Jim Connolly Marketing

Content Marketing: Is your design killing your content?

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The primary design task of any newsletter, website or blog, is to ensure the content is as readable as possible. The design should work like a picture frame and enhance, not hide, your work.

content marketing design

I was on a site earlier, where the design was so loud and busy, that it was hard to find the actual content. When trying to read the content, the rest of the site was so distracting that I left after just 30 seconds or so.

Most newsletters are just as bad. Instead of focusing on the message, they’re packed with distractions. Lots of different font sizes, colours, options, boxes and buttons — all getting in the way and breaking the reading experience. As a result, their actual content gets very little attention… and the newsletter providers wonder why their readership isn’t growing.

The poor readability epidemic

Unreadable design is such a huge problem now, that there are apps that try to combat it. Readability is maybe the best known.

Take a look at the design you use for your newsletter, website and / or blog. If the content is playing second fiddle to the design, change the design. After all, it’s your content that people come to you for and your content, which builds your relationship with your readers.

A quick tip: Clear, big fonts and lots of white space work better than almost anything, when it comes to making your content stand out.

The thing about remarkable work

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… is that it is risky, courageous and challenging. That’s what makes remarkable work stand out. It’s also why remarkable work attracts so much word of mouth publicity.

Those who want to attract word of mouth, must pay the price in advance. They need to do work, which is worthy of being remarked on or talked about. They need to embrace the risk, summon the courage and rise to the challenge.

Where to begin?

Ask yourself the following question, then take as long as you need to write your answer down:

If people were already talking about my business to their friends, what would I like them to be saying?

Once you’ve come up with your answer, think about it for a while. Next, commit to making the improvements to your business, which would motivate people to say those things about you.

Be the author of your word of mouth referrals

The most successful business owners already do this. They are the authors of what people say about their business.

How?

By creating amazing customer experiences, which people feel they HAVE to share.

To age online or not to age: That is the question!

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JimHomePage

Yesterday, I had some new photos taken for use on my blogs and social networking accounts. I asked the photographer to take honest photos… photos that reflected exactly what she saw. I’m happy with the end result. It’s me.

Honest photos?

Not everyone uses a recent or even accurate photo online. It’s understandable too. Whenever I change my photo, at least one person will feel compelled to criticise how I look. Here’s why people criticise you and how to deal with it!

It’s a great idea to use a complimentary photo you feel comfortable with. However, the photo should accurately reflect who you are and what you actually look like. If not, you could find it hurts you and your business, when people see the real you and wonder what else you’re hiding from them.

This reminds me of a recent story I heard from my friend Kelly in California. Whilst extreme, it’s something I have experienced to a lesser degree many, many times.

Picture this

Kelly is an attorney and recently visited a new client for the first time. When she arrived at his offices, she introduced herself to the receptionist and explained she had a 9:30am appointment with the CEO.

Kelly was taken to the meeting room, where a man in his 60’s was already sitting. This seemed odd as there was supposed to be just the CEO and herself attending. She was then stunned, when the guy in the room introduced himself as the CEO. He looked nothing like his photo on the company website, which was at least 10 or 15 years out of date.

She told me that her first thought was: ‘I wonder what else he will hide from me?’

To age online or not to age online, that is the question!

Thanks to photo editing software, we can instantly lose our wrinkles. However, we don’t have to. The decision is always ours. If we choose to, we can use kind but honest photos and change them every year or two, so we age online just as we do offline.

…. or we can stay eternally young online and fool ourselves into believing that no one will notice, when they meet us.

Is that ladder you’re climbing leaning against the wrong wall?

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After 3 years of hard work, she achieved it.

Yet, she wasn’t happy.

I was emailed last week, by someone whose primary goal for her blog was to get a minimum of 1000 visitors a day, for 30 consecutive days. She achieved this goal after years of hard work, writing content and marketing her blog.

Why so unhappy?

She reached her traffic milestone and realised that she wasn’t in the traffic business. She owns a translations business. What she needs is for her site to generate regular, high quality leads and inquiries for her business, which it is failing to do. Instead, she is attracting zero value, drive-by traffic from Google and social networks.

It’s easy to get seduced by the wrong numbers — especially online. Before you invest years of your time working hard to achieve a marketing goal, make sure it’s a goal that is in line with your overall business objectives.

