Posted by Vanessa Knipper on Wed, Aug 04, 2010 @ 01:14 PM
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Posted by Maddie Weber on Mon, Aug 02, 2010 @ 09:21 AM
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
Posted by Maddie Weber on Tue, Jul 27, 2010 @ 07:14 AM
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.
Create visual distinction between your post and the rest of the page. The start and end of each post should be clear.- Keep it short. Short posts. Short paragraphs (2-3 sentences). Short sentences.
- Create logical structure and flow (title, intro, heading, text, etc.) and use it consistently to give your site cohesiveness.
- Choose a common font that most readers are likely to have.
- Use larger fonts, bold, underlines or color to make headings and subheads stand out. Be consistent in application.
- Set space between lines in a paragraph to 1.5 (line height divided by font size should equal about 1.5).
- Pull quotes from the blog body to entice interest. Highlight with italic or bold type or by placing in colored boxes.
- Underline links so they're easy to spot.
- Skip SnapShots links. They may seem cool, but quickly become annoying and disruptive.
- Don't break up posts with ads; it disrupts readability. Place ads below the post or to the side.
- Shorten sidebars so they don't compete with content.
- Italic and bold type call enough attention to themselves. Don't distract the reader by making them a different color than the body type.
- Avoid all caps in body text; they're hard to read.
- Avoid large text blocks that can intimidate readers. Break up text with bold type or bullets and lists.
- Indent bulleted and numbered lists to differentiate them from text paragraphs.
- Left align text for best readability.
- Make pagination navigation clear and clickable. Add the option to read the entire article on a single page.
- Expand acronyms using acronym HTML code with the typical dotted bottom border.
- Place images at the beginning of a post to draw in readers. Top right placement captures greatest reader attention.
- 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
Posted by John McTigue on Mon, Jul 26, 2010 @ 07:32 AM
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:
Some people were born to blog. Some of them work for us.
Photo credit: stijnbokhove
Posted by John McTigue on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 @ 08:08 AM
Every business blog has the potential to become a marketing powerhouse, but achieving that goal takes a solid strategy, a bit of creativity and astute manipulation of search engine optimization techniques. When effectively produced and managed, business blogging can become a key element in your -Internet Marketing Strategy. Blogging has proven to be an effective way to build brand recognition, drive motivated customers to your website, generate sales leads and nurture positive customer relations.
Effective business blogs use a marketing strategy:
Interesting and useful content. Consumers return to blogs that provide information they can use. To attract potential customers, your blog should inform and be relevant to your particular business. Industry news, product updates, interviews with industry experts, developing trends, the impact of current events, and personals insights into topics important to your target audience are all potential blog topics. - Regular content updates. Blogs should be updated regularly to encourage readers to return frequently in search of new content. Publishing new blog posts three times per week, spaced every other day, is optimal. While regular additions of new content to your blog help build reader anticipation, encouraging them to return, posting new content also gives Internet spiders new material to crawl, boosting your search engine rank.
- Create a distinctive voice. Blogging is an informal medium. Approach blogging as a conversation with your readers. When you write a blog post, avoid insider acronyms and corporate gobbledygook. A blog shouldn't sound like a formal journal article or a memo to employees. This is an opportunity to humanize your business, to show potential customers that behind your website are real people waiting to take care of their needs. Most bloggers find it most comfortable to blog in their own voice, and it's okay to be chatty and humorous.
- Optimize your posts. Make sure that every post has strategic keywords in the title, headings, url, link text, body text and alt tags on images. Your blog content should be relevant to those keywords (and vice versa), i.e. make it a coherent keyword-rich post that conveys a message.
- Spread the word. Promote every blog post on social networks, social bookmarking sites and e-mail newsletters. Tell people what your post is about and why they should be interested. Use url shorteners to preserve as much descriptive text as possible in social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Leverage hashtags in Twitter to spread the word beyond your personal network of followers. Target groups, memes or audiences that should be interested in your post. Include social media sharing buttons and subscription forms on every post to encourage people to spread the word and come back for more.
Potential customers will return repeatedly to a blog that is informative and entertaining to read. Include a call to action in every blog post that is relevant to the topic at hand. This creates an opportunity to capture leads from your blog readers.
Content and voice are just the visible face of blogging. Underneath the words is a structure of search engine optimization elements that, when properly incorporated into the structure of your business blog, help to promote your brand in the search engines and bring in qualified leads.
Your blog - is it driving home the sales leads? Need some help with that?
Photo Credit: hughelectronic
Posted by John McTigue on Fri, Jun 11, 2010 @ 06:56 AM
Business blogging can be a dynamic way to generate sales leads and a powerful inbound marketing tool, but many companies are not making the most effective use of their blogs. Offering interesting, well-written content that's pertinent to potential customers and presenting that content in a pleasing manner are certainly important. However, if such altruistic externals are the only goals driving your blog; you're missing the key purpose of maintaining a business blog. Certainly, blogs have to attract site visitors and be interesting enough to ensure their return; but the core value of a business blog as an inbound marketing tool lies in its ability to capture sales leads. If your blog exhibits good site traffic but fails to convert that traffic into useful sales leads; you're wasting the time, money and effort that you're investing in your business blog.
