Social media marketing Archives - Page 27 of 60

Content Marketing: More about Content, than Marketing

By Jim Connolly | August 9, 2013

Updated May 2016

Do you use content marketing as a way to generate sales or inquiries for your business? If you do and like most people, you’re not happy with your results, you may find the answer you need right here in this post.

Here’s what I believe to be the primary mistake people make with content marketing, and how you can avoid it.

Focusing too much on the marketing

The main focus of most content marketing articles and guides, is the marketing part.

How to promote your blog, podcast, video etc.
How to motivate people to forward your newsletter to their friends.
How to get more people to share your content on social networks.
How to make your content rank highly on search engines.

In short: How to increase the number of people who see your content.

Marketing gives your content a push. It doesn’t give it legs

The challenge with that approach is that it presupposes that churning out content is enough… so long as you market the crap out of it. This is 100% incorrect.

The most successful people, who use content to market their products or services, actually do very little marketing of their content. Like me, they write, hit publish and then share their work on whatever social networks they use. It takes around 2 minutes if you do it manually.

If the content is useful enough, lots of people read it through, then a subset email you or call you. Others share it.
If the content isn’t useful enough, few people read it, even fewer get in touch with you or share it.

The key thing is the content. That’s what gives the; newsletter, article, blog post, video or podcast, legs. It’s what causes the reader to connect with you or ignore you. It’s what builds a tribe around your work or means you have to start from scratch each time. It’s what positions you as an expert or yet another purveyor of generic information.

Yes, the marketing is important

However, it’s by far the least important part. If you’re writing content, sharing it with your networks and not seeing much response, it’s the content you need to focus on.

It could be too long, like most ineffective content. People are busy and prefer short, information rich content, (rather than over-long content that the search engines seem to prefer).
It could be that the title fails to grab them.
It could be that you are SEOing your thoughts rather than expressing your thoughts.
It could be the 5th time they’ve seen someone writing a post about the same subject that morning.

It could be any number of things related to the content, which means it’s failing to engage and motivate people.

Writing with passion, clarity and brevity on your chosen subject, is something you can become very good at, relatively quickly.

It means being willing to practice. It means writing often. It means being prepared to adjust your style. However, you can do it and it’s well worth the time and effort involved.

This will help

This explains how I manage to publish lots of useful information, (I published 50 posts last month across 2 sites) and how you can improve the quality and quantity of your writing: How to write great content, every day.

How to immediately get more Word of Mouth referrals, for free!

By Jim Connolly | July 29, 2013

If you want people to talk about your business on social networks, the process is pretty straightforward.

Do something worth talking about.
Make it as easy as possible for people to share it.
And if you want people to know it’s YOUR business that’s being talked about, get YOUR name into the story.

It’s that final step, which I want to share with you today.

Steak out

I took the above photo in a great little village pub and restaurant. It’s a list of steaks they offer, which apparently always includes some very unusual [worthy of sharing] steaks.

I decided to share their steak menu on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, as well as my Instagram account. As I pointed my phone at it, one of the staff told me that people often took photos of the menu.

Take another look at that photo. Have you spotted something missing, which means they are gaining nothing from all the photos being shared about their weird steak selection?

The name of that pub and their website is missing from the steak menu.

A huge, missed opportunity

So, they have created a visual story worth sharing, but when people share it, the venue isn’t included in the share.

No one knows the name of the venue from the photo’s being shared on social networks.
Because there’s no website or phone number on the menu board, you can’t find the place either, if you want to try one of their steaks.
No name. No website. No phone number. No Word of Mouth (or Word of Mouse) referrals from all those social networking shares of their menu. What could be a powerful visual marketing asset is of no value to them whatsoever.

I wonder how much busier this relatively quiet venue would be, if the potential customers who see that menu on social networks, knew where the place was? My photo alone was shared with around 80,000 people.

The answer?

Take visual marketing seriously. Give people something worth photographing and they will share it. Just make sure your website and (or) company name and phone number are visible.

Is Google’s SEO loophole hurting your business too? Here’s how to check

By Jim Connolly | July 12, 2013

Google has opened the door to an aggressive SEO tactic, Negative Backlink SEO.

Here’s what it is, how it works, how to tell if you’re being targeted and how to stop it hurting your business!

Negative backlink SEO

Google now proactively punishes sites, which are linked to from sites with a bad reputation. Previously, Google only punished you, if you linked from your site to a ‘bad neighbourhood’. This included link farms, article directories, link exchange portals, etc.

Now, you get punished if they link to you – even if you know nothing about it!

So, your competitors or anyone who would like to hurt your business, can do so simply by linking to your site from dubious sites or directories. They can do it anonymously too.

