Brand and Capture

Tips for Using Multimedia to Enhance Your Blog

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A no-frills blog that is not enhanced with multimedia is like Las Vegas without the lights. The inclusion of multimedia -- photographs, video, audio files -- in a blog post captures the reader's attention, adds visual interest to your blog and illustrates the purpose of the post, increasing the likelihood that they will return to your site.

Multimedia firms churn out endless streams of web-ready content, but bloggers and marketers should be aware that much of this content has a price tag attached. Copyright infringement is a serious infraction that can land writers in legal hot water. Authors, reporters, students and bloggers get in trouble if they borrow a paragraph from a book or news article and print it as their own work. In the same vein, you can't add photos, graphics or song clips you find on the Internet to your blog without obtaining the originator's permission.

Here are four ways to play it safe when adding images, video or sound clips to your blog:

1. Purchase media from its creator. For example, many photographers offer downloads for a fee. You can also purchase multimedia from online resources and galleries such as iStock and Getty Images. Most will allow you to pay per item, but check into quantity discounts for big savings.
2. Use media that is provided with your software. Many software products like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop come with free access to extensive clip art/image galleries that can be used without charge by their customers.
3. Link to media hosted on other blog sites. Many bloggers will allow you to reproduce photos and videos on their sites as long as you provide a credit and direct link to the home site.
4. Create your own original media for your marketing purposes. Post your photos, self-produced videos and original music compositions.

Lastly, if you search for images using sites like Google Images - it is imperative to click through to the image source and review the permissions required for reproduction and use in your blogs as part  of your inbound marketing strategy.

How a Well-Written Inbound Marketing Blog Post is like a Latte

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Few things improve my day more than a great vanilla latte. I was thinking, while drinking my latte this morning, what makes it so great and how can I capture this feeling in our inbound marketing blog posts? Here are some ideas about what makes both a good latte and a good blog post turn in to great ones.

1. It's gotta go down smooth
   Like any well-made latte, your blog post has to go down smooth – meaning it has to read coherently. Stick to one topic, one metaphor, and really make it work for you. Not everyone will get it each time of course, but if it is easy to “digest” then people will continue reading it.
2. Everyone likes it hot
   No one likes a day-old latte. Keep your posts current with the trends. With the ability of real-time search, any news that happened more than a few hours ago tends to be old. Stay fresh, stay present.
3. Make room for a little art.
   Think of the latte art as your blogs accessories. A fun photo (in the upper right hand corner) is not essential to the blog post itself – but it gives it a bit of flare. A well-chosen photo can go a long way in capturing the attention of your audience.
4. Did you let it sit long enough?
   One of the best parts of a great latte is the foam. To get the best foam you have to steam the milk and let it sit for a bit. Now, you shouldn't sacrifice staying current for proofreading, but if you sit on a blog post for less than a half hour – you'll still be in the cutting-edge arena. Write your post and walk away for a moment. Come back to it and read it through once more before pressing publish.
5. If it's delicious, share it with others
   Nothing makes a great latte even better than telling your friends how good it was – sometimes they'll even go with you to get another one! The same holds true for a blog post. When I read something really well-written and interesting I make sure to share it with everyone.

And, if your blog post is great – people might tweet it a latte (sorry for the pun, I had to do it)!

Looking for more details about making your inbound marketing blog post more readable?

20 Tips for Making Your Inbound Marketing Blog More Readable

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Through experimentation and practice, inbound marketing professionals have developed a laundry list of tried and true tricks guaranteed to increase your blog's readability and keep readers coming back for more.

