Ten top tips to make your blog go further

May 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

10 blog usesYou’ve heard the phrase ‘don’t reinvent the wheel’ – and this applies to what you write just as much as it does to anything else you do.  Trying to do many marketing activities can appear to be very time-consuming.

If you want to create multiple means of engaging with your target audience and potential customers, here are ten top tips to make your blog go further and short-cut the time and effort you need to create many connections in different places and different ways.

1.  Start by writing a blog about one of your key areas of expertise – aim for 300-500 words.

2.  Take 3-7 ‘soundbites’ from your blog and package them as tips for social media – they can be posted to your Twitter, Facebook Page and Linked In account using a management tool such as Hootsuite.  Don’t forget to include a link back to the blog and to save these for use again later.

3.  Send the blog out to your list as a newsletter, add a link back to the online blog with an invitation to comment and you can add your current offers or anything else you want to promote to your list.

4.  Create a PowerPoint presentation with visuals and record the blog and post it to YouTube and Slideshare.

5.  Join AudioBoo and record an audio only version and offer this in the groups and forums you belong to.

6.  When you’ve done a few of these blogs, put 2-3 together as a longer article and post it to the article marketing sites such as ezinearticles.com and on your Google+ account.

7.  Collect a dozen or so blogs and edit them into an ebook with each one as a chapter on a particular subject and suggestions for action at the end of each one.  This can be offered for sale on your website or as a free gift for customers.

8.  Create a 30 minute webinar based on the subject of the blog and invite people as free or paid for guests.  Use GoToMeeting to allow you to share your screen and show people what you’re talking about.  Alternatively you could create a Google+ hangout and invite people to discuss the subject around your blog.

9.  Print the blog as a branded article on good quality paper and send it – in an nice envelope with a handwritten address, to a dozen companies you’d like to work with or to people in your network who might recommend you.

10.  Turn the blog into an infographic (www.visual.ly will help you to do this).

There are more things you could do – but this will be more than enough to get you started.  If you just do 3-4 of these with every blog you’ll soon have an impressive bank of material out there on the internet marketing you whilst you sleep.

Filed Under: Blogs, Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

5 tips on clicking and scrolling

April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Keyboard and mouseNo – not rocking and rolling – but the on screen equivalent!  Someone, somewhere made a ‘rule’ that you should be able to arrive at the page you want in no more than three clicks.  Then someone else also made a ‘rule’ that said a menu should not have more than nine or ten tabs on it.  If you have a website with a great deal of information the three click rule isn’t going to work here!

Then there’s yet another ‘rule’ that says that people won’t read more than two screens down a web page – so that means that pages have to have a small amount of information.  Besides, who decides how big the reading screen is?  In today’s world of smartphones, tablets, wide screens and notebooks how long is a screen?  Establishing where the ‘fold’ occurs is almost impossible.

So what is a poor website owner to do?  Here are my tips:

1.  Think carefully about the structure of your website before you start adding content (ideally before you ask a designer to create the visuals).

  • What is a logical arrangement of pages so that people can find what they are looking for easily?  
  • More clicks are better than more menu tabs, which many people just find overwhelming.  
  • However, the subpages need to be found under main menu choices that are obvious.

2.  Ensure you are clear on the purpose for each page .

  • What do you want your website visitor to DO when they’ve looked at the page?
  • How much information do you really need to give them in order to persuade them to do that?  
  • Only include the essentials – people don’t need to know how you do what you do, only what they get.  
  • And don’t forget your call to action.

3.  Don’t bury key pages in sub menus

  • You should include Home, About and Contact on the main menu.  
  • Also anything that you want people to find easily – FAQs, Case studies, blog.  It doesn’t mean that you can’t also link to these pages from other pages further down the pecking order on your menu, but if you think people will want to get to those quickly, put them where they can see them.

4.  Don’t fall into the trap of clever page names – stick to the obvious, it cuts down on people having to think about whether that page is what they think it is.  Some may not bother!

5.  If you have five services don’t create a page where they are all on a single page, one below the other.  

  • If they don’t see what they are looking for in the first screen or two, some people won’t bother to scroll any further and you could miss out on a lead.
  • Blogs and articles can have longer pages – people expect to see these on a scrollable page.

Just because tablets and smartphones are easier to scroll on don’t assume that everyone is viewing your site on one of these.  Acknowledge web-users comfort zones.  Make it easy for people to get around your site and it will work much  better for you.

 

Filed Under: Readability, Usability Tagged With: , , , ,

Marketing – one bite at a time

April 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Marketing strategyIf you’re not a natural marketer it can seem like a huge mountain to climb to put together a successful and ongoing marketing campaign for your business.  Then when a new product or service is launched you have to go back to the drawing board.

The challenge is that if you stop marketing your business will be less successful – no matter how good you are at what you do.  It’s a fact that a mediocre product with great marketing will outsell a fantastic product with poor marketing – simply because if people don’t know about it they can’t buy.

The secrets of successful marketing are knowledge and planning.  First you need to know:

  • Who are your key target audiences?  You may have more than one group of potential buyers, but you need to look at each group separately.
  • What are the demographics of each audience – age range, income, lifestyle, etc? 
  • How does your product and service benefit them?  In other words, how does it reach them emotionally and make them think  ’I want that’?
  • Where do you find these people; where do they hang out?  You need to check this out both offline and online.

When you’re armed with this information you should have enough to start planning your campaign.  For instance, you don’t join a business networking group if your target market are new mums and you probably won’t find many of this target market on platforms like Linked In, but they may be very active on Facebook and visit the doctor, nurse, shops that sell baby things, etc.  They may read the local newspaper and probably magazines that talk about baby related subjects and motherhood, but a small proportion are likely to have time to read a national daily or industry-specific journals.

This will help you to decide where to:

  • Go networking
  • Engage online
  • Advertise your products or services

You can’t do everything so start small and work up.   Start a plan and do a little every day and you’ll soon find these activities become part of your daily habits.

Put a reminder on your computer screen, enter time in your diary and make it flag up the ‘appointment’, leave yourself notes, make a list – whatever works for you.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , ,
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