How do you use your blog to generate sales leads? By taking a commercial view of your website, blog and other inbound marketing tools. Consider every item available through your website and associated social marketing platforms (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as something for sale in your virtual store. Assign each item a "price tag" based on its value to the consumer. Every time a potential customer "buys" an item, whether it's submitting a response to a blog post, downloading a white paper, viewing a podcast, printing out a coupon or signing up for your company newsletter, he "pays" for the information by providing his contact information. Obviously your "prices" will vary. For example, a visitor will be more apt to provide his mailing address, phone number and email address if he wants to download a buyer's guide or white paper from your website. To respond to a blog post or sign up for your newsletter, he may only be willing to provide his email address.
The point is to entice potential customers to move from a passive to an active relationship with your inbound marketing tools and, by extension, your business. You want your business blog posts to motivate readers to take an action -- click on a white paper link to your website, print a coupon, enter a contest, take a one-question survey -- and in the process divulge their contact information, providing you with useful customer leads.
Does Your Blog Generate Qualified Sales Leads? We can help!
Photo Credit: Kristina B
Posted by John McTigue on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 08:47 AM
Your business blog is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy. Your blog should provide interesting insights into your business - not just what your company is doing, but what's happening in the industry. You can use your blog to establish your leadership in your industry by providing expert commentary and helpful solutions. Visitors will read and subscribe to your blog if they feel it is valuable and not too self-promotional. Remember, it's not a newsletter or a webcam showing your employees working. Nobody cares about that. Your blog is for reaching out to communicate with your market and for building a loyal following with consistently excellent content. Think of your blog as a spider web that helps you capture leads brought in from your social media venues and search engines. A well crafted blog post not only interests readers but also inspires them to post links in social media and sign up for offers on your landing pages.
Why do so many business blogs get sidetracked?
Blogging is hard work and can be quite time consuming. If you're doing it right, your blog is well written and optimized for seo with important keywords. Not every company has a designated person or team capable of writing about their business not only with authority but in an engaging voice. Fewer still have professional seo experts on staff. Even those who have a talent for writing can feel overburdened by the pressure to create blog entries on a regular basis. For blogs to work their marketing magic, new posts should be published at least three times a week, or about every other day. Many business people simply don't have the time or resources -- or continuous flow of ideas -- to maintain the level of commitment successful marketing blogging requires.
Naturally, there are solutions. Many firms are now turning to professional blog writers or inbound marketing agencies to design and manage a comprehensive blogging plan, to provide original content and to optimize each post for search engines. Contracting out inbound marketing, including blogging, allows them to tap into resources and professional expertise most businesses can't afford to employ. Agencies can arrange for professional writers to update and maintain a company's blog site. Ghost writers typically write as staff members and sometimes as the business principal. Contracting out your blogging services allows you to focus on your business while reaping the marketing benefits blogging can provide.
How's your blog performing as an inbound marketing magnet? We can help.
Photo Credit: Mrs Magic.
Posted by John McTigue on Wed, May 05, 2010 @ 07:10 AM
Hear ye, hear ye, the Court of Public Opinion is now in session. Yesterday we heard the case FOR social media in business. Today, the nay-sayers have the floor. Tomorrow, the verdict.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury
Why should you turn your backs on all of this social media hype with no substance?
Anything You (or They) Say Can and Will Be Used Against You...
One slip of the tongue by you, your employees, your friends or relatives is part of the permanent public record. There is no retraction, and there are many hungry wolves waiting to grab your words and turn them against you. There are many notable cases of companies getting slammed by the public for inadvertant, ill-timed opinions, jokes or videos released to the social networks. Publish at your own peril! Disgruntled employees or competitors can disparage you all they want and bring your sales or public relations to their knees, and you have no recourse but to spend time and money monitoring social media and defending yourself. Are you listed on Yelp or other public review sites? Watch the sales drop off as soon as one negative review pops up. What can you do about it? Never make a mistake. Better yet, close up shop. It's easier that way.
Any Fool Can Publish a Blog
Remember the good old days when news came from journalists? Most of those folks had to get a degree, double check their facts and get reviewed by editors. Now it's a free-for-all of bloggers, most of whom have no credentials and plenty of unfounded opinions. Turn one of these folks against you, and you will have the wrath of thousands of like-minded citizens harassing you from every direction. Now suddenly everyone's an expert on your industry and happy to provide a review of you and your company. Everyone has their favorite channel to go hear the propaganda they like, so there goes fair-and-balanced information. Who can you believe these days?
