customer service, research and development and more as goals for your efforts, those in your organization who are skeptical of social will always be until you can show them how online content moves financial needles.

What are “secret” 3 predictions that you have for the future and importance of brands and content marketing?

A bank will actually “get it” soon. The entertainment industry will figure it out and lead the way for brands to “get it.” Journalists will soon aspire to be brand reporters.

All of that is made up bullshit, but I might get lucky.

We detect a complete absence of bovine fecal matter in your responses Agent Falls. Congratulations. 

For more no B.S. content marketing secrets, check out Jason’s presentation at Content Marketing World next week: Sept 5th at 10:30am “Cut the Bull – Blog with a Purpose and Drive Your Business”.

Also be sure to check out the TopRank session on the future of optimization: “Optimize and Socialize for Better Content Marketing” – Sept 6 – 3:05-3:50pm (Content Creation & Optimization Track).

What’s your best content marketing secret?
Share your best content marketing secret in the comments below and we’ll pick 3 winners this week to receive a free copy of “Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing”.

Who’s next in our series of Content Marketing Secrets?  It looks like Julie Fleischer, Director of CRM Content Strategy & Integration at Kraft Foods.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Secrets of Content Marketing World: Agent Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer | http://www.toprankblog.com

If you’ve read our blog for any period of time, you know I attend a lot of conferences. I couldn’t or wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t productive and in the past I’ve shared many ways to get more value from attending conferences and events. But that’s not all there is.

One of the best ways to gain business value from attending conferences and events is by creating content. I’ve been liveblogging and doing interviews at conferences for many years and so have many of the team at TopRank Online Marketing. We’ve created hundreds of blog posts this way, providing our readers with useful tips and information that gives event speakers and interviewees with exposure while expanding the search and social visibility of Online Marketing Blog.

One way to improve your productivity while traveling, attending conferences and creating content at events is to have the right tools. But it can be a pain in the rear to carry a lot of equipment. I’ve been “optimizing” my gear for travel and conference attendance for a while and thought I’d share.  Below is a photo of what I bring to conferences to help me get the most out of the time I spend there.

I’ll describe each item, how I use it and a link to where you can get it. (some of the links from the images are affiliate links). Clockwise starting from the bottom:

1. Incase laptop bag: As you can see I have a 13″ MacBook Pro and after trying several great laptop bags including a very fine one from Tumi, this bag is the right combination of light, useful and roomy for what I need to bring on any trip. It’s pretty basic with one large pocket in the middle with a sort of faux fur lining inside. There is one large outside pocket with a velcro closure (perfect size for a copy of Optimize) and on the other side are two more pockets for all of the accessories and gadgets you see pictured above. There is only one zipper for both pockets which is minimally inconvenient.  About $38.00 on Amazon.

2. Apple Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter: If you own a Mac then there are a number of adapters you’ll need for compatibility with other devices. It’s a bit annoying but you get used to it.  I speak at a lot of conferences and some require you to bring your own laptop. I bring the adapter to make sure there is no issue with connecting my laptop to conference projection hardware.

Once when I gave the opening keynote at a conference, the organizer put the wrong presentation (from a USB stick) on the event laptop. I was able to connect my MacBook Air quickly with no issues because of having this adapter. About $29.00 on Apple Store.

3. Apple USB Power Adapter & Qmadix cord – A must cord if you want to charge your iPhone, iPod or iPad devices. I lost my original Apple cord and replaced it with a generic one which has little clever blue lights on it. Adapter is around $10.00 on Amazon and the dock connector to USB cable is around $19.oo on the Apple store. Those are crazy prices, just buy a generic one for $2-10 on Amazon or at the airport.

4. Apple USB Ethernet Adapter – I rarely need this since wireless is the way to go, but on occasion, the only internet access of substantial quality is wired. And that’s important when you’re on the road and need to do Skype video interviews, Google Hangouts or transfer large files quickly, like video interviews uploaded to YouTube.  About $29.00 at the Apple store.

