Creating Quality Content – Can’t Get Found Without It!
Find ways to syndicate your content for the broadest visibility
This is post four in a series of posts on Inbound Marketing, focusing on creating quality content to fuel your content marketing strategy for your small business.
Now that you have the who, what, where and when of your content marketing strategy, you now need to generate a regular stream of quality information across all of your content channels (blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc).
The challenge – what is quality content? Like many things in life, beauty (or in this case quality) is in the eye of the beholder. Many posts are quick to point out that you need to deliver quality content, but few provide what it takes to actually do so.
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
This is post three in a series of posts on Inbound Marketing, focusing on developing your content marketing strategy for your small business.
Content marketing is creating, publishing and promoting value-based content to attract your target audience, position you as a trusted expert and advisor in your industry, help build your online brand presence and drive more traffic to your site.
Your value-based content can be blog posts, articles, videos, white papers, eBooks, presentations or other information products that focus on the problems your customers and clients face and you can help them resolve. The challenge for most small businesses is to provide engaging content on a consistent basis.
Inbound Marketing Plan
This is the second in a series of posts that will provide a road map on how you can plan and implement Inbound Marketing for your small business.
Now that you understand what inbound marketing is and how it can help your small business, it’s time to figure out your inbound marketing strategy. I know, you hate writing marketing plans. So do I actually, but they are necessary to keep us on track. However, once you put it in writing, you will only need to update it when you measure your results and determine what changes need to be made. And we can make it a quick and painless exercise that will get you out there doing something to start your lead generation activities.
How to develop your Inbound Marketing Plan
The following framework can be used as the base template for your plan. The links in each section provide you with more information. As usual with marketing plans, we start with the basics.
- Set goals: What are you trying to accomplish? How will you measure your success?
- Analyze your web presence: How is your business perceived on the web? Is your brand consistent across all properties? Can it be found at all?
- Know your target audience: where can you find them; what are they interested in; how can you help them?
Four Pillars of Inbound Marketing
- Develop strategies for the four pillars of inbound marketing: content marketing, social media, search engine optimization and public relations. Each of these areas needs a strategy that consistently projects your brand to your target audience.
- Content marketing – What type of content will you create? Who will develop this content and share it? What is your content distribution strategy?
- Social media – Which social media tools make sense for your business? How will you leverage each one to drive inbound leads? How will you respond and engage those who share, comment and connect?
- Search engine optimization – How do people search for your products and services? What keywords will you use to optimize your content? What is your link building strategy?
- Public relations – How will your business use public relations to drive inbound leads? What type of news will be interesting to your audience? Where will you publish your content for the most impact?
Tags: content strategy, lead nurturing, public relations, SEO
Inbound Marketing – A Powerful Weapon for Attracting New Customers
This is the first in a series of posts that will provide a road map on how you can plan and implement Inbound Marketing for your small business.
Inbound marketing is something that most small business owners have heard of but few have implemented consistently. But for those who do take the plunge, many are experiencing a more cost effective and in many ways a more successful form of marketing, than traditional outbound marketing such as direct mail, trade shows and print, radio and TV advertising.
What is it?
Inbound marketing is using online activities, such as social media, search engine optimization, public relations and content marketing (such as blogging and eNewsletters) to attract your target prospects to your brand, product or service and generate warm leads. These prospects find your brand primarily through search, looking for information they need to solve a problem or fulfill a need.
It consists of a range of techniques, all of which are focused on attracting customers through relationship building.
Read more »
Tags: content strategy, search engine optimization
WordPress Categories and Tags – Which to Use and How?
This is a question I get a lot lately. This feature of WordPress can be confusing, and throw in keywords for search engine optimization and people definitely get that glazed over look. And the more I read other good posts on the topic, the more I realize that there are a lot of opinions on what they are and how they are used. What I have come to realize is:
There is no one right answer to how you should use WordPress categories and tags for your blog, but there are some guidelines on using them effectively.
Things you need to consider:
- Should I use both?
- Should I assign posts to more than one category?
