Jim Connolly Marketing

Blogging: Why sharing valuable resources is so important

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blogging, blog tips, content marketing

In the past, I have been very hesitant about using this blog to showcase great services and products. In fact, I can think of just a tiny number of posts in the last 4 years, which were dedicated to introducing you to resources that I find extremely valuable.

I realised a few weeks ago that this was the wrong approach. This post explains why and also, why I believe it’s important for bloggers to share valuable resources with their readers.

The value of sharing

A few weeks ago, I decided to put things right and be a little more proactive, when it came to sharing useful resources. So, I gave a recommendation to the Marketing Over Coffee podcast, the only marketing podcast I now subscribe to. People are still thanking me today, for sharing that podcast with them.

Then yesterday, I heard some news that reinforced why unpaid, honest recommendations like that are so important.

A Seesmic shift

Some of you who connect with me on Twitter, know I use and love the Seesmic desktop app and Seesmic phone app. I’ve been using Twitter for 5 years and the Seesmic tools are the best I have found for my needs.

Yesterday, I discovered that Seesmic’s owner Loic Le Meur, had recently announced that he needed to release over half his workforce. You can read about it here. It’s especially sad news, as Loic is a lovely guy and the products, including the seesmic ping beta that I am testing right now, are extremely good.

In all the time I have used Seesmic products, I have never blogged about them. I have never shared why you may want to consider using Seesmic, if you are tired of using slow, browser based products that look like spreadsheets, for cross posting to your social networking accounts. Today I am doing just that. The news from Seesmic, shows us that it’s all too easy for people to miss out on great resources, if those of us who use them don’t share how much we value them.

Sharing matters

I am going to continue to be a little more proactive, about sharing resources I value, which I believe you will want to know about. These will always be unpaid recommendations and only for resources I personally trust and value, which will be of interest to business owners.

If you have a blog and there are resources you value, I suggest you use your voice to share them with your reader community. If enough of us do this, we will all benefit.

UPDATE: I heard from Loic earlier and he confirmed that Seesmic will now be focusing their efforts onto Seesmic Ping; an app that allows you to schedule posts across various social networks. You can find out more here.

Useful marketing tip

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One of the most powerful ways to develop your business, is to focus on being useful.

Here are just a few examples of what I mean:

  • Useful service providers retain their clients or customers for longer.
  • Useful blog posts and newsletters get read and shared the most often.
  • Useful videos attract more viewers.
  • Useful people attract more contacts and build larger, stronger commercial networks.
  • Useful websites get linked to the most.

‘Useful’ beats ‘demanding’ every time!

Typically, we see people trying to build their business by asking for help, rather than being useful. They ask us to; share their links, ‘like’ their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter and recommend them to our friends, etc.

All of these things are far more likely to happen, if we are consistently useful rather than continuously demanding.

A useful tip

Take a look at any area of your marketing, which is under performing. Now, look for ways to make your marketing messages and interactions around that area, as useful and helpful to others as you can. For example, if you want a larger, more targeted following on a social network, focus on being as useful to people in your niche with your social networking as possible. Offer ideas. Suggest useful resources. Connect people. No, you’re unlikely to see thousands of people immediately flock to you, but over time you can expect to make meaningful progress.

In short: If we want to be regarded as a valuable asset for our clients and customers, we need to consistently look for opportunities to be useful to them.

Twitter buys Posterous!

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Hot on the news that Posterous has been acquired by Twitter, I have a question for you:

If you were renting a house from someone, would you pay to have a luxury swimming pool built?

The obvious answer is NO. It would be crazy. You’d be paying tens of thousands for something, which you may only get a few months use of. The home owner could kick you out right after the pool has been built and paid for. You’d also be paying to increase the value of the home owners property, not your own.

There’s nothing for you, in a deal like that.

Posterous acquired by Twitter

It was announced today that Posterous has been bought by Twitter, in what analysts see as a talent grab. In other words, the Posterous team are joining the Twitter team, in order to work on Twitter’s development. Twitter is interested in the people, not the Posterous product.

Twitter, Posterous and that swimming pool

Many people, including a lot of small business owners, decided to use Posterous as their blogging platform.

  • They invested time creating content on their Posterous blog.
  • They added the Posterous address to their marketing literature.
  • They encouraged people, including prospective clients, to connect with them on Posterous.
  • They spent money on premium Posterous products.