1. Create visual distinction between your post and the rest of the page. The start and end of each post should be clear.
2. Keep it short. Short posts. Short paragraphs (2-3 sentences). Short sentences.
3. Create logical structure and flow (title, intro, heading, text, etc.) and use it consistently to give your site cohesiveness.
4. Choose a common font that most readers are likely to have.
5. Use larger fonts, bold, underlines or color to make headings and subheads stand out. Be consistent in application.
6. Set space between lines in a paragraph to 1.5 (line height divided by font size should equal about 1.5).
7. Pull quotes from the blog body to entice interest. Highlight with italic or bold type or by placing in colored boxes.
8. Underline links so they're easy to spot.
9. Skip SnapShots links. They may seem cool, but quickly become annoying and disruptive.
10. Don't break up posts with ads; it disrupts readability. Place ads below the post or to the side.
11. Shorten sidebars so they don't compete with content.
12. Italic and bold type call enough attention to themselves. Don't distract the reader by making them a different color than the body type.
13. Avoid all caps in body text; they're hard to read.
14. Avoid large text blocks that can intimidate readers. Break up text with bold type or bullets and lists.
15. Indent bulleted and numbered lists to differentiate them from text paragraphs.
16. Left align text for best readability.
17. Make pagination navigation clear and clickable. Add the option to read the entire article on a single page.
18. Expand acronyms using acronym HTML code with the typical dotted bottom border.
19. Place images at the beginning of a post to draw in readers. Top right placement captures greatest reader attention.
20. Check text wrapping around images and adjust text or resize image to create a pleasing fit.

How readable are your blogs? We can help.

Photo credit: margolove

Blogging for Maximum Inbound Marketing Impact

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There are more than 133 million blogs on the Internet with bloggers posting in excess of 900,000 new blog posts every day. With that kind of competition, it's a challenge just to get your blog noticed and even more difficult to keep your blog on readers' radar. Creating a blog with a high level of readability is an important key to gaining and maintaining dedicated readers.

To attract readers and entice them to return, try these tips:

• Present interesting content. Content should be original, varied, useful and interesting to site visitors and should have an obvious connection to your business or product.
• Be effectively organized. Blog posts should be easy to find on the page and quick to access with a click. Choose a standard format for headline and content presentation to give your blog a unified look. Create a logical list of categories and tags to make it easy for readers to find and access similar content.
• Be visually attractive. Select font sizes and color contrasts that are easy to read. Short paragraphs create more white space and appear more visually pleasing and more accessible to readers. Use underlining, highlighting and bulleted or numbered lists to break up content grayness and improve readability. Illustrations add visual interest and attract readers.
• Use language articulately. Use proper grammar, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation in your blog posts. Use the spell checker and proofread blogs before you post them.
• Be written in a suitable voice. The "voice" in which you write creates your blog's personality and molds the reader's view of your company or product. Choose a voice that is in synch with your inbound marketing strategy, the image of your company you wish to portray and your targeted readership. Depending on the company image you wish to build, your voice might be humorous, flippant, educational, compassionate, practical, etc. Blogging is an opportunity to connect with potential customers on an informal level. Use your voice to create a more personal bond with readers, just realize that your voice will also color readers' perceptions about your firm.
• Post new content on a regular basis. New content creates a reason for readers to return to your blog. A minimum of three posts a week, spaced about every other day, will keep readers coming back for more.
• Encourage your readers to subscribe. Place an RSS feed subscription button and e-mail subscription form in a prominent position on your blog page. A brief description of your overall blog subject matter and how often you post is also a good idea to convince your readers to subscribe. By converting readers to subscribers, you are far more likely to add repeat visitors to your site, which ultimately can yield loyal followers and sales leads.

Some people were born to blog. Some of them work for us.

Photo credit: stijnbokhove

The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing

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Sounds like an oxymoron doesn't it? Mixing philosophy with marketing. Those two words seem to be at opposite ends of the human endeavor scale. Philosophy deals with the larger truths, the wisdom behind what we say and do. Marketing is pure needs gratification, finding a way to sell your stuff to a group of unwary people. Here's the thing. We marketers get caught up in the results side and the tactics and technology, often forgetting about the real reasons that inbound marketing works. Inbound marketing is different from outbound marketing because it is based on voluntary relationships forged from reputation and trust. This 'philosophy' has several important elements that should not be overlooked in our zeal to generate leads and ROI.