5. Square Credit Card Reader – I never thought I’d need one of these, but when you’re an author, there are situations while at conferences where people want to buy books without waiting for delivery from Barnes & Noble or Amazon. I don’t always bring books with me to events so I’ve rarely needed it, but when I did, having it was extremely convenient for all involved. Free when you sign up for a square account. You can buy extras from the Apple store for $10 each.

6. MagSafe Power Adapter for MacBook Air – A must have if you want to keep your MacBook Air charged. About $46 on Amazon to replace.

7. Apple Magic Mouse – This is an extra mouse I carry with for travel.  The built-in trackpad has never been very convenient for me and I need every little bit of productivity gain I can get when traveling. This mouse works great plus its slim form factor works great for travel. About $69 from the Apple store.

8. Philips 3-Outlet Travel Power Strip – After buying one of these, I’ve purchased extras and given them away. It’s been getting a little better lately with airports installing more charging stations and some conferences doing the same. But overall, finding power when traveling can be a problem. That’s why a small power strip like this can be both an essential means to provide power access for multiple people and it can become a bit of a IRL social networking tool too.  I didn’t have it with me for the photo above and Amazon no longer carries them. But you can pick one up for about $7 at Drugstore.com.

9. Tumi Mesh Accessories Bag – This came with the previously mentioned Tumi laptop bag that I used to use for my older MacBook Air computers. The Tumi bag didn’t make the cut (heavier than the Incase bag). But this mesh accessories bag is essential for carrying most of the gadgets and accessories in the picture above. The’re not for sale individually, but you can find small mesh bags at Target or Amazon.

10. Samsonite WoldWide Adaptor Plug – Most of my international travel has been to Western Europe and the Asia Pacific region (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong) so I haven’t needed any exotic power adapter devices. This one in particular I picked up about 5 years ago and I’ve not been able to find another just like it so I’ve included a picture of the one that’s most curent. It can be used in Australia, China, US, Europe and UK. It’s just one piece that folds out different configurations based on what country you’re in. Very handy. About $24.00 on Amazon.

11. New Trent iCarrier 12000mAh 2A&1A heavy duty Dual Port Charger – This is a very large external battery, but when you’re on the road for 12 hours without access to power, this thing is priceless. It will charge your iPhone and iPad many times. You wouldn’t carry it in your pocket but in a laptop bag, it fits fine and is quite useful. About $80.00 on Amazon.

12. USB to Mini USB Cable – This came with one of the many gadgets or devices I’ve purchased and instead of carrying 5 of them, I carry just one to use for charging several other items on this list including the Verizon Jetpack MiFi, Bluetooth lavalier microphone and others.  It works with the New Trent battery or with any laptop with a USB port. Get a generic one on Amazon for $1.00-5.00 or at a Best Buy store.

13. 13-inch MacBook Air - This is a fantastic computer, particularly for travel. It’s loaded with 2.0GHz Intel Dual-Core Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz, 8 GB of memory, 512 GB of Flash Storage, a ton of battery life and it’s both super sturdy and light. Basically, it’s like a MacBook Pro in an Air form factor. About $1700 from the Apple store. I wish that was an affiliate link, but alas it is not

14. Olloclip 3 in 1 iPhone Lens - This is the best lens I could find for enhancing the iPhone 4s camera. During my 5 hours in Paris, I captured some amazing shots because of the wide angle and the fish eye lenses. Same for my many photos of audiences before I give a presentation.  When I was last in New York, I took some great photos with the macro lens as well. It easily snaps on by pressure and stays on. The only downside is that if you use a case, this lens doesn’t fit.  I don’t use a case so it’s perfect for me. About $70 on Amazon.

15. iPhone 4S White 32 gb – Once I purchased an iPhone for my partner, I was hooked and I’ve been buying the newest model since. This one was a “meh” since Siri is a pure waste of time for me. However, I have become very efficient with email, social networking, news and photos / video with the iPhone 4s. It is the device I use most often every day. Get it at Apple Store, Best Buy, AT&T stores or Amazon. Prices vary.