- Do either of these help with search engine optimization?
- Should I let search engines index your either or both of the archives?
Top 10 Facebook Marketing Questions
Small business owners ask me a lot of Facebook marketing questions, so I decided to compile the 10 most often asked questions and answer them in an eBook specifically for small business owners.
These most popular questions include:
- Should my business be on Facebook?
- What does it mean to market my business using Facebook?
- What’s the difference between a Personal Profile, a Business Page and a Business Account?
- Why do I need a Facebook Page for my business?
- What is the best way to drive traffic to my Page?
- Why do I need an email list when I have a community of Facebook fans?
- When and how often should I post on our Page?
- What content should I post?
- When is the best time to use a Facebook Group rather than a Page?
- What is a Facebook Places Page?
Protect Your Brand: Register a Trademark
- Have you come up with a great name for your business or a service you offer?
- Did you have a great logo designed that is unique and memorable?
- Did you know that your name and logo are valuable assets of your business?
Many businesses don’t understand the value of registering a trademark for your identifiable assets, but doing so allows you to protect your brand in the event someone infringes on your mark.
The definition of a trademark from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination thereof, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others. Trademarks identify a product, service, person or thing from others in the same field to avoid confusion and to separate your business from all the others.
Tags: brand identity, brand image, trademark
Why Your Business Needs a Marketing General Contractor
Marketing your business is a process similar to a home renovation: you need a general contractor to call the shots and make everything fit together.
I made this statement on my Facebook page and now will explain why this is an important analogy. I come in contact with many small business owners that hire different companies that “specialize” in one particular online marketing task. The result: no consistency and ineffective activities that counteract the effectiveness of one another. In fact, a couple clients of mine ended up with two websites (with two different designs) because each of these online marketing companies had to create their own website to guarantee first page placement on Google!
Having a marketing general contractor (or marketing consultant, coach, advisor or mentor as we are commonly known) to help you develop a plan, choose the right activities and work with the various niche specialists ensures that your web presence is consistently projected to your target market. Some activities you most likely will need help with include:
- Search engine optimization
- Web/blog design & development
- Social media
- Local search
- Pay-per-click
- Email marketing
Without a Marketing General Contractor that is well versed in online marketing, you run the risk of too many brand identities, inconsistent messages and different target markets, not to mention your lack of control and potentially higher costs.
Read more »
Creating Custom Facebook Page Tabs
Creating well-designed, custom Facebook pages to welcome your visitors and create valuable offers is important for making your page stand out and encouraging your visitors to “like” your page. This connection creates a communications channel between your brand and your fans.
Since the major Facebook page upgrade in March, however, creating custom landing pages has gone from relatively easy for the non-technical page administrator using Static FBML to relatively hard using an iFrame application. Although there have been many good tutorials that simplify the process, it can still be a challenge for those unaccustomed to programming as well as those who are pretty tech savvy but are not real developers (like yours truly).
Being the closet geek that I am, I took the challenge and created an iFrame application for my landing page. All worked well for those browsing on an unsecured (http) connection. Getting the application to work across all browsers using a secure (https) connection was another matter. And although not a requirement now, those browsing Facebook using a secure connection is growing rapidly (Facebook stated that as of April 2011, 9.6 million people are browsing over HTTPS and the trend is continuing to increase).
Tags: facebook business page, facebook marketing, WordPress plugins
5 Online Marketing Strategy Questions That Must Be Answered
There are many people who offer online marketing services. There are also many people who call themselves online marketing experts because they know how to:
- Build a WordPress website
- Implement search engine optimization (SEO)
- Set up your Google Places page and other local business listings
- Develop an AdWords campaign
- Send out an email marketing campaign
- Create a Facebook Business Page with the new iFrames landing tabs
All good stuff and important. But do these experts know marketing? Can they help you determine:
Which online marketing components are the best options for your business?- Who your target market is and how to best reach them?
- How your customers search for your products and services?
- What strategies (see diagram) are needed and which activities will be the most practical and successful given your time and resource constraints?