Earned Media

This concept was introduced by Fred Wilson at a recent Ad Age Digital Conference.The idea is that through publishing blogs and other content and engaging in conversations with people, we earn their respect and interest that can fuel brand loyalty and advocacy. Contrast this with paid media, where we pay a fee and broadcast our message without asking permission and without engaging in conversation. Couched in those terms, in today's marketplace earned media is bound to be more successful as long as we don't confuse popularity with loyalty. In other words, web traffic, Twitter followers and Facebook "likes" are probably a good measure of how loudly we are shouting, but do they measure how much is being heard? Perhaps we should focus more on blog subscriptions, repeat visits and leads that get converted to something more personal, like customers.

Give More Than You Take

There's a reason why influencers influence. They work hard at their craft not so much for personal gain but more for the love of the game. Most of them really want to help others avoid the mistakes they've made and find a better path to success or enlightenment. Most influencers are truly happy when they get feedback, because they know they have been heard, and that's the entire mission. Marketers would love to be influencers (and many are), but it's not so easy when your motives are less than pure. All of us sell constantly. We're always trying to convince someone else that we're right or that it's Mexican food night instead of Italian. A Marketer would talk about the great food and low prices. An influencer would ask the other person what they wanted and suggest some options.

Shut Up and Listen

Once you graduate from Earned Media and Altruism School, you find yourself up against the most difficult challenge of all - the loud roar of your own voice. It amazes me how everywhere you turn people are talking, as if talking is more essential to life than breathing. Social media is great when it's truly social, but how often is that? Seems to me it's mostly blah, blah, blah. Do this, read that. Check out my stuff. What sticks is when someone is actually listening and seeks to intelligently respond to your question. That's magic. Marketers would benefit greatly once in a while by shutting down the marketing and listening for a change.

That's it. End of sermon. I know you have something to say, so I'll shut up and listen.

The VERDICT on Social Media in Business

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Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury

We've heard from the Defense and the Prosecution on the case before you, social media in business. Now YOU are both judge and jury. It's up to you to decide. You can review the case FOR and the case AGAINST before casting your vote. Results are instantaneous and will accumulate for the next month. After you cast your ballot, please tell us why in the comments area below. We'll talk about the case once the votes are in. We thank you for your public service.

What Can Inbound Marketers Do About Haiti?

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Well, you could just write a blog about it, but I think we inbound marketers (and everyone) can do better. Right now Haitians need immediate boots on the ground help, and most of us aren't in a position to do much there. But the entire country has been pretty much flattened and many lives lost, so it will take billions of dollars to even begin to rebuild. We can start there. According to Pete Cashmore's (Mashable) blog on CNN you can make a difference right now:

"As of midday Thursday, the Red Cross had raised some $3 million in donations via its text message campaign: Text "Haiti" to 90999, and a $10 donation is added to your cell phone bill. The mechanism is so wonderfully simple -- removing credit cards and PayPal accounts from the equation entirely -- that donations have flooded in." If you can afford more, that's great. Here's a pretty complete list of the major donation organizations.

Don't stop there either. Get your buddies off their rear ends too. Just tweet "You can text "HAITI" to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief efforts in #Haiti" and your message will be heard with millions of others.

I would be a hypocrit if I hadn't already done all this stuff myself. So I did. I hope this helps the relief efforts down there. Thanks for listening!

The A-B-C of Inbound Marketing Strategy

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We tend to think about inbound marketing by its tools rather than its strategy. When asked "what is inbound marketing?", most people respond with something like "blogs, social media and seo". Those are some of the important tools, but they are not the essence of this new media approach to marketing. What are the fundamental principles? It's as easy as A-B-C.

Authority

This is what we're shooting for as individuals and organizations. We want to be the go-to source for information and judgement in our business sector. That's what will attract people to our website, our blog, our presentations and ultimately to our products and services. Why do you go to Google or WebMD or CNN? Because of their branding? Because they work well? I doubt it. It's because they are authoritative. You trust that you will find what you are seeking, and you know that they are the best in their fields.