16. Scosche Wireless Bluetooth Microphone for Video Recording – The video quality on the iPhone 4S is pretty great, but the microphone isn’t good at all, especially if you’re at a noisy conference. This wireless mic works like a lavalier and can be clipped on to the lapel of the person you’re interviewing while you hold the iPhone.  You can also have someone else shoot the video with the iPhone while you use the Scosche as a microphone for both you and the interviewee. I tested it up to 25 feet away and it works great.  The audio is about like what someone sounds like when they call in to a radio show. It’s not great audio, but it’s a lot better than the iPhone and gives you the option to capture video and audio in some interesting scenarios. About $62 on Amazon.

17. Verizon jetpack 4G MiFi – I used to have AT&T USB WiFi devices which worked OK when they worked. Connectivity was always an issue more than the devices. I cancelled 3 of those accounts and purchased one from Verizon using this MiFi device. Being able to share the internet connection from this one device with several of my co-workers at a conference when the conference wifi is a crapshoot, can be very useful for filing liveblog posts on time. The 4G speed with this thing has been fast enough for me to do Skype video interviews while traveling. It’s also enough to stream Netflix but watch the GB transfer.  Check the Verizon site for prices.

18. Shure Headphones – I’ve had these for a while. They fit and sond great and really have nothing to do with creating content while traveling or when you’re at a conference. But they do make it easy to “check out” on the plane when you don’t have the MUCH better noise canceling Bose Quiet Comfort 15′s with you. About $120 on Amazon.

19. Two Kingston 16 GB Data Traveler Flash Storage USB Fobs – If you’re giving presentations, you must have a USB stick or more. AV people will take them and not give them back. You will forget them in the computers too. I like these because they are one solid piece of metal with a ring on one end so you can attach them to a keychain like the kind found inside good laptop bags. About $13.00 each at Amazon.

20. Two Cuflinks – Nothing to do with creating content at conferences, but I’ll take a stab: If you bring a French cuff shirt and forget the cuff links, it looks pretty bad. Or at least incomplete and distracting. When you’re holding a camera up to your face to do a video interview with someone, the interviewee could be distracted by the fact that you’re wearing a French cuff shirt. Instead of paying attention to you or giving clever answers, they may be wondering if you forgot the cufflinks or maybe you’re making a fashion statement. Or more likely you forgot them and if you are capable of forgetting the cuff links, what else will you forget? So pack extra cufflinks to improve your video interview content.  That’s a reach I know, but I tried. All I know is, I’ve been saved numerous times by keeping a pair of cuff links in my laptop bag. $30 on Amazon and various prices at department and jewelry stores.

21. Logitech Wireless Headphones h800 – These folding headphones sound fantastic and are priceless for Skype calls when you’re on the road. The small USB receiver stores inside one of the ear pieces when not in use. It can connect wirelessly or through a USB to mini USB connection cable to your computer. The sound quality is quite good and I prefer it over my Yeti microphone for audio-only recording sessions. Here’s a video I did with Kevin Hunt of General Mills while wearing these headphones so you can hear what they sound like. About $75 on Amazon.

So, is that really it? Is this all I bring while traveling and to conferences to create content? Two things not pictured are my Sony NEX 5n camera and a small, mini charger attachment for the iPhone.  Other things come and go, but at the moment this is about all I can fit in my laptop bag!

What are some of your favorite travel gadgets and accessories? What tools make you more productive at conferences?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | 21 Essential Gadgets to Boost Conference Content Creation & Travel Productivity | http://www.toprankblog.com

At BlogWorld New Media Expo in New York, John P. and Cali Lewis had me on their GeekBeat.tv show where we talked about a mix of digital marketing topics including “walk the talk” marketing consulting, the power of word of mouth, the value of influence, common marketing challenges for companies, ROI vs. the promise of ROI, budget limitations vs. culture, the “must do” of getting started with social media.