They will wake up today, to learn that they are likely to need to move to a new platform soon. They now have valid concerns that Posterous may be either canned, or as happened when Facebook bought Friendfeed, left to fade away as the team focus on their new project.

Posterous Users are rightly concerned

This comment from the Posterous post, which announced Twitter’s acquisition is in line with many similar comments and observations:

Your FAQ is littered with “We’ll give you ample notice before any changes or disruptions to the service and we’ll provide specific instructions for exporting your content” But you don’t provide any clear dialogue on the future of the service. Your FAQ makes it sound like you are shutting things down, but very indirectly. Can we get a more clear answer?

The person leaving that comment clearly has concerns that all the value he has created there will be lost. He knows it’s now out of his hands. He wants answers. Maybe he needs answers. However, he built his swimming pool in a house he was renting and as a result, he has no control other than to export his data today and do what I believe EVERY small business owner should do: Build a blog on PROPERTY YOU OWN.

Twitter’s acquisition of Posterous: The lesson?

The lesson here, is that for a commercial blog, you need to have control. Every free platform comes with a cost, an enormous cost for small business owners. The cost of a free blog is lack of control. For example, WordPress.com have suspended and in many cases erased business blogs, which they believed violated their terms of use.

If you are serious about developing a successful, sustainable business blog, which YOU are in control of, you need to pay for a professional solution. I use a self-hosted WordPress blog and I am glad I own it. It generates a 6 figure income for me every year and I’d be very concerned, if I awoke today and found its future in doubt, because of some merger or acquisition.

The cost of owning your own blog is low enough for any small business to cover. You can get yourself a URL (web address) for peanuts, a copy of WordPress for free and some inexpensive hosting for as low as $6 a month. This puts you in control of what could be your most valuable marketing asset. I

It will also ensure you never find yourself in the position of that guy I quoted earlier, and many others, who will wake up this morning wondering what’s going on and expecting the worst.

Look: Another misleading blog post title!

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It just happened to me again! You know, where you see an interesting headline or blog post title, click the link, then find you have been fooled? You reach the post, only to find that it’s clearly not what the title promised.

That trick is used a lot, because it delivers short term results. However, there’s limited longevity in fooling people into clicking links. people are not stupid and the next time they see a headline from that blogger, they are far less likely to trust the link.

Headlines are promises

The headline of a blog post makes a promise. If the headline says “5 Powerful Time Management Tips”, we are expecting 5 great time management tips. If the content of that post then fails to deliver on that promise, we learn not to trust the next headline we see from them. They train us to ignore them.

I have regularly heard Internet marketing experts slam people like Seth Godin and Robert Scoble (and me) for writing post titles, which are not sensational every time. They suggest that we would get more traffic, if we made inflated promises with our post titles, rather than focus on titles that are compelling, yet make it easy for the reader to know exactly what the post is about. For me, and I am sure for Seth and Robert too, the trust of our readers is paramount.

Building trust

I reach thousands of people every day, using titles that people trust. That’s because people return to this blog, knowing that the content of my posts will deliver on the promise made in the title. If I over sold or made false claims in the titles, I would possibly attract more new readers, but they would only visit here one time. People really don’t appreciate being tricked.

We should write the best posts we can. We should write interesting, engaging titles too. It doesn’t matter which comes first. However, we must be aware that if the title is inaccurate, we will train people not to trust us. We have to deliver, if we want to earn the ongoing attention of our readers.

Avoid these 4 common blogging errors and watch your results quickly improve

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blogging topics r

When business bloggers come to me for advice on how to make their blog more valuable, there are 4 tips I seem to give more than any others. Here they are, for those of you who want their blog to deliver better results. I hope you find them useful.

Get readable

No matter how valuable your content is, it will fail to achieve anything like it’s full potential, if it’s too hard for people to read. The 2 most common readability issues I see, are font size and column width.

Many sites use very small font sizes, which are just too small to be easily read. This is a fast way to lose readers, needlessly. There’s nothing to gain from using tiny fonts, which are almost impossible to read on anything smaller than a 22 inch monitor. The reason every popular website uses a readable font size, is they know the importance of having the main content comfortable to read on smaller screens.

For reference, this blog uses a Arial as my font, set at 16px.

Similarly, studies have shown that people find it a lot easier to read narrower columns of content, than wide columns. Many popular child themes fail to take this into account, which is why there are so many W–I–D–E column layouts out there.