Now You Have 20 New Ways to Receive Spam
Remember the good old days of Viagra and Cialis spam? Now everyone's a stay-at-home business with at least 4-5 great opportunities to make your life whole again. I wish I had time to attend all 4,000 webinar invitations I receive each week. Amazing how many experts can pop up in a couple of years while education is on the decline. Oh, and don't forget, every time you make one of those new fuzzy friends on Twitter or Facebook, you get a cool new e-mail thanking you and inviting you to a great new webinar. And then you get 10 more, and so on...
There Are No Secrets
OK, maybe we went overboard with the secrecy thing during the Cold War (anybody remember that?), but now? I'm sure all the evil doers have fired their spy networks. There's no need anymore, it's all on Twitter and Facebook and your personal blog. I'm guessing the guys in Langley spend more time and money checking out social media than they do on just about anything else these days. And for business folks like you and me? Same deal. If you think anything's proprietary anymore, think again.
Tomorrow - THE VERDICT (you decide).
In case you missed it - The Defense has their say FOR social media.
What say you about the issues with social media?
Photo Credit:
Posted by John McTigue on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 @ 12:33 PM
We're all very busy, and most of us seem to have nine lives running concurrently. We enjoy social media, even if we can only find time for a few minutes of engagement per day. But what about people who do this for a living? Professional bloggers and social media marketing agencies are faced with the daunting task of trying to be out there building communities and sharing great content with the masses, often as a proxy for multiple clients. Does it make sense to use social media automation tools to accomplish these tasks, or by doing so are we spoiling our own impact and authority?
The Case For
A couple of common cases come to mind.
- The professional blogger or affiliate marketer depends entirely on generating compelling content and drawing leads to their landing pages, all day, every day. These folks must reach as many people as they can without being seen as obvious spammers. If you're on Twitter or Facebook, you see the same folks posting at least 100 times a day. Why? Because they need to reach a lot of people and they hope that at least some will click through and sign up.
- The social media (or inbound) marketing agency must create enough buzz for their clients that traffic and leads will increase on their sites. Often there are specific ROI goals that must be achieved in order to continue the service. These folks are under pressure to post blogs, tweets and updates early and often for multiple clients.
In these two cases, marketers use a variety of tools such as Twitterfeed or Tweetlater for Twitter or WP Robot or FirePow for blogs to rack up a bunch of social media content in a single blast of effort and schedule it for publication later. What's the advantage? It's an efficiency thing. Roll out your content once and publish (or even repeat) it over time so that it gets exposure throughout the day and week. It works - and nearly all of the aforementioned folks are using these tools regularly.
The Case Against
If you believe that the best use of social media is real people engaging with other real people in real time, social media automation is useless at best. If you're an inbound marketer, it's a thinly disguised method of outbound marketing. After all, it's a fire-and-forget approach that seems a whole lot like e-mail marketing or direct mail. Many people will unfollow the affiliate marketers and bloggers who use social media automation, even if they are well known and put out great content.
So Who's Right?
Well, as I've said many times before, there aren't any rules. It's up to you to decide how you manage your time and use social media. It's also up to you decide whom to trust and when and where to listen. If you need to make money in social media, then you do what you have to do. If not, you can make a difference by being selective.
What are your thoughts about social media and the devil's tools?
Posted by John McTigue on Fri, Mar 05, 2010 @ 08:35 AM
Boomers are all over social media, especially Facebook, according to a recent report. Wondering why these old farts (like me) are updating their profiles, tweeting, and otherwise hanging out in social space? Actually, it's in our upbringing and collective life experience. We love social media because it reminds us of who we are.
If you watched Tom Brokaw's special "Boomers!" last night, and you aren't a baby boomer, you got a glimpse of what makes us boomers tick. We were born after WWII and the Korean War, and most of us grew up in the 'burbs built during the post-war 50's. We were hooked on TV dinners and TV shows like Laugh-In and the Monkeys. We were influenced by space exploration and devastating events like the JFK and MLK assassinations. We entered puberty under the heavy shadow of Vietnam and the Cold War. Many of us became rebellious and many more experimented in everything including sex and drugs and rock-and-roll. We turned to each other for support and we banned together like no other generation before or since. As we grew up we became obsessed with material things and we bought it all on revolving credit, even though our parents warned us that someday (i.e. now) it would all come crashing down on us.
So now where are we boomers, and why are we into social media, tools that were designed for kids?
- We love to experiment. Remember?
- We lost touch with each other along the way, and we yearn to get back to that age of discovery and togetherness.
- We need each other more than ever since the dream has turned into a massive recession.
- Most of us have turned into empty nesters, so we actually have time for things other than kids and work. Not enough time to go visit each other much, but plenty to hook up on FB.
- Lots of us have been displaced from those jobs we depended on for so long, and now we need help finding new ways to make money.
- We never lost that urge to be playful and have fun. It was just buried under a ton of responsibilities.
Hey all you boomers out there, how do you use social media and what works for you (or doesn't)?