Those companies that take the time to understand who their audiences and influencers are can dig into optimal means of information discovery, what target audience preferences are for media type and format, and how to inspire action whether it’s a referral or a sale.  With that insight, marketers can work to develop a plan to continuously optimize the brand’s effectivenss at connecting content with customers all across the lifecycle: awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, retention, advocacy.

The result is more word of mouth, shorter sales cycles and more efficient customer acquisition. It also means more intentional efforts at being useful to customers after the sale through easily discovered and shared content.  The deep dive on this approach to online marketing is of course easily found within Optimize.

I don’t usually post video interviews that I do here, but because of the impressive interviewing skills John and Cali have, it’s one of the better interviews I’ve done and does a good job of describing an optimized state of mind for Marketing, PR, HR and Customer Service.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | GeekBeat.TV Interview: Optimizing the Customer to Content Connection | http://www.toprankblog.com

Most bloggers say they know what SEO is and some even profess to engage in SEO best practices, but I thought it would be interesting to do a simple analysis of the top 10 on the list to see what their referring organic keyword and inbound link profiles looked like. Arguably, if a blog is optimized, it will attract traffic through search with phrases that represent the topics the blogger wants to be known for.

The blogs I looked at include:

1. chrisbrogan.com
2. toprankblog.com
3. socialmediaexplorer.com
4. blog.blisspr.com
5. blog.devongroup.com
6. socialfresh.com
7. briansolis.com
8. dannybrown.me
9. holtz.com/blog/
10. spinsucks.com

Both tools I used only allow a comparison of 5 at a time, so I’ll show the keyword traffic and inbound link comparisons for the top 1-5 and then 6-10 based on the Cision list. Unfortunately, the Google keyword tracking tool SEMRush does not handle sub-domains or sub-folders, so I could not report on all blogs from the top 10 list.

Top 10 PR & Marketing blogs – keyword traffic from Google in the U.S.:

According to SEMRush, TopRankBlog.com (Online Marketing Blog) and chrisbrogan.com were neck and neck for quite a while when it comes to keyword diversity in Google search results. Then late last year, things separated a bit. Social Media Explorer looks pretty consistent across the board.

It’s easy to see that over the time span indicated, briansolis.com has had more keyword visibility on Google than the other 4 blogs combined. At the time of the snapshot, he’s still ahead and both spinsucks.com and socialfresh.com are neck and neck.

Top inbound links to the top 10 PR & Marketing Blogs

For the #1-#5 blogs on the list, both chrisbrogan.com and toprankblog.com are attracting a substantial number of links over a long period of time and as with keyword visibility on Google, socialmediaexplorer.com is consistent. This is a cumulative view, so it does not factor lost links or temporary links.

For the #6-10 blogs on Cision’s list, briansolis.com by far and away has attracted the most links over time by a long shot.

Another thing I thought would be interesting to do is take the list of keywords driving traffic to each blog from Google (as reported by SEMRush) and to bring those lists into a word visualization app and see by word size, how each blog looked topically according to search phrases.  Since SEMRush doesn’t handle subdomains, I had to skip blog.blisspr.com and blog.devongroup.com but finished out the 5 with Social Fresh and Brian Solis.

Here are the word visualizations of the top keywords driving search traffic (not of the blog content itself) to each PR & Marketing blog from Google:

chrisbrogan.com - 2,049 phrases

Over 2,000 different phrases tracked on SEMRush is pretty good and many of them are about Twitter as reflected in the word cloud.  The diversity of phrases that attract traffic to chrisbrogan.com is impressive from phrases like “sock it to me” to single words like, “flaws” or “persistence”.   There’s amazing engagement and sharing with this blog, attracting qualitative links. A modest adjustment in keyword tactics could boost search visibility of this blog even further.