In my own testing, I discovered that once I go beyond 95 characters across (including spaces) in a blog post, fewer people read through the whole page. Many people say you should stick below 75 characters, but using a large clear font, as I do, you should be perfectly fine up to around the 95 character mark.

If your current child theme doesn’t make it easy for you to reduce the content column width, either learn how to code it, pay someone to code it or use the theme I use here, which gives you 100% control over fonts and columns with the click of a mouse. It’s called Headway and that is NOT an affiliate link – It’s just an amazing piece of software that gives you the control you need, over your blog.

Have a call to action at the bottom of your content

If someone has just read all the way down to the bottom of a page or post, it’s because they were interested in the content. It engaged them. It earned their attention and their time. You now have an interested person, whose eyes are right at the bottom of your post.

THAT is the point where you should ask them to take action!

I use that approach here and it works extremely well, generating leads and inquiries all day, every day. Just remember to keep the call to action short and link directly to the conversion page. This may be a page that sells your products or services. It could be a newsletter sign-up page or maybe a link to subscribe to your blog via RSS. You decide what you want your readers to do, then put that call to action right where interested eyes will see it.

Don’t write anything just to publish something

This one goes against the traditional idea that you MUST publish something every day, even on days where you have nothing worth sharing. Despite what many people think, I don’t publish posts here every day. I usually publish 4 or 5 times a week on this blog, only very occasionally 7 times a week.

I use no blogging schedule other than this: If I have something useful to share here, I publish it. Useful is the key word.

I do recommend you publish at least once a week on a business blog(twice is better), if you want your blog to remain on your reader’s radar. However, there are no prizes for publishing anything, just so you can publish something. If you have something useful to say, share it. If you can’t find anything useful to say at least once a week, spend more time listening to the needs and opportunities of your marketplace and write about that. Keep informed of the latest news and trends affecting your marketplace, and write about that.

NOTE: This article has some great tips on how to write useful content.

Make your work easy to share

The content on Jim’s Marketing Blog is easy for people to share. There is a small Twitter and Google+ button at the top and bottom of each post. These are easily the most powerful drivers of share traffic here, so they get prominence. At the bottom of each post, I use the oddly named Twitter, Facebook social share plugin – which actually gives access to Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+ too. I also recommend sharethis, which gives easy access to over 30 different sharing platforms and allows you to make your preferred ones more prominent (see below).

I have tested a ‘floating share button’, which attaches itself to the side of the screen and follows the page, so your share icons are always in the reader’s view. This was very effective, for those who could see it. The challenge was that many people told me that they couldn’t see it. It wasn’t visible on many tablet devices or any phone I tested it on. It was also invisible on some smaller resolution netbooks. There may be a way around this visibility issue, which you might like to share with a comment.

If you do use this type of sharing system on your site, I suggest also adding a traditional sharethis or addthis set of icons to the foot of your posts, though this can look a little like overkill.

Blogging: It’s all about doing the work

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When it comes to commercial blogging, sometimes you just need to do the work.

Once your blog has been correctly configured, write the best content you can, as often as you can and make it as easy for people to share as you can. Put your work where the right people will see it, social networking sites are great for this.

Then, keep on doing the work.

The software alone is not enough

I often see people who seem to spend more time changing the design of their blog and the plugins they use, than they spend blogging and improving their writing.

The thing is, it’s the quality of our content and the regularity with which we show up with great content, which makes the difference. This is why you can have blogs like ZenHabits or Seth Godin’s blog, which are extremely plain looking and get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, and blogs that use the latest glossy WordPress theme, which very few people read. Leo and Seth write great content, regularly.

For those who want a bigger, targeted readership for their blogs, there are 2 areas I recommend you focus on.

1. Show up regularly

If people respond well when you write, (i.e they share your posts, link to them and talk about them), but you don’t write very often, increase the frequency of your blogging. Here’s how to write great content every day. The big secret to being able to produce useful content on a regular basis, is to do it. The more you write, the easier it becomes.

2. Show us what you know and what you think

If you write regularly, but people tend not to respond when you write, I suggest you take a look at what you write. People love to read and share blog posts, which offer them some kind of value, either because it makes them think, makes them act or makes them laugh out loud. The best thing you can do is be yourself, rather than try and copy what others are doing. One of the reasons you have not seen me writing about Pinterest or SOPA, is that thousands, maybe millions are already doing that. I can’t add value there. It would be a me too post.

Turn up regularly and do the work. Show us what you know and what you think. Give us a reason to keep coming back for more, to share your work with our friends, and that’s exactly what we will do.