Category Archives: Content Marketing

How Bloggers Blog: The Survey

Do you blog?

The number of people that answer that question with a “yes” continues to grow.

Blogging can look really different depending on who’s doing it.  A blog that’s mostly meant as a fun way to work out your thoughts or track your experiences on vacation will provide a different experience than the blogs meant to help promote a business. Even within the latter category though, how people blog varies.

To get a clearer picture of what business blogging looks like, Orbit Media took a survey. What they found, as expected, is that there’s a wide variety in how bloggers blog. Even so, they were able to pull out a few key trends in the blogging process.

  • Most bloggers spend less than 2 hours on each post, but it’s not unheard of to spend over 6 hours.
  • Bloggers don’t keep normal business hours. They write whenever they can fit it in, or when an idea hits.
  • Most bloggers work from a home office.
  • Many bloggers publish new posts multiple times a week.
  • Few bloggers have editors.
  • The main blogging promotion tools used are social media and SEO.

Not too many of those surveyed were freelance bloggers, but the survey findings match my experiences pretty well.

There’s no one right way to blog. Anyone who works in a creative field knows that you just have to figure out what works best for you.

If you want your blog to succeed as a business tool though, there are a few key things you need to keep in mind.

For a more in depth look at what you need to do to build a more successful business blog, download the Austin Copywriter report on the subject.

So what about you? How do you blog?

 

Why You Should Be Promoting Your Content (Not Just Your Products)

By this point, most businesses know they should be creating content. The advice is everywhere. Talk of content content promotionmarketing and business blogging is all over business magazines like Inc and Entrepreneur. You’re much less likely to encounter a business owner today who has never heard of content marketing than you are to encounter one who has thrown up her hands and agreed to go along with the tide and start a blog or YouTube channel for her brand.

You’re probably thinking: well what possible downside could a freelance copywriter whose job it is to create content see in this?

That more businesses are embracing content marketing is mostly a good thing, but many are taking an incomplete approach to it. Every business that starts a blog, publishes once a week, and doesn’t get results tarnishes the idea of content marketing a little bit.

For your content to gain traction, you can’t just create it. You need to promote it.

This message has made its way into the realm of common knowledge for those who specialize in content marketing or content strategy. Nonetheless, for many businesses who have just done cursory research into content marketing, the idea isn’t as familiar.

Jay Baer popularized the concept that you should make content so good that people would pay for it. Making content that’s good enough to be a product is step one. Step two is promoting it in the same way you do your products.

Well, not exactly the same way. The process of promoting good content is a little different than product promotion (although there’s plenty of overlap).

We’ll get more into the hows of promoting content in future posts, since it’s too big of a topic to cover in one blog post. In the meantime, there’s a lot of good information on the subject already out there. Here are a number of articles that touch on both the value of content promotion and techniques for getting started:

There’s some overlap in those posts, but that just lets you know that the stuff that comes up multiple times is the stuff you really need to know about content promotion.

Lest you read this and think, “Of course she says this is important, she just wants us to buy more of her services,” content promotion isn’t actually a specialty of mine. I can provide some consulting to help you generate ideas for a content promotion plan, but I’d rather help you find someone else to execute it.

I do benefit from more people understanding the value of content promotion though. Blog posts, reports, whitepapers, ebooks–all those things I do specialize in–are all worth more to a company that has a plan to promote them. I’d rather make great content for businesses that people actually see and appreciate, than great content that goes unnoticed by all but a few people outside of the company.

You’re Not Normal, So Stop Marketing To Yourself

Doesn’t it just drive you crazy when you’re trying to read a magazine and you keep having to flip to different pages to finish each article. No?

Image by Nina Mathews via flickr

That’s because you read a magazine the way most people do, flipping through to see which articles are interesting to you rather than starting from the beginning and reading straight through to the end the way weirdos like me do it. Magazine publishers design their issues based on normal reading habits. My habits aren’t normal.

I Wrote This Sub-Heading Just For You

Which brings us to another way in which I’m strange, I read blog posts the same way: I start at the beginning and read through to the end. As a writer who produces content for the web, I had to do my research to figure out that this isn’t normal.

