Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

1 Essential word your marketing needs. Plus 1 you MUST avoid

by

content marketing

Here’s a quick tip, to improve the effectiveness of your marketing. It’s all about a word you use regularly, which is negatively impacting how people feel about your business.

That word is… change!

People are hard-wired to fear change.

We know that change, good or bad, is a source of stress. Even something as positive as the change that comes from getting married, buying a new home or setting off for a week in the sun, is a cause of stress.

Because of the negative way people feel when confronted with change, it makes sense to remove the word from your marketing. Don’t worry, I am going to give you a massively more powerful, motivating alternative!

Improve rather than change

Whenever possible, use the word improve, rather than change. Improve, is a positive word. It’s an attractive word too, because we are always looking for something better.

For example, look how the phrase below becomes far more powerful, when change is replaced with improve.

“This copywriting tip will change your marketing results.” (It could make them worse)

“This copywriting tip will improve your marketing results.” (It will make them better)

Your prospective clients or customers fear change, but want things to improve. So, stop offering them what they fear and give them what they want!

Tip: Here’s how to ensure your copywriting is super-effective.

How to get word of mouth working for you

by

Word of mouth is powerful. A prospective client, for example, will expect YOU to say how great your product or service is, but when Bob or Sue tells their buddy how brilliant you are, that REALLY has an impact!

With websites and blogs, word of mouth can also be an extremely powerful way to get your message to a wider audience. However, to benefit from it, you need to do 2 things:

1. Avoid generic content

Thanks to “Social Media Guru’s” telling bloggers they need to blog as often as possible, there’s a lot of generic content ‘out there’.

However, when you think of the articles, websites or blogs that YOU have recently shared with people, they will be the ones that stood out in some way.  That was what made them worth sharing!  Maybe it was an article that made you laugh out loud or a blog post that made you think about something in a different way. Maybe it was a powerful piece of advice or some information that gave you an answer you had been searching for.

What it probably wasn’t, was one of those awful, generic posts that get written when someone follows their Social Media Guru’s list of “50 things to blog about!”

Focus on quality, not frequency. I often blog just once or twice a week, because I will only write when I have something to share, which I believe is of value.  I refuse to blog just to feed Google or fill someones RSS reader with crap.

As a direct result, this blog already has over 11,000 inbound links and an amazingly high number of readers / comments for a 4 month old blog!

2. Make it easy to share your work

You need to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content. If you look at the bottom of this post, you will see the ‘sharethis‘ link. With one click of that link, you can share this post with your friends via all the major social bookmarking websites. You can also ‘tweet‘ this post from there and even email it to a friend. I now get a stack of new readers from social bookmarking sites, often over 2,000 a day.  By the way, I have no connection with the people who make sharethis, I just use it and like it.

I hope you found this useful – if you did, share it!

Convert your readers into clients!

by

Would you like to convert more of your readers into paying clients or customers?  If you would, then this post might be just what you are looking for!  That’s because I am about to tell you one of the most common reasons that sites have poor conversion rates and also, how to fix it.

Convert readers into clients

In order for a site to convert readers into clients or customers (herein called clients) it first needs to be attracting the correct profile of readers.  You might be the best widget maker in the business, but if your site doesn’t attract people that are interested in buying widgets, it’s never going to convert.  When people think about attracting the right profile of people to their sites, they usually think exclusively of SEO.  So, they get their site’s optimized for the key words and phrases that they believe their target client profile will be looking for.

So far, so good!

However, in many cases, the site owner then shoots themselves in the foot by writing content for their site, which is written for totally the wrong audience!  For example, web designers often have blogs that are filled with posts about the latest coding tricks or the most useful piece of specialist design software.

Here’s the challenge with that approach: The only people interested in those subjects are their fellow web designers. NOT prospective clients!

Keyword density

Not only is that kind of content only going to appeal to fellow web designers, it’s also going to miss many of the words or phrases required, to help them attract the right search engine traffic.  Part of the process Google uses, when determining what words to rank your site for, is something called keyword density.  This is the number of times keywords are repeated within a page of text, in relation to the other words.  When you write your web pages or blog posts for the wrong audience, your keyword density will score too high for the wrong terms and too low for the correct terms.  As a result, your search engine traffic could be largely from the wrong profile of people.

I just saw a web hosting provider’s website, packed from page to page with technical specs, hardware combinations, buzz words and industry slang; rather than messages that their prospective clients will be interested in.  They should be primarily speaking about how their services will help businesses to maintain a fast, reliable online presence.  The software and hardware they use is important, but it needs to be worked into that message.  They should be clearly stating the commercial benefits of using their services and giving people a call to action.

The marketing value of focused copy writing

If you are reading this blog post, there’s an extremely high probability that you are a business owner.  Moreover, you probably own a small to medium-sized business too.  That’s because 100% of the material here is written for business owners.  As a result, this blog ranks highly on search engines for many phrases and terms relevant to business owners, who want to improve their marketing.  Equally, people share the posts here with business owners via social networking sites, because my posts are all written for my prospective client profile; which are small business owners.

So, if you want to convert more of your readers into clients, start off my making sure that you are actually writing for the correct profile of readers.  This means writing in their language, about topics they are interested in and likely to be looking for; such as common challenges within their industry and how you can help them.

[If you are a business owner and you want regular free marketing advice, remember to subscribe to our RSS feed and never miss another post again!]

Dead trees and a powerful copy writing lesson!

by

Writing marketing copy or sales copy that really works can be a challenge, especially for people with little or no experience.  One of the best ways to learn how to write great copy, is to read great copy and then study what you have read. Why did that particular message compel you to click a link?  What was it about the specific offer you just read, that made you follow-up on it?