So how do you attain such lofty status? You start by assuming that you are the authority, and you start acting like it. You take pride in every piece of content you publish and every comment you make on someone else's content. You strive for accuracy, completeness and relevance. You participate and try to help the conversation along towards something meaningful and helpful.

Benefit

You have to stop thinking about how inbound marketing will help you achieve some goal. That's the old marketing. Think instead about what you can do to help. To paraphrase a very old and pretty well known text, "give and ye shall receive". Make your daily content helpful and your free webinars, e-books and podcasts even more helpful. Don't worry so much about the SEO, inbound links and calls-to-action. Yes, those are important, but do they dominate your beneficial content? I see this happening way too often, even in our own materials. Keep it real and deliver real value. The rest will follow.

Consistency

Inbound marketing is a "long-tail" strategy. Success doesn't happen overnight. It takes a sustained, consistent effort over time to reach your market and build your authority. There is no quick-strike strategy that will work, and making a splash every now and then will not build the kind of lasting brand awareness we all seek. Your strategy must emphasize daily activities as well as long-term goals. The real winners work hard at inbound marketing every day and strive for excellence in every task they perform. If you want to see a nice steady increase in traffic, sales and brand awareness, make it a daily commitment.

Hey, this is a conversation, not a sermon. What are your ideas about the fundamentals of inbound marketing?

Recommended Reading: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs

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To all of our clients and friends,

We recommend "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs", by the founders of HubSpot, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.

Inbound marketing is nothing less than a sea change in the way we market our businesses. It's driven by consumers who want to reach out and touch us, rather than the other way around. Using the Internet as a primary vehicle, inbound marketing gives us the means to attract new customers without blasting them with advertising and endless e-mail promotions. Instead, we build relationships first, like we used to do prior to mass marketing. The only difference is that we do it online with social networking and publishing great content in our blogs and videos.

The HubSpot founders have been on top of this trend since day one, and this book delivers the best rationale for inbound marketing I have seen, plus lots of excellent how-to details. I am recommending it to all of our clients and friends.

Click here to read about our approach to inbound marketing and our inbound marketing services. 

Social Media Monitoring - Are You Hot, Hot, Hot?

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I'm sure you've heard us marketers barking about social media monitoring, but what's it all about? The standard line is something like "people are already talking about you online, so you might as well join the conversation". Well, maybe that's true and maybe not. Let's find out. Let's take our social media temperature.

First let's go to SocialMention (www.socialmention.com) and see what a popular brand looks like. Type "starbucks" into the search box and click the search button. Here's what I got today.

Here's how Social Mention describes its service: "It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc." Editor's note: Best of all, it's free!

In a familiar, Google-like search results page you can see all of the instances of your brand being talked about across the social media spectrum. Charts on the left-hand side show you the top people and keywords as well as some interesting metrics about how people "feel" about your brand and how "powerful" your brand is:

• Strength: "phrase mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions".
• Sentiment: "the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative".
• Passion: "a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly".
• Reach: "the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions".

Of course, they won't tell us how exactly how they figure out the positive and negative, but it most likely has to do with certain keywords related to sentiment, like "I love Starbucks coffee" or its converse.

Pretty cool, huh?

OK, now you try it

Search on your company brand or your personal social media identity, anything that might by found in a blog, microblog, web page or social media bookmark.

Once your results come up, filter by the "results" pulldown on "Last Day". Now you know how much "buzz" has been created in the past 24 hours. What's your social media temperature?

HOT

Like Starbucks. Hundreds of mentions in a single day.

MEDIUM

10 - 100 mentions. More typical of companies that are active in social media but may not have such a well-known brand.

COLD

0 - 10 mentions. Needs work. Good news if you're trying to keep your activities secret. Bad news if you're trying to spread the word about your brand. If the latter is the case, try inbound marketing and work it every day.

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