It’s not just me. Especially tech-minded people see the world differently than the audiences they sell to, a lesson they had to be reminded of by Justin Jackson. Whatever your personal vision of “normal” is, probably isn’t. When you to need to reach people that aren’t just like you, you have to get outside of your own head.

If I want people to read what I write, I had to figure out how to appeal to the normal reader, rather than doing what comes naturally to me.

Do Your Research

It’s human nature to assume that the way we like to do things is the best and most obvious way to do them. It sure would make marketing easier if that was the way it worked. Instead, figuring out what people respond to is hard work and involves a lot of research, followed with trial and error.

If you start a blog to promote your business, you can’t just sit down and brainstorm a list of all the topics you think would be interesting to write about. If you’re lucky, there will be some overlap between what you want to write about and what your target audience wants to read, but you can’t count on it.

Instead, you need to go where your target audience is and learn what they’re responding to.

The Best Way to Learn About Your Audience.

If you can contact them directly, this is the gold standard!

Surveys, calls to clients, email requests for feedback – if you have enough of a relationship with members of your target audience to get information on what they want to read about without annoying them, then use it. Few things will serve your marketing as well as taking the time to listen to your current customers (or people just like them) about their problems, concerns, and needs.

What Next?

Failing that (or to supplement that), find the other blogs in your space and lurk. Don’t worry. It’s not creepy to lurk on a blog or website the way it is in real life. It’s a valid and fully expected way for you to gather information about what people like.

Research the blogs and publications that are getting the most visits in your industry, as well as the ones that get the most engagement (they’re not always the same):

  • This tip probably goes without saying, but Google some of the key terms related to what you do and see what comes up.
  • Check out what’s listed for your industry on Alltop.com
  • Use FollowerWonk’s search function to find some of the people with the most followers in your industry.

This will get you started. Once you’ve found a few of the top blogs in your industry, it’s easy to follow the trail to more influential sites.

You see, bloggers and websites that get to the top of the food chain pretty much always get there with the help of other bloggers and websites. That means the guys you find that are influential in your industry are probably following, linking to, and otherwise connected with other influential sites in your industry. Once you find your first two or three, they’ll lead you to the rest.

Pay Attention to Metrics

You don’t want to just read these guys. You want to pay careful attention to the things they write that get the most shares and comments. These are the topics your readers care about.

Obviously, you shouldn’t straight up copy the big guys, but use what you learn there as a launching board for collecting ideas for your own blog.

Quick note: this isn’t a step you do once and are done with. Once you’ve collected a list of relevant blogs in your space, make them part of your weekly (or even better, daily) research routine so you can stay up to date on what people are concerned about in your industry. This will not only help you regularly come up with topic ideas, it will also help you stay connected to your industry.

You can use feedly to collect all the blogs you want to follow into one stream. And of course,  follow them all on twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

If what you discover your audience likes seems totally counter-intuitive, all that means is that you’re not normal. If you’d done your marketing based on the way you think, you’d have failed. Now, you can craft your marketing efforts based on what matters:  your audience.

8 Tips for Good Content Marketing

In the 4th and final video in the Austin Copywriter video series on small business content marketing, I’ve included 8 especially important tips for doing content marketing well.

What’s the point in putting in the time and energy, unless you take the necessary steps to get results from content marketing?

Watch it now:

In case you missed any of the videos that came before, here’s the rundown:

Part 1: Why Use Content Marketing?

Part 2: What is Content Marketing?

Part 3: The Benefits of Content Marketing

If you’d rather read than watch, here’s the transcript:

Hi! I’m Kristen Hicks and this is our 4th and final video in the Small Business Introduction to Content Marketing series.

At this point in the series, you should have a pretty good idea what content marketing is and the kind of forms it takes. So, now you have a decision to make:

Are you ready to get started?

I’ve got 8 important tips to help you create content that gets results.

Tip #1: Choose your Goals

First, you need to decide what you want to get out of content marketing.  If building authority’s your primary goal, your technique should look a little different than if traffic is the top priority.

You’ll probably want to accomplish some combination of these, but having priorities will help refine your strategy to something sustainable.