toprankblog.com - 5,794 phrases

With just under 5,800 Google search phrases tracked on SEMRush for Online Marketing Blog, there’s a very large long tail as one would expect with a blog that’s about 8 years old.  Google Analytics reports that toprankblog.com actually receives about 30,000 Google keyword referrers each month, so what SEMRush reports is just a sample. At the same time, the word cloud is overwhelmed by a small number of words due to the frequency of their use. ie we’re trying very hard to be the best answer for a mix of marketing-related topics and have been sticking to a fairly narrow editorial focus. This blog attracts traffic from keywords that reflect the expertise of the agency. As a result, the blog is very productive at attracting attention from the media and from those who want to work with our agency.

socialmediaexplorer.com - 1,197 phrases

Google associates socialmediaexplorer.com with Tumblr (and social media) to a great degree. Like our blog, sociamediaexplorer.com has a diversity of referring search phrases, but there is a very significant and specific association with a handful of phrases.  My favorite top phrase: “how to piss people off”

socialfresh.com – 466 phrases

The number of phrases SEMRush is tracking for socialfresh.com seems low but there’s more than enough to create a good word cloud. There are quite a few references to Facebook in numerous variations – so it overwhelms the word cloud. There are also many variations of other topics, none of which stands out in particular – long tail. Curiously, Google really likes socialfresh.com for this interesting keyword cluster: “newt gingrich wiki, newt gingrich wikipedia, wikipedia newt gingrich, wiki newt gingrich”

briansolis.com – 893 phrases

I’ll be honest, I was really surprised that SEMRush is only tracking 893 referring Google search phrases for briansolis.com.  It’s a very credible, longstanding blog with a lot of rich content.  Many of the most popular phrases are social media oriented as you would expect and a good number that are variations of Brian’s own name. There are also a number of popular acronyms: SMO, PR, PR2 which is not easy (from an SEO standpoint). Some fun referring phrases include “please tell me why” and “whoops”.

What’s the takeaway? For any website or blog that expects to be easily found in a relevant way through search, then it’s worth tracking how search engines are treating your blog in search results. Besides the growing importance of social shares and the ever-important technical aspects of indexing and crawling, the two most basic things to consider are:

1. Topic to search phrase congruence
2. Topic to link phrase congruence

In other words, do people and the web at large see your blog congruent to the way that you are promoting it? Web analytics is probably the most powerful source of data to answer this question but of course I do not have access to web analytics for any website other than my own. For simple competitive analysis, SEMRush and Majestic SEO work quite well.

How do you make sure the content topics you’re targeting with your blog are how people, social networks and search engines are actually seeing it? How are you taking full advantage of all the searching going on (11billion queries a month on Google alone) for topics you’re writing about?

Corporate blogs who cannot allocate as much time and talent as many of the bloggers on the Cision list should pay even more attention to the value of search for reaching their communities and expanding reach online.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Top Marketing & Public Relations Blogs Are Influential, But Are They Optimized? | http://www.toprankblog.com

"There are plenty of crappy photographers out there, that is why they invented Instagram." - Chris Brogan (touche Mr. Brogan)

I must say the pre-keynote presentation was hilarious.  Tom Webster (@webby2001) from Edison Research shared some “feedback” his company had received from the post-session surveys that were sent out for evaluation of the speakers.  The comments were those that many bloggers experience on a daily basis: Poorly written, irrelevant, spam on your painstakingly written blog post.

Tom’s commentary was the perfect seguay into Chris Brogan’s (@chrisbrogan) keynote presentation.  First off, Chris is hilarious, second of all he is not afraid to poke fun at himself.  This wasn’t the sort of presentation that is easy to live blog (plus there was zero Internet connection) so I decided to share the information like I consumed it.  In bite sized chunks that are easy to consume and easy to share.

Spoiler Alert
I’m taking some direction from Chris Brogan here and I’m going to share my most important point up front.  Chris said the number one question he is asked is: “how do you get more readers to your blog?”  The answer: write a post about someone who has recently passed, or is rumored to have passed.

Blogging Hurdle #1: OMG I am SO busy!

Stop! Everyone is busy.  No email should start or end with “god I have been so busy lately.”  Do you think anyone is ever going to say “I haven’t done anything all day.” Chances are they wont.  Lets face it, we all have things to do.