The move by Google is supposedly aimed at stopping websites from buying links or exchanging links, in order to boost their search rankings. Instead, it has created a huge headache and Google is showing no sign of relenting.

Are you being targeted?

The only way to know if your site is being targeted, is to monitor the sites that link to you. There are lots of tools to do this, some you pay for others are free.

If you use Google analytics, you can set up a Google Webmaster account for free and it will provide you with a list of all the links it can see, which point back to your site (backlinks). You can access Google Webmaster Tools here. The benefit of using Google’s solution is that it shows you what Google can see and as Google is the hub of the problem, this makes sense.

I have also found other backlink tools often inaccurate, when testing them. There are over 107,000 backlinks to Jims Marketing Blog, with most backlink apps and programs only able to find between 10% and 20% of them.

Fixing the problem

Technically, this should be pretty simple. You find the toxic links using Google Webmaster Tools, then send the links to Google, using their Disavow Tool – You can find it here. Google then disavows (or accepts you show no responsibility) for those links and stops penalising you. You then ask Google to reconsider the penalty it applied to you and hope for the best. Here’s how Google’s Disavow Tool works.

In reality, this can be a massive pain in the ass. New, toxic backlinks can be added to your site at any time, meaning you need to remember to check for new links, regularly.

Also, if you’re new to this, it can be hard to tell a valuable link from a toxic link. Some toxic links come from URL’s that look pretty normal and some genuinely great links come from URL’s that seem dubious. So, be very careful what links you decide to ask Google to disavow. Whilst you can reverse the process, it’s best to be sure before you disavow anything.

You can also email the site owner, to ask if they will manually remove the link or links to your site. Obviously, your success will depend on whether the site owner wants to help or even if the site linking to you is still being actively managed.

Google is not the only game in town

Google has never changed the rules as often or as dramatically as it does today. As I wrote a few days ago, many small business owners are seeing Google search traffic drop like a stone. I received dozens of emails from people following that post, whose businesses are suffering seriously from these changes. It’s a very real problem. One that Google seems oblivious to.

Thankfully Google is not the only game in town. It is just one component of Internet marketing.

So, regardless of whether you are being punished by Negative Backlink SEO or any of the other 3 changes Google has made recently, I strongly recommend you diversify your Internet marketing.

You’re not scared: You just need the right strategy

By Jim Connolly | July 9, 2013

We live in a golden age of marketing, with amazing opportunities for you to grow a hugely successful business. So, what are you doing with it all?

Today, you can share your ideas via blogs, email and social networks and build a community of people, who are interested in your work and what you have to say. Moreover, you can do it for peanuts. When done correctly, this generates regular inquiries from highly targeted prospective clients.

What an amazing opportunity.

What does the typical small business owner do?

They decide not to build a community around their own ideas, beliefs and thoughts. Instead, they create social networking accounts for their business, then mostly fill them with the thoughts, links and work of other people. They start a blog, but fill it with generic ‘me too’ content that tells us nothing about them, their beliefs or ideas.

Yes, they get follower numbers, but no community. In fact, most people that follow them will know very little about them or their business.

I was prompted to write this, after hearing some very strong words on the subject from marketing thought leader, Seth Godin. I provide a link to the audio below, so you can hear what he has to say, in context (it’s around 7 and a half minutes in).

No personality, invisible conduits

During the 15th episode of Seth Godin’s Start Up School podcast, Seth called those who regularly share his content and the content of other well known experts (rather than their own ideas): “No personality, invisible, conduits”.

Seth continues: “These people aren’t showing the guts to say, I have a point of view. I have something to say.”

That’s a little harsh and very different to my experience of business owners. Very few of whom are gutless.

It’s not guts that small business owners lack

I disagree with Seth’s belief that it’s fear, which primarily stops people from creating their own content.

I started what’s now called Content Marketing in 1998, with my marketing newsletter. Over the years, I have spoken with countless small business owners, about building their business via email, then via blogging and social networks.

Do you know what stops them?

Here’s a clue: It’s not fear!

In the majority of cases, they simply don’t know what to do or where to start. It’s a strategy they need.

They don’t want to waste time just adding to all the noise that’s already out there. They want results. Let’s not forget, business owners have already shown the courage to start their businesses, often leaving ‘safe’ careers to do so.

When business owners know what to do and they can clearly see the direct commercial benefit of sharing their own ideas, most will get straight to work on it. They are not gutless – certainly not those I work with.

So…

If you are not developing effective marketing assets online right now, stop what you are doing. Then, either learn how to build an effective content marketing strategy or hire someone who can show you exactly what you need to do.

Yes, feel free to share other people’s content, but remember to tell us who you are and what you think. It’s the latter, which creates community, builds relationships and drives marketing success online.

People hate being taken for a fool

People respect honesty