Tip #2: Keep your audience top of mind.

Make giving your audience something you know they need or want your priority. You’ll win more points with generosity than self-promotion.

For this tip to work, you have to make an effort to understand your audience. Create a customer profile and think hard about how to put yourself in their headspace.

Tip #3: Identify a need.

Review all the questions you’ve heard from customers and potential customers. Talk to everyone else in the company who ever interfaces with customers. From there, build a list of common issues and concerns your audience has and get to work answering them.

Tip #4: Include a call to action.

The end goal of all this content is to gain new customers. To help shepherd them from the role of content consumer to customer, you need to employ calls to action.

These won’t always be directly about sales. They could encourage the reader to leave a comment, reply to an email, or read another piece of content. The point is to continue the relationship beyond that first piece of content they encounter.

Tip #5:Do keyword research.

You want to talk the way your readers talk. The terms it’s most natural for you to use as an industry expert won’t necessarily be the same ones your customers use. Do your research, so you can make sure to be understood (and found more easily in search engines to boot).

Tip #6: Show your expertise.

Show people what you know! For anyone on the fence, or comparing competitors, a piece of content that clearly demonstrates how well you know your stuff will help make their decision that much easier.

Tip #7: Pay Attention to Industry Trends

Knowing what others in the industry are talking about will both make it easier to come up with content topics, and help you become a part of the conversation. By joining the larger industry conversation, you’ll draw more attention to your business and position yourself as an expert.

Tip #8: Network

As in most things in life, who you know matters! The more people who know and trust you, the more people in the world who are likely to share your content and recommend your business. Work to make connections online and off. Community can be a fantastic tool for content promotion.

Thanks for viewing the Introduction to Content Marketing for Small Businesses series.  If you have any questions or topics you’d like to see covered further, be sure to let me know in the comments.

The Benefits of Content Marketing

Now that you know what content marketing is and why it’s good for your small business, let’s talk about some of the specific benefits a business can achieve with good content marketing.

Part 3 in our Introduction to Content Marketing for Small Businesses video series covers what you can expect to get out of content marketing.

Give it a look, and let me know what you think!

If you prefer to read it rather than watch it, here’s the transcript:

Hi! I’m Kristen Hicks and welcome to part 3 of the Austin Copywriter video series on content marketing for small businesses.

Our focus in this video is some of the specific benefits content marketing can offer to your business.

We’ve talked more generally about why it’s useful and what it is, so here’s what you can expect to get out of content marketing.

Benefit #1: A stronger reputation.

So much of small business success comes back around to reputation. Who’s heard of you and what did they hear?

Current and past customers who have had a great experience with you are a really good way to build this reputation, but limited. They don’t know everybody, and you want to attract and impress customers included in that circle beyond their reach.

Imagine a woman in crisis. She’s having a terrible day because she has a problem she can’t solve on her own.

Naturally, she turns to Google. She finds a blog post on your website telling her exactly what she needs to know to solve her problem.

Success! You’ve just made a positive impression on someone who has never heard of you before.

The problem and solution vary depending on what you have to offer, and how you help your customers, but the idea is consistent. Helping people will improve your reputation.

Benefit #2: A convincing demonstration of your expertise.

That same woman we just talked about. Not only does she think fondly of your company now because you helped her solve a problem, that blog post also showed her you know your stuff on: accounting/furniture building/gardening/whatever your business does.

If you’re worried that giving your expertise away for free could lose you business, chances are, it won’t.

Most people are happy to hand over the chores they don’t excel at to someone who does (for a reasonable price).

Benefit #3: Greater visibility.

You need people to know you exist, plain and simple. No one will ever think to buy your product or services without first knowing you exist.

Content marketing helps spread the good word of your business throughout the web. And, once people start liking you enough to talk about you with friends, beyond.

You give people something worth talking about and sharing, and they will. Your reach will extend based on how large of an audience you gain, and how much they like what you have to say.

While not a comprehensive list, that hits some of the most important benefits of content marketing for your small business.

Check back soon for the 4th and final entry in our Beginner Content Marketing for Small Business video series where we get into some of the best tips to make sure you do content marketing right.