A helpful tip for bloggers is to create a framework for how you blog and use that same process over and over again.  You will notices that it will take you a lot less time to blog because it has become second nature.

First Places to Find Extra Time

• Turn off the email “noise”
• Ignore the little red circle
• Try writing in small blocks of time
• Take a couple minutes no matter where you are

Google+ for Business: 5 Things Marketing Professionals Should Know About Google+

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Stand Out Above the Noise – Blogging Tips From Chris Brogan #BWENY | http://www.toprankblog.com

I will be giving a track keynote at BlogWorld this week on Thursday morning (9am) covering bigger picture topics and specific tactics to help attendees to better use blogs as content marketing tools. Here’s the presentation info:

Search, social media and content marketing are converging, and consumers are using numerous ways to discover, consume and act on content. In this session, you’ll learn how to use content marketing best practices to design information that inspires audiences to share, buy and recommend your brand.

Key Points
1. Learn the framework for an optimize and socialize approach to content marketing
2. Understand the framework for optimizing across the customer lifecycle
3. Know the difference between KPIs and business outcomes for web and social measurement

But back to the TECHmunch presentation, here’s a few of the tips I shared using the old, “Dinner Party” metaphor:

Audience – Who’s coming to dinner?
What makes your blog unique and how does that satisfy a need for a particular audience? What do they care about? What are they searching for? What topics relevant to your blog do they talk about on the social web? Empathize with their information needs and language to anticipate topics that will be interesting and sharable.

Keywords – What do they like to eat?
Take your understanding of what your target audience cares about and translate it into search phrases and social topics. Develop a reference document or keyword glossary with scores for popularity and competitiveness to serve as guide for editorial and SEO. Keyword use on the blog as well as with social sites helps relevant search visibility. Use of popular and relevant social topics can inspire sharing and interaction.

Content Plan & SEO – Which ingredients?
Create an adaptable editorial calendar to outline topics, titles, descriptions, keywords, tags, media types, promotion channels and ways to repurpose content.  Apply keyword glossary phrases in topic selection, post titles, post copy, file names and link text.  Write title tags for search engines and on-page titles for readers and social shares.  Think of the blog as a hub and build promotion channels as spokes around it. Create content that deserves to be the best answer to the questions your target audience are searching on or asking about on the social web. Make sure your blogging platform is configured as search and social media friendly using plugins such as AllinOneSEO and social sharing widgets like AddThis.

Links & Social – How will we invite our guests and help them spread the word?
Participate in and grow social networks daily. Tweet, RT, Plus, Pin, Like, Update and Comment where it makes sense to the audience you’re trying to reach. With your blog as the hub, many of your spokes will be social media and network websites that you can promote content to. Monitor mentions of your blog or keywords on social sites for interaction opportunities using social media monitoring services as simple as socialmention or Trackur or try these search queries replacing toprankblog.com with your own blog’s domain name:

• https://twitter.com/search?q=toprankblog.com
• https://plus.google.com/s/toprankblog.com/posts
• https://www.google.com/search?&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Afacebook.com+inurl%3Aposts+%E2%80%9Ctoprankblog.com%E2%80%9D
• http://pinterest.com/source/toprankblog.com/

Make it easy to share posts and inspire social sharing within the networks your active on. If you contribute content to other blogs or websites, always ask for an author link back to your website.

Tools – Which cookware, dinnerware?
Evaluate competitors rankings with SEMRush.com, Validate your blog with Google Webmaster tools, Manage your SEO efforts with Raven Tools, Research keywords with Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Research social topics with socialmention.com or Radian6, Measure blog content performance with Google Analytics, Monitor inbound links with Majestic SEO.  Leverage a social media management platform like HootSuite to organize, schedule and publish social content.

For more good resources on optimizing your blog for better performance on the search and social web, check out Google’s new Webmaster Academy and of course if you want a deep dive, get a copy of Optimize.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | A Recipe for Better Blogging: Optimize & Socialize #bweny | http://www.toprankblog.com