Copy writing and Dead Trees

One of the best pieces of copy writing I have seen over the past few years, is just a simple, short phrase.  It’s often used when online publications refer to paper-based; newspapers, magazines and trade publications etc.  The term is dead tree media.  For example, when referring to a headline on the front page of the traditional paper version of The Times, a blogger will often refer to it as the front page of the dead tree edition of The Times.

The reason this is such a clever phrase, is that those 2 words, dead tree, are extremely emotive:

  • The phrase dead tree immediately focuses our mind on the fact that in order for paper to be made, trees not only need to be cut down; they have to be killed!  Even recycled paper was once a tree.
  • By calling the traditional version of a newspaper, magazine or whatever the dead tree edition, we start to think of it as out-dated.  When we see the term applied regularly enough, it can be a very powerful way to reinforce the belief that paper-based media is either dying or dead.
  • When there are 2 options available to the reader; either a dead tree edition of a magazine or an online version, the online version is automatically made to sound more attractive, simply because it isn’t being referred to negatively.

A quick copy writing tip

If you are serious about the success of your marketing, you need to get serious about copy writing too.  Here’s a tip.  Collect all the; emails, marketing letters, articles or blog posts that motivate you to take action and study them.  Study what it was that compelled you to click their link, visit their store, call them or email them.

For example, look at the box below this post, with a call to action.  Every hour of every day, people click the link in that box to find out how they can work with me.  Look at the message and think about how you can apply something similar to YOUR site; something that will provide you with sales leads all day every day.

The bottom line: Your site should (and could) be a relentless, lead-generating machine for your business.  If it isn’t, you could well be missing out on more sales and higher profits than you currently believe is even possible.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

How long should your blog posts be?

by

Some of the best blog posts are also the shortest.  Blog posts that offer information rich copy, with all the unnecessary fluff stripped out, get to the point quicker and save the reader valuable time.  This post about social media experts is one of the most read on my blog and it’s just 112 words long!

Why do many commercial bloggers write mainly longer format posts?

From what people tell me, there seems to be 2 reasons. The first reason, is that it’s believed by many that unless a post is more than 300 words long, it will not rank well on search engines.  I have seen enough evidence of this to believe there’s truth in it.  However, if you are in the UK right now and you ask Google: “What is a social media expert?”, you will see that 112 word post I mentioned earlier on page 1 – Out of over 42Million results.

The second reason, which I am going to focus on in this post, is the belief that the longer a post is, the more valuable it will be, and the more people will want to read and share it. My experience over the past 24 years in Marketing, is that the quicker you can make a valid point, without all the fluff that typically weakens a message, the more impact your message has.  Because of this, I think it’s worth adding some shorter blog posts to your commercial blog.

Seth Godin understands the value of brevity

One of the reasons Seth Godin’s blog is so popular, is that his posts are never any longer than they need to be.  Seth’s blog posts are focused, information rich, but never too long.  That’s because Seth understands the power of brevity.  This means some of his posts are just 1 or 2 paragraphs in length.  With Seth’s blog, you get all the juice, without having to wade through acres of bloated content.

Interestingly, I noticed a post on Seth’s blog recently, which is apparently his longest post of the year.  If you look at the number of times people have ReTweeted that post, you will see that it was actually less popular (from a sharing perspective) than many of his very short posts.  BTW: It still achieved over 900 ReTweets, which is amazing!

I’m not suggesting you ONLY write short blog posts

There are good reasons for writing longer format posts, (including SEO.)  I wrote earlier this week about how to write more great blog posts, and it’s almost a thousand words long.

Here’s what I’m suggesting: The next time you have an interesting point you want to make, but you think it may be too short for a blog post, try publishing it anyway!  You may be pleasantly surprised with the feedback you get.  Don’t waste all your short, insightful ideas and opinions on Facebook or Twitter – Write them on your blog and then share them across your social networks.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Keep clear!

by

One of the primary reasons that so many small business owners miss out on sales, is that their marketing messages lack clarity.  When it comes to sales, clarity is king.  In fact, one of the oldest sayings in the business is:

“A confused mind always says NO!”

In other words, if you ask a prospective client to make a purchasing decision, before they clearly understand your proposal, they will typically say “no”.  That’s why the best salespeople and negotiators always make sure they clearly explain their proposition, in as few words as possible.  They prompt prospective clients to ask them questions, and answer them fully, before asking them to make a decision. The clearer a prospective client is about what you are offering, especially regarding how it will benefit them, the better.

Copy writing and clarity

With written marketing, we also need to ensure that prospective clients can clearly and quickly learn what we do and how it will benefit them.  However, when we look at most small business marketing, we see pretty-much the exact opposite!  It is generally written in a long winded, bloated, pedestrian style, which the reader has usually given up on way before the actual core benefits have even been mentioned.  It usually focuses way too much on how great they are, and way too little on the problems facing the person reading their message.

Guess how interested the average reader is in YOU or YOUR business?

Not very!

They came to you because they have a problem.  Every successful product or service is designed to solve some kind of problem.  If your marketing is targeted correctly, the people reading it will be suffering with the problems, which your offering solves.  By clearly explaining how YOU will directly make THEIR situation better, you stand the best possible chance of attracting their custom.  The focus should be on them and how you can help them.

Quick marketing tip

Take a moment to review your written marketing and see how long it takes the reader, to find out exactly how you can help them.  Check your website’s statistics software and note the pages that visitors to your site arrive on the most.  Ensure that your marketing message on those pages is clear and that it gets to the point quickly and without fuss.