Otherwise you risk wasting years climbing a very long ladder, which is leaning against the wrong wall.

Marketing 101: Make it more attractive. Not more annoying.

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Marketing Tips, marketing advice, ideas

Around 50 people email me every day with some kind of unsolicited sales pitch. They spam me because they think that their email is somehow special. They think that it’s only spam when other people do it.

It isn’t.

The rules apply to all of us

No matter how important or valuable we believe our message is, the rules of effective marketing still apply to us. Spam is spam, even if we do it.

If you want people to take notice of you, do something worthy of their attention and make it easy for them to share. When your message is genuinely of use or interest, the first 10 people who hear about it will get you another 10, who will do the same, and so on. That’s how every successful product or service spreads.

If you constantly need to pester people, either with spam, cold calls or at networking events, it’s time to improve your strategy.

A better approach

It’s as simple and as challenging as this — focus on making what you do more attractive… not more annoying.

25 Reasons to write a business blog

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Without doubt, business blogging is the most powerful and cost effective marketing tool I have ever encountered.

Here are 25 reasons, why I recommend business blogging to you.

  1. Business blogging encourages you to keep learning, so you have something useful to share.
  2. Business blogging can generate regular (daily), targeted business leads. The caveat here, is that you need to learn how to write well and how to market your blog. If you’re prepared to do that, it can improve your business beyond recognition.
  3. Business blogging is the best way to build a huge, targeted, professional network. You don’t need Linkedin or any other network, when thousands of people already know who you are, exactly what you do and how to contact you. Think about that for a moment.
  4. Business blogging allows you to reach people… lots of people, with your message. That’s because blogging scales to infinity. In other words, a post can reach one person or a million people, yet it still takes you the same amount of time to write it.
  5. Business blogging is more fun than watching prime-time TV.
  6. Business blogging is also far more rewarding than watching TV.
  7. Business blogging publicly demonstrates your ability to show up regularly. Reliability is highly valued in business. Just imagine how useful it would be for you, if your marketplace knew you could be relied upon, before they even spoke to you.
  8. Business blogging provides a showcase for your knowledge. This is enormously valuable. People who hire me, know all about my work long before they ever speak with me.
  9. Business blogging increases your professional profile, as new people discover you and your work every day.
  10. Business blogging gives you the best tool on the planet, for building a community or tribe.
  11. Business blogging gives you a voice. If you have something important to say, people will hear you. This is especially the case if you stick with blogging, for long enough to build a large readership. How long does that take? About a week longer than the typical blogger is prepared to invest, before she gives up.
  12. Business blogging inspires people to email you, to say how your work helped them. This is far more rewarding than most people imagine.
  13. Business blogging makes you a more informed reader, as you understand the work and creativity that people put into their written work.
  14. Business blogging causes you to have to regularly dig down deep, really deep, to find something worth sharing. That sounds like hard work, but just as lifting weights builds your physical muscles, digging down deep builds your mental muscles.
  15. Business blogging makes you a better communicator. I’m convinced that regular blogging has improved my communication skills across the board, not just in writing.
  16. Business blogging is a great way to connect with your marketplace. By making it easy for readers to contact you, you open a valuable channel of communication. This provides you with an insight into what your marketplace is thinking… what matters most to them and what they need. This kind of insight is worth a fortune to your business.
  17. Business blogging makes you a lot better at asking questions.
  18. Business blogging also encourages you to question your own opinions, to ensure they stand up to scrutiny and are worthy of your readers.
  19. Business blogging encourages you to regularly do research, increasing your own knowledge base.
  20. Business blogging can get you recognised in the mainstream press, for being named the most influential blog in your class, by the world’s biggest PR company.
  21. Business blogging allows you to build fantastic contacts. My initial contact with my friend Nile Rodgers, started because of something I wrote here on this blog a few years ago.
  22. Business blogging teaches you to look at things from more than one perspective. By writing for others, you need to know what the world looks like, through their eyes.
  23. Business blogging provides you with a creative outlet, which helps you grow as a person. In fact, blogging has been the most powerful professional development tool I have ever used or researched.
  24. Business blogging ensures you remain constantly curious… this is priceless.
  25. Business blogging allows you to build a business asset, which grows in value with every passing week.